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What Makes a Good Sequel?

Fri, 02 Mar 2018 11:30:00 +1100

And is it Different to What Makes a Good Film or Game In General?

So I was on a friends podcast recently, and the topic of discussion for that episode was: What Makes a Good Sequel? This was in relation to both computer games and films. A good amount of what I had prepared and wanted to talk about with that subject we did touch on in the podcast so if you like audio-on-demand discussions then go check that out and then come back to this article where I plan to expound my thoughts to my usual level of overindulgence.

Lightning Striking Twice. Or Thrice?

Firstly, as you will hear in the podcast we did, in preparation for that discussion I compiled a list of best and worst sequels for both games and movies, the ‘best’ lists were 11 items each (a top ten with one honourable mention each) and the ‘worst’ lists were 3 items each. That is just a reflection of the fact that I like more things than I dislike in general. I’m really not a negative person and would rather talk at length about things I love rather than things I hate. So, in case you were curious at all, (and I’m sure you will be once you see the lists haha), below are the lists themselves. I’m not necessarily going to go through and mention every single one, this isn’t meant to be a listicle. But there are some items on these lists that people will surely balk at and I think that is where I will focus my attention. That and a few items that I didn’t get to discuss on the podcast itself.

A few quick notes on how I decided on these lists: I didn’t count any movie series that was more like a single story told over multiple films, such as Lord of the Rings. These are also personal preferences, not objective, critical lists. Finally a number of these items were chosen not because there was no example that might rank higher, but because they were exemplary of some aspect of what can make or break a sequel for me personally. With no further ado, the lists:

Best Sequels

Games:

Baldur’s Gate II
Pokémon Gold/Silver
Conker’s Bad Fur Day
Metal Gear Solid
Red Dead Redemption
Guitar Hero III
Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind
Resident Evil 2 (or 4)
Final Fantasy 8 (or 7)
Saints Row 2

Honourable Mention:

Age of Empires 2

Movies:

The Matrix Reloaded / Revolutions
Aliens (and Terminator 2: Judgement Day)
Thor: Ragnarok
Desperado
10 Cloverfield Lane
The Dark Knight
The Empire Strikes Back
X-Men: Days Of Future Past
Planes: Fire & Rescue
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them

Honourable Mention:

Back to the Future Part II

Worst Sequels

Games:

World of Warcraft (And any other games that become mmos for no reason, like FF11)
Dragon Age 2
The Sims 4

Movies:

Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2
The Crow: City of Angels
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

I feel like anyone who actually played Pokémon Gold and/or Silver would tell you that those two games are probably the best game sequels ever made. (Games? Game? Do they count as separate? Gah!) I said as much about them on the podcast so I wont go into detail on Pokémon, but they were awesome and you should play them. So what then would people not generally agree with on my lists? The Matrix sequels probably. Very few people I talk to seem to agree when I say that they contained way better stories than the original film. That topic is something I could, and most likely will, write a good five thousand words on at some point in the future. So I won’t go painfully deep into why they are so good in my personal opinion, instead I will try to explain it as briefly as possible. (Ha!)

What else? Planes: Fire & Rescue seems like a film that very few people would expect to see on a list of best ever sequels, standing right next to The Dark Knight no less! But yeah, I stand behind that choice. If you can get past the premise of planes and cars that have eyes and are basically alive or whatever, (a big ask, I know), then yeah Fire & Rescue is actually an amazing example of how a sequel and provide a truly deep and satisfying conclusion or continuation to a story. Even one you might not be that invested in to begin with.

In terms of worst sequels that are contentious, yeah World of Warcraft is an interesting one. If you like that game, that is fine. It’s obviously a hugely successful game. But personally I was pretty invested in the story of Warcraft and wanted to know more about it, but grinding my way through an MMO was not the way I wanted to experience it. Not at all. Personally I have grown to hate it when game sequels end up in a different genera. Especially when they are just a slight shift, like in Dragon Age 2. They started with an awesome successor to the classic Infinity Engine games and then pushed it into like an action rpg? Why? Sure both of those genres are rpgs, but otherwise they are nothing alike. The people who like Dragon Age 2 hate Origins, and the people who like Origins hate 2. Surely there is some small percentage who like both, but even they should be able to admit that they are very different games and wonder why the hell they decided to change the game so much.

In terms of worst movie sequels, well my short list there basically illustrates that a bad movie is a bad movie. Regardless of whether or not it is a sequel. With films I feel very differently than with games, just in that, unless the filmmakers decide to do something radically different and/or extremely annoying I will generally be along for the ride. Unless they just make a pile of shit movie like basically all of The Crow’s sequels. Revenge of the Fallen was just blegh and Book of Shadows is something we talk a good bit about in the podcast so I won’t go over it here. Except to say, wow that ending…

But enough about the bad stuff, like I said I want to focus on what is awesome, and the most awesome thing on my lists is… actually that’s way too hard to call, let me rephrase. One of the most awesome things on my lists of great sequels is, what I would call my all time second-favorite game, Baldur’s Gate II.

Baldur’s Gate II: Reloaded Revengeance

Baldur’s Gate is a pretty difficult series to explain on paper to someone who isn’t at least passingly familiar with D&D, computer role playing games, or at the very least fantasy stories in general. But hey this is me, so I’m going to try. In essence the story of Baldur’s Gate is one about the many children of the god of murder and how having that title can adversely affect your life pretty much top to bottom. It is set in the Forgotten Realms, which is a popular D&D setting. It’s not a great one, but it’s functional. It has typical fantasy tropes all over the place like dragons and goblins and little towns with blacksmiths and local wizards and all that fun stuff. I should mention that none of that ‘god of murder’ type stuff really impacts the story until very far into the first game.

The first game starts off as would any normal D&D campaign, with a couple of average joes who have to leave their life of peace behind and go on the road to uncover a mystery and solve problems along the way. Like many crpgs, and most tabletop rpgs as well, you start off the game by creating a character and seeing that character get swept up into a great mystery. I don’t want to go into too much spoiler territory, but to be honest I can’t talk about the second game without doing so, and the games are nearly twenty years old now so fucking get over it.

So, very long story cut very short, in the first game, after roaming around solving problems and stealing everyone’s belongings if you so choose, you eventually come to realise you are what is called Bhaalspawn, aka the spawn of the murder-god. And, unsurprisingly, one of your siblings really wants to murder you. Said sibling tries again and again to murder you from the beginning till the end of that first game. Until you deal with them. What you do from start to end is entirely up to you really, as it is in most rpgs. You can act like a total murder loving murderbot, or be an innocent soul trapped by circumstance. And this level of player direction continues until the end of the series in Throne of Bhaal, which is kind of an expansion to Baldur’s Gate II and also in some ways it could be called Baldur’s Gate III, so I’m not entirely sure whether to include it’s content in Baldur’s Gate II for the purposes of this explanation. But it seems like I should, so I will.

At the of Throne of Bhaal you can literally become the god of murder. Or some type of good-guy-god. Or not become a god. Or whatever, it is really up to you what you do and how you approach everything. Remember this was before the current four-option-bioware-dialogue-tree became so popular. So it was not like you can be a good guy, a dickhead or an invocation of the darkest evils. I mean yeah you could be all of those things at different times if you wanted. But there were so many more options, so much subtly. Not this good, bad and ugly bullshit that boils player choice down to ‘pick the option that is obviously going to have the most interesting outcomes and voice acting’, not ‘pick the one that you as a player actually agree with.’ In more modern crpgs it often feels like there really is only one answer that the dev’s want you to pick and you are an idiot if you pick anything else. This didn’t feel like that. This felt like, and still does feel like, the best attempt at making a D&D style game for a computer that has ever occurred.

Many games have come pretty close to it over the years. And many of those were basically trying to be, what has become a bit of an overused buzzword at this point, a ‘Baldur’s Gate II Spiritual Successor’. (Seriously why can’t we have an actual remake or some kind of real sequel? Please humanity. If we are aiming to colonize mars why can’t we aim for this as well?). None of these so called successors have really lived up to Baldur’s Gate II sadly. It still tops the list of D&D style computer gaming in my opinion. And maybe it always will. But what made it so much better than Baldur’s Gate the original? Basically everything. But mostly the villain. A very wise writer once said ‘The strength of your villain is the strength of your story’. And I think once you understand that to be true, a lot of hard-to-articulate story problems become pretty clear pretty quickly.

The villain in the first game is… well it’s this guy:

This guy is called a Deathbringer. He brings death. Duh!

I mean he looks kind of badass I guess? And his voice acting, although back in the day you didn’t get very much of it, was pretty dang great. So what made him a lesser villain? I mean you can see the problem right there in that image but some of you might not be able to articulate it all that well. He was obvious! He clearly is ready for some hardcore medieval battle. And we see him kick the ass of our older, higher level, patron early in the game. But what the hell is his motivation? Become a god… or something? Kill his siblings… because ‘there can only be one’? I guess? Maybe?

The differences between the villain in BG whose name is Sarevok and the villain in BG II whose name is just Jon are actually numerous now that I think on it. I mean here look at the BG II villain:

This guy is basically just an elf. But with like, weirdness.

Looks pretty average right? I mean his face looks a little weird but we get nothing of the overwhelming obvious evilness of the first villain. Well you might be surprised to learn he pretty much immediately becomes the stuff of vivid psychological nightmares. When the second game starts you have been captured by unknown assailants and put in a horrible prison. And these are the first things you hear out of BG IIs main villain:

You just wake up to this guy all up in your grill.

He then proceeds to blast you with spells like an asshole.

Is that supposed to make me feel good?

I hope so, or is it going to be game over before we even start?

Maybe I would if I wasn't trapped in a dang cage from the start of the game!

Fucking haunting. And very different to what we got in the previous game. In the last game we knew the villain was powerful, wanted more power, and wanted to kill us to get it. We get the same gist here but the ephemeral nature of these threats and the vague shape of this villain’s plans are just so horrifying compared to the original villain. Interestingly as well, a lot of the differences between the two are shown in how they affect the party. In the first game, for spoilery reasons that I won’t go into, your first companion Imoen is just as threatened by the main villain as you are. But she is basically an annoying child the whole time never taking anything seriously. In BG II however, the game starts with ole Jon conducting ‘experiments’ on Imoen and for the rest of the game she is mentally shattered by the experience. You can’t help but empathise with her and the emotional toll of all this is heavy and lasting.

Going into any more details of the plot of these games would be a whole lot of ‘telling’ and not enough ‘showing’. And ultimately I would love it if I could actually convince someone to play one of these games who hasn’t as yet. So I won’t go into more detail on the Baldur’s Gate series, (to do so properly would require its own post), except to say that you should play it, obviously. But especially the second game. That is where the fun really lies. And yes you can just learn about what happens in the first game through the second one, sure playing the first might help, and you can import your save into the second one so that is awesome. But overall, it’s not needed.

The Transform Matrix

Since the title of this section is a reference to how video games render graphics in three dimensions you can probably infer that I love both video games, and multidimensionality. Wait you didn’t infer that? Are my references too esoteric? Whatever. Anyway, The Matrix series has both of those things. Video games, and multidimensionality. Yeah ok I can see why people say my use of language is a bit strange.

But it’s true! The video games actually form huge parts of The Matrix’s story, telling the tale that lies between the first movie and the second movie in Path of Neo, and then canonically telling the tale of everything that happens within the matrix itself, after the films, based on player actions in The Matrix Online. (There was also a game that followed a side story called Enter the Matrix).

Did you know Morpheus dies later on in the story of The Matrix? You didn’t? Well he died because players of The Matrix Online failed to defend him from an assassin during a ten day multiplayer event. Pretty neat if you ask me, that the fans had so much influence on the canon of the universe. But I didn’t play that game (well I created an account and ran around a bit, but MMOs have never been my thing), and besides, other people have told that tale better than I could, even the [wiki] is pretty good. That said, I do have a lot to say about the movie sequels. And how they are better than the original film. In every way that matters.

In order for us, myself as a writer, and you as a reader, to be on the same page here we both need to agree on one thing. The Matrix, while a very enjoyable film for a whole host of reasons, is, at its core, a white male led power fantasy. Now that isn’t bad in and of itself. But for a lot of us out here in the world it gets pretty fucking tiresome. Clearly that is true for the Wachowskis. You just have to look at one of their more recent works [Sense8] to get an idea of how they feel about the typical hero’s journey plot of a white male who has no knowledge of how to fight, meeting and of course surpassing, various people of other ethnicities and genders just because he is the ‘chosen one’. Sense8 pretty much shoves the idea of the chosen one up its own ass, and manages to be the best TV show I’ve watched in decades.

So why then would the Wachowskis make a movie that is exactly that ‘chosen one’ plot filled with every possible trope from those plots imaginable? Well, I don’t claim to have any inside knowledge of what they might have been thinking, I can only guess there was no simple answer to that question. But the answer that I find to be the most satisfying, and probable from my point of view, lies within one of the most controversial scenes that involve only dialogue in a film that I can think of. The infamous Architect scene in The Matrix Reloaded.

I will link here to a full video of the scene Neo has with The Architect. But of course it is spoilery as hell, so just in case someone who hasn’t watched this movie is reading this and doesn’t want spoilers (who the hell would do such a thing…), I’ll just repeat the main line I want to dissect here:

Architect: The first Matrix I designed was quite naturally perfect, it was a work of art…flawless, sublime. And triumphed equally only by its monumental failure. The inevitability of its doom is apparent to me now as a consequence of the imperfection inherent in every human being. Thus: I redesigned it based on your history to more accurately reflect the varying grotesqueries of your nature.

Now different people take this line differently. For me, within the context of the movie, this was fairly obvious and literal. Meant to express a machine’s inherent distaste for biological life. But the more I thought about this movie in the face of the many people who shit all over the matrix sequels and this scene especially, the more this line seemed like a kind of meta lampshading. I can read this line, and imagine it being said by the Wachowskis themselves in reference to The Matrix films. I can read this line, and realise, that in all honesty, the Wachowskis most likely created that first movie to fully satisfy the audience of typical white-male power-fantasies exactly so that they could follow up that movie with a total deconstruction of the very concept of it. The fact that the plot of that first film is so gross, and yet so appealing to the movie going masses leads me to believe that the Wachowskis may have even intentionally rewritten their original movie script, due to an unfortunate realisation that this would be the only way they could make a successful film.

I can’t blame them for wanting to make a successful film to launch their careers. But I absolutely celebrate the fact that they ultimately gave the people that love the tired ass ‘chosen one’ plot the middle finger with their follow up films. Reloaded and Revolutions shatter the very idea of the chosen one plot. They explicitly state that the entire world and everything that Neo has experienced right up until he walks out of the wrong (or very right?) door in the Architects room was entirely contrived to appeal to humanity’s basest nature. The whole plot of the film up to that point is a reflection of the most grotesque parts of the collective unconscious of humanity’s hive mind. I think we were meant to love that plot, because we are all horrible ass hats who somehow love the idea of a pasty white guy with no personality becoming the most powerful being imaginable. Whether or not this is also a direct deconstruction of messianic plots in general I can’t say for sure, these films are deeply laden with philosophic meaning and it is hard to decipher any exact point of view on the part of their creators, but I strongly assume that it is.

At this point I should make a slight addendum, and admit that in large part there are shades of the chosen one plot right up until the end of the story. Even though we receive direct confirmation that there is no actual ‘prophecy’ and that the Oracle is just a program who has her own agenda, we still do see Neo exhibit some pretty real, pretty ‘chosen one’ esq powers throughout the films, especially once he realises that he can control stuff with his mind in the real world. Now you might see that as a bit limp if you are on the bandwagon of disliking those kinds of stories like me, but remember these films are deep, deep affairs and rarely can anything hold up to a single pass of analysis. For example one common belief around why and how Neo is able to do this, is the ‘matrix within a matrix’ theory. The idea that the whole thing from start to finish is some kind of simulation about breaking out of simulations. I’m not sure where I land on this topic since I actually love the idea that agent smith was able to inhabit a real human body, the idea that it is just another digital persona that he is taking over surely makes a lot more sense but it is also somehow less cool from my point of view. Regardless The Matrix is a trilogy of films that I think we should never stop talking about and filmmakers should strive to live up to.

Now If you are the kind of person who has watched all of the Wachowskis various follow-ups to The Matrix and felt disappointed that they haven’t just made a new messianic, white-guy power-fantasy, I understand that you probably are not convinced that Reloaded and Revolutions are better than the original film. That is ok. We can disagree on this point if we have to. But I would ask that you go back and watch all their newer stuff again, but think about it from a different point of view. For example: Jupiter Ascending isn’t for you. It is for a certain kind of young, female, sci-fi fan who wants a protagonist that they can relate to. Not one who is a badass, or a powerful fighter, just one who is kind of ditsy and has a good sense of humour. That movie is filled with wish fulfilment for that audience, just as The Matrix is filled with the kind of wish fulfilment that you like. You got a badass woman who kicks dudes in the head and is hopelessly in love with the chosen one, they got a badass wolf-dude who can fly and is hopelessly in love with the chosen one. Both were played by awesome actors and fulfilled their roles wonderfully. Just because one was obviously not intended to satisfy your sexual fantasies, doesn’t mean he isn’t satisfying someone’s sexual fantasies. And satisfying them damn well, have you seen Channing Tatum for fuck’s sake? Magic Mike anyone? Hot damn!

I would love for everyone who feels this way about movies to just be able to say to themselves, ‘this movie isn’t for me, but I can see that it would be awesome for the kind of person it was meant to satisfy’. Rather than just saying ‘this movie is shit’ because it didn’t get their dick hard. But that isn’t the world we live in. All I can do is make a case for why these sequels are so lovely. And I will endeavour to do that even more than I have here, in a real meaty post at some point in the future. For now, I would recommend you go back and check them out, or at least watch Sense8. That show is insanely good, being the most expensive Netflix show made up until now. It fully blows my mind that such a show could ever have been made. If you get that show, and then go back and rewatch The Matrix sequels thinking about who their creators really are, you might see something else this time.

That one where the cars have eyes and shit

So Cars, (the Pixar movie not the death traps we all willing get into on the daily), was a pretty average kids film. Not quite up there with the rest of the Pixar line-up to be honest. But I mean, kids like it. So, as above, just because a film isn’t meant for me doesn’t mean it’s bad. And it’s not just kids that like it either. My partner Jess really liked that movie as well. It was under her insistence that I even watched that movie, or it’s sequel, which was also pretty average. I then also watched Planes with my partner, which was the same basic movie, but now they can sell toy planes I guess instead of just toy cars. And then I watched Planes: Fire & Rescue. And my opinion on the whole affair changed pretty dramatically. The premise of the whole thing, as in, the fact that vehicles have big eyes instead of windshields and they are alive, is still pretty weird. But the story in Fire & Rescue is very real and not weird at all.

Planes: Fire & Rescue is about a crop duster plane called Dusty. (I am about to spoil Planes 1 pretty heavily in case you can’t tell yet. So if you care about that sort of thing, go watch it and then come back.) In the last film Dusty went on quite a journey, going from plucky young crop duster to full on racing plane. It was uplifting and enjoyable in whatever measure you were able to look past the fact that a plane had eyes and was alive. So for me, by that point, having watched two other similar movies, pretty enjoyable. But I am pretty great at the art of suspension of disbelief, so your results may vary.

At the start of Fire & Rescue however, we see Dusty have some problems. He is pushing himself harder and harder to go faster and faster and blam he breaks part of his engine. This, one might think, is not all that big a deal for an alive-vehicle. Since we all know vehicles have replaceable parts in the real world, and in fact they have established that alive-vehicles also have them in this film world as well. However, after a fairly sizeable sequence where they try and try to find a replacement for Dusty’s broken part but they just can’t seem to locate one, (spoilers for the whole film here:), they do not find one. Dusty remains broken. This film is about how he finds meaning in his life after his dreams have been permanently shattered.

Now, this actually kind of blew my mind. I mean these movies have dealt with this kind of issue before and the good guys have always come out on top, just barely managing to win the race because of true grit and determination. This was not that movie. I’m not sure exactly when, but at some point during this movie I stopped seeing all the characters as vehicles with eyes and just saw them as people. That, I suppose, is the power of narrative. If we can find ourselves drawn into a character, we go along on the journey with them. Forgetting ourselves and our lives for just a moment and living with them in their reality. (Even if said reality makes no scientific sense whatsoever.) The people in this film have real problems. Problems I have gone through. Problems I am still going through. Dusty has no fucking idea what to do with himself after his injury. I am certain people with medical problems can relate to that, but I don’t even have medical problems. Well, not to that degree at least. I have plenty of crushed dreams however.

That look in Dusty’s windshield-eyes when he finally realises that everything he wanted for himself, everything he knows that he is destined for, everything he has just had an intoxicating taste of, is dead, gone and over, was fucking harrowing for me. I know that look. I’m sure I’ve had that look on my face too. Probably more than once now. Relating to a character can come in many forms, but I have found over the years that, for me at least, the most visceral of these forms is relating to a character’s pain. And shit I can relate to Dusty’s pain. I’m right there with you man.

I should let you know, all of this pain happens fairly early in the film, as is normal in an animated kids movie, and eventually Dusty does figure out a way to give his life meaning again. He meets characters who have had similar problems in their lives, he shows us he is still a hero and blah blah blah. The actual Fire & Rescue type parts of the film are awesome, equally dramatic, and very much something I won’t spoil so that if you ever do watch this movie I haven’t actually ruined it for you. Just be ready to go on a fucking emotional rollercoaster with fucking sentient planes that are trying not to be quite so dead inside just like you are. It’s a trip man. But a good trip nonetheless.

I guess I can’t blame the movie going masses for not kicking up a bigger hoo-haa over Planes: Fire & Rescue. It was something like the fourth movie in the vehicles-have-eyes franchise, and I imagine it was pretty cheap to make, and was likely just a good way to maximise merchandise profits. But whoever was behind the script of that movie poured some real shit into it that really caught me off guard. Anyway, I forgive the academy for not honouring Fire & Rescue, but why the hell does it have a 55% audience score on rotten tomatoes?! What the hell! Blah, one can’t judge these kinds of movies based on how the internet views them. They weren’t made for the internet. I feel like this movie was made for parents to plop their kids in front of, and the people behind it were like; ‘maybe we should put some shit in this movie that makes these parents wish their life was different, but like, way more than they normally do when they just look at their kids or whatever?’ Can you tell I don’t have kids? Haha! Hooray me!

And well, in summary:

The rest of my top sequels lists are either pretty obvious, as to why they are good sequels, or they are just good movies/games that happen to be sequels. Movies like Desperado (if you don’t know what this is, or why it’s such a good sequel, google it, you will be surprised), and 10 Cloverfield Lane (also good but if you are on board yet just watch this one by itself, it would be more satisfying that way I think) are obviously amazing for various reasons when it comes to the question of ‘how do we follow up that movie/game we made that everyone likes’. And I’m not going to be able to do them justice in just a few words, nor do I have the passion for them to write thousands upon thousands of words about them. Furthermore, games like Resident Evil 2, Elder Scrolls III, and Final Fantasy VIII are all awesome in both the sequel sense (yes FF8 is better than FF7, get wrecked) and in the sense that they are just awesome games. Final Fantasy VIII, obviously being better in every way than Final Fantasy VII is something that I may write a post on one day actually. But that would be a hard post to write. Do I write it just catering for those who have played both? Those who might only have played one FF game in the past that may or may not be VII or VIII? Or those who have no idea what I am even talking about at this point? I think writing a post that explains FF 8 and how it is better than FF 7 in a way that non-gamers can understand would be an amazingly long and involved piece of work. So yeah that appeals to me obviously. Maybe that will be my next post? Should it be? What do you guys think? Oh what is that? No one is reading this even though I keep writing as if someone is? Oh ok. Well now I’m sad. :(

See ya next post phantom internet lurker people who can trick google analytics into thinking my site has zero views! ;)

A System to Call My Own

Fri, 23 Feb 2018 11:30:00 +1100

The modern tabletop role playing scene is a very weird scene indeed. If you only have a passing knowledge of the current role playing world we live in then you have probably heard that D&D still exists, and it’s latest iteration is actually doing quite well and bringing a lot of people back to the hobby. And while that is certainly true, there are so many other things going on in this scene that it is actually intimidating to think about writing an article about it all. Even to me, a guy who commonly writes articles in the range of five to ten thousand words.

There are those who want the hobby to return to what it was in the 70’s and 80’s, they are often referred to as the old school revolution, which is an awesome movement name for anyone I think. They seem to want more heavy simulation in the rules of their rpg systems. Which is not to my taste personally, but I support them fully. There is no wrong way to have fun, assuming no one is being hurt.

Then there are of course people who want exactly the opposite of heavy simulation in their rpg’s. Systems that cater toward this newer group of players appear to be adopting the title of Story Games, which as a name, sounds super appealing to me, but I do worry that they will eventually segregate themselves right out of the hobby and essentially become a whole new hobby.

That worries me because tabletop roleplaying games as a hobby have always been somewhat niche and I don’t think anyone wants to be in a niche of a niche of a niche. Pretty much any role playing system or product that doesn’t have official D&D branding on it already suffers from this problem. I think most products in this category think they will break out of the D&D Venn diagram and become a hit with mainstream game audiences but my fear is actually that they will turn off their main market of wargaming audiences, who are the real big spenders of the gaming world.

What makes this problem even worse for anything that doesn’t have D&D branding is that one could more easily justify writing ten thousand words about D&D fifth edition itself than just about every other system or style of play combined at this point, if one was just looking at the potential popularity of ones material. Luckily that is not something I care about. What I care about is that more people pull back the curtain that D&D draws over the rest of our hobby and get a chance to see all the wonderful things that can be found here.

To that end I offer two things. Firstly a look at a role playing game that I have been cobbling together for the last few years. It has primarily been for home use, but lately I’ve been thinking of releasing it. And then later on, (probably in a month or so), an article expounding even more on the many other role playing games that came to inform different parts of my homebrew games and how those have grown over time into their own system.

Firstly - The Why

I think before I get into the nitty and gritty of the role playing system that I am currently playing around with, I need to explain why it is that a person would ever think to create their own role playing system in the first place. I mean there are obvious reasons of course, like if you are a game designer and it is job to create role playing systems. But that is not my job. Well, I certainly don’t get paid for it yet anyway. But besides doing it for work, or with some plan to sell the game that you design, why the hell would you bother? There are tons of tabletop role playing systems out there. They come in every shape and size, every theme, with every style of play in mind. So why make your own?

For myself, it wasn’t as much a choice to make an rpg system as it was a slow process of integrating disparate game mechanics into my homebrew games. There have been many systems that have entered my life and revolutionised the way that I think about the practice of playing games. Not the least of which is D&D itself I am pained to admit. But starting with D&D and continuing on even to Fate Core and onward, I rarely enjoy playing a game system exactly as it is written in the rule book. Now, the boastful creative in me wants to say, ‘that’s ‘cos I am just so imaginative, it would have been impossible for me to not revolutionise the gaming hobby’.

But in truth, it isn’t even rare or special for a GM to change large swaths of the rule book or make up entirely new rules as the game goes along. It’s basically standard practice. It often happens in the beginning because you are a new GM and instead of bogging the game down to look up a rule you just make something up to keep the fun going. Then at some point you might look up that rule and realise whatever it was that you made up on the fly actually makes way more sense than what it says in the book.

Or maybe you have been playing by the book for awhile, but one rule in particular is just getting out of hand, or not working correctly, or negatively impacting your fun or the players fun. And so you toss that shit right out of the window. And suddenly the game is so much fun again. You get a sudden reinvigoration for the game and everything feels fresh. Until some other dirty rule comes along and drags you down again. And so you shed that rule as well, or modify it for simplicity or time or balance. And before you know it you are chatting with your friends who also play the same game system and realise that they game they play with their group is intensely different to the game you play with yours. Even though you have the same books on the table.

This kind of slow shifting and changing of the rules (or perhaps ignoring of the rules entirely, I’m looking at you grapple rules) is entirely the normal way to play the game. It barely even warrants a mention. Other than to segue into how a person can arrive at the game table one day bringing their players hand book with them and realise that, for their game at least, there are actually no rules from that whole book that are even being played at your table anymore.

It might be just because you have shifted from D&D to Pathfinder, or visa versa. Or it could be the gradual removal and modification of little rules here and there that culminate in one or more rule books becoming entirely obsolete. But one way or the other, in our hobby one can come to realise just how much the rules can be shifted with very little to no impact of the level of fun we are having when we play.

By that I don’t mean rules themselves have no impact on fun, quite the opposite in fact. What I mean to say is that you can play any system you want, and still have fun with it. You will naturally gravitate towards certain rules and away from other rules, but ultimately, the rules aren’t what make the game fun. The people you are playing with make it fun. The story you are creating makes it fun. Rolling a critical hit makes it fun. If some rule gets in the way of that, it is the natural instinct of almost every player and GM out there to strike that rule down with great vengeance and furious anger. Which is the way it should be in my opinion.

At some point though, (and this point is less common I imagine), I realised that I had struck down so many rules that there were very few rules left. This first happened for me as a teen when a bunch of friends wanted to play some D&D at school on a day where no classes where being held for some reason. I said hell yeah and volunteered to DM since I assumed no one else would. But we didn’t have the rules with us, nor did we have smartphones or good internet back then, so I just ran the game to the best of memory using only six sided dice since we couldn’t find any other dice at the time. And it was fine.

It never seemed odd, or awkward, or like we didn’t have enough rules. We had plenty. Roll the dice, if its a good role then whatever you said you wanted to do works well, if the dice comes up with a one, then it fails etc. We just played by whatever rules made sense. I gave the wizard less HP, the fighter a bit more. The wizard got some spells. The fighter got a sword and armour. The tropes of fantasy gaming are so ingrained in us that I think any given fan could be an art director, or a game designer on an rpg straight off the street and perform the job to an acceptable level.

Later on I returned to using the full rule book many times. I actually have a surprising ability to store vast amounts of the rules in my head at any one time, so it isn’t all that much of a struggle for me in that regard. But I always found some rule or other just being a bother at the time, not adding much to a scene, certainly not adding much to the drama of what was going on, let alone detracting from it. And so rules were removed, games moved to rules-light systems, more rules were removed, some rules I found in other systems were added in that actually reinforce the drama of a scene, some rules were modified, some rules were made up on the spot, and at the end of the day I looked at what I had and it looked like an entirely new thing. Not a cobbled together thing, but more like a sculpture that was sitting inside the marble all along. I mean it was a fugly sculpture that didn’t make much sense. But it was my sculpture. :)

It was for the start of my more recent campaign in a setting I called Industrial Fantasy (high fantasy, mixed with an industrial revolution) that I just told my players that we are now playing with my own system that I am creating. They were basically my play testers for that system. Like with any new thing, some bits went very well and some went poorly. But the overall feeling was one of lots of fun and it seemed like my players really engaged with the drama that I was putting in front of them, and managed to come up with tons of awesome creative and dramatic moments themselves.

One thing I’ve learned about this game is that you really do want the players to be adding to the game. And putting creative pressure on them is one of the best ways to tie them to the game, since parts of it are their direct creation, and also to ensure that no one ends up in a rut, just coming to the game because that’s what they do on the weekend. Everyone needs to be excited for an rpg to truly be awesome. And putting consistent creative demands on the players means that if they can’t be bothered to engage and focus they know ahead of time that the group may as well play a board game.

In the system that I am putting together, players being able to take control of the story and the world is a big focus. To that end I have mechanics like Montages and Moments. Montages are scenes that we as a group don’t feel we need to get into the nitty gritty of, so we just go around the table, with each person adding a scene to the Montage, narrating it up to a certain point, then passing it off to the next player to resolve. Then after that player has resolved it, they set up a new shot in our scene, pass it off the next player and so forth until we rotate back to the GM or until we are up to a point in which, we as a group, want to dive into and explore in more detail.

Moments are kind of like player character super weapons. The main Moment, called a Spotlight Moment is basically a silver bullet that can take out a whole obstacle in one shot, but can only be used once per session. It is a great way to get players into the idea of narrating their character, and controlling the whole narrative, bad guys and environment included. Some players find those kinds of concepts difficult to engage with at first, and Spotlight Moments are a great way to get them involved. There are other Moments as well, like Off-Screen Moments and Narration Steals, and there are some specific different types of Montages too. But let’s be honest what you are really wanting to hear about is how you make a character in this system right? So let’s get into it. It won’t take long to explain. But I mean… I’ll still write a couple thousand words on it just because that’s what I do. But really I promise you it is about as simple as making a character could possibly be.

Is My Character Just a Collection of Rules?

Not everyone sees it this way. I’ll admit that up front. But in my opinion, it doesn’t matter whether or not I am playing a paladin or a fighter when I start an rpg. I told you my guy has a sword and armour and she has made a life as a soldier fighting orcs in the mountains. Isn’t that enough for us to get started? It’s not? Why the hell not?

If I was watching a movie and it opened on a woman in armour fighting a band of orcs in the mountains would I be asking what class she was playing? I suppose that’s an unfair example since a film isn’t a game but even in a video game I don’t necessarily care what class I am playing. What class is Geralt in the Witcher series? Well yeah, sure you are correct, he is a Witcher. But do we have any fucking clue what a Witcher is when we start playing? Even looking at the game on the shelf you probably wouldn’t guess that in those games the word Witcher basically means mutant monster hunter. But does it matter? We see he has swords, some armour, lots of scars. We get the gist! We can dive right in and slay some monsters and not even notice that Geralt’s special something is that he makes and drinks decoctions to augment his bodily mutations. We don’t need all that detail up front. If those games made me understand every complicated game system up front I would tune out immediately. I want to know that my character is a cool badass in an interesting and satisfyingly dramatic story before I want to know how many spells he can cast before he needs to have a lay down ‘cos he is tired.

I fundamentally question the very Idea of classes in an rpg. And not in a ‘let’s deconstruct them all into abstract game systems and make the player buy them with points’ kind of way. I question whether or not they are a complete red herring. I wonder if they just seem like a great idea and a source of fun, when in fact there might be some simpler facet of our hobby that is the real source of this fun and classes are just another set of complications that we don’t really need.

If you ask a current player of D&D Fifth what their favourite part of the game is, they would likely say the classes and the options those classes have. But is that because classes are actually awesome? Or is it because in that system, classes represent 95% of the meaningful choices players get to make about their characters. I would argue the later. In truth any veteran player of that system would probably tell you that background selection has a deeper impact on your character than class does. Yet backgrounds are something that can be considered and decided upon very quickly whereas class choice seems to take forever when you are starting a new game. Why is that?

You might think it is because people place less importance on their background and are more interested in what lies ahead. And to some degree that is true. But I would argue that people take so goddamn long to pick a class firstly because they know that this choice might affect a year or more of their favourite hobby but also because, to really know whether you want to be a fighter, or a blade focused warlock or a melee bard, or a barbarian who wears armour or whatever the hell else that can constitute ‘guy with sword and armour’ you have to read pages upon pages of rules and compare them to one another. And I’m not even considering power gamers here who of course would be so paralysed by choice at this point that they would just google what an optimal build is for the weapons or spells they like and go with that. I’m talking about regular role players who just want to know what is going to fit with their playstyle.

I could rant for a long time about the way D&D does everything so let me cut off my own ramblings of the concept of rpg classes here and tell you what the system that I am working on does instead of classes. Actually this part of my system replaces a lot, if not all of the normal rpg character creation choices. I call it the Heart of an Adventurer and it is just four choices, none of which are chosen from a list, you just choose them based on the kind of game you are playing in and the kind of character you want to play.

The Heart of an Adventurer contains a characters Concept, Twist, Struggle and Destiny. These four choices outline who and what your character is, and what they are heading towards. Literally that is all the info you could give your players and within ten minutes you could start playing. Perhaps it would help the players out to know a bit about how each of those parts of their characters Heart are meant to change their game experience. But a quick run down is all that is needed. The idea here is to keep every part of the system, including character creation, conversational. Since role playing games are by definition, conversations. I want to eliminate the difference between character creation and actual play that many players report as jarring and awkward.

Following our ‘guy with sword and armour’ example from above I could create a character with the following Heart:

Concept - Blond, stocky, female, mountain folk, who wields a sword and wears heavy plated armour.
Twist - Her armour is magical, she found it deep inside the mountain and doesn’t know much about it.
Struggle - Dark beasts continually rise up from within the mountain and plague the land. Only she has the power to deal with them.
Destiny - To pass on the mantle of her role beating back the forces of darkness. To make the ultimate sacrifice.

And now I am ready to start playing. Literally every other rule in the system is optional and can be introduced later on in the game. I think writing four simple sentences about your character and thinking about why they are cool, but also why they are dramatic and interesting is all you really need to get started playing an rpg. (Ok yes in the example above I wrote six sentences. What do you expect this me we are talking about!)

The rules in any tabletop rpg should be simple enough that the GM can explain them as you go along. And the complexity should build up as you go. The less overhead there is to creating a character the more actual games we all get to play. Rolling up characters is a fun pastime in and of itself, which is why another reason I think the concept of class choices has persisted for so long. Those choices work well enough in video games, but at the tabletop, personally speaking, I want drama, I want action, I want an awesome story filled with cool character moments. I don’t give a shit about whether or not I get +2 to my grapple attempt because of a feat I chose last week that I can’t remember the name of anymore.

That’s not say I want to shit all over the old school players who want to play simulations. I don’t. Not at all. It is more to say that I want to show them how a narrative simulation can be more fun than a physics simulation. In terms of actual tactical combat choices to make, don’t worry, there are plenty here and they are deep and interesting. But yes, simple. Simplicity is one of the hardest things to design for, any designer will tell you that. Any kind of experiential design can be enhanced by simplicity. If hunting animals before we could talk as a species was not simple we would not have survived, but if it was not in essence deep and complex and hard to master we would not have evolved such amazing brains and tools. I want emergent complexity in my rpg games, depth people, not breadth. I want a short rule book for a game that takes years to master, not a long rule book for a game that gets boring immediately.

So! With the simple character we created above we can venture forth into the world, knowing everything we need to know to react genuinely to events and people, to get involved in some fun adventures and hopefully, based on what we have written, the GM will know where we want our character to end up and what kind of things we want to her to struggle through. The details on exactly what she can do with her sword and her interesting magic armour are things better worked out when they come up. It might happen straight away, or we might spend a session just role playing and getting to know each other’s characters and the world we inhabit.

Getting to the Action

I don’t want to bore you with every detail of my new system, and actually I’m not sure I want to give away all the details at this point, because a small part of me still thinks maybe I could offer it as an official product some day. Personally I think it’s that good. But I will go over the main mechanic that will come up pretty much whenever a character goes to do something. Since without that info your mental picture of how creating a character and then diving into play straight away won’t be perfect. You might think that I am just skipping a bunch of rules that really we will need to go over at some point just to get to the action, much like Fate Core encourages you to do if you are new player. And to some degree you are right. That is a big part of why I designed the system that way.

But we aren’t skipping anything as players by doing it this way, it’s more like the system itself skips these steps to get you into the action right away. By just writing those four sentences for your character (and choosing a name as well I suppose) you are officially ready to play, no further action on the players part is required. There might be some games where something else is done in character creation, like Bonds between players are worked out before play starts, or your character might start off with a Duty or a Boon. But under normal circumstances you would be ready to go. The question then I guess, is how the hell does the whole rest of what D&D’s class and race and background systems gives us even end up in the game? How do you just tack on all of that in-depth information?

It’s simpler than you would think: If you want your character to do something, you just say what they are going to do and roll to see if they are successful. (Currently my roll is 4dF, because I just love Fate Dice, but basically any d6 based roll will work). The defence will also say what they are going to do and roll as well. Everything is defended, even if it’s just a door rolling to see if it can avoid having it’s lock picked. Now comes the interesting part, this part is inspired by a mini-rpg called Roll for Shoes, which has a hilarious name that I love. Whichever side is successful in their roll gets a new Talent named after whatever it was that they did.

So if my woman with her sword is going to attack the forces of darkness and makes a powerful downward slash against a monster, and the dice say it succeeds, then she gets a level one Talent called Power Slash (or whatever else she wants to call it). The same is true if the defence succeeds, they might get a level one Talent called Dodge. In later rolls, if what I say my character does is the same (or very similar) to one of my Talents then I add my Talent level to my roll. For rolls where we are using an existing Talent we don’t earn a new Talent if we succeed we just get to apply our bonus. That encourages us to try new things! But of course any Talent we use regularly will level up and allow us to become very powerful in our areas of expertise.

And that’s basically it! I mean there are rules for cashing in Talents you no longer want in order to upgrade the Talents that you do want and a few other progression and levelling rules for Talents, but in terms of what the players need to play the game right now? That’s it mate.

Combat. Plus lots of Other Stuff I Guess.

I guess I should give you a clue as to how combat works as well. I know you won’t just take my word for it that there is any depth there. There barely manages to be real tactical depth in even D&D combat and that system is 99% combat rules. So here goes, as much detail as is necessary for you to see how deep the system can be:

At the beginning of a combat round, all players and NPC’s roll all their dice for actions and defence. (Currently I play this 8dF, the players get to choose which four dice are used for each either when they take their action, or when they need to defend.) Then someone goes first. Who goes first depends on the genera you are playing more than anything, and to be honest I need to do a bit more playtesting for this rule as it affects the combat a lot as you will see below. The first player gets to take an action using the Action Test rules, as I explain above in my downward slash against a monster example. Once that action is resolved, consequences are doled out, any new Talents are awarded, and then the current player chooses a character to go next. That part is so important it bears repeating. The current player chooses who goes next. That continues all the way down the line until all players have acted once in that round.

These two small rules, being able to do basically anything on your turn, and choosing exactly which character gets to go next create an amazingly deep game. The choice of when to pass the turn to the enemy is massive. And remember you can see all the dice that have been rolled for the whole round. You don’t know which ones will be used for defence and which will be used for attack, and you don’t know what Talents and other powers the enemy might have. But you can see a lot about how the rest of the round will go down, and you have a ton of information to inform your decision. All of that, plus the fact that the enemy might choose to do something that you had never even considered, because they can do literally anything they want with a decent chance of success, creates an awesome sense of tension and tactical play. But the whole time everything feels very visceral and dramatic, just like it should in a narrative focused game.

There are a bunch more rules than that of course. Like what happens when someone gets hurt (Consequences, which work a little bit like they do in Fate Core), special powers or items that the characters may discover through play (Boons), things to work on that allow our characters to grow both as people and in terms of power (Bonds and Duties), and a bunch of rules that help us keep things dramatic and engaging (Moments, Montages and one of my favourite mechanics: Getting in Trouble). I even have a couple of variant rule systems for those that prefer a more crunchy experience that make Talents work more like D&D’s Skills and Class Features, although they are variants for a reason, they just aren’t as fun in my opinion!

But this post is already a little over five thousand words and I swore I would try to keep them short (short for me is under five thousand, so I have failed, but not by much). If this system sounds intriguing to you please let me know, either on Facebook, twitter (which I rarely use but if someone messaged me on there I might start using more), in the comments section below or hell send an email to vorpal@[theurlofthiswebsite-duh]. I am currently looking for more play-testers, but would require this to be face-to-face play so you would need to be physically present in Canberra, ACT, Australia, Earth, This joke got old real fast, why am I still comma separating everything, oh well, bye.

Player Information - Class/Race Examples.

Sun, 05 Mar 2017 11:31:00 +1100

Beyond the Shadows

Welcome To Industrial Fantasy

Character Information - Some Flavour and Lore

Beyond the Shadows, Industrial Fantasy is being run via an unholy mishmash of various rule sets. The main RPG tropes you will find missing from this hacked together system are those of Class and Race. Industrial Fantasy has taken a page from Fate Core here and instead uses the High Concept aspect to replace Race, Class and any other statistic that might determine your character’s primary identity.

For context purposes however I have included a list of the different species that one might find in The Queendom of Lennaun and then some of the more adventurous jobs and lifestyles as well. Please don’t let this list stifle your own creativity however, in the best case scenario I want your awesome character to surprise and amaze me and be completely original. Don’t worry if your muse doesn’t strike however, anything found below should provide a fun basic idea from which we will develop an awesome and dynamic character for you to play.

Species

There are many, varied species to be found among the populace of the planet Finn. Nearly two hundred years ago, after the invention of the Clockwork Jewels, The Queendom of Lennaun successfully invaded and conquered all of the known lands surrounding the Central Seas. During their initial occupation, before the eventual emancipation and democratisation of their many colonies The Queendom of Lennaun enacted an horrific policy of relocating children during the war to subdue the populace. This involved thousands upon thousands of young children being taken from their homes and resettled in other lands, to other parents.

Besides creating a stolen generation, the wounds from which can still be felt to this day, nearly a century after the final relocations occurred, this policy had the effect of mixing and melding the peoples of all lands. While some prejudices may always remain, nowadays by and large, any person of any town or country that surrounds the Central Seas might be of any species or race. And most old conflicts between Finn’s various sentient species are a thing of the past. Some Therianthropes, especially Werewolves, Shapeshifters and Vampires are still treated with suspicion however.

Most of Lennaun’s species come under one of the below types:

The Common Peoples - As a response to the Great Relocation a very old magical invention came into widespread use and forever changed the very make up of the common species in the countries surrounding the Central Seas. Known simply as the Melding Chamber it allows biologically incompatible species to bear children with one another indiscriminately. Nowadays, what were once very distinct species, Humans, Elves, Dwarves, Hobbits and Gnomes, are now simply known as the Common Peoples. After generations of magical interbreeding most civilized people are now able to breed without the aid of magical assistance and so a change in taxonomy was demanded. There are still the so-called “Pure Blood” examples of the old common species to be found in small, isolated communities. But these are very rare indeed.

Wildlings - Visually speaking Wildlings appear as a mix of Common Peoples and animals. They are fairly normal sights to behold in any large city of the Realm and are held in much the same regard as any of the Common Peoples. They are much more common in the wild places of the world, since by and large they find cities and larger communities to be exhausting. Wildlings can include Therianthropes, such as Selkies and Kitsune however they also include Beast-men such as Centaurs, Merfolk, Catfolk, Tengus and many others.

Otherkin - Otherkin are beings that currently reside in the Material Realm but are originally from other Realms or can trace their ancestry back to beings from other Realms. No Angels, Demons or other denizens of the Divine or Infernal Realms can be found in Material Realm any longer due the events of the Final Mercy. However Aasimar and Tieflings can still be found in small numbers. Otherkin, while not overly common are still treated just the same as any member of the Common Peoples in most established communities. Some examples of Otherkin include Elementals and their more Common-like cousins Ifrits, Sylphs, Undines and Oreads but also Fetchlings from the Shadow Realm and Doppelgangers or Shapeshifters from the Mirror Realm.

Cursedfolk - Cursedfolk in The Queendom come in many shapes and sizes. Vampires are the most well known (and oft feared) example of Cursedfolk but this term extends to any species whose identity can be traced back to ancient curses. Orcs, Goblins and many others were once the products of powerful dark magic or other evil machinations, even if in the modern world, they are all very respectable by and large. Most Cursedfolk keep to themselves and are not overly welcomed by the populace of Lennaun, however this is purely an issue of perception as they are fully protected by the law of the land just as any other citizen would be. Cursedfolk can also include Dhampirs, Changelings, Ghouls and some Therianthropes such as Werewolves and Werecats.

Jobs, Roles, and ‘Classes’

The below examples should be considered the most common adventurer ‘classes’ that one might run into in the world of Beyond the Shadows. Players in this world can choose one or more of the below archetypes as part of their High Concept, or they can come up with something completely original. In either case the below examples should provide a bit of insight as to the kinds of individuals one might come up against or ally with during the campaign.

Gunslinger - Gunslingers are still a rare sight to behold in Realm. The ancient Frost Giant tradition of guncraft barely survived the final Great Blight and might have been lost forever were it not for the mysterious organisation known as the Ordo Jotun. The order managed to preserve much of the art of gunsmithing, although not much is known about how they performed this feat as the order has always been shrouded in mystery. As a result however, the few members that have left the order over the last thousand years have shared their knowledge of guns and ensured that the technology has managed to proliferate all over the world.

For hundreds of years after the discovery of the Shards of Serin those who wielded guns in combat were considered oddities at best. Any normal weapon became powerless when brought before an opponent wielding a weapon or wearing armour that had been empowered by a Shard. With no way to harness that amazing power for their own weapons, the ways of the Gunslinger fell into decline. However since the introduction of Clockwork Jewels guns have recently come back into vogue. Now any Gunslinger can imbue their shots with greatly amplified power and there is often little that a swordsman or a sorcerer can do in response to a quickly drawn Clockwork Jewel powered pistol.

Modern Gunslingers are often artisans with firearms and can end battles with lightning speed. They practice arcane rituals that enhance their reflexes and fine motor control allowing them to draw their guns in the blink of an eye. And the eldest practitioners of this fine art have been known to enter an almost trance-like state when reloading their weapons, their fingers move faster than the natural eye can see when slotting each cartridge into place. Gunslingers dedicate many years to training in their art, and as such, guns as a whole are very rarely seen in modern armies or mercenary companies. Simply because the devices themselves are so hard to acquire and their use takes far too long to master.

Duellist - The Duellist is a master of one on one combat. They are skilled with many weapons but perhaps most well known for their artful use of the rapier. Anyone can pick up a Clockwork Jewel empowered sword and become a force worthy of fear in this day and age, however a true master of the duelling arts should be treated with caution even if they only appear to be brandishing a rusty spoon.

The popularity of Duellists has risen in recent years in the Queendom of Lennaun due to the overall rise of duelling as a means of dispute settlement. In this day and age Duels may arise at the smallest of insults such as the spilling of ink upon a beautiful new dress. While not everyone wants to risk their own life for such petty matters, by the rule of law all are allowed to name a champion who may present at the duel in their stead.

Thus master Duellists are able to garner high wages and even die hard fans who come out to their every match in most cities across Lennaun. Duelling is most popular among lawyers and politicians and thus it is not uncommon for talented duellists to easily rise to stations of great power and privilege due to both their general popularity and their undeniable skill in dealing with the law of the realm.

Inquisitor - In the past, Inquisitors would serve the gods and the church utilising their grim determination to root out enemies of the faith. In the Crystal Age, with the gods having been silent for a millennia and their touch upon the realm having moved on to the stuff of myths and legends, Inquisitors could have just faded into obscurity along with their churches or perhaps devoted themselves to powerful beings of other planes like the Clerics of the realm. But now more than ever the job of the Inquisitor has become vital for very survival of entire nations.

No longer using their skills in service of deities, Inquisitors now represent the very manifestation of the will of their government. Operating largely from the shadows they are often sent deep into enemy territory as spies to destabilise entire regions single handed, softening them up before an invasion. They can also be found pulling the strings of industry, fuelling the logistics of war for Queen and Country or rooting out threats within their own lands such as criminal gangs and domestic terrorists.

While some with the skill set of the Inquisitor have been known to go rogue, the very term Inquisitor often carries with it the weight of the crown in the minds of the commoners. An Inquisitor of the crown is considered to be above the rule of law, answering directly to their sovereign and being given a free license to conduct their work however wish. Even though most Inquisitors prefer to move unseen, when the time comes that they must take the spotlight the very armies of the nation are theirs to command.

Investigator - Unlike most of the other adventuring professions in this list, Investigators don’t have a long and storied history in the lands of Finn. They are a by-product of modern times. With the advent of more complex legal systems and larger civilizations came a need for highly educated individuals who could delve deeper into mysteries and achieve greater focus on their areas of study. Part scholar, part officer of the law, Investigators fill this need both in official capacities as detectives and forensic specialists and in other capacities as field researchers and scientists.

To the commoners of Lennaun, Investigators appear as the very face of modern society. Every commoner knows that, should there be a horrible crime in the village, an Investigator shall be dispatched, and the truth will win out before long. Never in the history of the Queendom would common folk have hoped to have access to such swift and reliable justice. The same can be said when strange goings on are affecting the crops, or ancient magic is threatening to overtake the land. The commoners know that an Investigator will get to the bottom of it and things shall soon return to normal.

Investigators who have spent long years of study and field work mastering their craft are able to sense when things are amiss almost supernaturally. They will perceive important clues where an ordinary town guard or sheriff would see nothing out of place. They hold vast swaths of knowledge coming from many academic areas in their near photographic memories and can recall obscure and esoteric details in an instant. They carry with them tools that ordinary people can barely fathom ranging from modern technology such as second-accurate timekeepers, all the way to ancient artefacts of arcane significance such as the herbal substances that sharpen their senses and open their minds and the various magical lenses they slot into their goggles and scopes.

Alchemist - Despite the rise of shard-charged crystals and Clockwork Jewels, Alchemists still ply their trade in the lands of Finn. From remote huts deep in the wilderness to small shops in the heart of commercial districts, Alchemists have found that their wares are still of little interest to the average farmer but can be of great interest to those with less common goals. Alchemical substances, ranging from euphoric drugs to horrible poisons are very much still in use in the Queendom of Lennaun.

In centuries past, Alchemists would dabble in mutagens and other powerful relics that had made their way to the Material Realm during the Elemental Storm of the First Age. These days, more is known about these relics and very few Alchemists are willing to accept the risks. In the Crystal Age, the roles of the Alchemist are many and varied. From providing healing salves to those who refuse to be healed in the Chapel of Fire, for fear of being cursed, to outfitting armies with explosive devices and rage-inducing drugs, Alchemists can ply their trade anywhere.

However there do exist legends of more adventurous Alchemists discovering and experimenting with forces and substances so powerful that the very laws of reality have been bent and broken by their will. From traveling through time, to creating vast troves of wealth from naught but garbage. There are many accounts of foolish Alchemists being tormented for eternity by beings from other realms for crossing lines they did know existed. Though more recent tales have been told as well. Tales of fearless Alchemists who, disregarding the old warnings, have delved deep into the powers of mutation and have managed to control these otherworldly beings by binding them to their very essence.

Summoner - There have always been those who have dabbled with forces and entities from the other Realms of existence but only since the discovery of the Shards of Serin and the invention of the Clockwork Jewels have mortals had command over enough raw magical energy to be able to fully control and manipulate these primal beings and powers. Even with the slow proliferation of the Jewels there are still very few who fully understand the arcane incantations that are needed to summon a powerful being from another Realm into the Material Realm. And fewer still who can do so safely, keeping these eldritch powers under their command and not being seduced by their tricks and manipulations.

Those Summoners that have strived to hone their craft have been known to bring forth such horrors unto the battlefield that few have lived to tell tales of the unnatural creatures that have ravaged through their forces. But that is not to say that those who practice the art of Summoning always serve dark powers. Much to the contrary. Some of the most well known Summoners hold high ranks within the Queen’s personal Guard. For what better to stop a would-be assassin than a creature that defies all logic and presumption, does not sleep, does not eat, will fight ferociously until death while wielding powers that few of our world have ever seen before.

Most practicing Summoners believe that the heights of their art have yet to even be fully explored. A truly intrepid Summoner may one day come along and show the world such wonders that have never before been dreamed of by mortal folk. Those who have spent countless hours researching more and more powerful beings of other Realms have concluded that there are powers in the ‘verse that none have yet discovered and that appear to have more power as individuals than entire nations of our world could try to muster. But still the question remains, will anyone discover a way to connect to, let alone command these powers?

Elementalist - During the War in Heaven, when Serin the Ascended enacted her Final Mercy and severed the tendrils of the Void Web that once connected the Divine and Infernal Realms to the Material Realm thus ending the thousand year blight, the Clerics and Paladins of the Realm felt the impact of this disconnection more powerfully than most others. For they had now lost their connection to their Gods. And with it, much of their power.

The period of time after the Final Mercy became known in their circles as the Great Darkness. When once healing and blessings could be offered by those few whose who had been connected closely enough to their Gods, now nothing could be done at all. The Great Darkness came to an end as the Church of Flame rose to power. Drawing their power from the Elemental Realm of Fire, the Church of Flame could offer healing and blessings like none before it.

In modern times, many religions have sprouted up around these new found connections to the Elemental Realms. And not all of the practitioners are interested in healing and blessings. Some prefer to focus the powers that their Patrons bestow directly through their Clockwork Jewels, producing such powerful effects as can hardly be believed. There are tales of small groups of Elementalists burning down forests of nearly endless size and creating tidal waves taller than mountains to wash away their foes. Weather such tales should be believed has yet to be seen in the Queendom of Lennaun, however the rise in popularity of these religions in recent years has raised the question of how closely these new Elementalists should be watched.

Ritualist

Character Creation

Sun, 05 Mar 2017 11:31:00 +1100

Beyond the Shadows

Welcome To Industrial Fantasy

Character Concept

Character creation in Industrial Fantasy starts with figuring out a concept for your character. This could be taken from one or more characters from your favourite books or films, or it could be about something that you want your character to be able to do, like having magical powers, flying around on demon wings, or being able to build and repair airships. Player characters need to be powerful and interesting people. The kind of people that are proactive in dealing with their problems and the difficult situations they find themselves in.

Character Concept is the first slot that becomes unlocked for any character, and is by far the most important, both mechanically and narratively. In the Beyond the Shadows campaign you can think of your Character Concept as a combination of your characters job/role in life/calling and their species/style/history. If you are intending to play a species other than common (highly recommended) then it must be reflected in your Character Concept. Otherwise if you are playing a common character, feel free to leave that detail out of your Concept unless the fact that they are of the common race is important. Here are some examples to help you understand what you should be aiming for:

You can follow your intended species directly with your literal job: Catfolk Detective, Common Knight of the Queen’s Air-Guard, Ratfolk Gun-Wielding Thug.
You can use adjectives and other descriptors to refine the idea: Desperate Mayor of Shadowflower, Reluctant Catfolk Detective, Ambitious Ratfolk Thug.
You could mash different ideas together that most people would find odd: Werewolf Private Detective and Wizard, Dancing Knight of the Queendom, Vampire who is a Monster-Hunter by night and an Accountant by day.
You might incorporate an important relationship your character has: Black Sheep of House Irongrad, Orcish Street Thug for the Fool’s Demise Gang, Fire Spirit Patron of the Church of Flame.

Your Character Concept represents what you are really good at, but should also represent a responsibility you have to deal with. One that is filled with complications and opportunities all its own. To simplify, like all character slots you should fill your Character Concept slot with some good elements, but also with some bad.

Don’t worry too much about nailing an amazing Character Concept right off the bat! If you can’t seem to come up with anything straight away then have a read through the player hand out, choose a species that sounds cool to you and a role that piques your interest. Mash the two together for now and you can go back in and tweak your Concept later on.

Your Unique Thing

Your character’s Unique Thing is a special element of their backstory which sets them apart from every other hero. It is unique to just you in all of the world. Try to think of a special trait that is markedly unusual. Something that might be immediately obvious to the those around you, something that anyone who would tell tales of your deeds might use as a clue for the audience. Some examples might include:

I am the only Undine Gunslinger in service to the Republic of Normwinter.
I have a Clockwork Jewel embedded in my chest that keeps me alive.
I am the only known example of direct offspring between a Fire Elemental and a pureblood Kitsune.
I wield a power unknown to this world. Brought to me from another dimension.

Again, here in your Unique Thing you are looking to include elements of your character’s fiction that are obviously good for them, but also something that might complicate their life from time to time. Your Unique Thing is the only character slot that is unavailable for change later on (unless something truly epic occurs), so if you don’t have a good idea for this at the start of the game it is fine to leave it to be worked out during play.

Index of Folklore

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Significant Historical Events

The Final Mercy

Serin the Twice Cursed ascended into the heavens during the last Planar Alignment to enter battle with the gods themselves and bring an end to the thousand year blight. During the battle Serin chose to sever the Tendrils of the Void that connected our Material Realm to the Divine and Infernal Realms. In order to accomplish this Serin made a sacrifice of her seemingly limitless magical energy. As the Void Web recoiled from the impact, reality itself expanded and contracted. After the initial shockwave fell upon the world, those left standing would see a blinding point of light falling from the heavens, plummeting back down towards the planet Finn. As the scriptures tell the story, this light was Serin The Ascended. After falling through the warping, rippling folds of reality eventually that point of light collided with the planet like an asteroid. Coming down in the middle of the central seas. In the years that followed this event, The Shards of Serin (immensely powerful magical crystals) began to wash up on all the shores of the mainlands.

Historical Heroes

Serin the Twice Cursed

Serin the Twice Cursed Ascended into the heavens during the last Planar Alignment to enter battle with the Gods themselves and bring an end to the thousand year blight once and for all. During the battle, Serin would discover that the only way to truly end the blight would be to sever the Tendrils of the Void that connected our Material Realm to the Divine and Infernal Realms. If the denizens of either could continue to exert their influence on the Material Realm the blight would always be assured to return before long.

In order to cut through the Tendrils, Serin made a sacrifice of her seemingly limitless magical energy. Focusing every ounce of power she could muster from her fragile connection to the Spirit of Finn into a single, unimaginably powerful beam of pure mana. She directed the beam through the now overlapping layers of reality, aiming directly for the connections between our world and theirs. When the beam struck the Tendrils the entire Void Web recoiled from the impact, reality itself expanded and contracted as the shockwave rippled out across all Realms and Worlds.

After the initial shockwave fell upon our World, those left standing would see a blinding point of light falling from the heavens, plummeting towards the planet. As the scriptures tell us, this light was Serin The Ascended. After falling through the warping, rippling folds of reality as time itself began to stretch and wobble, eventually that point of light collided with the planet like an asteroid. Coming down in the middle of the central seas.

The Locke’s & The Key

During the last Planar Alignment, after helping his ward Serin the Twice Cursed achieve ascendancy and rise to fight the Gods in the battle of the Final Mercy, Agent Locke rushed to the aid of Braeden, the last living Frost Giant and leader of the Ordo Jotun. Braeden had stayed behind at the ancient Frost Giant Temple, to assist Avery, (former holder of the title Locke and currently still alive due to a form of Lichdom) in keeping the blight-bitten Frost Giants frozen in time, both for their safety and for the safety of the entire Realm.

During the ensuing battle against the Divine forces Braeden held back the rallying Angels as Locke and Avery worked to seal the Frost Giants in their time bubbles once and for all. The two finally completed their rituals and deployed the last known vial of Liquid Time, then sealing themselves inside the temple on Braeden’s orders. When the last of the ancient alchemical substance had finally dissolved weeks later the two emerged to discover Braeden frozen in time at the vanguard of his brethren. Holding high his mighty shotgun, in defiance of the gods themselves.

Locke mourned deeply at the loss of Braeden. He was his commander in the order but more than that, he was like a father. As Locke openly wept at the loss of his friend the demon Key took advantage of Locke’s emotional state and began forcing herself to the forefront of Locke’s consciousness. Since the walls between realities were so thin Key, who had been imprisoned and bound to Locke when he joined the Ordo Jotun, was able to break through from the Mirror Realm and split away from Locke’s mental binding once and for all.

After finally escaping Locke’s grasp Key attempted to steal his very Life Force in order to cement her place in the Material Realm and avoid being sucked back into the Mirror Realm as the Planets came out of alignment. As Locke’s Life Force quickly drained, Avery, realising that if his Living Phylactery were to be robbed of all Life Force so too would he perish, made the snap decision to bind himself to Key. Avery’s body withered as his essence merged with Key and he was sucked into the Mirror Realm.

Locke, swearing himself to the cause of saving as many of his friends as possible, descended into Avery’s tomb to gather the knowledge and materials he knew to be within that would allow him to live forever in undeath. His mission would be a long one. And no longer could he allow the small distractions like eating, sleeping or getting old to distract him from his purpose.

Braeden, Master of the Ordo Jotun

Having fought tooth and nail for over 600 years to end the blight and cure his people of its affliction Braeden was not about to let the Armies of Heaven ruin everything he had worked so hard for. The ancient Frost Giant Temple would be the site of his final stand against all that Heaven had wrought upon him and his people. A fitting battleground, since it was where the blight was first brought into existence, and where Braeden, Avery and their friends had stopped it in its tracks so long ago.

As the Planets were brought into alignment and the walls between Realms thinned, Braeden stood firm against hundreds of Angels as they rallied outside the Temple. With each thunderous boom of his mighty shotgun another warrior of Heaven was laid low. Before the end, Braeden had slain so many Angels, and so much Divine blood had soaked the grounds that the area hundreds of miles around the temple would forever more be lush, fertile and green instead of the frozen wasteland that it had been for a millennia.

Braeden trusted in his friends. He knew Locke would be able to activate the Liquid Time just as he knew Serin would be able to turn the tides in the war against Heaven, wherever she was now. His job was only to save his brethren, hoping that one day Locke or whomever else survived might be able to bring the Frost Giants back into the natural order.

In his last moments Braeden felt the shockwave blasting over the Temple from the war in the Heavens and knew that Serin had succeeded. And as he felt that moment stretching out on into infinity he knew that Lock had as well. A broad smile crept upon his haggard face as he raised his mighty shotgun in victory. His was a face that had not known the feeling of a smile for hundreds of years. He knew that if no one else survived he may wear this one for an eternity. And he would wear it proudly.

TODO - Acquire write-ups for this history of the other PCs from the old campaign:

Thelkor - Shadow Assassin

Livi - Pirate Queen

Reiliegh

Arathir - Magus, Holder of Brombar Higgleby’s soul with his BlackBlade

Locations

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Historical Locations

The Frost Giant Temple

The Frost Giant Temple is a tourist destination. People come from all over Finn to The Frost Giant Temple to see the wonderful statues of Giants in battle. But they stay for it’s lush, magical surrounds. The entire area around the temple is brimming with beautiful flowers and meadows despite the fact that if one were to walk 30 or so miles in any direction one would find nothing but a frozen wasteland.

Spoiler Warning! - Click to read more.

Rumors

It is a common rumour that no one knows how to build the statues that are found at the Frost Giant Temple anymore. The statues have an essentially perfect level of detail with no visible or magically detectable seams. When inspected by top magical essence experts no trace of magic can be detected, nor can the true density of the material used be ascertained. As such it has been determined by the mainstream scientific community that the statues were made by an ancient, society that must have been devoid of magic. Most likely out of a mineral that fell to the planet from outer space.

Spoiler Warning! - Click to read more.

Ten RPG Openings That Are NOT: ‘You Meet in a Tavern’.
Part 1 - Full Party Involvement

Fri, 24 Feb 2017 11:30:00 +1100

Tabletop Role Playing Games are truly wonderful things. If for no other reason than every time you play one it will be a different experience. (Although there are many many other reasons). Even if you play through a published adventure module that you have run through before And even if you do so with the same exact group of people that you played with last time. This time it will be different.

You will make different choices. You might play a different character. Things that seemed easy last time might be harder, and visa versa, due to the randomness of dice. Different NPCs might appear. You might even have some new characters or players at the table every now and then, either of which will change up your experience dramatically. The variables in any RPG story are almost endless. And so why then, if RPGs are so varied and unique, do so many campaigns begin with those age old words ‘you meet in a tavern’?

Mechanically and logistically speaking, sure I get it. Almost regardless of the setting a ‘tavern’ is going to be somewhere that adventurey type people might meet. And it provides a neutral mood for the beginning of the game, where the group can get a feel for each others characters and how the GM is going to run the session and all that stuff. Plus, at least usually, meeting in a tavern avoids the risk of the very rare, yet horrifying possibility of a character meeting their death before ever seeing the light of day. (Side note, the closest I have seen to that actually happening is the time I almost killed a new players character before they had even met the party. They were approaching our campsite at night and I decided to roleplay my wizards bad habit of casting spells in his sleep. The new player just barely made a saving roll to not die from my chain lighting nightmares. Good times!)

Even though this article sounds, as judged by the title, totally against taverns, I would like to point out that I actually don’t hate taverns at all. ‘Tavern’ is not really the keyword that I am focused on here. I actually think taverns are an awesome RPG trope. You do need to know when to bring out that trope, but every tabletop RPG should get a tavern scene at some point. They are awesome.

It doesn’t really matter if you are a band of elves who have left the mages college to learn more about their ancient heritage or a group of computer ‘hacktivists’ looking to take down a mega corporation. Any place that has music and booze is going to be a good place to meet up at if you are of the adventuring persuasion. But if you think about those two examples I just gave for a second you might start to realise which keyword in ‘you meet in a tavern’ is the one I do have a problem with.

Time to Meet Your Maker

The problem with meeting in a tavern is the meeting part. In most cases, ‘you meet in a tavern’, legitimately means that the whole party is just now meeting each other for the first time in the story. Now, maybe if your GM is pretty good, then there is some small bit of story about why you all decided to meet here. Or perhaps two of your players decided that they knew each other in their backstory. But often there aren’t even those small boons.

Most of the time we just get a bunch of random characters meeting up at a bar for reasons that may or may not exist yet. As cold openings go, ‘you meet in a tavern’ is in the arctic. Let’s drop the players right into a social scene at the start of the game, (the hardest scenes for players, at least until after a few sessions when they have a good handle on the dynamics of the group), and assume that everything will proceed swimmingly.

Except it doesn’t proceed swimmingly. Ever. Ok maybe if you are part of a regular group and this is just a campaign reset for you, then you might get through this as a team and make the scene story related and exciting. But even then, probably not. What happens in this scene, if the characters have no backstory ties whatsoever, is that each character will start to do different but random things that make very little sense in context. And this usually sends the GM into a bit of a panic.

Chaos on the Tavern floor

It goes a little something like this: The roguish character just introduced themselves at the table and then promptly started trying to pickpocket every person in the establishment, often including the PCs themselves. The bard is now asking the tavern keep if they could get some work for the night playing their lute and telling tales for the patrons. The barbarian has picked a fight with a big group of drunk guards. The paladin and the cleric are at least talking to each other, but it’s not about the story that is going on, it’s probably about how crap each others deity’s are. The wizard isn’t even really playing the game yet, they are still flipping through the spell list in the Player’s Handbook because the GM said they could just choose their spells later since it was getting a bit late by that point.

Does any of this sound familiar? I’m sure it does if you have ever played with a group of people who hadn’t really met before and/or whose characters ‘met in a tavern’. In response to this the GM is surely reassessing who they invited to the game. They are worried that there is no group cohesion. That everyone just did their own thing, no one stayed on point with the goal of the session and it seemed like people weren’t getting along.

Of course the GM has nothing to worry about in that regard. Everyone probably had a great time. It was hilarious and fun. People actually got along better than they might have otherwise. But why is there this disconnect between player perception and GM perception? Because the players were doing exactly what their characters were suppose to be doing, or at least so they thought. But to the GM, it seemed like none of them were doing the right thing. They should have been discussing the best options for approaching the tower of evil right? Well not in the eyes of the players.

See, at this point, if all the characters are meeting for the very first time, then the players will just assume that their character will do things that they have read about in the race and class chapters of the player’s handbook. Or maybe if you have a really creative player, then they are doing something a bit more interesting that relates to stuff they came up with in their backstory. But right now none of these characters have met each other before, and they are all unique and interesting snowflakes, so what’s to say that they would even get along? Let alone entrust their very lives to one another and immediately cast themselves into the fires of adventure?

Nothing that’s what. If they are just meeting now, then that means they have no ties to each other. No history. No bonds, blood or otherwise. And if they aren’t bound to each other then all that makes sense to them is to do whatever sounds like something a ‘Bard’ would do. Or a rogue, or a barbarian. Or even an orphan who has been searching for their long lost parents. But they won’t be doing what the GM wants them to do the most, which is play as a team. Because up to now in their backstory, they haven’t even been a team! And unless they are under very strict instructions from the GM or if they are all veteran players and thus aware of this issue, they aren’t going to know how to come together and magically become a well oiled adventuring machine out of thin air.

A Few Obvious Complaints

Now at this point, purists might be arguing some of the usual points about how the ‘everyone meets each other’ opening is more of a warm up session and the group needs time to work out their characters and yadda yadda yadda. And warm up sessions are important, don’t get me wrong. But other than warming up, what did that tavern scene even accomplish? Well it set the tone for the whole bloody adventure, that’s what.

And again, here is where the purists might say that setting a tone for the adventure that is barrels of fun can’t be too bad. Can it? The fun element of silly tavern openings is most likely the reason they have stuck with us as a gaming culture for so long. I mean fun is the whole point of doing what we do. So in that sense, these scenes do at least accomplish something. But they aren’t always fun. And they aren’t ever helpful to the story of your game. Nor do they help the players figure out how to roleplay their characters. Despite some people often disagreeing with this point.

In my opinion, ‘doing what a bard would do’ isn’t really roleplaying. I mean sure, in the most basic sense it does qualify. But if you are just doing that, then you aren’t playing your role in the team. And this is a team game after all. Everyone needs to be having fun and working out how they should bounce off of each other. Both in tactical, fighty situations and in the more social, talky situations. And if you are just ignoring the other people at the table and fighting/grifting/robbing NPCs or anything else that is all about you and not about your fellow players, then you are doing the whole table a disservice.

One Way for us to Skin this Cat

But, don’t despair my friends! With just a small tweak, we can keep all the fun, even keep all the silliness if that is what we want as a group, but remove the difficulties having our rag tag bunch of characters meet for the first time in a crowded noisy tavern creates for us. All you really need to do is to tie the characters together at some point before the first scene. The tighter the existing backstory bonds between them are, the more they will operate as a unit. And the more they do that, the more of the long term issues that starting untethered will creates, are just avoided all together. And there are lots and lots of those.

Games with these starting points almost always end up with problems, even if by some miracle the players make it through the first session and end up trying to work as a group. Ever had your players diverge so far down different paths that they ended up trying to kill one another? And even though you hated it, you had to admit that in terms of the narrative and what each character was trying to achieve it actually made sense for them to do so? Me too. But it shouldn’t ever get that far if they have a strong backstory relationship.

For the sake of example let’s say the players are quarrelling siblings. Siblings are together till the end. Even if they do end up on different sides of some war, the players of these siblings won’t want to actually kill each other. Whether this is because of the human experience of knowing what the sibling relationship feels like, or because said players have watched too much Supernatural, it’s hard to say. But what is clear is that if you bind everyone together somehow, before the game ever starts, it keeps them together for the rest of the campaign.

The Aforementioned List

So, hopefully I have convinced you that trying to tie the party together in terms of backstory is a very good idea indeed. If I still haven’t managed it, go and play a game of Fate Core, including the ‘phase trio’ section of character creation, and then tell me that it wasn’t one of the smoothest first sessions you have ever had. I bet it was, since the phase trio is a cool mechanic in-built into Fate that does this whole process for you automatically. (Side note, even you are playing Fate Core this list is still relevant to you, choosing something of this list to use and doing the phase trio, will just cement your players together even more).

Once you are on board with what I’m saying here, or if you just love reading stuff you disagree with, carry on to the below list where I outline ten awesome ways to start your next RPG campaign that will tie the players together and have everyone on the same page from session one.

1. The Mercenary Company

Premise

The basic premise of The Mercenary Company is that the Player Characters are an established organisation that will do jobs for money. Does that sound familiar? Yes that’s right, it’s basically what the PCs already are. A group of strong, powerful individuals that roam around taking odd jobs (some more odd than others) for money. So what’s the difference between that and The Mercenary Company you ask? Banners! Flags! An official group name! In other words, more teamwork. Teamwork that is built right into the premise of your adventure.

Implementation

In medieval campaigns, whether historical or fantasy, The Mercenary Company can be implemented exactly as the name implies. The players form a Company, and the Company, rather than the individuals is what takes the jobs or missions that the players will then attempt to complete. Of course the players can still all have their own motivations, obligations and other personal goals or issues. But it is the Company that takes the main jobs and receives any rewards from those jobs.

In sci-fi campaigns The Mercenary Company works nicely as well. Pretty much in the same way it works for medieval campaigns. If you use The Mercenary Company in a sci-fi setting however you might end up with a table full of Boba Fett type characters. If that happens, just try to make sure that the players don’t adopt Bobas horrible trait of being shit at working in teams.

The Mercenary Company is an especially good option for your sci-fi campaign if the players do not have access to interplanetary travel. If that option is available then The Mercenary Company will still work very well, but you should definitely look into The Spaceship Crew below and try to work out a mix of the two backstories since that will work even better.

Some other examples of The Mercenary Company include a posse of bounty hunters and quick draws in a western setting, private investigators in a modern mystery, a group of vampire / werewolf hunters or any other group of people that an NPC would hire to do… well whatever it is the PCs normally do in your setting.

Regardless of your setting, if your players want to form a Mercenary Company then make sure it happens either as backstory or as the very first mission that you run. Even then, my personal preference would be backstory. You usually want your RPG sessions to start in media res (in the middle of the action) and setting up a business would be a pretty boring first session. Unless of course it was mixed in with a good action story as well. Then it might be awesome!

Before the first adventure of your campaign starts, get the players together to do the following:

Come up with an awesome Company name!
- Try to make sure it is an equal name. Not ‘Jason and the Argonauts’. Just ‘The Argonauts’.
Draw up some banners and flags!
- Even if your players are all art-hating philistines they will be able to pick three colours they like and put them together on a piece of paper somehow. That is all that is required. But if they are more creative types try to encourage them to come up with detailed designs that reflect parts of each characters unique style. Bonus points if they keep updating their banners and flags to reflect their victories as the campaign goes on!
Decide on a going rate and a party split for the loots.
- Usually this would be an equal split of the reward money and the GM would come up with a going rate that makes sense for the adventure. But make sure the characters talk about it and agree to it. Bonus points if you write up contracts and sign them in character!

Final Thoughts

The Mercenary Company is perhaps the most classic example of a backstory tie-in in RPG history. Well as far as I am aware it is, I don’t really profess to be truly encyclopaedic on the subject of tabletop RPG history, but this one has come up in some form or another pretty much since the invention of the hobby itself in the 1970’s. That isn’t to say it’s the best or most effective entry on this list however. It is probably the most commonly seen backstory example simply due to the fact that it is almost inherent in the formula of D&D. And in turn D&D has been the most commonly played RPG since its inception (my stance on which you can find here).

To be honest though, this is actually one of the weakest and most tentative backstories on the list due to the fact that the players may just choose to quit the Company or to betray it. And if they have set their character up to be roguish those actions would still make sense in terms of the game world.

However the main advantage The Mercenary Company does have over some of the other options on this list is that it is very easy to get solid player buy-in on this concept. It doesn’t really change much in most regular, D&D-like, RPGs. And the PCs get to make things up for their group like flags, banners, advertisements and all kinds of other cool team props. So most players will be all for it. And then at least you can say ‘you meet in your Company hall’ rather than ‘you meet in a tavern’. Sometimes it’s the little upgrades that make all the difference.

2. The Spaceship Crew

Premise

In The Spaceship Crew the player characters each take a different role aboard the helm of their very own vessel. Now before you read the title of this entry and run away screaming because there are no dragons or wizards, The Spaceship Crew works just as well in the ever popular medieval fantasy genre, with just one small edit: The Space Pirate Ship Crew. See? Of course you could use any type of ship (Pirate or otherwise). Or even another type of other vehicle that requires a number of people working together in order to operate it correctly. Spaceships are just the coolest version of that idea. (Let the flame wars begin in the comments below).

Implementation

This backstory will actually affect your campaign fairly significantly so only go ahead with it if your game will still work if the players should be able to travel anywhere they want at any time. Of course do remember that the player’s ship could always mysteriously break down and need repairs, or it could be stolen or lost entirely, requiring a whole session to repair it or to steal a new one. So make sure that everyone at the table is aware that some adventures might need a little plot doctoring in order to make diegetic sense.

The exact nature of the vessel that the players will command can vary greatly depending on setting and how powerful/rich the players are meant to be. But as a general list of prerequisites, such a vessel should have the following; A ships wheel / pilot’s chair (somewhere from which a player can set the vessel to go in a particular direction), a captain’s chair and/or cabin (someplace for the party leader to bark out orders and such), a crows nest / scanner (a spot for someone to sit and look around and tell the rest of the party if they are approaching land or when an enemy vessel is approaching them), a gun / cannon (or someplace a player can sit and operate a weapon that will fight back against bad guy vessels) and an engine room (someplace that a player can do work that increases the speed or some other performance metric of the vessel).

There are many options for what exact vessel any given party might start out with. Pirate Galleons, Space Freighters or even an old beat up Panel Van will do the trick, depending on what makes sense for your setting. Just make sure that the players do the following before the first adventure starts:

Name the ship!
- Bonus points if you can purchase or create a miniature statue that matches your chosen vessel!
Assign each player a role on the ship!
- Each player has to know what role they are performing. Like, I am the helmsman who steers the ship! Or I am the main engineer who diverts all power to the shields when shit hits the fan! Etc. Every player should have a different role (no double ups, trust me) and every role should greatly benefit the ship. The ship should be significantly debilitated if one player is not performing their role.
Get the players to talk about what possible missions or adventures they have completed together in their backstory while aboard the ship.
- This helps cement the sense of camaraderie that you are trying to build between your players by tying their backstories together and it can also give you some juicy story hooks for later.

Final Thoughts

The Spaceship Crew, is a beloved campaign starter that can be found in published adventures everywhere. It really helps to give every player an idea of what they should be doing during critical times (like ship to ship combat). This helps a bunch in warming up that cold dead air that can arise when you say to a group of people who are new to the hobby ‘you meet in a tavern, what do you do’.

If they have already gone through the setup of having everyone choose their ship roles and naming the ship and talking about their past adventures, then when you say ‘you all meet aboard your vessel, the shit is hitting the fan, what do you’ they will know exactly what to do and what everyone else will be doing. And trust me they will have a blast doing it.

One last thing to note about The Spaceship Crew is that while it is a great tie-in in terms of helping new players understand their role in the game, it can still lead to players not having enough direct, solid ties to each others characters in the shared story you are all creating. So consider combining this one with pretty much any other entry from this list that your group might be excited about.

3. The Band

Premise

The Band is all about the music, man. In The Band, you will be doing what awesome, adventurous, highly egotistical humans have been doing for millenia: sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll. The reason The Band works so well as a backstory is that it creates just enough room between the players that they can still squabble, bicker, break up, reform and otherwise cause each other grief. But not so much room that they would consider doing physical violence upon each other. Well not not much more than the odd drunken punch up at least. Which is awesome if you find that, while your players really enjoy fighting internally now and then, they sometimes end up actually killing each other’s characters and thusly ruining the game for themselves. (If this has never happened to you as a DM, consider yourself lucky).

The Band can become the centerpiece of your adventure if your group wants it to, (roaming the land from gig to gig, getting into adventures along the way), but it can also just come up in play every now and then, if that works better for you. In that way this is actually one of the most flexible backstories on the list, since depending on what the plot dictates, it’s very plausible for a Band to simply not get any gigs in a certain area, or for a certain time frame. Thus allowing the plot to veer off and be about anything the GM wishes.

The Band concept is actually one of my personal favourites and I have been trying to convince people to play in a game like this for near on ten years. So if this sounds cool to you, LET ME KNOW!

Implementation

The Band is one of the most genre agnostic backstories on this list that still affects who and what the players really are. And as such it can squeeze itself into almost any campaign. Music is one of the most basic and instinctual elements of human life and getting a musical group together to make it that much more awesome just makes sense. So whether your Band are minstrels, playing their Lyres and Harps, or a modern Band that plays metal by night and slays vampires in the day or some kind of awesome retro-80’s-future Band that exists in a post apocalyptic cyborg wasteland, one way or another, music is going to make their lives a whole lot more awesome.

In order get your PCs a’rockin’ you will first need to figure out whether or not The Band itself is a core part of the story. As I said earlier, you could play this as backstory colour, where the players are in a Band together, but going out and getting gigs isn’t going to be the main focus of the adventure. Or you could really dial in on The Band and perhaps the players are entering a Battle of the Bands and must rise to the top and win over the crowd, all while overcoming many other shenanigans at the same time.

Personally I would recommend hitting somewhere in the middle, where the players might be seeking musical work whenever and wherever they can find it. And by doing so, they get mixed up in all kinds of other issues. This is a great way to hook the players into basically any kind of crazy story, whether it be in a gross back-alley bar or playing to an arena of thousands, Bands can get into all kinds of weird and wonderful situations. Plus this way you could play out the plot of The Green Room, which is an amazing movie and would make a badass RPG one shot.

Before starting your first session as a Band, make sure the players do the following:

Come up with a Band name!
- Bonus points for cover bands with names that are clever puns related to the original band. Even more points if you decide what kind of music your Band plays. This is even better if you can bring along a mixtape of tracks and hit play on them whenever your band is meant to be rocking out on stage.
Figure out what instruments each player plays!
- Whether they are the lead guitarist or the drummer, each player should have a unique instrument to play and the group should figure out how, if at all, the playing of these instruments affects gameplay.
Work out how famous The Band is!
- Are you just starting out, sending demo tapes and practicing in your garage? Or are you grizzled rockers whose brains have been addled by years of drugs and STDs? Would every person on the street recognise you? Or have you had one hit song, years ago, and now it’s an awkward story you tell at parties? The GM might need to weigh in here to fit your Band into the adventure they have planned but just make sure everyone at the table is happy with the choice before proceeding to play.

Final Thoughts

The problem I have always faced trying to get The Band into an actual game is that players often balk at the very idea of it. I think it is probably too silly of an idea for the average player to bring into most RPGs. Which is odd since most RPGs devolve into silliness at every opportunity. Another possible reason for its rarity is that the Bard is not a very popular class in D&D and for whatever reason most people decide that if you are all in a Band then you all must have at least one level in Bard or some such other annoying cost. Personally I think The Band is actually perfect fodder for RPG stories. And no costs should apply to allow your character to be able to play music.

As many writers, directors and other creative people who deal with story on a daily basis will tell you, often the most interesting storytelling will occur when characters have to juggle the wild, crazy situations given to them by the main plot with their everyday normal lives. Countless TV shows, movies and books revolve around this idea, a small notable selection of which might include Buffy the Vampire Slayer (and actually most of Joss Whedon’s work), Harry Potter and practically every superhero movie, etc.

The Band offers an excellent way to both tie the players together and to give the story that everyone at the table is crafting some real meat on its bones. It will help the GM work out hooks for the players to get involved in the plot, and it will help the players work as a team and know what their role in the group should be. Plus any excuse to blast highway to hell on whatever speakers you can find during your rpg session is good enough for me.

4. By Our Powers Combined

Premise

By Our Powers Combined is a classic trope wherein the players are literally more powerful when acting together as a unit (often by transforming into a giant robot of some kind) than they could ever hope to be alone. I have seen this trope implemented by sneaky GMs more than once right in the middle of a campaign without anyone noticing. The players find a few magic items, but they don’t know what these items do. After some experimentation they realise that the items are meant to work as a set. Wherever the fighter points his new sword, the player holding the new magic shield will appear! But it doesn’t work if the same player is holding both the sword and the shield! Suddenly the players have to work together and they might even figure out ways to basically break the normal rules of the game using their new items, which is super cool and fun!

But of course you can also use this backstory as the very core idea of a whole campaign where the players must join together or they stand no hope of defeating the big bad boss. Think TV shows like Voltron, My Little Pony or the age old classic for which this entry is named, Captain Planet. (Side note, Captain Planet is actually not a great example, since if you were playing an RPG by the exact rules of that show, once the players had combined their rings of power you would basically either be giving a separate player who was silent up until this point, or the GM themselves, the only way to win the main battle of your session. Which sounds pretty boring and not in the team spirit that his article is espousing).

Implementation

By Our Powers Combined is a bit of a tough trope to pull off when it comes to player buy-in. Most RPG players want their characters to be unique and beautiful snowflakes who are each the protagonists of their own massive novel series. They often don’t want to be part of a team. But since you are reading this, you have probably recognised that playing as a team makes the whole hobby more enjoyable for everyone. The players don’t even have to be all goodie goodie and super into team spirit, they can be an evil team of baby-snatching witches with they want to be. They just need to all be on the same page.

The player buy-in problem is why most GMs that I have talked to who have successfully pulled off this kind of trope have done so very sneakily. Rather than doing the normal thing, talking it all out with the group, ensuring that everyone thinks the game they are about to embark upon sounds fun, they just keep this element as plot development that they reveal fairly soon within the campaign. And that can work very well.

Personally, having played too many games where player and GM expectations did not overlap enough, I would steer clear of this approach. Especially if By Our Powers Combined is going to be the very core focus of the plot in your game. Anything that is super important like that should be agreed upon by everyone. So instead of just telling the players that they are all pilots of animal-shaped-space-robots that must come together to form a much larger animal-shaped-space-robot, instead just ask them what is awesome about their particular space robot.

Or their ring of power. Or their element of harmony. Or whatever plot device it is that they use to combine themselves into a more powerful force. If they at least get some awesome benefit from it that relates directly to their character concept they are more likely to want it. And ultimately they are going to be working as a team to overcome the bad guys anyway, so that will just happen naturally later on.

To formalise this process I will explain that, before starting out on a By Our Powers Combined adventure, the players should all do the following:

Figure out what happens when their powers do in fact combine!
- Now this may be provided by the GM, but if the GM is open to it then having the players decide this will pretty much always add to the overall awesome level of the adventure.
After having decided what happens when they assume their ultimate form, have the players work out exactly why their own power is special and how that relates to their character concept.
- Bonus points for coming up with catchphrases, colour coding their outfits, and making sure that no two powers are too similar.
Decide whether or not the players start with their powers unlocked.
- Usually I would say all of the entries on this list are better as backstory. But for this one, so long as the players are aware of this whole idea and have chosen their powers already and everything, it can be very fun to have a bit of an ‘episode one’ where they all come together and receive their powers. Just make sure that they don’t ‘meet in a tavern’ first. Please. For me.

Final Thoughts

By Our Powers Combined is certainly a bit of a weird story tie-in since it can barely affect the main plot at all (in the form of some disposable special items that have to be used together) or it can be the very centerpiece of your campaign (as in the various TV shows that use this trope). But it’s actually somewhat difficult to imagine any kind of middle ground for this one, it’s basically all or nothing. So it’s a bit specialised for those two use cases. Either as a smaller technique to try to get any players who aren’t getting along to work together. Or as the backbone of the whole story.

But however you choose to use it you should find that once it is cemented into the game it will help the players know their role in the party. It will also give everyone automatic stakes in any encounter related to their powers or related to a bad guy who is only vulnerable if they use their powers. And it also ensures that the players all value each other’s roles in the team. Because without every single player working together, their giant-spaceship-robot-hamster just wouldn’t be the same.

5. Cops or Robbers

Premise The idea behind Cops or Robbers isn’t just that your player characters might enjoy playing as a squad of lawmen or a gang of outlaws. The core idea behind this type of story is the ‘us versus them’ mentality. Now in the real world this mentality is pretty much always unhealthy, but in a tabletop game it can actually work wonders and be a really positive thing. The most important word in the title of this entry isn’t Cops nor, you guessed it, Robbers. It is ‘or’. The idea that is most important here is: you are either with us or against us. There is no middle ground. The players need to stick together, because out there in the big bad world all they will have is each other.

All that said the title I chose to express this concept is Cops or Robbers because both cops and criminals are both great examples of this idea. If the whole party are lawmen, be it FBI agents, Space Cops, or sheriffs of the shire they will have a shared hated of the other side of the line. And the same is true if they are members of a notorious drug cartel. Assuming none of them are crooked cops or snitches. Both of which can be fun roles to develop later on in the campaign, but I would recommend everyone play it straight for at least the first few sessions even if they know from the start that they want to be a betrayer later on.

Implementation

The details of your Cops or Robbers implementation will really depend a lot on your setting. Sometimes a systemic approach to law or crime doesn’t make sense in a particular world. If your players are some of the last few surviving humans left on Earth then it might not make sense for them all to enrol in a police academy. However there is always a way for you to work out an us versus them situation. It could be your survivors have banded together to fight against an undead horde. Or maybe there are ‘Others’ roaming around, stealing the supplies that should have gone to you players. Either way, since we are all human, we all know instinctively how to hate groups of people who are eager to show how much they hate us first.

The more organisational you can make your player’s side the better. It helps if there are ranks they can rise up, NPC team mates who might help or betray them, a place that the organisation will meet up at to receive new missions or orders and above all the organisation needs to have a diametrically opposed organisation. One with which no real peace can ever be reached. Cops themselves, and even Robbers (if they are the Godfather kind of robbers) are both awesome examples of this kind of story setup. But there are plenty of other options, such as soldiers in a war, opposing sports teams, hunger games esque dystopian children, normal people as posed against Cthulhuian monsters and their horrible cultist peons and etc.

If you group seems excited by the idea of having system hate built into their weekend fun times, get the players to do the following before the first session:

Come up with who is ‘us’ and who is ‘them’.
- It must be clear that the two groups could never coexist.
Have everyone come up with a backstory that involves some detail about why they hate ‘them’ so damn much.
- Bonus points for originality! But having ‘them’ kill your parents/wife/children tragically will always work, so don’t think to hard if you don’t feel like it.
Decide on all of your organisations details, like if you are lawmen choose exactly what comes under your jurisdiction, or if you are criminals, what kind of crimes does your gang control in this city?
- I can’t get through one of these lists without writing: Choose a group name! So go on, you know it will be fun, just do it.

Final Thoughts

Cops or Robbers is a simple choice and very easy to slide into most campaigns. Even ones that have been going for years. It just takes the players making a group choice that they will now dedicate themselves to furthering the cause of (us) and ridding the streets of (them). Once the choice is made they can get deputised by the local sheriff or they could meet a local drug dealer and start selling dope to school kids. For that reason, it is very flexible which is a great boon if your campaign is already complicated but you just need something in there to unite the players. However you might find that at one or more of your players really doesn’t to be a Cop when all the rest of them do, and that is a big problem.

This entry, along with The Mono Party which one might say this is a descendant of, are both very hard to run. Just simply because you need every single player, and the GM to boot, to not only agree to it but to be excited for it. RPG players are fairly notorious for loving their characters to be totally unique and amazing individuals (a large part of the reason this list exists) and so getting that total player buy-in can be very hard. It’s kind of a ‘planets aligning’ type situation. Rare as hell, but awesome when you can make it work.

Part Two Coming Soon!

Keep hitting that refresh button! Part two of this list will be coming out soon! In the next part I will explore some options that don’t necessarily involve the whole party. Although they still can be used across the whole party to keep everyone on the same page, many of the items in part two are also great when they are just used to connect two or three of your players instead of all of them.

Slim Pickin's - 2017 Poem

Fri, 17 Feb 2017 11:30:00 +1100

My second effort for February is a little ditty I call slim pickin’s. Oddly I don’t see this as a country song, even though the title sounds like it would be. In fact, personally I read this one with the long drawn out notes of a glam rock group. If I was to continue to work on this one I would add more stanzas that end with slim pickin’s, since I see that stanza basically as the chorus to the song. If it was a song. Which at this point it is not.

Written on 23-01-2017. Posted here in February 2017.


With each new stride the stones now fall in line
and the pace of my life just quickens.
The moments that I need, ones when I can breathe,
are so few and far between, slim pickin’s.

Feels like I’m flying too fast, I don’t know if this can last,
think I gave myself the shaft with this pace.
Brain tells me I’m spinning, my heart knows that I’m winning,
but I don’t think I can finish this race.

Knowledge speculation and feelings, that intersection’s also what ‘me’ is.
Last week I realised what I believe, and just exhaled.
But I’m hoping one day, that I can lay back and say
‘me’ is just the way that I prevailed.

This one is about shit in your life getting hectic and how you have to really decide what is important to you when that happens, because time is something you can’t just buy.

The Journey - 2017 Poem

Fri, 17 Feb 2017 11:30:00 +1100

And here we get to the part where I explain how I fucked up my four poems a month idea already. So, as you might notice on the page listing, I only managed three poems in January. Worse still, at the time of posting this I have only written two poems for February. And I only have a couple of days left. Maybe I will try to scramble a couple more up. But to be honest, I have already hit 2016s poem count x2.5 so I’m feeling pretty good about it regardless.

Even better, this poem is one of the better ones that I have written in recent years, so fuck yeah! I’m on a roll bitches!

Written on 02-02-2017 and 09-02-2017. Posted here in February 2017.


Peering, squinting, staring at the ocean of my life
tryna’ catch a glimpse past the glinting blue light.
Eye’s in the scope as I scream land-ho,
gotta wrangle this ship now, just get up and go.

So far my path has been a fast, long, scribble
Not some dotted line that just grows little by little.
But I as far as I’ve come I still feel that old niggle,
the whispers say: ‘the Journey’s not over just yet.’

Many times in my life have I seen this sight;
The boats of people's lives, just drifting with the tide.
With no steam a’risin’ from the top of the stacks,
they just sit back, relax and let the time elapse.

And maybe in the end my life will look the same
and I’ll be searching all around for where to lay the blame.
But as of right now I’m fighting just to try
to grab the world by the collar, look it right in its eye.

So I can scream out loud at the top of my lungs,
be heard by every single fucker, tell em’ live it as it comes!
Doesn’t matter what your life was about or where you’re headed
in the end it’s just exactly who and what have you affected.

Unnamed Love Poem - 2017 Poem

Fri, 27 Jan 2017 11:30:00 +1100

This poem is unnamed mostly because it doesn’t really work. It started off being about the nervousness and emotional pain I was feeling during a health scare. But then became a sort of sappy love poem after one stanza. It actually reminds me, both the top stanza and the rest, of my old teenage poems. Which were bad and awesome at the same time. I mean, objectively they were bad poems. But they were awesome in how obvious it was they didn’t give a fuck how bad they were.

Written on 27-01-2017. Posted here in February 2017.


The skin peels back as I scratch and scratch
Never before has it been this bad
My fingers keep taping
I’m worried ‘bout them snapping
And I’ve given up thinking ‘all’s good’

But I’ve made my choices and I’m seeing them through
I’m just so fucking lucky, couldn’t do this without you
You tell me that you love me and I’ve always known it’s true

We walk hand in hand down the barrel of a gun
But somehow when I’m with you even that just feels like fun
And I know you think I have regrets, but baby I’ve got none

And no matter how long we are together
It’s all been worth it, couldn’t have been better
You are all that matters, all else is just whatever

The second stanza is one I actually like. If I had not abandoned this poem, I would probably try to shift the rest of them to line up more with that. It actually hits its point well and doesn’t read quite so bad as the rest. That said, the line about not having regrets is probably my fave part of the poem overall. Rule of cool for the win!

Ben Eyles - Personal Website

What Makes a Good Sequel?

And is it Different to What Makes a Good Film or Game In General?

Lightning Striking Twice. Or Thrice?

Best Sequels

Worst Sequels

Baldur’s Gate II: Reloaded Revengeance

The Transform Matrix

That one where the cars have eyes and shit

And well, in summary:

A System to Call My Own

Firstly - The Why

Is My Character Just a Collection of Rules?

Getting to the Action

Combat. Plus lots of Other Stuff I Guess.

Player Information - Class/Race Examples.

Beyond the Shadows

Character Information - Some Flavour and Lore

Species

Jobs, Roles, and ‘Classes’

Character Creation

Beyond the Shadows

Character Concept

Your Unique Thing

Index of Folklore

Significant Historical Events

The Final Mercy

Historical Heroes

Serin the Twice Cursed

The Locke’s & The Key

Braeden, Master of the Ordo Jotun

Locations

Historical Locations

The Frost Giant Temple

Ten RPG Openings That Are NOT: ‘You Meet in a Tavern’.Part 1 - Full Party Involvement

Time to Meet Your Maker

Chaos on the Tavern floor

A Few Obvious Complaints

One Way for us to Skin this Cat

The Aforementioned List

1. The Mercenary Company

2. The Spaceship Crew

3. The Band

4. By Our Powers Combined

5. Cops or Robbers

Part Two Coming Soon!

Slim Pickin's - 2017 Poem

The Journey - 2017 Poem

Unnamed Love Poem - 2017 Poem

Ten RPG Openings That Are NOT: ‘You Meet in a Tavern’.
Part 1 - Full Party Involvement