Archive for the Role-Playing Games Category
 I still need to work on getting all of the different characters posted. It should be easier now that I have everyone’s sheets sitting in my pile of gaming stuff. Expect those in the next couple of days.
In the meantime, though, we did play our playtest sessions of the actual game. Mostly, we used the first session to sort of bring everyone up to speed on the game mechanics. The nice thing is, it seems like some of the rules as presented in the Dresden Files RPG are a little more clear than they were in Spirit of the Century, especially the rules for performing Maneuvers.
Before I go into the actual play report, I’d like to review some of the characters. We went over Oklahoma “OK Tom” Tomorrow previously, but I haven’t really detailed any of the other characters.
Martin Dover Gentry is a changeling, and the owner of the comic book and curiosity shop, First Edition. He’s built around a magpie theme, so he’s very birdlike. We modified the Supernatural Stunt Bless this House slightly to fit with his theme - in some legends, magpies were the ones who taught people how to build homes, so we thought it was appropriate. Mechanically, it works as written, we just chose not to base it in Faith.
Calista Annabelle Thorn is a werewolf firefighter with a hero complex. She pretty much has the werewolf package straight out of the Character Templates chapter.
Kate is a college cheerleader/novice Wizard. She’s also a spoiled rich girl. She used the basic wizard template, minus Thaumaturgy - the player really had no interest in it.
I won’t go into minute details on each and every roll. I don’t think that it’s important to the playtesting, and, really, the basics of the rules have already been vetted in SotC. On the whole, the regular game mechanics worked excellently.
The Scenario
Martin’s comic shop, First Edition, was robbed. He and OK Tom discover the assailant still in the building and chase him down. After a brief fight*, the mysterious theif tries to get away, but gets creamed by a car. The characters check the thief for signs of life, but instead find him to be a conglomeration of sticks and junk, wrapped up in old jeans and a hoodie and carrying a backpack. In the backpack were the items that were stolen from the comic shop, including an old hand-carved chess set that had been left by the previous owner. The black rook and queen were broken. When the rest of the group showed up at the shop, everyone went searching for clues. Martin, Calista and Kate found a wallet on the construct, and decided to track down the owner to see what he knew.
This is where the added importance of compels came in handy. I compelled OK Tom’s Bicycle Messenger Aspect - he had packages he needed to deliver. Upon making his last delivery, he found a a man dead, clearly murdered. A small green plant was growing out of his chest. A quick once-over of the room revealed the murder victim’s letterhead - he was an artist named Tad Willows, and his logo was a black rook. The package he was delivering also had a logo on it - a black queen. It was sent by one Emily Bellhaven. He used his Psychometry stunt to gather some additional information about the artist, basically discovering the “how” of how he died, but not the “why.” He passed off the information to an underfunded group of cops that we had created during the city creation sessions.
Meanwhile, the rest of the group traced the wallet to the area known as the Woods. Turned out that the wallet owner was a cripple, and a red herring. They were about to head back to First Edition when Kate’s College Student Aspect got compelled - she had a test that she HAD to take. While at school, another one of the stickmen came after her**. She managed to escape by slipping through a crowd, basically using an Athletics as a block against the assailant.
After that, everyone met back up at First Edition to figure out where to go next. Calista decided to use her werewolf senses to sniff out where the stickman came from. OK Tom decided to go digging on his own.
The scent trail led Calista, Martin and Kate on a merry chase around the Portland bus system. A quick compel of Calista’s Werewolf Aspect caused a bit of a scene (”Is that a service animal? We don’t let pets on the bus…”). Martin’s Resources cleared the way, and the chase was on. The three of them followed the scent into the Shanghai Tunnels beneath the city, which were filled with about two inches of water. As they were searching the tunnels, they heard footsteps splashing toward them.
Meanwhile, OK Tom decides to call Emily Bellhaven. It goes straight to voicemail, and he leaves a message, pretending to be the murdered artist. Later, the cops call him back, demanding to know how he knows Ms. Bellhaven, and if he’d be willing to have a detective come and speak with him at the loft. OK Tom, of course, agrees. He shows up at the artist’s loft a while later, and sees a detective’s car out front. So, Tom makes like a delivery boy. The cop questions him as the crime scene unit and coroner’s van show up. The officer demands that Tom hand the package, but loses the social conflict. He tells Tom that he’ll get a court order for it, and to keep the package sealed and safe until that happens. Of course, Tom opens it later. Inside are some seeds, and some chips and grains of some kind of grey stone.
Meanwhile, down in the tunnels, the werewolf, wizard and changeling are attacked by yet another stickman. Martin dove for its ankles, effectively blocking the thing while Kate made a grab for its hoodie. Calista used her Supernatural Strength to body check it, taking it out. After that, they followed the tunnels to a door. Beyond that, a good-sized room lined with cupboards and drawers and workbenches. They proceed to start investigating everything.
OK Tom, meanwhile, had gone to Powell’s Bookstore to do a little research. He discovered that the seeds were honeysuckle, and the stone was volcanic basalt, the same kind found at the Giant’s Causeway in Ireland. He discovered that the plant growing from Tad Willows’ chest was honeysuckle as well. He makes an attempt at calling the rest of the group. Unfortunately, between Kate’s hexing and their being under ground, the call doesn’t go that well. Ther was, however, some hilarity involving text messaging, and a lack of a QWERTY keyboard. Tom then goes to his Contacts, invoking his Shadowy Contacts aspect, attempting to find out what the hell is going on.
Down in the basement, Calista picks up a new scent - this time of spring flowers, honeysuckle, and fresh cut grass. They follow it to a doorway bearing a plaque with the word ‘Antiquities’ on it. A clever use of Kates hexing shorted out the alarm system, and cleared the way for them to get inside. The trail stopped in one corner, at a stacked up pile of boxes…
Tom got ahold of his contacts, and started grilling them on what was going on. Turns out that the victims were Changelings aligned with the Autumn Court who were expected to make the Choice soon - the presence of the honeysuckle indicated that the perpetrator was a member of the Spring Court.
Meanwhile, I compelled Kate into using The Sight to see past the Glamour that was the pile of boxes. Behind the glamour was Annah, a former Changeling-turned-Fae who is one of the contenders for the Spring Queen throne***. This was, of course, the excuse that we needed to test out the Spellcasting rules. Calista body-checks the Fae and uses a maneuver to give her the Prone aspect. Kate gathers some power, but holds it in check. Annah used Seelie Magic to attempt a Bind maneuver on Martin, but he tags her Prone aspect. She fails the Discipline roll, and causes Fallout. Vines break through the linoleum floor and start coming for everyone, incidentally binding the Fae. Everyone else escapes the effect, but the vines continue to grow out of control, and are about to bind the door closed. Martin’s turn comes around, and he drops his Refresh to buy Wings, giving him a Refresh of 1, and then Intimidates Annah, giving her a “Cowed” aspect. She looks like she’s going to try and escape, so Kate releases the power that she’s gathered with an Evocation effect, knocking Annah unconscious. The vines were still coming, so they tear the Fae out of her bindings and flee back the way they came.
There was some incidental dialogue after that, most of which was questioning and bullying Annah, with me trying to twist the truth without actually lying. We left strings hanging to pick up when the game actually comes out.
* We managed to weasel in a test of the new Grappling rules here - it worked incredibly well.
** Kate’s player is very D&D/White-Wolf minded, and she had trouble grasping the idea of succeeding at a conflict rather than a task. It took quite a bit of explaining, and I don’t think she ever quite “got it.”
*** One thing that never came out during the course of play - mostly because the players never really made it an issue, and it was mostly an entertaining side-note - is that the new Faerie Courts that were created for the Portland setting don’t necessarily play by the same rules as the canon Courts. I wanted to keep the Chess metaphor going, so the Spring and Autumn Courts match the back row of the Chess board - a King, a Queen two Knights, two Rooks, and two Bishops. However, as new as they are, and with their limited resources, not all of the royalty has been chosen. The courts are filling the gaps with more powerful Changelings who are approaching their Choices.
What Worked:
The grappling rules worked really well for us. Much better, in fact, than they do in most systems. I don’t know if anyone else had problems with them, but for us, it was really quick.
Evocation worked well for me, personally. In retrospect, the vine maneuver should have probably affected the intended target - I erred on the side of what I thought was more interesting. But, in a situation where the players know the rules fairly well, spellcasting as written doesn’t take much input from the GM, which is exactly how I like my games to run - let the players do the hard work  Also, the Backlash and Fallout mechanics worked really well - I liked using them.
Unfortunately, we didn’t get to really test out Thaumaturgy, but the rules, as written, look like they should play well, since they follow the same basic principles.
What Didn’t:
There wasn’t really any mechanical issues that didn’t work.
When it came to antagonists, I had some problems, mostly due to the fact that there weren’t any fully statted out examples of things like True Fae. For the constructs, I basically used the goon rules from SotC - they were +2 at pretty much everything, with 2 boxes of Stress. For Annah, the recently changed Changeling, there wasn’t anything to go off of. I intended for her to be a weak Sidhe, but she came off as significantly underpowered. Some minions might have helped, but she was really an excuse to bust out some evocation.
Other Thoughts and Feedback:
One thing that we saw, specifically with the Supernatural Stunts chapter, was an organization issue. Since nobody was super familiar with the rules, the lack of an alphabetized list of supernatural Stunts made things a little bit difficult. It’s a minor issue that will most likely be mitigated in the final product, assuming it’s got a comprehensive index like SotC does.
One of the players also asked about someting that occurs in the source fiction, and how it’s intended to be handled in the game. In the books, Harry is often drained after casting a lot of spells, to the point where even calling up simple effects is beyond him. This player wanted to know how the game modeled that. I told him that it was pretty well handled by taking consequences in exchange for power, and, if that wasn’t good enough, the character’s Wizard aspect could be tagged or compelled to represent that. So, I was a little curious as to whether that was the intention, or was it something that just isn’t important enough to gameplay to matter.
So, that’s pretty much it, as far as our DFRPG playtest went. Really, the problems we had were pretty minor, and we’re all pretty stoked for the full game to come out. I think that this system will sing in long-term play.
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Things have been slow as far as the DFRPG playtesting has been going. Fortunately, since my wedding is all done, and things have finally started to calm down, we’re actually getting a chance to play over the next few weeks. The hard part - character creation - is already done. As they come in, I’ll be posting the characters.
We decided to go with a standard naming convention for everybody’s novel (those of you who have played Spirit of the Century know what I’m talking about). All of them are a phrase that start with a number. This isn’t exactly supposed to indicate chronology, we just wanted a way to tie everyone into the same “series” as it were. The novels, preceded by the PC they are about, are as follows:
- Martin - First Edition
- Calista - Second Degree
- OK Tom - Third Wheel
- Kate - Fourth Quarter
I’m tempted to title the playtest scenario in the same way, but I can’t seem to come up with anything that starts with the word Fifth. If anybody has any ideas, feel free to post a comment.
Overall, I’m pretty pleased with how easy character creation went. Nobody at the table is exceedingly familiar with FATE/SotC, so it was nice to see that the character creation rules clicked pretty well for everyone. Not that they’re particularly difficult, but people latched on to them early on, and just ran with it. Even the newest player managed to create a novice Wizard with little problem. The only real issue we ran into was some confusion about the text, which was, I believe, an editing problem.
Probably the nicest thing was when we got to the “guest starring” phases, and people really started talking to each other about how they wanted their stories to intertwine. I really think that it helped get everyone on the same page and excited about playing the game.
On the mechanical side, it’s kinda nice not having so many Aspects in Dresden as there were in SotC. I think that people had an easier time coming up with things. Building the concept and theme of each character into an Aspect was also a nice touch.
As for skills, we went with the default 25 skill points, which gives a pretty good range of skills. Capping them at Great (+4) also gave the characters some room to diversify their skills. I don’t see this system as one that really rewards specialization as much as a lot of skill-based systems do.
On the downside, I wish that the character creation chapter talked about the Stress tracks, and how your skills relate to them. SotC starts characters out at 5 stress boxes, with skills and stunts that can push them up to 10. Dresden defaults to 2 boxes. This means that characters can get taken out pretty quickly (although, fortunately, the game isn’t designed to be particularly lethal), and are probably going to be picking up a lot of consequence aspects. The problem that I see is that the rules for increasing your available stress boxes are split between several chapters. I have no problem with them being detailed separately - like say, in the Skills and Stunts chapters - but it would be nice if there was a sidebar or chart that showed what skills and stunts increased your available stress.
All that being said, here’s the first character that I’ve gotten turned in to me. This is OK Tom, played by my friend and TMD co-host, Randy.
Oklahoma “OK Tom” Tomorrow
High Concept: Psychic Rom Bicycle Messenger
Theme: Heritage v. Progress
OK Tom is trying to reconcile his family’s pressure to adhere to Rom traditions, and his own desire to understand the truth about the universe in all its scientific glory.
Background: Autodidact
He had to hide all his pilfered science textbooks from his family. He spent all his free time with his head in a book.
Rising Conflict: I slept in the bed, now I have to make it.
OK Tom cheated on his girlfriend while she was pregnant with his child. She aborted the fetus. OK Tom values family, and his actions destroyed his chance to have a family of his own. Now, he’s dealing with it.
First Novel: Eye for detail
“Third Wheel” OK Tom’s ex-fiance, one who his family arranged for him, has come back to town with a new squeeze. After an accidental use of psychometry, OK Tom discovers the man to be a serial murderer. Can OK Tom save the next victim all the while keeping it a secret from his family?
Guest Star 1: Watch Kate’s back
“Fourth Quarter” At Kate’s sorority party, OK Tom discovers the truth about an old book of spells just in time to save Kate from a fire she caused.
Guest Star 2: Shadowy contacts
“First Edition” OK Tom overhears Martin complaining about customs; he can’t get his goods across the border. OK Tom comes to the rescue, even though he had no clue how to do it. So he made some new contacts…shadowy ones.
Stunts:
Psychometry
Human Google Map (+2 to navigation-based Driving tests)
Backhanded Compliment (use Rapport for social attacks)
Quick Eye (Investigate twice as fast)
Skills:
Great (+4): Contacts, Rapport
Good(+3): Driving, Investigation
Fair(+2): Scholarship, Craftsmanship, Presence, Resources
Average(+1): 3 to be determined
Refresh: 4
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Saturday evening, I ran a Dread game at Endgame in Oakland. For those of you who listen to the podcast, you may have listened to the original recording of the playtest of the scenario.
All in all, I feel pretty good about how it went. Only one characte died, which is a little disappointing. Not because I particularly like killing characters in RPGs, but Dread is a little special. Dying can be pretty awesome in this game. In any case, things went well. My players gave some really good feedback, and managed to stay in the game pretty much the whole time. I’m going to go back and edit the scenario again, keeping their feedback in mind. I don’t usually run the same game multiple times, but I think that the Ghost Hunters scenario works well enough as a con game.
There were a couple of things that I changed for con play. First, I dumped one of the ghosts. I felt that, in the original draft, there was too much going on, and it distracted from the story. Also, there was a rape in the original scenario. While I haven’t removed it from the scenario entirely, I decided to omit it for the con. If I ran this at KublaCon, I would probably leave it in, since each game has its own private room. At Endgame, there were a great deal of people around (hell, a game of 3:16 was going on immediately behind me), so I figured that a murder/rape, even when described through the filter of a FLIR camera, might not be appropriate for all audiences. It didn’t take much away from the game, anyway.
I’m very strongly considering running this scenario, with some more edits, at KublaCon next year. I don’t think that Dread gets enough love, and it’s such a fun game. That being said, I’d like to thank The Game Master Show for introducing it to me.
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Earlier, I talked a little about the interview with Luke Crane on Canon Puncture. What I failed to mention was Mr. Crane talking about his joint project with Jared Sorenson, Project Donut.
Information on this particular title has been sketchy at best, but there are some really interesting things about it that Luke revealed during the interview. We know, from the website, that this is a sci-fi game, but beyond that, it’s proven to be quite the mystery. Some of the new info sounds incredibly promising, though.
The setting and the rules are supposedly more than tightly integrated. They are, in fact, the same thing. This makes things interesting because it means that there is no such thing as metagaming in the Project Donut system. I find this to be a fascinating concept, especially after having run Burning Wheel, where gaming the system is somewhat expected (see Practice in BWR). I’m used to hearing things like “i need 100 more XP to make it to the next level,” but the idea that you can talk about the game mechanics at the table and still remain 100% in the game is, well, amazing to me.
Perhaps the most fascinating idea is that the game setting is one where there is a disctinct lack of both scarcity and death. This, of course, means that there’s no money, and no life-or-death struggles. The economy of the game is based on the idea of your social currency - how many friends, fans, and followers you have - and how much you can give away. At least, that’s how I understand it.
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So, I was listening to Episode 50 of the Canon Puncture Podcast, and Luke Crane dropped the title of the next Burning Wheel book - The Adventure Burner.
I have a feeling that this is going to cause Mr. Crane no end of annoyance, as all of us BW fanboys ask him when the book’s coming out. I mean, it only took 5 years for the Magic Burner to drop after he announced it.
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I’ve been trying to make something of an effort to keep this blog on the topic of RPGs and gaming in general. However, sometimes some of the other things I’m passionate about are going to make an appearance. For example, you may have noticed the big scarlet letter over on the right-hand side of the page. It has nothing to do with RPGs.
On rare, happy occasions, though, some of my interests come together in bizarre ways. Scott from Geek Nights posted a link to a fantastic article written by R. Scott Bakker for the magazine Heliotrope. I have yet to read Mr. Bakker’s novels, but this article has me intrigued. He sounds like my kind of guy. I know that Rym and Scott have talked his Prince of Nothing series up quite a bit, so maybe I’ll finally pick it up.
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We created Portland in two sessions. The first took just a hair over three hours (from other posts, this seems about the right amount of time), the second took maybe an hour. We had an additional player for the second session.
Choosing a city - we started with a list of about a dozen candidates, purposely avoiding cities that other groups were doing - took us maybe a half hour. A couple of players weren’t jazzed about Portland at first, but once we got to sketching it up, the city started to take on a life of its own, and everyone started getting really excited. We found the Wikipedia article on Portland incredibly handy, and we had one player at the table on her laptop pretty much the entire time, looking up information as we needed it. Once we figured out the themes we were playing with, translating them into Aspects was a snap.
Creating locations was absolutely the most enjoyable segment of city creation. So enjoyable, in fact, that we went completely overboard, creating nine locations between four players (including myself as the GM). This is probably the root of our troubles during the second session. Still, this is what the players latched onto. They came up with locations, Aspects, and Faces almost faster than I could write them down.We also took some liberties with the city, creating one or two locations that don’t actually exist, such as the neighborhood known as The Woods, but were interesting in light of the setting. In any event, as I said, we wound up with nine locations all told. This process took the most time.
We hit the Touch of Magic section next, and found that, in our discussions of the locations, we’d already started addressing this point. This is about the time that the redundancy issues started manifesting. When we were coming up with locations, we basically asked ourselves, “Is this magical? If so, how?” for each location and character associated with it. So we found ourselves hitting this all in one fell swoop. So when we got to this question, we sort of went “Oh, this is already done,” and moved on.
The same issues occurred as we continued down the list of questions. The creation of locations and personalities gave rise to the answers to the last few questions organically, to the point where we were asking ourselves, “Why are we going over this again?” Again, it could be that we were just overzealous during the early parts of city creation, but the remaining questions just seemed redundant – they were the questions we were already asking ourselves as we created the locations.
One interesting thing to note is that we used index cards to create the city. Each location had it’s own card, so we were able to sort of map out the city physically as we worked, which gave us a visual aid to work with. Again, this could have contributed to the last questions seeming redundant. By giving ourselves a visual map, of sorts, we were able to see what the relationships between the locations, factions and faces of Portland were, which already put us in the mindset of creating conflicts and alliances and motivations. On the other hand, it could also have been the fact that three of the five players that were involved were also playing in a Burning Wheel game that we had just created the setting for, so we had an idea of what to expect.
Overall, the process worked well. One suggestion that we thought might help would be a step-by-step example of how city creation worked. Alternately, since the city is basically a character, itself, it might work to break it down into distinct Phases, similar to character creation. An example city sheet would be helpful as well.
Aside from that, though, everything seemed to turn out well. Despite the fact that we managed to answer several questions ahead of time, everybody at the table was stoked to create characters and get to exploring a Dresdenified Portland.
We plan on running through character creation in the coming week. All of us have read at least one or two of the novels by now, so we have a somewhat better idea of how the Dresdenverse works, and what characters should be occupying it.
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I had wanted planned on doing a wrapup of the first day of PAX this year, but it’s three in the morning, and I’m beat. If I have time, I’ll post tomorrow. At worst, I’ll do a full wrapup when I get back home.
As a side note, I did get to meet Rym and Scott briefly at round two of the Omegathon, which was cool. I’m looking forward to their panel tomorrow evening.
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I’ve got multiple gaming groups. Occasionally they merge, but some of us have more interest in particular games than others. On Fridays, a group of four of us are going to be getting together to play a real, honest to Joe Pesci Burning Wheel campaign. To that end, we’ve started building the setting over on the This Modern Death Forum, but I figured that I could write up the condensed version over here.
Just to warn y’all, this is still a work in progress. Things are still unnamed, unclear, and undeveloped. But it’s a damn good start. We’ve been referring to the game so far as Burning Deadwood, but I believe it’s gone slightly beyond that by now.
So, here’s the setting as it stands. Special thanks to Xenith, who posted this excellent summary on the forums. Also, I’d like to thank Babe and Randy, my other two players, for their contributions.
 A map of the immediate area, from the Field Roden perspective What’s the Big Picture? What’s going on in this setting that makes it ripe for adventure. What’s changing, evolving, declining?
The Dwarves have found a mineral-rich stretch of low, old mountains which they have been raping for a couple decades in secret (as those greedy little fucks do). But, given emergent technology, word traveled fast. Men came from the east in wagon-loads to fill their pockets and make a name for themselves. They are motivated by their internal clocks. They know their time on the planet is comparatively short, so they take advantage of any opportunity. A fringe group of elves settled much of the area north of the rich mountains thousands of years ago. Settled is a light term, they conquered it. They think they have a right to land and don’t like others encroaching on it. Men and Dwarves used Orc slave labor to build their cities and railroads, but cast them aside once the work was done. If the Orcs ever rally it could get messy. The Roden and Orcs occupied the land long before the Elves, but were pushed out of their land by the other races.
But the land, having been raped for as long as it has, it’s definitely not producing except for a fortunate few. The good veins have been monopolized and everyone else is just trying to squeeze in where they can. The dwarves still own most of the proven veins, but the increase in people brings many problems. Quite a few dwarves who didn’t keep up with the times lost their claims through legal trickery. They try to find support, but the lawless, unclaimed land grants them no safe harbor. Once man put his name on the paper for the claim, he protects it with might, muscle, and gun.
But man is stupid at the same time he is crafty. The vices that attract men in such towns-the alcohol, the camp women-strip them of what they gain as soon as it lands in their pocket. Elves, unhappy with the degree of land desecration, run brothels and saloons and tobacconists, trading minuscule claims for a week’s worth of dick stink between the legs of a jaded woman. Their goal is to gain enough to have sway, like being a majority stakeholder somewhere.
Dwarves have changed tunes as well. As man begins to take over their claims, they too figure out ways to put their hand in man’s pocket as he did to them. Dwarves have started working procurement trades, getting man to pass back the money he stole in the form of exuberant mark-ups on mining gear. There’s a large band of them, too, that control trade. They’re an alliance, because they found out pretty quickly they couldn’t defeat man on a mono a mono basis, and they have to band together.
Rural life is declining. “Place” is devolving from sacred to commodity. People are favoring pidgin over their native tongue. Material is valued over action. All of the worst parts of capitalism are destroying the serenity of peasant/agrarian life. True belief is declining. It has become a convenient excuse for conquest and persecution. Most people out in the frontier do little more than pay it lip service, but otherwise it has become unimportant in day-to-day lives.
There’s an entire band of settlers who came out for this very purpose. They only come into the main bits of town and such during the day, before all the philandering and drinking begins, to preach, but a few battered women and a dead preacher was all it took to realize they weren’t welcome after dark. And the women fit the cult of “true womanhood” to a T - Piety, submission, purity and domesticity. They will follow their men, they will venture in to town after dark if a father or husband asks to prove the true godlessness and sinful ways of the other settlers. They will not raise their voice to the men nor a hand to protect themselves if one should get upset, for it’s a woman’s place to be subservient and accepting of the whims of the superior men. However, to the “camp women”, they are nothing but fire and brimstone. Half the whores go to church because they want some solace. The other half go to rile the believers during service.
What’s the world’s culture? What are the cultural analogs? Analogs can be taken from historical earth, current events or fantasy works.
Dwarves - Very traditional Tolkein-esque, but tone down the merriment and up the corporate capitalist.
Orcs - Nomads. Savage beasts. Hatred with a capital H.
Roden - Farmers, peasant-folk, “Agrarian”
Humans - What *aren’t* they like? Greedy, opportunistic, technological, frantic (short life spans)
Elves - What a sad little boy you are
What’s the conflict in which the characters are involved? What are the sides? What’s wrong?
The characters have recently…ah…”stumbled” upon an unmanned claim. Orlan, the big boy of Halcyon Falls, has a significant stake in the claim and does not take kindly to the characters sitting on it.
What physical place does the conflict take place in? What’s the ecology, environment, location?
Halcyon Falls is settled in the middle of a lush valley nestled up against the craigs of the Badlands. There is a big river running about 1/2mi east of of town. The area gets really wet winters, which usually floods the river and threatens outlying houses and settlements.
What’s the name of the most important place in this setting? Not the capital or any dumb shit like that, but The Place where all the action goes down?
Halcyon Falls, the claim the characters find themselves in possession of, and the surrounding area.
What’s the name of a faraway place that folks talk about, dream about or mutter under their breath about?
Sunday City lies further yet to the west. Halcyon Falls is many people’s hope of gaining enough wealth to be able to afford that final push to Sunday City. It’s what people talk about, what people toil in the mines for, what people mutter in their sleep during their most pleasant dreams. No one’s been there, but the stories of that friend who had a friend who went and returned are enough to turn the sourest of souls, the most pessimistic of men west as the sun sets over those high, cold crags. (I believe we came up with a different name during the first session, but I cannot for the life of me remember what it was.)
Who are the antagonists? Who is opposing the goals of the characters?
Orlan, the big bad businessman in town.
The next two questions don’t have answers yet:
Imagine all of the characters are standing in a room/ruin/field with the antagonists or their minions. What do the antagonists want from that meeting? What do the character want from that meeting? That’s where your game begins.
Alternately, imagine the characters standing at the scene of some great disaster or calamity clearly caused by one of the antagonists. What’s the disaster? How did it happen? What are the characters going to do about it right now?
What type of magic exists in this world? Pick one or two of the magic systems: Faith (and Blasphemous Hatred), Sorcery (and Abstraction), Natural Magic, Spirit Binding, Summoning, or Enchanting.
Sorcery still exists, but is falling behind the surge of technology in the eyes of man. The other races, moving slower as a result of their different lifespans, still rely heavily on magic. Elves with their spell songs, dwarves with their arts, and orcs with their blasphemous chants.
Faith is powerful, but failing. Other races have their own versions of Faith…the Immortal Elves with their wearisome Grief, the Dwarves and their endless Greed, and the Orcs, with the deep and boundless Hatred.
Some of this may change when the Magic Burner is available.
If Sorcery is used, what’s its idiom? Does it require speech? Gestures?
Sorcery requires speech, and then gestures are a character idiom. Some sorcerers use them, some don’t.
If Sorcery is used, what spells are available? Which spells are inappropriate to the game world?
So far, all spells are available for use.
If is Faith used, what is the Faith idiom? What are the religions? Is Faith universal or does it only affect believers?
There are two major gods worshipped: Zoltec, the Sun and Turkis, the Earth. The names came from older cultures, but have managed to stick around. Many people just refer to them as The Sun or The Earth, so phrases such as “Sunblessed” and “The Earth take you!” are fairly common. As mentioned, most of the common folk simply pay lip-service to the gods. Some of the zealots claim miracles, but, as is common for that sort of thing, the doubters tend to see them simply as happy coincidences.
What character stocks are in play in this world? Which are restricted and why?
Men, Dwarves, Elves, Orcs, and Roden. Possibly Great Wolves at some time in the future.
What Cultural Traits apply to the characters of this game world? Pick three Character Traits for each culture.
Intrepid, Risk-taker and Cocksure for Men. The other stocks get their standard Common Traits.
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