Races in the Colonies Part Two

The last time we visited The Colonies, we took a look at three of the six major races.  Today, we will look at the remaining three.  The races described in the first entry were, more or less, cosmopolitan in nature.  The three today, while having complex social structures in their own right, are much less urbane.  These races reside on the rougher edges of The Continent.  Rare individuals may represent these races in the settlements of The Colonies, but for the most part, these races keep to themselves.

The most populous of the three races are the Orcs.  These fearsome looking individuals live in small, extended family units scattered throughout the continent.  Orcs are capable warriors when the occasion calls for violence, but their primary existence consists of subsistence farming and occasional hunting and fishing. Many Orcs are talented craftsmen, especially in woodcraft.  Some Orc tribes located near forests have even taken on the relatively new occupation of lumber production.  Of the three races, they are the most likely to come into contact with Colonials, as the more outgoing Orcs trade their handcrafts, lumber, and surplus produce for metal tools, seafood, and more exotic goods. Orc tribes, on the whole, respect the delicate balance of nature and strive to use the land without abusing it.   Their balance is ill understood by most of the other races.  The Elves claim all interior lands, but especially forests, for themselves and resent even the modest intrusions of the tribes.  The Colonials look at the talents the Orcs possess and wonder why they do not do more to exploit the abundant natural resources of the Continent.  For their part, the Orcs seem content with their lifestyle.

The Elves profess to be the original inhabitants of the Continent, and are violently opposed to the incursions of the other races into "their" lands.  The Elves spent much of their long history warring with the other races of the continent.  For most of the other inhabitants, survival against the continuous attacks of the Elves has been the ultimate goal.  The Elves proclaim that each of the other races are invaders who do not respect the natural order.  It seems to the other races, however, that Elves are simply incapable of not hating anyone who is not an Elf.  The Elves are especially protective of the forests where they make their homes.  Little is known about the structure of Elven settlements, as no non-Elf has ever seen one and returned from the forests.  At least no one who will speak on the matter.  The exceedingly few Elves who have ever come to The Colonies will speak of their homeland either.  For all their protestations about the other races misuse of the land, it is rare to see an Elven warrior who is not wearing weapons and armor stolen on a previous raid.

While the Elves proclaim they are the first sentients to inhabit the Continent, the Reptilian Elders remember when the first Elves arrived, and so know the truth of the matter.  Of the major races, the Reptilians are by far the least populous.  There are perhaps only a few hundred of them left on the Continent.  Indeed, they are a dying race, and they are aware of this fact.  The Reptilians have a very low birthrate, offset only somewhat by the fact that they are extremely long lived. All but the youngest have lived on the Continent for millennia.  No Reptilian can recall any other member of their race ever dying of disease or old age.  They are not immortal, however, as evidenced by the great number of them slain by the Elves over they years. Most Reptilians live their lives as either as solitary individuals or in the occasional pair bond, scattered throughout the Continent.  They congregate only with the greatest infrequency.  On those rare occasions when one of the females lays a viable egg, the nearby Reptilians flock to the area until the new child hatches.  The Elves watch for these congregations, in the hope that they can destroy the new life.  Only on the rarest of occasions will a Reptilian ever be seen in a settlement of one of the other races.  With their race slowly becoming extinct, one would think the Reptilians would not have much to offer the other races of the Continent.  What the Reptilians do have, however, is a prodigious memory.  They remember everything that has ever happened on the Continent.  They remember those who inhabited the land before the Elves came.  They know where the ruins of that civilization lie.  And they know how to fight them should they ever return...

Races in the Colonies Part One

I have given a lot of thought to the intelligent creatures of The Colonies.  The twin influences of J.R.R. Tolkien and Dungeons & Dragons on the fantasy genre in our hobby have made certain races default in many fantasy games.  Certainly there are plenty of exceptions to this, but I have seen a great number of "systemless" systems that contained the standard races and even included the relatively recent additions of Tieflings and Dragon Men.  Still, the traditional fantasy races are ubiquitous because they allow the players an immediate familiarity with the world. One of the most jarring experiences I have ever had was trying to read a fantasy game in the past where the races were so alien that I had trouble imagining them in the world the author was trying to create.  A middle ground is in order then.  

Nasty Hobbitses! We hates them.
No wait.  Hobbitses are cool. Nasty
Gnomeses!  Yeah, that's the ticket!

The first thing to do is to determine which traditional fantasy races are not a part of The Colonies.  There are no hobbits  halflings in the world of The Colonies.  I have nothing against halflings.  In fact, some of my most beloved NPCs over the years have had furry feet.  Halflings, however, are the most tangible link to Middle Earth, and I am trying to distance this fantasy realm from that source material.  I have no such love for Gnomes.  Gnomes suck.  Gnomes are the Aquaman of the standard fantasy races.  No Gnomes in The Colonies.  No Tieflings or Dragon Men either.  Tieflings have always struck me as a bolt on race for players that want to be "cool" and "evil" without actually being evil. Or cool for that matter.  And Dragon Men, well... there is a reason that there are no Dragon Men that will be revealed in time.  A final change will round out the exclusions:  The various races are not interfertile.  No Half-Elves or Half-Orcs running about.

Of the traditional fantasy races, that leaves Humans, Elves, and Dwarves.  Not a bad start.  In fact, a pretty diverse game could be made from these three races alone. To make them somewhat less than the standard fantasy fare, however, I am going to put a substantial twist onto each of them.  Humans are the baseline race and will have several sub-categories that will be the subject of a later post.  Dwarves and Elves are instantly recognizable.  Their roles in The Colonies are going to be very different than most fantasy worlds.  

There are six sentient races of consequence in The Colonies.  It is important to note more than six sentient races are present, but only these six races possess the numbers and resources necessary to make a significant impact on the land.  Other sentients include both adjunct races (Ogres that live among the orcs, and the Goblin's meaner cousins the Hobgoblins) and smaller tribes of barely organized creatures (the Gnolls of the Thesalian Plains).  The intelligence of some monstrous entities in The Colonies is suspected by certain scholars, but rejected by most of the populace.

The most prolific race in The Colonies is the humans.  The human population stems from two sources:  the descendants of the small indigenous population that lived in small tribal units on the continent before the arrival of the Old World castaways, and the much larger number of immigrants that have come from the old world since.  The immigrant contingent is further divided to a certain extent by their Old World nationality.  These divisions, while often quite serious in their native lands, have largely gone by the wayside in the The Colonies.  The prejudices of color, culture, and nationality that pervaded the Old World were significantly trivialized when the humans immigrants came into contact with the other races in their new home.  Indeed, one of the few real divisions that remain in the human population is between first generation immigrants and humans of Old World stock who were born in The Colonies.  The newcomers do not understand how old rivalries can be so easily cast aside.  The Colony natives do not understand how their society can survive if humans of all stripes do not work together.

The Dwarves were not the first natives of the continent to encounter the humans, but they share, by far, the closest ties with the newcomers.  The Dwarves of The Colonies spent most of the century before the coming of the Old Worlders in a disastrous war with the Elves.  The war went so poorly, in fact, that the Dwarves were driven from their underground homes by an Elven ritual curse.  To this day, any Dwarf who tries to enter one of their former homes or mines falls incapacitatingly ill.  Worse,  many of their former homes have been infested by giant ant-like creatures.  As a result, the Dwarves have reluctantly resorted to surface dwelling.  They still practice their mining and metalworking crafts by open pit mining.  This scarring of the land ensures the continual enmity of the Elves.  When the human immigrants began coming to The Colonies, the Dwarves quickly began crafting tools and weapons for the newcomers and traded these superior wares for a protective alliance.  Today, humans and Dwarves live together if not in complete harmony, at least in a series of relationships that benefit both races.

 When the castaways arrived in the continent, it was a Goblin tribe that welcomed them.  Lack of communication and misunderstanding almost led to violence in this first encounter.  The intervention of the Goblin magician and scholar Tovak (and a spell which allowed him to speak with the newcomers) prevented bloodshed.  The Goblins initially sheltered the humans, introduced them to representatives of most of the other races of the continent, and provided whatever assistance they could in the repair of the merchant ship.  All the while, they watched the humans and learned from them.  By the time the merchant vessel was repaired, the Goblins had learned enough about ship building to create their own.  This is the Goblin way.  They Goblins of The Colonies are the most adaptable race on the continent.  Their scholars can learn virtually any subject.  Their warriors can learn any tactic.  Their workers, any task.  The Goblins watch, learn, and adapt. Frequently, they combine their adaptability to surpass the craftsmen and scholars that they have learned from, a trait that made most of the other races treat the Goblins with suspicion.  There is only one thing preventing the Goblins from becoming the dominant race of The Colonies: they are extremely fragile.  Goblins are very susceptible to disease, and their slight frames are ill suited to the rough nature of life on the continent.  The life expectancy of a Goblin is only 30 years.  It is not uncommon for the best and brightest Goblins to perish just as they are about to complete their greatest accomplishment.  This is so common, that most Goblins of ability attract a number of apprentices, both to assist them in their work and to carry it on when the inevitable disaster strikes.  

This post is becoming a bit long.  In the interest of not losing too many readers with verbal bloat, I think  it best to break this up into two posts.  In the next entry in this series, we will take a look at the remaining three major races of The Colonies: the xenophobic elves, the crafty, tribal Orcs, and the venerable Reptilians.

Giving the New World the Hook

In the making of a new fantasy world, I am using advice from a lot of different sources.  There is plenty to learn from those who have taken this journey ahead of me.  As I make reveal the different aspects of this project, I will be highlighting some of those resources for the other world builders in the audience.  The first product I want to highlight is brand new.  In fact, it came out (how very serendipitous) the afternoon after my last post. Jester David's How-To Guide to Fantasy Worldbuilding is 200+ pages of useful, creative advice for a mere $4.  A quick look at the free preview indicated that this guy had given a lot of thought to the process of building a game world, including a number of organizational aspects that I had not considered.  Since the price seemed exceedingly reasonable, I took a chance on it.  While I have not read it in its entirety, what I have read is quite insightful.

As a result, this first post about my new world will NOT be about the races.  That post will be my second of the week, which was when I intended to present it.  Taking a cue from Jester David, this post will present a bit of information about the game world that will inform the subsequent entries.  It is my hope that this entry provides context for all the others.  According to the How-To Guide, every new campaign world needs a unique hook.  Something that makes the game world interesting and a place where the players will want to have adventures.  The author poses a question that I find it hard to disagree with:  If a new fantasy game world isn't unique in some way, then why would it not be more useful to use one of the many existing game worlds that have been published over the years?

I agree with this assessment.  Indeed, I had already determined what the unique elements of my world were before reading his book.  Where the author has changed my mind is in the presentation of some of those elements.  I had planned to unveil the hook slowly as I revealed the world through blog posts.  In order to gain initial interest in the project, Jester David has convinced me of the importance of revealing some of the bigger elements of the game world up front.  Being too cryptic about things and, in this venue, stringing the nuggets of knowledge out over too great an amount of time would only kill any player interest in the project.  A basic knowledge of what is going on in the world will (hopefully) help generate interest among potential players.

The Colonies.  

A little over  a century ago, a merchant ship was cast well off course by a storm.  When the crew finally found land after several weeks adrift, it was not any land with which they were familiar.  Indeed, as the crew explored their surroundings, they became certain that they had discovered a previously uncharted land.  The coast was rife with old growth forests, timber that would have been exploited long ago in their own lands.  This was but the first of many surprises in store for the castaways.

The sentient denizens of the old world were entirely human.  The first contact that the sailors had with the local population were assuredly not.  In fact, in the year that the sailors lived in the new land, they encountered five non-human civilizations.  Some of the natives were friendly, others wary, and one race was entirely hostile.  The friendly natives took the castaways in, taught the crew how to survive in the rugged, untamed land, and used powerful magic to repair their ship and give them the means to find their way home.

A little over a year and a half after their ordeal began, the surviving crew of the merchant vessel finally came to port in the Old World.  Most of them were happy just to be home.  One of them, a  merchant named Jovah Vrell, however, began immediately planning an expedition back.  The land simply had too many underutilized resources, a veritable fortune for the taking.  Vrell quickly found interested investors, outfitted new ships, and hired craftsmen and mercenaries enough to populate an outpost in the new world.  The native populations of the new land greeted the newcomers in much the same way as the original castaways.  Some natives enthusiastically embraced the new craftsmen, and the products they could create, others violently opposes what they saw as an invasion of their homelands.  By the end of the first year, however, none of the natives could deny that the Vrell colony was there to stay.

It was not long until Vrell and his investors were among the wealthiest men and women in the Old World.  Raw materials and finished products alike flowed from the new land.  Not to let such an opportunity slip through their fingers, other merchants and governments of the Old World launched expeditions to the new land.  Other colonies were established and the conflicts of the Old World were transferred to the new.  Old enemies found new reasons to hate one another in what became known as "The Colonies." The distance between the continents coupled with the resistance of the natives prevented any sort of mass immigration.  The colonies gradually grew and expanded for ninety years, until the vast majority of their inhabitants were natives of the new world themselves.  Small scale immigration continued, however, until eight years ago.


Major astronomical events were not unheard of in the Old World.  Usually they were attributed to the whim of one god or another.  Most people dismissed the Great Mass, a ball of light that streaked ever closer to the planet, as another such event.  One that would impress upon the people the power of the gods without changing their day-to-day existence.  As the Great Mass came loomed ever closer, however, many became concerned that this event was different.  The storms, earthquakes, and giant waves that followed when the Mass impacted in the Old World made believers of even the doubters.  Once the natural disasters subsided, the colonists began to realize that no new ships were arriving from the Old World.  Furthermore, after the impact, no ships that left the colonies for the the Old World ever returned.   For better or worse, the Colonies were now the world, both old and new.


Without a mother country to answer to, each of the colonies were forced to forge their own path.  Some now thrive, some languish, one utterly collapsed.  The friendly native races share the sorrow of the Colonists.  The less friendly plot their revenge.   Some of the colonists long for the Old World.  Others see coming of the Great Mass as the dawning of a new era of opportunity.  One that they wish to seize and make the most of.  Hopefully, the players will be some of those last group.

The Rule of Six

When I proposes creating my own fantasy world to kick around in, I knew it would be a lot of work.  The number of details that go into such an endeavor are astounding.  I have done a considerable amount of research over the last several days, and come to at least one conclusion: anyone who decides to undertake this kind of world building probably suffers from some kind of mental malady.  A journey begins with a single step goes the old adage.  It holds true for both a journey of discovery and a the road to damnation.  It remains to be seen which one this endeavor will become.  Perhaps both.

There are a bewildering array of choices to be made when creating an entire game world.  Maps, cultures, races, technology, magic, monsters, style... the list is nearly endless.  And yet, to have a finished product all of these choices must be made even if the choice is to exclude that category altogether.  At least part of this is the Paradox of Choice.  There are so many options that it becomes difficult to make any choice at all, or be satisfied by the choice once made.  Hand in hand with the Paradox of Choice comes Analysis Paralysis: in which the frantic search through the myriad options in service to a "perfect" option leads to making no decision, and therefore, no progress.  For the purposes of this project, determining a path and following it to a conclusion, even an imperfect one, is preferable to scrapping the project due to the lack of a perfect solution to any of these design problems.

PSST.  Hey bud! Want to buy a six?

In an effort to circumvent any potential impasse that may arise, and especially because my preliminary thoughts found such paralysis creeping in, I have decided to institute an artificial constraint to the proceedings which will give me a good finish point when dealing with any of the individual issues that may cause a sticking point.  I call this The Rule of Six.  When designing any aspect of the world that contains multiple choices, the goal will be to design six distinct options.  There will be six predominant sentient races.  Six major nation-states will comprise the central gaming world.  The major races will share a common pantheon of six deities.  There will be six major trade routes through the central game world.  The object will be to make this an upper limit, but not a hidebound goal that must be obtained.  Why six?  It is a nice middle number that gives variety without making the choices akin to "everything but the kitchen sink."  Also, it is a manageable number of things for players to remember.

The plan is to make this endeavor system-less.  If the project reaches a conclusion and players would like to play in the world, I would probably use Savage Worlds, of course.  Still, I would like the end result to be playable even my readers who do not regularly use SW.  Perhaps at the end of the exercise, I can create some specific rules for SW.  Edges and Hindrances that reflect the game's flavor should be pretty easy to create, but are perhaps better left for when the project is closer to completion.

I am going to reveal one aspect a week.  Each will be a, hopefully, brief synopsis of the topic.  There is more to be known about each subject than I can possibly include in a weekly blog post, but I hope to include enough information to interest both potential players and the casual reader. Next week, I will reveal the major races that inhabit the world of Sextus (a working name for the world, I have yet to firm up some of the details of the cultures that might necessitate a change).

Like Attracts Like

This is the last of my promised one-a-weekday campaign posts.  Next month, I intend to continue posting on things and stuff.  There may be more posts like those I have just completed as I have new campaign ideas come up.  Believe it or not, the well is not completely dry.  The number of fully formed ideas, however, is much shallower.  I have a lot of concepts like: "Hey!  We could mash up Interface Zero and Savage Worlds Fantasy Companion and make a Shadowrun game with a magic system I actually understand!"  Until I have a more concrete idea of where to go with that concept, I don't consider it post worthy.  Also, there is the big finale post that I had hoped to wrangle into submission for near the end of this, but it still eludes me.  Which is a shame, because if fits wonderfully with what I am presenting today.

My idea for the day is not really a standalone campaign, although I guess it could be considered as such in its roughest form.  Rather, I think this idea is better used in conjunction with another fantasy game.  An overlay, or lens to use the GURPS term, if you will.  I will also say that it is not especially original, it has been used a time or twelve before me.  What it IS is unique to my experience as a game master.  What I am proposing is to place a character creation constraint on the players and have them design characters that are all of the same class.  I have been kicking around the idea of proposing this for years and I can think of no better time to present it to the prospective players.

Now clearly, this would be much easier in a game where there are actual classes, but as the people I game with are smart, I do not think this is such a difficult obstacle to overcome.  Even in games with classes (and sub- and prestige classes) I think exploring differences the base class offers is a worthy goal. Also, I understand the old arguments about niche protection and thumb my nose at them all.  In fact, I think one of the primary reasons to engage in this exercise is for the players to see just how different the characters could be even with similar career paths.  Since this is an exercise in class, let us look at ways that each of the traditional classes could be used and created to accentuate these differences.

Since I just caved and finally put some money down on the Guild of Shadows Kickstarter by SQPR Games, perhaps the Thief/Rogue class should be the one to begin with.  I have already had one player indicate that they liked the idea of playing a Thieves Guild game.  That is certainly a possibility with the players creating a team of rogues:  the acrobat/second story man, the light fingered cutpurse, the brutish mugger, the smooth confidence woman, etc. Perhaps the characters are all new to town and are forced to work together to show the Guild power structure that they are worthy of admittance.  Or perhaps their are multiple Guild-like organizations who operate in a shadow war.  The players then could either be new to town and have to pick a side, or could already be members of one of the factions and therefore be active in the conflict.  Alternately, perhaps their side already lost, and the objective becomes protecting themselves from the vindictive victors.

Perhaps the easiest class to diversify in is that of the Fighter.  In a game like Banestorm, one of the players could be a noble knight, while the rest were men-at-arms, scouts/foragers, archers.  Even should more than one player be a knight, there are always different orders of knighthood that could differentiate the players.  Perhaps one is skilled in mounted combat while another is better with sword or axe.  In a more traditional fantasy game, the task becomes even easier.  A fighting adventure company that consists of a tough close fighter, a quick skirmisher, a ranged expert, and a big hitter could emulate much of a traditional adventuring party all within the warrior class.

A group of magic-users could really diversify as well.  The classic set up would be four magicians each focusing on one element.  Earth, Wind, Fire... no wait, that is a funk band.  Earth! Fire! Wind! Water! Heart! DAMMIT, that is Captain Planet and the Planeteers.  Well, you get the point.  Alternately, in a game where magic is carefully hoarded, perhaps each of the PC magicians  is a member of a different magical order that jealously guards the spells that they consider their exclusive domain.  In this setup, each PC has access to spells and training the others will not.  In a game like this, they PCs would be brought together to defeat some powerful magic user who has somehow managed to steal and combine the secrets of one or more of the orders.  Or maybe they just decide to band together to shore up each other's weak points.

A group of disparate clerics intrigues me as well, mostly because it seems to be the least likely to ever see the table.  Why should the clerics ALWAYS be healers only though?  A Warpriest, a protection expert, the buffer, the direct damage priest who calls down the wrath of her god are all good options as well.  I could easily see a party of priest that are all devotees of the same god.  Perhaps they have been sent out into the world to thwart the machinations of a rival god, gain converts in a new land, or perhaps just to display the various powers manifest in the godhead.  I think a game in which each player was the devotee of a different god would be an interesting wrinkle as well. Imagine each member of the party as a representative of their respective church, brought together to investigate rumors of a strange nihilistic cult practicing somewhere in the city/countryside/sewers/homes of the rich and powerful.  The players would have a common goal, but perhaps very different worldviews.  That sounds like a game I would like to play in or run.

The Heartbreak of Desolation

Even with the ever greater encroachment of things that are only tangentially related, Gencon is undoubtedly the biggest annual event in American tabletop gaming.  It is THE place where gamer companies shill their products and gamers gather to buy them.  On one level that is a very good thing for both parties, the game companies have a very direct conduit to their target audience while the gamer with money has almost unlimited ways to trade that currency for product.  For the small publisher, however, this situation can often work against them.  Every year there are new, fresh faced designers who come to Gencon to sell the game that they have been working on on in their basement for years/decades.  It is their labor of love and they have brought it to the gaming mecca so that they can share that object of their obsession with the world.

The problem comes when the dealer halls open up and thousands of people come crashing into the room.  These new fledgling games are surrounded by other better established game lines, each with a shiny new project to sell.  The gamer's budget is limited (and for some non-existent).  Once Paizo, Mayfair, and Fantasy Flight have taken their chunk out of that small pie there is often very little left for those small, first time publishers.   

Now, sometimes that is just market forces working their magic.  Some of those labors of love are not really that much different than so many things that have come before.  ("But our fantasy world is so different!  Our elves are blue!")  Others are so far from the mainstream sensibilities that they seem to be more an exorcism of the designer's personal demons than a playable game.  ("But our fantasy world is so different!  Our elves eat their young to power their magic!").  Every year though, there are a handful of new products that have a new or at least fresh take on their genre without being so decidedly odd that they could never gain a following.  Unfortunately, the market is so tough that most of those games fail too.

Exhibit A.

One of the best examples of a game that came to Gencon and fell through the cracks is Desolation by Greymalkin Designs.  The core rulebook is a beautiful hardback with professional production values.  The artwork is evocative, feature some gorgeous color art in the center section, and maps by William McAusland.  The premise, of a near-Utopian fantasy society that has been recently shattered by a huge magic purge, is accessible, yet fresh enough to provide a unique roleplaying experience.  And yet, even as I was paying for the game at the booth, I could tell that the game was probably doomed to membership in the Dead Games Society within a year or two.  The booth was sandwiched among a number of well known properties, and looked more than a bit forlorn.   Also, in its original state, it uses a modified version of the Ubiquity system (originally used in the game Hollow Earth Adventures) which employs a very odd dice mechanic which can be, frankly, off-putting.

The game world, however, has a lot to recommend it.  The setting begins in a fantasy world eighteen months after a magical cataclysm occurred.  Before the catastrophe, the Ascondian Empire stood as a bastion of civilization in the known world.  By harnessing magic the Ascondians were able to make tremendous advances in agriculture, architecture, medicine, and culture.  The Empire became a model which other nations resented and admired in turn.  Even as the Ascondian's reached higher, however, the metaphysical tensions of the magic/technological union began.  Using magic could physically harm the practitioner.  The Burn, a fatigue based damage, afflicted every magic user.  Magicians used a number of means to dampen the effects of the burn, causing the magical backlash to manifest itself in a more dramatic way, the Night of Fire. 

The Dwarven race was almost wiped out as their mountain
holdfasts,  augmented by Ascondian magic, collapsed and
became their graves. 

As the sun set across the world one evening, the magical backlash manifested itself as a world spanning cataclysm.  For lack of a better term, the magic took itself back.  Magical items lost their abilities.  The huge, physics defying edifices created by the Ascondians crumbled in a moment.  The evidence of magic as a force of nature became evident as storms erupted, mountains collapsed, rivers changed course, and great chasms opened in the earth, some swallowing entire villages.  Forests burned, or turned to stone.  Stone melted or became ice.  By the following morning, almost no part of the land remained unaffected.

In the aftermath, the survivors are forced to learn to survive in a world where their previous reliance on magic is shattered.  Magic still works, but without the previous ways to mitigate the Burn, recreating the old traditions is not an option.  In an evening, the world has gone from High to Low Magic.  Those who can still weave spells must also contend with sometimes angry resistance from other survivors who worry that the effects of the casting might bring a recurrence of the Night of Fire.  

The setting offers some interesting twists on the usual fantasy races as well.  Humans come in several different flavors.  The Ascondians are the baseline human race and are analogous to a Romanesque people who expanded from their small city state into an empire using magic and force, but incorporated conquered foes into the fold much as Rome did.  Other human races from the lands outside Ascondian sway exist as well.  The few remaining Dwarves come in two varieties, Mountain Dwarves who seem intent on reclaiming what is left of their mountain holdfasts, and Desert Dwarves who have taken their knowledge to the salt mines of the Saikin Wastes.  The Elves of the world, while they did not necessarily share the technological bent of the Ascondians, were just as sorely pressed when the Night of Fire dramatically reduced their reliance on magic.  Lonarians are the small folk of the world.  Island folk, the Lonarians are a somewhat savage and strange folk who use curse magic to great effect.  Two more original races round out the Desolation role call: Mongrels and Rovers.  Mongrels are a catch all of mixed parentages.  No two mongrels look quite alike, making them the most downtrodden of pre-cataclysm races.  Now that the "great" races have been laid low, some Mongrels see the modern age as a time when they can excel as well.  Rovers can be best described as sea faring gypsies.  The are traders who live in great ship cities, and sometimes come ashore.  Their society is expressed by an intricate series of bodily tattoos that tell their life story to those who know how to read them.  While they resemble humans, they are a distinct species, and some may even possess gills.  Kinda like Kevin Costner in Waterworld, only not nearly so lame.

This is a very open world.  One that allows for both a wide variety of characters and adventures.  On one hand, I could see the characters all being from the same village trying to rebuild before some combination of winter and invaders came.  In this type of game, the characters would have a definite home base and could venture out as need dictates.  On the other hand, a game in which the characters are all travelers of differing backgrounds would be equally possible.  In this setup the players could come from virtually any background, but have decided to travel together for the safety that numbers provides.  For a game set in the world of Desolation, I think I would sit down with the players and let them decide which style of game they would prefer.

I don't need a thousand points of light. Just one good one will do.

Game authors write a lot of material for our hobby.  Some hobbyists can find a way to expound on just about every aspect of games and gaming.  My favorite example of this is Warriors, a sourcebook by Skirmisher Publishing that takes a single paragraph about NPC fighters in the Third Edition Dungeons and Dragons Game Master's Guide and expands it into a 130 page supplement.  As I get older, though, I find that I just do not have as much time to wade through as much material as I would like.  I am always on the look out for a supplement that manages to either be brief but thorough or packed with really useful information (regardless of length).  When I find one that is brief, thorough, AND packed with gaming goodness, that is the worthy of note.

One of my favorite products that manages to do all of those things is Points of Light by Goodman Games.  Points packs four fairly detailed campaign settings, each loosely linked to the others, into 48 tight pages.  The settings are nominally designed for use with Dungeons and Dragons, but the material is largely devoid of stats, so each page consists primarily of setting material.  A full page map is included for each of the four settings. The rest of each entry is a series of locations with short descriptions of what makes the location interesting.

It is these descriptions that make Points of Light stand out.  The author manages to insert something interesting into almost all of them.  That alone would make this a pretty good product.  How the individual entries interact in intriguing ways makes this supplement truly stand out.  Each setting also strikes a nice balance of information.  There is ample empty space on each map for the GM to add things to make the setting his own.  Also, there is plenty of detail, but not so much that the PCs will have trouble finding a way to become important to the setting. Three of the four offerings are settings that I think I would personally enjoy turning into settings for my players. The fourth is less to my personal taste, but still manages to provide some tidbits that I could find uses for elsewhere.

All four scenarios are linked by a central event:  the collapse of the Bright Empire after a long glorious reign.  The setting is created to intentionally resemble various areas of Europe after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire.  The Empire was able to withstand various external forces, but was finally brought low by a civil war between the followers of two gods: Delaquain, the Goddess of Honor and Justice, and Sarrath, the God of War and Order.  While these forces were combating each other, the various enemies on the borders took the opportunity to strike and bring a permanent end to the Bright Empire.

The campaign setting I find the most intriguing is entitled "The Wildlands."  Set in a outer province of the former Empire, the area has been overrun repeatedly, first by non-human invaders and later by equally vicious human barbarian tribes.  A decade has passed since the collapse.  Only a single walled town remains as evidence that the Bright Empire ever held sway in the province of Tharvingia.  This town is currently ruled by a priest of Sarrath, who recaptured the area a mere two years ago from the barbarian horde.  The Priest and his allies struggle to restore the city despite the dual pressures of hostile forces without and desperate townsfolk within.  In such a hostile environment, even the actions of a few good heroes can make a difference.

In this campaign, the players would all be denizens of the walled town of Yellzurthi.  The town is in desperate condition and can look only inward for help.  The PCs will, whether under their own initiative or at the behest of the town elders, make forays into the countryside to repel the (in this case literally) barbarians at the gates.  Missions to surrounding ruined towns to retrieve needed materials, foraging expeditions, and perhaps even the occasional retaliatory raid against the enemy would round out the PCs mandate.  Many fantasy games are travelogues, with the players roaming the land and having adventures in a series of interesting locales.  This game is exactly the opposite of that.  The characters have nowhere to go that is not in the same dire straits as their home.  It falls to them to first survive and then, if they are fortunate, push back against the dark.

At Play in the Untamed Lands

Like most gamers my age, I cut my roleplaying teeth on Dungeons and Dragons.  After several years of Elves and Magic Users and Clerics who cannot use edged weapons, I began looking for something different.  Most of my college gaming was spent running GURPS Autoduel and playing in Spy Games, first Top Secret and later the James Bond RPG.  There were the occasional forays into fantasy gaming, the occasional Tunnels and Trolls game or even the occasional GURPS Fantasy game.  What led me away from the genre was a seeming monotony of the material.  Tolkienesque Fantasy was in abundance in those days, and even some of the more original worlds seemed to take the standard tropes and lay them over a slightly different background.

My first years out of college led me even further astray from fantasy in the TSR mold.  In Louisiana, I discovered Harn, and played in a ripping game of GURPS Conan.  Even so, by the time I returned from my southern sojourn, I had plenty of non-fantasy roleplaying under my belt, and could be occasionally coaxed into a game, either as GM or more rarely as a player.  

In the last couple of years, I have completed a couple of long more-or-less traditional fantasy campaigns, and one very short one (my second TPK thanks to a seemingly endless string of missed combat attacks by the players).  As previous, and future, posts will attest, I think it is safe to say that I have long since put to rest any axe I had to grind with that genre.

After those recent successful forays, I have been actively seeking material that rests firmly in the realm of fantasy, but travels well away from most of the traditional fantasy tropes.  With the advent first of the OGL, which I have mentioned in the past, and the e-publishing industry, there are innumerable fantasy products on the market.  Most of them are variations on the traditional fantasy theme ("Our Dwarves fly in airships!"), but there are some really interesting and different products out there as well.

One of the products that excites me is Totems of the Dead by Gun Metal Games.  Totems, which uses the Savage Worlds rules set,  is squarely in the realm of fantasy while managing to steer clear of most of the usual fantasy tropes.  It achieves this primarily through setting.  Rather than the usual vague Eurocentric setting, this game is set in a fantastic version of the Western Hemisphere.  The result is a world of the Americas developed with the inclusion of working magic systems and a very different set of outside influences.  Cultures range from the Incan-inspired Yaurocan Empire in the south all the way to Arcitic tribesmen that resemble the Inuit.  There are some external influences as well.  The Northeast corner of the map is the domain of the Skadians, Norse analogs who have expanded from unknown lands to the East.  The West Coast likewise has seen preliminary contact with the seafaring Chen and some violent encounters with the warlike mounted raiders the Ruskar.  To round out the picture, the mysterious land of Atlantis lies to the east.  Atlanteans staged an abortive invasion of the Untamed Lands a generation ago, before troubles at home brought the conflict to an abrupt end.

Gunmetal Games does an admirable job of handling the differing cultures that inhabit the Untamed Lands.  The various populations are each given unique starting edges, allowing them to feel very different from one another.  Additionally, the authors culled through all the various native american cultural traditions to put together a fantasy bestiary that feels refreshingly unique.  Thar be no Dragons.  Instead, Wendigo threaten the frozen North while winged serpents and Demon Frogs bedevil the more tropical climes.

The central temple at Chichen Itza.  

One of the more interesting cultures sits right in the middle of the continent, the Maztlani Empire.  Over the years I have made excursions to Tulum,  Chichen Itza, Altan-Ha and other ruins in and around the Yucatan.  Those trips, brief though they may have been, have given me a desire to revisit those cultures in game terms as well. The spread out nature and sheer size of the continent dictate that some cultures would likely never make it into play. As a centrally located trading empire, the Maztlani would be a good location for many of the cultures to interact.

The game I have in mind takes place in this central trading empire so that it allows for characters from any of a number of the surrounding areas.  The Maztlani Empire has traded with its neighbors for quite some time and established itself as the premier power in the central Untamed Lands.  Recently, many a number of outsiders seem to be making their way to the shores of the Yukek peninsula.  A strange new power has arisen in the East and is gradually conquering its way West.  The refugees report that invaders dress stangely and use foul magic rituals never encountered before.  The reports may be true, but some Mazlani scholars recognize the descriptions of the invaders from the legends of the ancient Zipacan civilization.  Brave men and women are needed to find the abandoned ruins of the Zipacan and see if they contain the secret of repelling these foul marauders.

Song of Hark and Wood

My engagement with the various elements of geek popular culture is pretty hit or miss.  Outside of Boba Fett and Han Solo, I really don't give Star Wars much thought.  Monty Python and Hitchiker's Guide quotes leave me flat.  I am really freakin' tired of every damn RPG product having some kind of Cthulhu tie in.. I don't give a good god damn about any of the various Doctor's of Who, their companions, or the Tardis. The influence of Harry Potter, Twilight, and even (to a lesser extent) the works of Tolkien leave me usually more than a bit sad.  The Marvel superhero movies interest me, but are not appointment theater experiences for me.

I am not completely on a deserted geek island though.  I have a deep affection for Firefly. I like Star Trek, although my preference for DS9 seems to make me apostate in some quarters.  I can quote The Princess Bride (and often do), watch Walking Dead every week that it airs a new episode, and wait longingly for the fall return of Sleepy Hollow. My closest association with the cutting edge of geek culture, however, is that I follow Game of Thrones.  I have read all the books, and am working my way through the Dunk and Egg short stories.  I own all the legal seasons of the HBO series, although I am a haven't yet gotten to season 3.  Not an uberfan, perhaps, but at least I knew the red wedding was coming, and I periodically fret about how long Mr. Martin takes between literary installments.

Even their logo is bad ass.

I even own most of the Song of Ice and Fire RPG by Green Ronin.  Green Ronin is one of my favorite companies.  The publishers of Freeport and other nifty products over the years, they have earned a reputation for making quality games.  SOIAF is no exception:  it is beautiful, thorough, and elegant in its own, complex way.  It is also a game that I do not think I will ever run. The mechanics make internal sense, but the nuances involved look like exactly the sort of crunch-intensive game that I try to avoid. One of the things I really like about the system is the idea that the players sit down together and design their own minor house, with each player working out their own position within that house.  That is a brilliant design choice, but I once sat down with a group of three players to do just that and it took us an entire evening to design three characters and the house they belonged to!  When that game got scrapped before we even played the first session, it sapped a lot of my desire to go through that process again.

Also, there is the matter of the whole weight of the expansion weighing down on the enterprise.  When playing material set in a pop cultural universe, the game master often must face two problems that do not crop up in less well known material:  property familiarity an expectations.  As a game master with only casual engagement with the sacred cows of much of geek culture, both of these can be an issue.  If even one of the players is familiar with the property, then their perception of the major players and events of the property may be very much at odds with my own.  If they are deeply invested in the property, it may very well be that their perception is correct, and what I am presenting is less true to the source material than it ought to be.  Given the rant in my previous post, I should probably avoid that sort of thing.

Expectations are equally troubling.  The SOIAF game is set four years before the events of the first book.  In one respect this is good, since Mr. Martin seemingly created a cast of thousands and is determined to kill every one of them before the series is over.  Placing the game before the book ensures that all of the characters in the books are still alive for the game.  On the other hand, it can seriously rob the game of tension.  If the game master tries to preserve the game world in such a way that the events in the books will come about, it robs some of the tension from the game.  Why bother saving King Robert Baratheon in the game if you know that he will somehow make it to the boar hunt in the first book no matter what your actions?  Why engage in a duel with Jamie Lannister if you know he must survive the encounter? On the other hand, if the game master does allow the players to kill or save any of the major characters from the books, then the game can spin so far afield of the books as to no longer resemble the material the players found so engaging in the first place. Quite the pickle, no?

GURPS Banestorm. One of the few Fourth
 Edition products that wasn't complete rubbish.

Still, the backstabbing and political machinations that are the trademark of SOIAF are perfect for a roleplaying game.  So how can I as a game master who admires the spirit of that tension, but probably does not have the inclination to wade hip deep into Westeros' cast of characters (and their baggage) proceed?  By transporting the skullduggery to another, less burdened setting!

 One of the best things that Steve Jackson Games ever produced was their fantasy setting, the Banestorm.  In this world, a splinter group of elves cast a ritual to rid them of the rising Orc menace, by banishing their enemies forever.  The ritual catastrophically failed, and not only did not expel the Orcs, but the resulting backlash (the titular Banestorm) dragged individuals and even whole villages from other realities into their own world.  A large number of these new transplants came from our world circa the year 1000.  For the last nine-hundred years, the old races and the new have lived hand in glove.  Jealous of their prerogatives, magic users ruthlessly suppress many technological advances, especially gunpowder, leaving the world roughly in the same feudal condition as when the importees first arrived.

Banestorm's brightest spot is the Aaron Allston classic Harkwood,  set in the low magic nation of Caithness, a kingdom that has recently lost its charismatic leader.   Harkwood is a fiefdom loyal to the new, uncertain young king.  Forces loyal and rebellious conspire at the Baron of Harkwood's annual tourney, and the players are inserted into the middle of the activities. One of the best parts of this supplement is that it allows you to chose which of any number of NPCs might be the ultimate bad guy.  Even players who might have played in this scenario before might not have an inkling about what is going on.  I ran a heavily modified version of this years ago.  A change of villain, new players and the twist I envision, could turn it into an very different experience.

For all the goodness that Harkwood contains, I think it could stand to be a bit nastier.  As written these are the machinations of the costume dramas of the 1950s.  If a clever game master (or failing that, if  I...) mixed the interesting succession conflict from Harkwood with the nastiness of the politics in SOIAF, a very satisfying campaign could result.

This union could even be taken a step further.  The players could use the house construction system from SOIAF (known as the Chronicle System) to create their own minor house of Caithness nobility and determine their level of (dis)loyalty to the young king.  When the events occur at Harkwood, they already have a vested interest in the outcome.  From there, the game progresses into the full blown political and perhaps military campaign as the various forces vie against one another for the very future of Caithness.

For this game, I would probably convert the whole magilla to Savage Worlds.  Changing a system can often lead to different character choices.

Roleplaying on the Razor's Edge

Some game masters like ninjas.  Some like robots.  I tend to prefer pirates and their landlubbing cousins bandits.  It is pretty easy to figure out that someone who is willing to kill you and take your stuff is probably the bad guy.  Let that sink in for a moment.

When a new, piratey RPG product comes out, I generally take note.  Many of the items either seem to be reworking familiar material or just jamming pirates into an otherwise standard fantasy adventure. Sometimes, the material rises above that level and I take notice.  Razor Coast is one such product.

 At Gencon last year, I spent a good chunk of the trip dithering over whether I would buy the Razor Coast book or not.  At $100 the price was steep!  I will admit that the product was packed with material.  It was also a huge book, 432 pages for the Swords and Wizardry version I bought (544 pages for the Pathfinder version of virtually the same material!) and full color throughout. It is equal parts source book, adventure source book, and game master guide.  Finally, on the last day with a matching donation from Eric, I went ahead and made the purchase.  In order to make it worthwhile, though, we will actually have to play the game.

It is interesting to compare this product with Freeport as they both nominally mine the same territory: a mashup of Pirates and Fantasy.  It is truly a credit to Razor Coast that it really has very little in common with Freeport.  Where the older product is set on a small island chain that is close enough to a home continent to prey on well established trade lanes on an existing continent, Razor Coast has a very different feel.  Port Shaw, the central location of the game is a colony port, far removed from the mainland.  To give it a buzzword tagline it feels like Fantasy Pirates of Polynesia.

To be sure, the colonizers fill some of the usual fantasy tropes, but the setting details feel very different.  The natives are of a Pacific tribal bent, hard pressed to reconcile their current oppressed status with their warrior past.  Meanwhile, there are threats and machinations from on land, under the sea, and even from within.  The local volcano god may very well be real, and if he is, he is pissed!  The local enemies are of an interesting stripe as well:  Alligator men in the swamps, Weresharks  ply the deep, and mutated cannibal pygmies await the unwary.  I cannot express how much I want to unleash mutant cannibal pygmies on my players!

Weresharks.  These aren't in your daddy's Monster Manual.

In his blog, Zak Sabbath posts a lot of things that I thoroughly agree with, a few things that I completely disagree with, and a disturbingly large number of things that I do not understand.  Recently in the post I like RPGs..., there was a LOT of the things I agree with.  One of the statements he made that I really agree with was this: "I almost even kinda like that published modules are almost uniformly an object lesson in how much worse published modules are than what you could invent at home." Fortunately, while there is much truth to this sentiment, a great deal of the adventure material for Razor Coast does not fit into that category.  While I would not wish to use everything as written, there are some plots and scenes within the material that I would want to use without wholesale changes.

My campaign idea for Razor Coast allows the players a lot of rope when creating characters.  A mix of natives, citizens of Port Shaw, and new arrivals would all fit for what I have in mind.  They will all begin the game in Port Shaw one personal business, but circumstances will cast them together and force some initial cooperation.  Afterward, the adventures will interweave the best elements of the "adventure path" from the original book, plot elements of my own device, and the usual ramifications of player actions into a singularly tasty seafood chowder.  With weresharks.  And mutant cannibal pygmies.

One more picture of a wereshark.  Because I do not have any
good pictures of mutant cannibal pygmies. And because...
wereshark.

Midnight in the Garden of Evil and... More Evil

When the third edition of Dungeons and Dragons arrived in 2000, it came with a gift, a new way of thinking about things:  the open gaming license (OGL).  The OGL made it possible for third party publishers to create material for the newest edition of the world's most popular roleplaying game (at the time of course).  And create material they did.  Some of the third party content was excellent (Freeport and Ptolus).  Some of it was Terrible with a capital T.  Most of it, however, got buried in an absolute glut more or less dubious products.  The good material often could not find an audience.

One of the products that did find a bit of success was Midnight.  Fantasy Flight Games published a massive core book that went through two editions and a baker's dozen of supplemental material.  It even spawned a made-for-tv movie pilot that never became a series. In 2009, Fantasy Flight devoted themselves full time to making good, but ridiculously complicated board games and dropped the line entirely.  After a long hiatus, the products are once again available on DrivethruRPG.

Midnight has been described as Lord of the Rings if Sauron had won.  I have always found those sorts of pitch phrases reductive, but for the uninitiated, that description does serve a purpose.  The game is set on a continent that has been subjugated by the minions of a once defeated God.  This entity escaped his confinement, raised an army of Orcs in the frozen North and conquered a land that scarcely realized he was still a threat.  A hundred years after the frozen God's return, the human population has been subjugated. Elves and Dwarves have been run to ground and hunted almost to extinction.  The halfling population is routinely enslaved, while gnomes work as collaborators with the Orc occupiers and the God's omnipresent Church of the Shadow.  The Church is dominated by the Night Kings, powerful sorcerers (one is even a dragon) tasked with keeping the entire continent under their thumb.

The Night Kings.  Guaranteed to get your next party
 shut down by the cops.

In this world, magic is proscribed for all but priests of the Church.  As a result, magical items are scarce and generally of the relic variety.  The subjugated populations, however, have not completely given up the practice of magic.  In secret they create charms: small single (or limited) use magic items that generally grant skill or attribute bonuses. Possession of even these meager boons is subject to death, but their very presence shows the will to resist the occupation persists, even as the years of occupation drag on.

As far as fantasy games go, this one is pretty bleak.  The game material states explicitly that the world is so tightly under the control of the frozen god that it will likely never break free.  Into such a world, heroes are often born only to be crushed under the filthy Orkin boots.  So why, then would anyone want to game in such a world?

To answer that, I look to the words of Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird.  Real courage, he told his children comes "when you know you are licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what.  You rarely win, but sometimes you do."  The Frozen God is evil and the Church of Shadow is pervasive.  Still, they cannot be everywhere.  Maybe the players, who must start from meager beginnings, can bring a little light to their corner of the world.  If the light in that corner shines bright enough, perhaps it might allow for a little light somewhere else as well.

It's nobody's business, not even the Turks.

The pictures in the banner of this blog represent some of my favorite game products over the years.  Many of them are going to make an appearance on these pages at some point or another.  Most of them are familiar to at least some of my readers.  Down in the bottom right corner, however, is a work that I daresay most of you have NOT heard much about.  It is a fairly new product, one that I am a huge fan of.  Presenting things like it to my potential players is exactly why I started writing this blog.  Parsantium: City at the Crossroads is an amazing product.  A world that I would love to both run and play in.

There are a LOT of city books out there.  Some of them, like Castles and Crusades' Town of Kalas are small, but captivating.  Some of them are just freaking huge.  Some of them are both huge AND good, like Ptolus.  Good city settings make the local the center of adventure rather than just a location where a single adventure might happen or where the players rest up between adventures elsewhere.  The very best city settings avoid what I like to think of as the "blunt object syndrome" wherein the author has crafted a city so intricate, with plots and antagonists so well defined, that the player characters' only role is perfunctory.  In these settings the PCs either become the instrument by which one of the factions smashes one of the others, or they become their own tool of destruction: bashing up against all the various factions without ever truly engaging with them.

Parsantium, I feel, takes a place among the very best city settings.  Author Richard Green takes our own historic Byzantium and overlays a number of fantasy lenses to create a vibrant, multicultural playground.  The city has a detailed history of different cultural influences which all shine through in both the various quarters of the city, especially where one series of conquerors has settled in an area that was the center of leadership for a previous culture. Analogs of the Mediterranean/European tradition rub elbows with significant and meaningful cultures of middle eastern, Indian, Slavic, and Chinese extraction.  In addition, fantasy races are added to the mix, with varying degrees of success (and which I will discuss in more depth farther down).

The book weighs in at 175 pages, but they are packed with good ideas.  This is nominally a Pathfinder product, but the author promises minimal stats and delivers.  Each NPC stat is a single line consisting of alignment, race, class, and level number.  There are no prestige classes or other special crunch to bloat the page count meaning that what we have is an entire book of usable world building material.  Now strictly, this might be a negative for its usability as a Pathfinder product.  Since I do not play Pathfinder, however, that makes adapting the material to whatever system I do wish to use that much easier.

The simple two column layout presents the city first as a whole, and then by quarter.  The descriptions evoke feelings of a city that has lasted for millennium, and that the evidence of such is present everywhere around the characters.  From the colossus in the merchant quarter to the description of how the current residents of one quarter have adapted the structures of the previous tenants, there are details both subtle and obvious, that make this setting unlike anything that the players are likely to have experienced before.

The beauty of the setting is that all the things you expect to find in a fantasy city are there, just given a fresh twist. The various cultural pantheons, for example, take their cues from real world religions, with the Aqrani (middle eastern) culture worshiping a single god, while the Bathuran (Roman) rulers have a full pantheon of gods, although many of them are given mere lip service.  Green does a good job even of naming the gods in such a way that they feel familiar, yet still exotic.  The Bathuran goddess of Love is named Cytherea, a name associated with a cult of Aphrodite in our own world.

There are thugs, and cults, and corrupt officials, and kindly patrons in Parsantium just like in most of the other good city settings.  Where Parsantium really shines is in showing you ways to interact with all of these various people in ways that are not always earth shattering.  To be sure, Parsantium offers storylines with big impact, but it also allows for, and encourages, smaller stories to unfold, the kind I prefer to craft with my players.

If there is a weakness in the game it is the sometimes clumsy inclusion of the traditional fantasy races into the game.  Where the human races are rich in depth, many of the fantasy races look and feel the same in this world as in any other.  There are notable exceptions:  One small faction to the north of the city is a rampaging nomadic tribe of centaurs that seem to be Mongolesque and a strong army of Gnolls that sacked the city and occupied it in the recent past.  Elves, Dwarves, Halflings and Gnomes are present in name and deed that make them seemigly no different than if they were in any other fantasy world.  When the leader of your nation is named Corandias and there is a hobgoblin bard roaming around that answers to Theoderic, I would think that the local halfling baker could have a name more original than Flourfingers.*  I am sure that the inclusion of all the fantasy races is a nod to the Pathfinder tie in, but in a land this exotic I do not really see a need for Tieflings and Dragonmen.  Or even Elves, Dwarves, Halflings, and Gnomes for that matter.  Why can't the tinkerer be an Aqrani?  Or the brewer be of non-Dwarf extraction?  Before playing in this world, I would certainly want to discuss this particular wrinkle with the players and see how they would like to proceed.

Unlike most of the entries that I plan to make this month, I am not presenting a specific campaign for Parsantium.  It has so much potential, that I want to show it off to anyone who might like to play in this world, but would rather find out what the players would want to encounter in the world before I created too much material.  Given the divergent cultures, what would work for a group made up of a singe racial extraction might be a poor game for a mixed group. At the end of the month, however, I plan to present a campaign conceit that will work for a variety of game settings, and would mesh very well with Parsantium.

* This sort of naming convention is a problem for much of Fantasy Gaming and is therefore not strictly a Parsantim issue.  The concept of naming fantasy races with some compound name of either adjective-noun or (worse) noun-noun variety is lazy.  It takes NO thought whatsoever to slap a couple of words together and call it a name.  Worse, when I see (as I have) a Dwarf named Rockhammer, I don't think Dwarf, I think Flintsones.  The idea that any self-respecting halfling family would name themselves the Cherryberries is ludicrous.

The Sea Lord is Dead! Long Live the Sea Lord!

One thing that role-playing game designers often do is a mashup of genres.  This has been a part of gaming for a LONG time.  As early as 1980, TSR was mixing science fiction with fantasy in Expedition to Barrier Peaks.  Want some horror mixed with your old west action?  Play some Deadlands.  Cyberpunk and Trolls more to your liking?  Try out some Shadowrun (but you will have to do it without me.  For the life of me, I could never figure out the magic system for that game.) 

Roleplaying at the turn of the 80s.
   Back when so much of the art was rubbish,
 but we didn't know any better.

Sometimes, the genre mixing goes so far that it is hard to tell where one genre ends and the other begins (Torg comes to mind).  One of the products that got the mix just right, however, is the Freeport setting by Green Ronin.  One of the original third party products released alongside Third Edition Dungeons and Dragons in 2000, Freeport is a world independent setting that mixes the trappings of the fantasy and pirate genres into a tasty grog of goodness.  In keeping with the independent nature of the setting, material has been created by GR and its affiliates for Freeport that span the fantasy rules gamut: 3^rd edition, True 20, Savage Worlds, Pathfinder, Castles and Crusades, and Fate all have conversion rules to adapt the setting.  There is even a 4^th Edition Dungeons and Dragons conversion, but I doubt even Freeport could salvage that train wreck.  A recent kickstarter is going to lead to an expanded edition of the Pirate's Guide going from systemless to a Pathfinder product.

The Pirate's Guide to Freeport strained the limits of
how  much awesome could be contained between
 two book covers.

The eponymous island is a fantasy pirate haven built to drop off the coast of any traditional fantasy campaign continent.  Most of the traditional fantasy races have a role to play on the island, but humans are clearly the biggest movers and shakers there.  Eventually in the pretty brilliant Pirates Guide to Freeport, they added some skeletal information for a fantasy continent to place the island near if you did not have a world in mind to use.  The beauty of the setting is that they layered a number of plots and schemes over one another and allowed the Game master to pick and choose which plots to use.  Need some horror?  Freeport has a little King in Yellow action going for you.  If secret societies are your bag (baby) the island was lousy with them all going about their nefarious way.  Want big pirate battles?  You could always tangle with the dreaded Orc Pirate Captain Scarbelly.  My players did, and paid the price for it.  Don’t necessarily want to use any of that?  Well, that is okay too.  Freeport has plenty of room to create your own material and just use the city as a piratey backdrop.

I have used Freeport on a number of occasions.  I filed off the fantasy serial numbers (made all the fantasy races human) and used it briefly in one of my 7^th Sea campaigns.  Freeport was the setting for abortive 3^rd Edition game I ran in 2007 as well.  My best use of the setting, however, was the 2012 Savage Worlds fantasy game I ran for my Sunday group.  The first half of that game was set directly in Freeport until the characters decided that killing the great Sea Lord Milton Drac was probably going to make them outlaw and they fled to the mainland.  Since Freeport was where I planned on running the whole game, I just cobbled together a combination of the continent provided in Pirates’s Guide with the caravan module from the GURPS basic rules and slapped Trobridge Inn from Harnmaster into the mix and we had a campaign that lasted another six months.  I think the players enjoyed it.  I know I did.

But this brings me to my campaign idea for the day:  What happened in Freeport after the Sea Lord’s demise?  The original players fled the city and left chaos in their wake.  Drac’s line of succession was unclear.  Will the great Sea Council make their move to expel the hated Drac family from the Sea Lord postion permanently?  Drac was insane, and probably a cultist, but Freeport was stable under his rule.  Will one of the rival cults be able to capitalize on the power vacuum to strengthen their position?  Will the remnants of the Brotherhood of the Yellow Sign regroup and try to reestablish themselves?  Will rogue pirate captains use the disorder to strike out and attack the very ships they were supposed to protect?  The answer of course is yes to all of these things and the players would be right in the middle of it, helping some factions (whether they know it or not) and fighting others.  And then there is always the matter of that skeletal dragon figure that was seen flying over the port a few months back. Surely that was an aberration that will never appear again.  I see this game as a haven for new characters with an opportunity to build on what has come before.

He's not evil.  He's just misunderstood.  And hungry.