I started into the whole Tabletop RPG hobby right around the Height of AD&D 2nd Edition's existence. At the very impressionable age of 12, I was reading every DragonLance book I could get my hands on, and buying Every single Player's Handbook "Complete" guide I could find. And at that age, I could afford all of it, because there wasn't anything else that I needed to buy or worry about. So very quickly, I amassed hundreds of dollars in TSR's finest Roleplaying materials, most of which coming from the only major source for books and gaming supplies in town: Waldenbooks. Since there wasn't much in the name of RPG competition coming out of Waldenbooks (Primarily I remember Shadowrun, and StarWars), my Impressionable mind told me that TSR was the top dog, and that idea stuck in my head for nearly a decade.
Even after I tried a couple different game systems, (namely Shadowrun and a strange superhero game called Villains and Vigilantes), I still considered AD&D the game to be. I kept buying the books and boxed sets clear through the days of Planescape and RedSteele. But around that time, (maybe 1996 or so), I noticed things were changing at TSR. The novels were being rereleased without the "good" covers by Easley and Elmore, and the new setting being pushed out, Birthright, seemed to lack the sort of oomph that I had been used to. The rereleased core books had a kind of shaky (this isn't a 3rd edition, but we know we need to do something else) feel to them, and the Players Option books seemed to really show that TSR was reaching for some hook to keep its fanbase. I bought the Birthright box, and after reading through it a couple of times, all I could think of was, "My campaign world is way better than this, and it's still in its infancy." Then the book sales started dropping off. Then the whole Waldenbooks fiasco happened, TSR was bought by WotC, and my heart sunk.
I was one of the kids, who hated Magic: the Gathering when it came out. Not that I didn't eventually get sucked into the game, but I saw it as an evil force coming into the RPG world, and WotC as an evil company looking to scarf up all the surrounding competition. Not that there's any real proof of that, or that sort of thing actually happened, but as for as this podunk town goes, that's the kind of vibe I got. I've never seen much of a gaming community here, so when MtG exploded, I kinda felt like all us Tabletop PnP players were getting pushed back to the "old timey" room. Anyway, I kept on playing D&D all along through the MtG heydays (all my friends quit Magic about the time the Homelands set came out, because the cards started getting rediculus), and to this day, I'm grudgingly still using a core of AD&D 2nd edition rules, but I'm definetly not happy about that constrainment. But as the nineties drew to a close, I began to wonder and worry what would happen to the tabletop RPG niche. I love game, and will never quit, but I was worried that this sort of thing wouldn't exist for future generations. I knew that WotC needed to do something to the gaming scene to bring tabletop back; they needed to launch a third edition of D&D.
I was pumped when I first heard that a third edition was in the works, but then I saw that the "A" had been dropped. They were making a 3rd edition of classic D&D, not an improvement of the classic 2nd Edition rules I had come to love (albeit feelings of growing constrainment and age). I started out on classic D&D, and found it to be terribly boring. I never liked the dungeon crawl, and really, D&D isn't much more than that--fights, dungeons, treasure. My hype-level on the new edition dropped to the minimal level, even though the media was buzzing about all the "fantastic" additions to the new system, like Assassins, Monks, and prestige classes. All I could think about while folks raved about being able to be an assassin was, "they already have that in 2nd edition--it's a character class kit from the complete thieves' handbook."
Fortunately, my standard gaming group was about as excited for 3rd edition as I was. Sure, we were all planning on looking at the books, and I knew that I'd eventually buy them for the inspiration aspect gained from the art and maybe a few weird interesting facets, but none of us were planning on making a conversion.
Then I transferred to another college, and moved down to a new town for a few years. While I was down there, I was happy to find a thriving gamer/anime community, which I became a part of very quickly. However, I was shocked to see that everyone down there had completly fallen for the new 3rd edition rules, which had just been released. Granted, this was my first real experience with gamers outside the microcosm that I lived in my hometown. All my friends became gamers because of my influence, and I taught myself how to play, so our play style evolved into something weird and nonstandard. For the first time, I found myself in a group of standard gamers; a place where the fabled min-maxers, petty GMs, dungeon crawls, and lack of roleplaying existed and were more part of the norm than the fringe (until this point, I had only 1 min-max player).
Once I had gotten to know some people enough to want to run a game for them, they were shocked and appalled that I was against 3rd edition. "It's so much smoother," they decried, "it's not as cumbersome as 2nd edition," "there's more options." Well I wasn't conviced, but I let them make 3rd ed. style characters and tried to run the game on 3rd rules. The storylines I ran made the players really happy, but all of us hated the rules for different reasons (though the players liked them more than I did). Battles took forever, and I felt like all the dynamic description and cinematic style action that I was used to was lost in constant checks and dice rolls. I hated making arbitrary DC numbers for skill checks, and I didn't even begin to unravel the mess of mob creation with the difficulty ratings and checks and balances. But we clunked along until summer vacation. Over the summer, I switched everyone's characters to 2nd ed versions, retaining all gained skills. When play picked up the next year, things went a lot more smoothly for me, and the players quickly got into the more streamlined style of play that 2nd ed allows for. Dice rolls dropped, and roleplaying increased. The only problem: 2nd edition has a very inconsistant rule set; there are way too many different rolls, and all the players had a hard time remembering if they needed to roll high or low.
By this point, I had been running on the same rule set for more or less 10+ years. Sure, I knew just about everything inside out, and if I didn't, I generally knew page numbers off the top of my head. But as I encouraged my players to new levels of roleplaying, and as the plots continued to build and twist, I started to see the stress marks and holes that plagued the 2nd edition set. I've been struggling since this realization to modify the rules somehow to open up for more roleplaying, less dice rolling, and more unique character design.
In the last couple of years, I've struggled with this once magestic system, turned haggard crone. I've explored options of creating a classless character creation system, percentile based rolls in order to unify the high/low difficulties, new rules such as Channeling (as in drawing essences from one source and tranferring them), alternate magic rules, and various limited combat modifications. While I've had some very good ideas, I'm not particularly good at rule writing by myself. And currently I don't have any players with the time to vest into creating a wholly new system with me. So after spending a good chunk of this past summer wrestling with attempting some sort of facelift on the rules I know, I've decided that I should be doing something that I probably should have done long ago: look to other game systems.
My search for other game systems, has opened me to a nice little microcosm of Gamers and gaming blogs such as Treasure Tables, Roleplaying Tips, and others that have fueled my ideas and led me to picking up GURPS and thinking about lots of new things like conflict resolution and paying closer attention to my own GMing habits.
Granted, I haven't severed my link to D&D, but the love and respect I once held for "the one" system has diminished greatly; I feel as if the mask of obscurity has been lifted, and hopefully in time, my gaming sessions will feel a lot more like I want them to feel, and they'll play with a lot less hassle, headache and rules-checking.
Wednesday, December 14, 2005
Monday, December 12, 2005
Life as a Soloist GM
As I mentioned earlier in my What I'm Playing Now article, I'm more of a soloist style GM, and having been this way for much of my GMing career, Its led me in directions that generally aren't as easily recreated with a group of gamers. In this article, I'm going to explore what I see as the roots behind a solo game.
One of the key factors of a solo game is that there is only one player, and that player's character is full on in the spotlight for the entirety of the campaign. At first, this notion may seem to players to be the ultimate best situation; no competition from any other player, save NPCs. But I've found that this style of playing doesn't seem to work for every player. It requires a definetly strong sense of the character and a great internal drive to realize the character's long term plans. PCs that don't have very detailed backgrounds or Players that are indecisive, I've found, have a very difficult time making a solo campaign last beyond the first few adventures.
In order to build an adequate solo game, the GM needs to spend a little extra time with the Player upon character creation. Work a little closer with the Player and ask as many questions as possible to ascertain as many aspects of the character's personality, goals, and whatnot before starting play. I generally use the following template as a basis: Ae'rinus Character Creation Notes. From there, I can get the starting point for the campaign (both location and time), as well as the general overall "feel" of things.
Here's an example of the setup process: Recently, my wife came to me and said she was kicking around a new idea for a character--a dhampiel. I gave her the ok on the concept, and she came back to me a couple of days later with her background. The dhampiel's name was to be Vera and she has been sealed in a stone sarcophagus for over a year. She has amnesia and only remembers a few things from her past: a dark man giving her the necklace she now wears, that the dark man told her to feed only from animals--drinking blood from humans was bad, an image of an evil lady that was friends with the dark man--she taught her things of the occult and drank blood of humans, and an image of a young boy named Donovin, who was her friend in a garden and they fenced together.
From there, I interviewed Sue on all aspects of Vera's personality. And this sort of interviewing continues as we play (It's a lot easier to plan stuff for the character when you understand what emotions are ripping through the character). Vera is a sort of manic depressive that displays an almost faux "happy daredevil" outer appearance to cover the anger, confusion, and grief underlying everything (especially moreso now that she remembers her past). We both agreed that the feel for this campaign would be slightly tilted more towards cinematic than realistic; and it's been working out very nicely. The advantage of going to a more cinematic playstyle is that it emphasises Vera's natural superiority to most of the people around her. She may have started out at first level, but as soon as she fed on blood to recover her stamina, she was faster, stronger and meaner than just about everything around her. If the campaign were played with more rules and realism, I think a lot of Vera's Dhampiel edge would be lost and along with it would be interest in playing.
Another requirement is that as a GM, you must be prepared to control many NPCs and run them in a way that they have separate personalities, goals, and intelligences, which, to say the least, is a monolithic task. One of the key factors that helps the flow of a solo campaign are the character's companions. Usually I'll try to limit the companions to one or two others, because any more than that begins to get difficult to manage and roleplay (I'm still not fond of having NPCs talk to eachother--I usually screw up one of their accents/speech patterns and end up breaking tension). For the Vera campaign, I decided that she would meet her first companion in a prison colony called The Cauldron. His name is Esteban and he was thrown into The Cauldron fourteen years ago at age 10, for being "cursed by the gods." Essentially, he's one of the many people affected by the magical fallout resulting from the destruction of Elven Magic on Ae'rinus in 1600; however, he had the horrible misfortune of being a native of the religiously fanatic Barony of Ganto, and having his innate magical pollution manifest as demonic looking growths. He's big, has horns, hooves, a tail and a big black claw arm. But underneath he's a sweet little boy that doesn't know much about the world. In a lot of ways, he's very similar to Vera (trapped and without a history to call his own), but at the same time, he's managed to maintain an incredible amount of innocence in respect to having almost no anger over his inprisonment. His similarities and differences allowed for some really great interactions between Vera and Esteban and gave Vera a really good reason to not allow herself to descend into a deep depressive and violent trough. And when the two of them break out of The Cauldron, they collectively are beginning a new life together, and leaving the solitary life behind them.
From there, you now have a clean slate (sort of) to work from. They don't know any antagonists, and haven't really made any enemies yet to date. In order to create more interaction with Vera, I created a hook before she was sent to The Cauldron. She was aware of the sarcophagus being opened and a man calling himself Corvin looking at her and saying that if she got out of The Cauldron to seek him in Riversedge. When they eventually found Corvin, they were given the opportunity to join a semi-secretive guild, from which multiple interesting NPCs were brought about. Rather than having Vera travel in a traditional party, which doesn't really fit her personality, she usually travels with no more than two other specialists. This allows me to flesh them out, develop personal histories and backgrounds, as well as maintain a good roleplaying flow without buning out on having too many NPCs tooling around together at once.
In addition to the planned associates, Vera has made her own connections through her personal angendas, such as a blood doll (her source of clean blood), an accountant (to manage her estate, and go out on dates with her when the need arises), and her former quartermaster. Each NPC needs to be a little more fleshed out than your standard NPC because the PC is relying more heavily upon their input than input from other members of a traditional group-style game. As a GM, you need to keep this in mind, and dole out information carefully. All the PCs clues end up coming from the GM's mouth ultimately, so you have to be somewhat careful in controlling tension; if you let something slip too easily, then the player doesn't have much of a challenge on solving a problem. On the other hand, if you don't help the player enough, she'll get frustrated with the problem at hand. Basically, the best plan of action is to try to get your player to diversify who she talks to as much as possible, so that she has a wide knowledge base to make her decisions from.
The third piece that comes into play moreso than a group campaign is continuity. Nearly all of my solo campaigns have progressed on a day to day basis, with only a few short spots where the PC will be "doing nothing but research for the next week." Generally, the PC's actions are motivated either by personal goals or plot elements that I drop in her face. And this is the point that really will make or break your solo-campaign. All the background, NPCs and good interaction in the world can't save a solo-campaign when the PC becomes complacent with her position. What you need is a division of goals between both GM and Character. The Character needs to have certain personal goals aside from whatever plot the GM is currently running. These personal goals, add tension when time constraints are brought into place, and provide excellent rich filler when between set plot elements, or a certain amount of time needs to pass before the next plot element moves. Personal goals also provide the GM with a great fresh sense of action; you don't necessarily know what the character wants to do, so when she announces that she's going to spend some time trying to force the magic in one of those magic stones to work, you end up with a very interesting unplanned sidequest. These sidequests are the meat of my entertainment, because they're usually the place where characters grow the most, mainly because they're persuing activities that they're generally interested in, not forced into through circumstance. And as a result, the sidequests usually provide a nice little creative charge that tends to boost up the interest in your active plot elements.
This post has gone on for a little longer than I anticipated, but I hope that it provides some sort of interesting information regarding the art of solo-GMing. It can be a lonely path, but at the same time, I regard all of my best campaigns to have developed their roots within the lonely road of the solo adventurer.
One of the key factors of a solo game is that there is only one player, and that player's character is full on in the spotlight for the entirety of the campaign. At first, this notion may seem to players to be the ultimate best situation; no competition from any other player, save NPCs. But I've found that this style of playing doesn't seem to work for every player. It requires a definetly strong sense of the character and a great internal drive to realize the character's long term plans. PCs that don't have very detailed backgrounds or Players that are indecisive, I've found, have a very difficult time making a solo campaign last beyond the first few adventures.
In order to build an adequate solo game, the GM needs to spend a little extra time with the Player upon character creation. Work a little closer with the Player and ask as many questions as possible to ascertain as many aspects of the character's personality, goals, and whatnot before starting play. I generally use the following template as a basis: Ae'rinus Character Creation Notes. From there, I can get the starting point for the campaign (both location and time), as well as the general overall "feel" of things.
Here's an example of the setup process: Recently, my wife came to me and said she was kicking around a new idea for a character--a dhampiel. I gave her the ok on the concept, and she came back to me a couple of days later with her background. The dhampiel's name was to be Vera and she has been sealed in a stone sarcophagus for over a year. She has amnesia and only remembers a few things from her past: a dark man giving her the necklace she now wears, that the dark man told her to feed only from animals--drinking blood from humans was bad, an image of an evil lady that was friends with the dark man--she taught her things of the occult and drank blood of humans, and an image of a young boy named Donovin, who was her friend in a garden and they fenced together.
From there, I interviewed Sue on all aspects of Vera's personality. And this sort of interviewing continues as we play (It's a lot easier to plan stuff for the character when you understand what emotions are ripping through the character). Vera is a sort of manic depressive that displays an almost faux "happy daredevil" outer appearance to cover the anger, confusion, and grief underlying everything (especially moreso now that she remembers her past). We both agreed that the feel for this campaign would be slightly tilted more towards cinematic than realistic; and it's been working out very nicely. The advantage of going to a more cinematic playstyle is that it emphasises Vera's natural superiority to most of the people around her. She may have started out at first level, but as soon as she fed on blood to recover her stamina, she was faster, stronger and meaner than just about everything around her. If the campaign were played with more rules and realism, I think a lot of Vera's Dhampiel edge would be lost and along with it would be interest in playing.
Another requirement is that as a GM, you must be prepared to control many NPCs and run them in a way that they have separate personalities, goals, and intelligences, which, to say the least, is a monolithic task. One of the key factors that helps the flow of a solo campaign are the character's companions. Usually I'll try to limit the companions to one or two others, because any more than that begins to get difficult to manage and roleplay (I'm still not fond of having NPCs talk to eachother--I usually screw up one of their accents/speech patterns and end up breaking tension). For the Vera campaign, I decided that she would meet her first companion in a prison colony called The Cauldron. His name is Esteban and he was thrown into The Cauldron fourteen years ago at age 10, for being "cursed by the gods." Essentially, he's one of the many people affected by the magical fallout resulting from the destruction of Elven Magic on Ae'rinus in 1600; however, he had the horrible misfortune of being a native of the religiously fanatic Barony of Ganto, and having his innate magical pollution manifest as demonic looking growths. He's big, has horns, hooves, a tail and a big black claw arm. But underneath he's a sweet little boy that doesn't know much about the world. In a lot of ways, he's very similar to Vera (trapped and without a history to call his own), but at the same time, he's managed to maintain an incredible amount of innocence in respect to having almost no anger over his inprisonment. His similarities and differences allowed for some really great interactions between Vera and Esteban and gave Vera a really good reason to not allow herself to descend into a deep depressive and violent trough. And when the two of them break out of The Cauldron, they collectively are beginning a new life together, and leaving the solitary life behind them.
From there, you now have a clean slate (sort of) to work from. They don't know any antagonists, and haven't really made any enemies yet to date. In order to create more interaction with Vera, I created a hook before she was sent to The Cauldron. She was aware of the sarcophagus being opened and a man calling himself Corvin looking at her and saying that if she got out of The Cauldron to seek him in Riversedge. When they eventually found Corvin, they were given the opportunity to join a semi-secretive guild, from which multiple interesting NPCs were brought about. Rather than having Vera travel in a traditional party, which doesn't really fit her personality, she usually travels with no more than two other specialists. This allows me to flesh them out, develop personal histories and backgrounds, as well as maintain a good roleplaying flow without buning out on having too many NPCs tooling around together at once.
In addition to the planned associates, Vera has made her own connections through her personal angendas, such as a blood doll (her source of clean blood), an accountant (to manage her estate, and go out on dates with her when the need arises), and her former quartermaster. Each NPC needs to be a little more fleshed out than your standard NPC because the PC is relying more heavily upon their input than input from other members of a traditional group-style game. As a GM, you need to keep this in mind, and dole out information carefully. All the PCs clues end up coming from the GM's mouth ultimately, so you have to be somewhat careful in controlling tension; if you let something slip too easily, then the player doesn't have much of a challenge on solving a problem. On the other hand, if you don't help the player enough, she'll get frustrated with the problem at hand. Basically, the best plan of action is to try to get your player to diversify who she talks to as much as possible, so that she has a wide knowledge base to make her decisions from.
The third piece that comes into play moreso than a group campaign is continuity. Nearly all of my solo campaigns have progressed on a day to day basis, with only a few short spots where the PC will be "doing nothing but research for the next week." Generally, the PC's actions are motivated either by personal goals or plot elements that I drop in her face. And this is the point that really will make or break your solo-campaign. All the background, NPCs and good interaction in the world can't save a solo-campaign when the PC becomes complacent with her position. What you need is a division of goals between both GM and Character. The Character needs to have certain personal goals aside from whatever plot the GM is currently running. These personal goals, add tension when time constraints are brought into place, and provide excellent rich filler when between set plot elements, or a certain amount of time needs to pass before the next plot element moves. Personal goals also provide the GM with a great fresh sense of action; you don't necessarily know what the character wants to do, so when she announces that she's going to spend some time trying to force the magic in one of those magic stones to work, you end up with a very interesting unplanned sidequest. These sidequests are the meat of my entertainment, because they're usually the place where characters grow the most, mainly because they're persuing activities that they're generally interested in, not forced into through circumstance. And as a result, the sidequests usually provide a nice little creative charge that tends to boost up the interest in your active plot elements.
This post has gone on for a little longer than I anticipated, but I hope that it provides some sort of interesting information regarding the art of solo-GMing. It can be a lonely path, but at the same time, I regard all of my best campaigns to have developed their roots within the lonely road of the solo adventurer.
Friday, December 09, 2005
What I'm playing Now
Currently I'm running two sessions, both using a heavily bastardized version of AD&D 2nd ed.
The first game, which is roughly weekly, is with three players, and fairly straight forward vanilla style adventuring. This particular game is serving as the gateway drug to my friend, who is thirteen and has never played D&D before. His mother, an avid nerd and gamer from days of yore, and my wife are the other two players. The group has bonded very well with each other over the last few months, and somewhat surprisingly, they all like and care about each other a lot (which seems to usually be lacking in most of my gaming groups). This group's particular campaign is set in the 1620s of Ae'rinus' history against a backdrop of a growing backlash of monstrous dissention in the arrea surrounding the Great Inner Sea of Drachmaar.
The group has been dealing with an epic level invasion of goblinoids coming down from the mountains to the south. The town of Südenberg, where they all first met, is now largely in ruins, and until recently (last gaming session), the nearby Untergeist Forest had been taken over by SeveredLimb (troll immune to fire) and his three BrokenTusk Ogre commanders; they were using captured druids to fortify the forest as their base of operations, which was pretty successfully outstripping all the trade around the Inner Sea.
The campaign itself is more of your traditional hack n slash type game, but as the group games together more often, they have begun to develop some very good roleplaying. And now that they've begun to grow as characters, I think they're getting ready to break into some very interesting storyline opportunities.
The other game I'm running is a solo game with my wife and I. I'm very much the type of GM that is more used to Solo games than larger groups, thus rarely have I ever had a gaming group with more than five people participating (largely because when I started playing the game, I could rarely get more than one friend over at a time, so we all kind of got used to the solo gig). In this game, my wife is playing Vera, a dampiel, who until recently, had a pretty rotten case of amnesia. The gameplay here is very dark, fast paced, and somewhat surreal in regards to character power. The effect has created a somewhat unbalancing character in Vera, but since the game is solo, that sort of problem is only limited by the surrounding NPC perceptions, and she tends to travel with the freak train anyway, so there's really not a problem. In this campaign, particularly more than any other campaign, I've been forced to do far more homework than I'm accustomed to; mainly because my wife, Sue's, thirst for "What happens next" is so great that I can't get a way with saying I don't have any new content for her for more than one night a week.
The plus side of this, of course, is that the story line has had a lot of openings and twists to the point that Vera's story is both rich, nonlinear, and in my opinion a pretty good plot for a book (which is exactly what Sue plans to do with all those session notes she takes).
The story takes place largely in Riversedge, the largest city on Ae'rinus, and revolves around Vera's action with a semi-secretive guild known as the Brotherhood of the Raven, of which she is a member of an elite subset of that group known as "The Murder." Since she's part of The Murder, she has been simultaneously helping progress three separate plotlines in addition to her own desires and goals.
The only problem with the Vera campaign is the rules; d&d rules have no ability to really generate the play and feeling I want to go with on this campaign, so its led me to searching the net for more interesting info, and finding a scad of new resources, mostly in the form of other gamer blogs and forums, hence spurring my own desire to start something up with this blog.
My current plan of action regarding the rules, will likely involve picking up a copy of the GURPS basic set with my birthday/christmas money, and begin considering a paradigm shift.
The first game, which is roughly weekly, is with three players, and fairly straight forward vanilla style adventuring. This particular game is serving as the gateway drug to my friend, who is thirteen and has never played D&D before. His mother, an avid nerd and gamer from days of yore, and my wife are the other two players. The group has bonded very well with each other over the last few months, and somewhat surprisingly, they all like and care about each other a lot (which seems to usually be lacking in most of my gaming groups). This group's particular campaign is set in the 1620s of Ae'rinus' history against a backdrop of a growing backlash of monstrous dissention in the arrea surrounding the Great Inner Sea of Drachmaar.
The group has been dealing with an epic level invasion of goblinoids coming down from the mountains to the south. The town of Südenberg, where they all first met, is now largely in ruins, and until recently (last gaming session), the nearby Untergeist Forest had been taken over by SeveredLimb (troll immune to fire) and his three BrokenTusk Ogre commanders; they were using captured druids to fortify the forest as their base of operations, which was pretty successfully outstripping all the trade around the Inner Sea.
The campaign itself is more of your traditional hack n slash type game, but as the group games together more often, they have begun to develop some very good roleplaying. And now that they've begun to grow as characters, I think they're getting ready to break into some very interesting storyline opportunities.
The other game I'm running is a solo game with my wife and I. I'm very much the type of GM that is more used to Solo games than larger groups, thus rarely have I ever had a gaming group with more than five people participating (largely because when I started playing the game, I could rarely get more than one friend over at a time, so we all kind of got used to the solo gig). In this game, my wife is playing Vera, a dampiel, who until recently, had a pretty rotten case of amnesia. The gameplay here is very dark, fast paced, and somewhat surreal in regards to character power. The effect has created a somewhat unbalancing character in Vera, but since the game is solo, that sort of problem is only limited by the surrounding NPC perceptions, and she tends to travel with the freak train anyway, so there's really not a problem. In this campaign, particularly more than any other campaign, I've been forced to do far more homework than I'm accustomed to; mainly because my wife, Sue's, thirst for "What happens next" is so great that I can't get a way with saying I don't have any new content for her for more than one night a week.
The plus side of this, of course, is that the story line has had a lot of openings and twists to the point that Vera's story is both rich, nonlinear, and in my opinion a pretty good plot for a book (which is exactly what Sue plans to do with all those session notes she takes).
The story takes place largely in Riversedge, the largest city on Ae'rinus, and revolves around Vera's action with a semi-secretive guild known as the Brotherhood of the Raven, of which she is a member of an elite subset of that group known as "The Murder." Since she's part of The Murder, she has been simultaneously helping progress three separate plotlines in addition to her own desires and goals.
The only problem with the Vera campaign is the rules; d&d rules have no ability to really generate the play and feeling I want to go with on this campaign, so its led me to searching the net for more interesting info, and finding a scad of new resources, mostly in the form of other gamer blogs and forums, hence spurring my own desire to start something up with this blog.
My current plan of action regarding the rules, will likely involve picking up a copy of the GURPS basic set with my birthday/christmas money, and begin considering a paradigm shift.
Introductions
Since as far back as 1995, another world has been writing, rewriting, and living its life within my head. The whole situation, however, has been a lonely one with less than a dozen people in that time getting any sort of minimal access to it, so in an effort to perhaps grow this world out of its traditional grounding, I'm starting this blog as a place for ideas, nuances, and other data that I think is pretty neat. Call it an egomaniacal persuit. I sure do.
Ae'rinus is a RPG campaign setting originally created for the D&D ruleset, but as I've matured as a GM over the years, I've come to the decision that D&D itself cannot sustain the richness of experiences that potentially could be happening on Ae'rinus. Since the release of D&D 3rd ed., which shattered my long standing love affair with D&D, I've been passively looking for new platforms/looking for ways to create my own system that would allow for the type of heavy roleplaying with minimal dice rolls and high levels of excitement that I've come to envision as a requirement for my game sessions.
I've been playing, and GMing D&D now since about 1992, and in that time, I've come to realize that my style of play doesn't really fit with the standard dungeon crawl vision of D&D fame; my players, too, have often praised the lack of twisting tunnels, prolonged fights, and video game style play.
So with this blog, I'm hoping to make it as a resource for folks interested in running Ae'rinus as a campaing world, as well as provide a forum of sorts for discussion relating to developing working methodologies towards running successful, ongoing storylines that focus upon roleplaying and dealing with difficult moral decisions rather than just hack n slash.
A large portion of this blog will probably be narrative descriptions of various small nuances of Ae'rinus as I try to begin fleshing out the lesser bits. Currently, the setting is in the year 1643 (general play started in 1454, so there's a lot of PC created history around to draw from), and the world is in a relative state of peace for once. It's a world of growing technical knowledge (much of it would be considered Early Renaissance, though Medieval Era areas are still common) and more importantly growing political and national influence. There are two pantheons of gods, both of which aren't particularly fond of the other as well as a second layer continent, Terrasond, existing beneath Ae'rinus. Ae'rinus itself is a relatively new continent having only 1600 years or so of recent history as a result of considerable cataclysmic activity, as well as much recent turmoil including a gods' war and semi-permanent disruption of wizardly magic. It's a world chock full of ideologies and beliefs; and as such, nearly all conflict results around belief structures being undermined, attacked, or destroyed.
There's a fair amount of information regarding Ae'rinus over on my website: http://aerinus.houseofspears.net but I don't have a lot of time to keep that data up to date.
If anyone is interested in more information than what is currently available, I would be happy to divulge. However, please keep in mind that, ultimately, it is my gameworld and none of the Ae'rinus material may be reprinted without my permission.
Ae'rinus is a RPG campaign setting originally created for the D&D ruleset, but as I've matured as a GM over the years, I've come to the decision that D&D itself cannot sustain the richness of experiences that potentially could be happening on Ae'rinus. Since the release of D&D 3rd ed., which shattered my long standing love affair with D&D, I've been passively looking for new platforms/looking for ways to create my own system that would allow for the type of heavy roleplaying with minimal dice rolls and high levels of excitement that I've come to envision as a requirement for my game sessions.
I've been playing, and GMing D&D now since about 1992, and in that time, I've come to realize that my style of play doesn't really fit with the standard dungeon crawl vision of D&D fame; my players, too, have often praised the lack of twisting tunnels, prolonged fights, and video game style play.
So with this blog, I'm hoping to make it as a resource for folks interested in running Ae'rinus as a campaing world, as well as provide a forum of sorts for discussion relating to developing working methodologies towards running successful, ongoing storylines that focus upon roleplaying and dealing with difficult moral decisions rather than just hack n slash.
A large portion of this blog will probably be narrative descriptions of various small nuances of Ae'rinus as I try to begin fleshing out the lesser bits. Currently, the setting is in the year 1643 (general play started in 1454, so there's a lot of PC created history around to draw from), and the world is in a relative state of peace for once. It's a world of growing technical knowledge (much of it would be considered Early Renaissance, though Medieval Era areas are still common) and more importantly growing political and national influence. There are two pantheons of gods, both of which aren't particularly fond of the other as well as a second layer continent, Terrasond, existing beneath Ae'rinus. Ae'rinus itself is a relatively new continent having only 1600 years or so of recent history as a result of considerable cataclysmic activity, as well as much recent turmoil including a gods' war and semi-permanent disruption of wizardly magic. It's a world chock full of ideologies and beliefs; and as such, nearly all conflict results around belief structures being undermined, attacked, or destroyed.
There's a fair amount of information regarding Ae'rinus over on my website: http://aerinus.houseofspears.net but I don't have a lot of time to keep that data up to date.
If anyone is interested in more information than what is currently available, I would be happy to divulge. However, please keep in mind that, ultimately, it is my gameworld and none of the Ae'rinus material may be reprinted without my permission.
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