Myth Campaign: October 5 through 10, 166 Sword Age

The Road to Ywrmasr

[Update: Blogger tried to eat this post, so I had to republish it. This was originally posted yesterday, before the Desolation of Smaug review.]

Myth, The Shield Age: A dramatic synopsis of the tabletop RPG campaign I'm currently leading my friends through. It's a variation on GURPS, built up from and inspired by the excellent computer game Myth. In it, the player characters begin as a selection of relatively ordinary folk in an unremarkable town. Their adventures grow, the dangers swarm, and the PCs? They pretty much just have to deal with it without serious power progression. It's gritty, it's deadly, it's fantasy with a political and social edge and an emotional timbre: it's Myth: The Shield Age.

Last time I introduced the plot of my GURPS Myth campaign. Today's entry is going to continue Alrid Hock's account of the events at the beginning of the adventure. One of the really fun things about (some) tabletop RPGs that you can't get from a video game is dramatically emergent gameplay. This is purely a function of the interaction of the game and the improvisation of the GM, and in this write-up the improvisation allowed the players to take the reins of the quest and do it on their own terms in a way that genuinely surprised me.

Now as a GM you might be tempted to view this in an adversarial way, like the players are out to destroy your plans. Don't. View this as an opportunity to expand the story to encompass your players' goals. Then twist and corrupt those plans with the harsh reality of consequence and adaptive antagonists. Or use it as a way to create an endearing, tragic NPC that the players not only welcome into their party, but also protect diligently.

Note: This segment begins with a pretty awful implication as the party finds Giselbert about to be set upon by the leader of her captors. This part is very important and also a pretty delicate topic. The threat of sexual assault here was something I carefully weighed against my group's love for Rob Roy, Braveheart, Game of Thrones, etc. where such deplorable acts are inciting plot events. The players' actions in quickly finding Giselbert that night, however, allowed them to prevent the worst of it.

Even so, Danlyra's player's first reaction was "Oh, maybe I don't have what it takes to play a woman in this setting afterall..."

In addition to being a non-traditional and emotional start to a fantasy RPG campaign, this session set up a tenuous balance where the characters constantly abuse their despicable prisoner even as they have to take him in for justice. That's a huge running theme throughout the first leg of this campaign.

A man was in the cave partition with Giselbert. Tall, hale, and dark of skin, this man looked like a Gowern by Ten Green Gem Vine's estimation. He sneered at the intruding blacksmith and Heron Guard, even with his armor and sword set aside. Giselbert had clear been abused. The brigand went for his sword, a curved eastern blade, and drew it on the two men in a flash. But the young Heron's blooded fangs struck out, one carving into the man's forearm whilst the other divested him of his weapon. Keagan's hammer fist struck out and bandied the villain about the head. The fight done and out of him, the man surrendered to the tips of Ten Green Gem Vine's swords. With boot and gauntlet, they got a name from him--Guy, if his blood-bubbling words could be believed. The party might have questioned him further, but four bandits lay bleeding and pleading in the front of the cave. Out of mercy and prudence to bring captives to village justice, Ten Green Gem Vine plied their injuries with his Heron ken, and saved three men. While the Heron tended his enemies, Guy began to heckle the distraught Giselbert. Keagan quick had enough, and put Guy's face to the cave wall and boot to earn them all a swift silence. Donovan's daughter recovered her senses shortly after Guy fell to Keagan's blows, and even helped staunch the gored spear-wound in Crow's side. For all the beating the girl had surely taken, she seemed intact. I have Ten Green Gem Vine's testimony to that fact. He offered to swear as much to Regan, but I declined it. The vow of a Heron Guard is a terrible thing. There they were, four now made five with Giselbert, and four prisoners under hand. Guy's wounds would leave him in darkness for hours, and one of the bandits that had lost an arm had passed out as well. Crow's wound was well-tended, but the walk back to the village could tear open his wound and leave him dead in his own blood. And too many hours had passed into the dark autumn night, cloaking rock and pit in shadow. So they stayed the night in that den and broke for Misty Downs in the morning. With the morning's fog the party developed new questions. Guy spat venom and invective at them, and it soon became apparent that Keagan would beat the man to death before he gave useful answers, so Vera gagged him. The bandit who lost his arm, one called Muck or Mook by Guy, answered every question put to him. Apparently, Guy was a deserter from The Legion who had become an infamous bandit in the Realm over the past year. The Gowern had hired Muck and the other bandits with a purse of shillings for a very specific job, plus whatever they could take. At the time none of the bandits knew what a fiend Guy was, but they soon learned. That was all they got from Muck before his arm's feverdreams got the better of him. Before arriving at Misty Downs, the party oriented themselves to the Craw farm to most swiftly deliver her to her father and brother. The girl ran to her family in tears, while Donovan eyed the group's prisoners. Innocent Giselbert, though, dominated her father's attentions and insisted they take care of Crow, who'd been wounded fighting her captors. Donovan agreed and sent his son Laanor to help with escorting the prisoners to the village. It was near midday when the party ambled into town, and the cry amongst our village was great. Laanor immediately began telling an exaggerated tale of the bravery of his sister's rescuers, and as I assembled the village council the matter was made fodder for the gossips. Nara Pugh, however, insisted on calling upon the divines before passing her judgment. Over the next day, our village recovered and celebrated, while the four prisoners awaited their fate in the cellar of the Flooded Downs tavern. When Nara called the council the next day, she related a vision of stars converging around The Great Comet and of a blood moon. We agreed it was a sign that these prisoners were part of some greater plot, and so they needed to be brought into higher scrutiny. But first, they needed to be saved. Ten Green Gem Vine's knowledge of medicine may have patched wounds and staunched bleeding, but Muck and another of the bandits were bleeding out, and Guy had been pressed with questions to the point of death. Afraid their portent would pass away with them, we ordered a company of our village's men to escort them to Fort Ywrmasr on the frontier of The Barrier, a day north. Before the prisoners were brought up from the cellar, Ten Green Gem Vine addressed the village in the square. In my years in The Legion, I have fought and served alongside many Heron Guard. They are all valorous and inspiring. Ten Green Gem Vine rallied our village like a commander marshaling his standard. Of our village's seventy houses, thirteen men stepped forward to see the task done. Amongst them were Vera the huntress, Crow the vagabond, Keagan the blacksmith, and Danlyra the Gowerna. At Danlyra's volunteering, my hot-blooded grandson, Baith, pledged his mettle. And at the end Laanor Craw, brother to the girl Giselbert, stepped out from his father's side and bound himself to the task as well. But most surprising of all was when Tiernan Seithkarl, Magistrate of Misty Downs, pledged to lead the expedition. The Magistrate is a good man, but his ways are quite unlike ours. He rips the clouds with his nose, wearing fine clothes in the spring fields and glutting over every meal. To see him pledge to lead the expedition was a surprise to all the council. But his authority over our village would extend to any requests made of the garrison at Fort Ywrmasr. He packed up several books into a fine leather traveling bag and threw an extra week's worth of provisions onto the blacksmith's donkey as they headed out. Traveling to Fort Ywrmasr takes about a day for a man with light burdens. For the Magistrate's assembly, bringing four wounded captives, it would take longer. The blacksmith's donkey pulled a simple two-wheeled cart along for Muck and carried much of the group's provisions. The Gowerna Danlyra profanely rode her horse for the duration, acting the maggot in our country. In all, it took two days of slow progress to reach the fort, and it was not uneventful. In the middle of the night, with but one of the farmers on watch, the party awoke to the sound of nuzzling followed by shrieks coming from the cart. A wolf had wandered silently into the camp and was worrying open Muck's bloody legs. The crippled bandit lay sobbing and panicking as the party threw themselves upon the beast. Keagan Na Anyon ran the beast through, spitting it upon the thrust of his broadsword, and Ten Green Gem Vine tended to Muck as his blood muddied the soil anew. He needed the attention of Journeymen now more than ever, and of the band of captives he deserved it most. In the morning, Keagan had Seth Drafend skin the wolf and prepare the hide in exchange for letting the huntsman keep the meat. Misty Downs' expedition reached Fort Ywrmasr in the cooling light of the next afternoon. Crossing a military foot bridge, the group took great care leading Keagan's burro across. Legion engineers make carefully-designed foot bridges surrounding their frontier forts. They are designed to permit only a few men wearing heavy armor at a time, enabling the bridge to crumble under the weight of massed hordes or easing sappers' deconstruction of such edifices in battle. And while the ass pulled the near-dead prisoner across the small bridge amicably, Danlyra's fine-bred horse balked at the creaking timbers of the flexing construction. I am told she had to coax the beast like a mangy dog to cross, much to my villagers' amusement. They arrived at the fort late on the ninth of October. Ten Green Gem Vine quickly conducted Magistrate Seithkarl to treat with the fort's commander, an older Heron Guard named Seven Eagle Falling Sun. Quickly making the matter plain to him, the fort commander dispatched the fort's Journeymen to tend to the prisoners. Magistrate Seithkarl didn't come forward with his account of the Journeymen's art and none of the others bore witness to it, but in my time in The Legion I have seen senior Heron Guard treat similar wounds. They intone a deep throaty song, lost words in deep sonorous notes that shake your core. Then they break roots of the mandrake over the men, from which blue smoke pours and falls onto the men's wounds. The cut and festering flesh sizzles and burns, filling the nostrils with the acrid stink of burning men--an odor that parches my blood to this day. The patient feels everything as the magic peels back skin and dissolves torn sinew, devouring the flesh until the original wound is replaced completely with a new one. It is only then that the curative magic knits the newly exposed muscles and tendons, drawing the meat to grow and fill the gouges and gore of battle. The blessed arts taught to the Guard by Regan himself can even reattach limbs under the right circumstance. But the healing magic is never complete--only time can sponge away the last injury. The wound is always left as a raw, tender sore that is inured to infection but susceptible to re-opening. The scar that remains is clean and distinct. With the prisoners tended to, the Magistrate worked with Seven Eagle Falling Sun to determine the fate of the prisoners. With three companies under the Oghre Standard beneath his command, the fort commander could not spare men for our village's quest, but he did offer to judge the three bandits and allow the Magistrate's party to keep custody over Guy to bring him before the Emperor. Despite Muck's willingness to help the group, Tiernan had no more use for the crippled brigand. Ten Green Gem Vine supported the decision, but Keagan, Vera, and Danlyra all pointed out that the fort commander would surely summarily execute the brigands within a week. Tiernan reminded them that he who pays the piper calls the tune, and thereby sealed the bandits' fate. They would be left at Fort Ywrmasr. On the following day, the party set out to return to Misty Downs with a restored Guy in their thrall, though with his health largely restored they decided to gag the brigand. They made good time that day, but still they had to make camp before reaching home. That night was a restless one of ill-omens and poor sleep. Ten Green Gem Vine stood the second watch along with young Laanor Craw, though it seemed more than the suddenly docile prisoner merited. Ten Green Gem Vine rousted the rest of the party with a terrible start. And they quickly discovered that not only had Guy somehow slipped his bonds but he had also spirited away with Laanor Craw. As the final hours of October tenth waned, the party assembled in darkness and set out to hunt down the villain once more.

Gowern: a man of Gower, a hilly kingdom to the east, part of the Empire. Fem. is Gowerna. Gower is superficially similar to a medieval Middle East: defined by steppes and scrub-land, with dark creatures frequently wandering out of the far east and attacking their settlements. Keagan will be freely beating Guy quite a bit in this campaign. Regan: the Heron god, patron of the Heron Guard. Protector of wisdom and longevity. "The vow of a Heron Guard is a terrible thing." -That's called foreshadowing, kiddos. This first post-battle sequence was my chance to remind the players of how deadly combat was, and to also give them a chance to see how difficult first aid would be in a combat situation. I also wanted to establish here that the players could expect to get sympathetic portrayals of characters they'd be tempted to label "bad guys". Muck proves to be helpful, but things don't pan out for him. These first few sessions of the campaign were extremely emergent in terms of the players helping to guide the plot to delve into certain themes. Characters that had originally been throw-away NPCs to illustrate the dynamics of the game and setting, both Laanor Craw and Baith Hock become important figures in the campaign. My players like Laanor quite a lot, but I'm a sucker for the idiot romantic in Baith. More emergent gameplay: Ten's player made a great speech calling the men of the village to action, then made a great roll on top of that. Bam, all of a sudden they have a party of commoners helping them along. That can only be a good thing, right? Rips the clouds with his nose: he's arrogant. An expression of The Realm. One of the core features/mysteries of my take on the Myth setting is that Emperor Alric has never ridden a horse or used cavalry in any way. No one knows why, but in the patriotic Realm everyone assumes that riding horses is bad in some way, or at least unpatriotic. Acting the maggot: behaving foolishly. An expression of The Realm. Wolf attack! I love wolves, and this was a great chance to let the players know that random events would also be present. Of course, if the party had been smaller, an entire wolf pack would've attacked them. But as it is, only one was brave enough to sneak past so many people. Sketch of Fort Ywrmasr scribbled out by me during player character creation. Inspired by Roman motte and bailey forts used to fortify barbarian Europe. Yes, all Heron Guard have funny names. And it is an insult and bad omen to give them nicknames. So nyah. Parches the blood: to make afraid. An expression of The Realm. (I told you I gave everyone a colloquialism and culture sheet, right?) I hate healing potions. I want players to have scars, to favor bad legs, and to fear the long-term effects of wounds they survive. So even though the Heron Guard have miraculous healing magic, I wanted the cost of that magic to be somewhat horrific. If you have a minor wound, you certainly don't want a Journeyman to look at it. (Description inspired by a foot incident I had back in my college days.) He who pays the piper calls the tune: he who has the gold makes the rules. An expression of The Realm. I told you things didn't pan out well for Muck. It gave me a sadistic GM happy to see my player grimace as I revealed the helpful NPC they'd saved had no life worth saving. Good times.

Wow, so congratulations on making it this far. I know that was a pretty mammoth wall of text, but a lot of the details of these early sessions are really important to later characterizations and themes. This covered a little more than two game sessions, too. And yes, that means that one session featured no fun violence except for a little wolf-slaying. That's how I roll as a GM, yo. Deal with my thespy nerdiness.

And as you should be well aware, tomorrow is the release of The Desolation of Smaug, the second installment in The Hobbit trilogy. Accordingly, I've got a crazy few hours ahead of me. Here's and overview:

8-10PM crash period. Nerd poppa needs sleep, occasionally. Or at least time laying down and mopily surfing the net on my Powerbook while watching kids' programming.
 
10-11PM critical caffeine period. Mountain Dew goes here. Just like being a punk kid all over again.

11-12AM go to movie theater. As a bonus, I use this pre-show time to creep people out by bringing a notepad to the movies. Few things are as disturbing to movie goers as to bring writing utensils to a film. "What're you going to do with that?" "I'm gonna manually bootleg the script, fool."

12-3:30AM watch Desolation of Smaug. This is the phase where I watch the film. Gripping, no?

3:30-4:30AM hangout and post nerdview. Just for the heck of it, I'm going to put up a link to a Google Hangout while I work on my nerdview post of the movie. If you're insane enough to want to join me in a little red-eye post-movie discussion while I type out my thoughts, watch my Google+ and Facebook pages for the link to be posted.

Myth Campaign: October 4, 166 Sword Age

Myth, The Shield Age: A dramatic synopsis of the tabletop RPG campaign I'm currently leading my friends through. It's a variation on GURPS, built up from and inspired by the excellent computer game Myth. In it, the player characters begin as a selection of relatively ordinary folk in an unremarkable town. Their adventures grow, the dangers swarm, and the PCs? They pretty much just have to deal with it without serious power progression. It's gritty, it's deadly, it's fantasy with a political and social edge and an emotional timbre: it's Myth: The Shield Age.

I've recently been watching a number of videos on YouTube depicting other people's role-playing game sessions, and it's really gotten my Game-Master juices flowing, so to speak. Wil Wheaton's Tabletop has chronicled two very fun RPG sessions in the past: the Dragon Age RPG was a fun and more traditional hack-and-slash adventure that got me to nerd-out to Sam Witwer's gaming style; Fiasco was a sublimely dramatic RPG without so much mechanics and direct violence, building a tableau of tragedy and drama and then setting it all on fire. Both are a lot of fun, and could merit detailed posts on their own (or more, if you know me). I've also been watching a series of recordings of a group that livestreams games using Skype and Roll20 to play an RPG set in the Warhammer 40,000 universe. Called "Rollplay: Dark Heresy", that group's fun antics almost lured me back into the grimdark dumb setting before a horrific boondoggle scared me right the heck off of the Games Workshop website (filmatleven on that).

But as much as these games have inspired me, they also leave me cold as a role-player and GM. Dark Heresy is based on the Inquisitor system which was my first love in the role-playing genre, but they add a rigid class system to it that makes me want to vomit in terror. The Rollplay group is fun, but also irreverent and obtuse towards the story in that power-gamey self-conscious way. I'm a thespy, snobby GM I guess, because as fun as it is to watch I know I would hate that in a campaign I was leading. Similarly, the Dragon Age episodes of Tabletop were a really entertaining watch, but the contrived elements of the class system is a turn-off to my gaming tastes. Fiasco is dramatically around my sweet-spot in terms of harrowing player characters without violence or fakey game progression being necessary, but it doesn't touch upon combat or traditional adventuring the way I would like.

What does? GURPS Myth, baby. Or at least the way I play GURPS Myth, it does. I'm actually in the process of returning to this campaign after more than a year off--I think we've played one game of it since my family and I moved to our current place. This synopsis is going to be focused on a fast summary of the story rather than highlighting the GURPS mechanics in action, though if any questions about the nitty-gritty come up, I'd be happy to answer them either in comments or future posts as appropriate.

Note that I'll be pretty careful to track dates, seasons, and holidays in my campaign. The passage of time is an important element of the game. Not only do I use time spent training in lieu of traditional game experience, but I try to keep world events on an independent timeline from player action--whether they dawdle or hasten towards their goals is up to them, but the forces of evil act out their own plans at the same time.

Also please keep in mind that I tend to run more R-rated or at least hard PG-13 games. You won't get too much bad language--at least not much bad contemporary language--but there is some more mature subject matter in the run of the plot. And I tend to cut loose with my descriptions of violence.

The twelfth of November, One hundred sixty-sixth year of the Sword Age. Here taken to script is the account of Alrid Hock, founding elder of Misty Downs, warrior of the The Legion. Tiernan Seithkarl, the Magistrate of Misty Downs for these past two years, has bid me record the dire goings of our village this past moon. Misty Downs is a small village of perhaps three score families in Umbra, the region immediately east of Tharsis, the great billowing mountain at the center of the Cloudspine. The Cath Bruig village is honorably distinguished in The Realm as furthest north and west in the region. To the north just past Lake Ywrmasr lies The Barrier, filled with Myrkridia and soil now damned for one hundred and sixty-five years. Founded a generation ago, Thom Etteryn, Ostler Farris, myself, and two other brothers in The Legion were awarded these lands for our years of service in Alric's Legion, fighting in the First Myrkridian Campaign. Having sheathed our swords, the five of us farmed the land and beat back the wolves and catamounts of the region. We have broken the earth and planted crops in the shadow of the last war, and as our families joined us we made the cursed soil fertile and built two generations in the fog dripping down from Tharsis. But every good Bruig knows that peace is fleeting, and the wolf waits for its prey to slumber. For Misty Downs, it began on the fourth eve of October. I awoke from the harvest mind to a cry raised in the center of the Downs. I stirred my house and summoned the rest of the council to join all in the village square, before the Flooded Downs tavern where we always held town meetings. "Giselbert Craw is gen missin'," the village crier reported. Giselbert was Laanor Craw's sister, daughter of Donovan Craw. Her father and brother stood by, eyes red and torches in hand. She was but a dozen and one years old. Thom, Ostler, and I seized upon the townsfolk there assembled to get their witness. She had disappeared from the pastureland along with her father's small herd of fourteen cattle. The last of our assembly to have seen her was a Gowerna from the east named Danlyra. She was known to me already, as any Bruig Elder worth his teeth would meet any horsemaster entering his village. We quickly put the test to her. She had not touched Giselbert nor shared many words with her but to take directions to our village tavern as she rode in on her fine Gowerna riding mare. That was least two hours and spare before the crier rose the alarum amongst the town, but Danlyra saw nought else. We mustered the men of the village to find Giselbert Craw. By this time, much of the entire village had put themselves under our cause, and so we parceled the men to range afield for her, while the women and children stayed close to home to keep fires lit for her swift return. Danlyra stayed at the tavern, tending to her horse and distracting my grandson Baith with her lilting words and strange expressions. Were her clothes less refined I'd have called the whore her true name, but she had the bearing of one beyond my station and all were pressed to find Giselbert. By Wyrd's sight, we had a Heron Guard tending our Temple of Wyrdras for that season. We called him Ten Green Gem Vine, a name strange to those who never served with the Heron Guard in The Legion. He was young, even measured by my short span, but he quickly divided us and led our group into the dark. Tall and strong as all his blessed brothers are, he donned the glittering armor and twin fangs of his station and sallied into the hills. The young Heron Guard selected a falconer from our village to lead the search, a huntress named Vera Wealwa. With her bird and bow, Vera led the men of the village to sign of young Giselbert. They found only a bloody patch of ground where someone had split ope one of the Craw farm's cattle and strewn its entrails about the field, knotting the gibs together here and there. The search parties ranged in small groups from there, forced together by darkness, fog, and wolf as the night deepened. Vera led the Heron Guard, following a trail of what she scryed to be a single cattle into the scrub to the west of our village. Joining him was Keagan Na Anyon, our village blacksmith. Soot-browed and meade-bearded, he could swing his fists like many men swing hammers, and were he less fond of drink and brawling he'd have left Misty Downs years ago. Indentured to our last smith as a boy, Keagan clung to Misty Downs, though, and he was blustering to find Giselbert at the first cries from Laanor Craw. Also joining their number was a wandering vagabond of perhaps thirty years. Named Crow, he carried himself unlike any beggar I've met in my two score and ten years. He held a stout quarterstaff, bound at the haft with leather strips, the mark of a staff used to striking more than leaning. A gourd hung from his belt, but his eyes were clear and acute. I saw him for a soldier even in the midst of the tavern, but on that night I thought to say nothing. The four moved through the dark for hours, scrabbling up slopes and gutters torn by Tharsis' great eruption two ages ago. While many of our hardiest villagers turned back in exhaustion, Ten Green Gem Vine urged them forward, making every clue Vera found into a certain promise of Giselbert's well-being and proximity. Then they were suddenly set upon. Stones in the darkness whistled to crack against the Heron Guard and torch-wielding blacksmith, breaking the redheaded smith's nose and tumbling him. Drawing his twin swords, the Emperor's Twin Fangs, Ten Green Gem Vine charged into the stygian hills and let his blades find the guts of a bandit with a sling while Vera's arrows hobbled another as he fled into the night. Two more highwaymen witnessed the slaughter and the armor of a Heron Guard and retreated into a cave nearby. As Keagan drew his sword and caught stride with the Heron, the group strode into the cave to find a nest of eight men waiting for them. Keagan, Ten Green Gem Vine, and Crow waded into the fight. Crow's staff broke bones and whistled teeth, but a spear threaded his ribs and he fell even as his cohorts' blades cut into the rest of them. The Emperor's Fangs gutted a man and twisted the leg off another, leaving the man screaming and bathing in a pool of his own blood. Keagan's sword threw a bandit down to ruin as well. While Ten Green Gem Vine tended to Crow's wound, Vera saw three more bandits returning to the cave, the one she'd earlier hobbled among them. Arrows answered stones, and the bandits tumbled into darkness and screams. Inside the cave, three of the villains had the strength left to scream and beg for their lives, but the party ignored them. Keagan followed the path of the cave deeper to find signs of an encampment of sorts. A fire and spit, bedrolls for a dozen men, and a gutted cattle close at hand. And a heavy foreign curtain draw across a smaller tunnel to create a room. With the Heron Guard stepping beside Keagan, the curtain was cast aside, and they found Giselbert.

Major events since Soulblighter's defeat, about fifty years ago: -Muirthemne and The Realm of the Cath Bruig are slowly being restored. -Emperor Alric orders the Myrkridian Campaigns, periodic assaults on The Barrier to try to weed out the Myrkridia infesting the ruins of the last age. -The Province in the west establishes its own king, beneath Emperor Alric. The Barrier The Barrier is a wild area, cursed by the gods. It fills the land north and west of Muirthemne, and is in turn teeming with beasts and foul creatures, the greatest of whom are the Myrkridia. A scorching desert filled with ruins nearly two centuries silent, every farmer knows that The Barrier’s soil radiates heat both night and day and will not permit seed to take root. The Barrier is the scorched remnant of the heart of the Cath Bruig Empire. When Balor sacked Muirthemne in the last year of the Wolf Age, the winds carried the sorcerous blaze across the rest of The Realm, hastening the death of the towns in that region as their crops withered and fell even before the Dark laid proper siege to their walls. After Soulblighter’s defeat, the hordes of leaderless Myrkridia he let loose upon the world swarmed to The Barrier, drawn to the sites of massive carnage. As Alric and his Circle of Mages have begun pushing back the curse of The Barrier, he has also installed a dozen forts along the edge of the wastes, each supporting a company or more of the Legion’s soldiers, helping to keep the monsters within at bay. Misty Downs Misty Downs is one of the smallest and most remote villages of the Umbrage region, consisting of perhaps a hundred families. The nearest settlement is a Legion border fort, nicknamed Foggy Bottom, about a day’s travel to the northeast. Misty Downs benefits from frequent rains and mountain streams rolling down from the Cloudspine, and so most of the farmers in the area have a goodly number of cattle. The area is named for its hilly area that frequently clots over with fog banks. The small, remote village of Misty Downs has roughly four hundred residents, most of whom rely on wheat and cattle farming. A day’s travel to the northeast is the Legion fort Cwmasr, nicknamed Foggy Bottom. Fog rolls into the hills around Misty Downs with regularity, especially in their wet autumns. Few travelers make their way into Misty Downs, due to the fact that it is so far from the roads and passes of the south. The nearest town is more than a day’s journey to the southeast, as is the Emperor’s Highway. The village, like many others in The Realm, was founded about forty years ago by retiring soldiers of the Legion. A few years ago, the veteran elders sold their holdings to an affluent noble named Tiernan. Council of Misty Downs: elders Alrid Hock, Thom Etteryn, and Ostler Farris; Magistrate Tiernan Seithkarl; Seeress Nara Pugh. This initial session was meant to turn the typical fantasy RPG on its head. Instead of everyone meeting inside a tavern before their call to adventure, the characters were scattered about the village as they experienced the village's building panic in their own ways. Then they were called to the tavern and asked to meet. Also, the concept of the men of the village meeting and pushing the female player characters out of the tavern to do so was a fun way of helping to establish that this would be a socially grounded medieval setting. Danlyra, Gowerna noblewoman Ten Green Gem Vine, Heron Guard Vera Wealwa the falconer Keagan Na Anyon, Blacksmith Crow, Wandering Adventurer

Cliffhanger, that's right! If you guys enjoy this, I'll post more. This first entry roughly summarizes the action of our first night's gaming session, but since this one involved so much exposition too I think future Shield Age articles will cover more than one session at a time.

GM Tips: Scaring Your Players

GM Tips: It's easy to get into any number of RPGs as a new player, but getting started is a rocky, uphill battle for the Game Master, as he must wrangle player personalities, schedules, and the rules of the system in addition to developing his own plot. Hopefully, a few personal lessons will ease your GMing burden, or at least illustrate how one nerd shoulders the burden of the Game Master.

Last week I mentioned that I wanted to follow up on a search hit with GM tips for scaring one's players. With Halloween this weekend, now's as great a time as any to share my thoughts on the subject and impart a little advice. At first I had planned on sharing tactics to evoke a variety of emotions, but to keep this post focused I wanted to pare things down to scaring your RPG group. Fear is one of the harder emotions to evoke around the game table, so it's all the more important.

When players come together to play a tabletop RPG, they do so to entertain each other and socialize in a shared, imaginative experience. But that means that every role-player is interested in a certain amount of  goofing off and chit-chatting. That's fine, but it makes fear more elusive because your players' mindsets are in the wrong gear. Fear is about anxiety, and anxiety is an emotionally taxing state--it requires your constant attention and imagination. A horror movie or video game can cheat anxiety by throwing a grotesque image or gore at the audience, but in an RPG session this tack can be problematic--and smelly. The GM needs to be deliberate and reactive to his players to keep them afraid for their characters.

While I haven't led a lot of horror-focused games, all of my campaigns have featured fear and suspense as important factors. My current RPG campaign in particular--the one in the Myth setting--is thematically built on three pillars of tragedy, duty, and horror. I've also played and led a few games in a low-powered mortals campaign of World of Darkness, with all The X-Files creepy goodness that went with it. So I've stretched these GM muscles a bit in the past. There's a lot of interactivity in an RPGs, obviously, so anything you do needs to be tailored and responsive to your group. An easy shortcut to tailoring is to find out what other stories your players like. Do they like psychological horror? Throw thought puzzles and philosophical paradoxes at them. Do they like gory violent schlock? Give them a red-shirt or two and have them die in meticulously detailed scenes. Responding to your players is about two things: correcting wrong assumptions you made in the tailoring process and letting your players have a legitimate sway over the direction of the plot. This is the balancing act of fear in an RPG--your players want to exert control over the plot, and in so doing they are out to destroy any atmosphere of horror you might create.

Tell The Story

This is a fundamental issue for most RPG sessions. GMing a campaign involves a lot of work: mapping out locations; plotting out characters and adversaries; hammering out the mechanics of player options in-game. But once everyone is at the table, you're all involved in a storytelling experience, so don't forget to tell the story. Tell the frakking story. Don't give your players a mechanic or stat-value unless they have a description to justify it--and sometimes if you give your players a thorough description of the action, you can make some of the mechanics unnecessary. And don't fall into the trap of describing only the mechanically important elements of the story. It may be important that the room has a conveniently heavy desk near the only door, but does it have pictures on it? What about interior decoration? Do the drawers have paperwork that might entice the player characters to waste time investigating? These details help create a three-dimensional story that draws the players in and helps put them in a place where they're more likely to feel the tension and fear you're trying to create. Yeah, you need to do some legwork to get your players into the right mood for your fear-mongering to settle. Deal with it.

Don't Name It!

By this, I mean don't use the official rules-related name for your game's adversaries. This is especially important when your players might have a good idea of what a NPC is capable of once they get the monster's name (a particular problem for DnD groups), but it applies pretty much whenever that antagonist's name or title will give a hasty shorthand of their capabilities and/or motivations. Nothing kills the mystery of your average monster as much as seeing its Playboy spread. Sure, it might be convenient to refer to that level 3 Ghoul as such, but once your bring your monster into the light, you generally can't convince your players that it's a silhouette again. So don't name your monster unless it's absolutely necessary: that isn't a zombie--it's a twitching, pallid trucker in a torn plaid shirt and broken fingertips; that isn't a ghost--it's a flickering cloud of sighs and soft crunching of bones. This ties in with telling the story, as filling out archetypal NPCs with detailed, unique descriptions are a good way to add depth to your players' investment in the story.

Extending this principal beyond the monster's appearance and name, you can take this as a reminder not to give your players cozy answers to unsettling mysteries. Most serial killers and real-life horrors are scary because of the fickle, unfathomable motivations behind their acts. Only a GM, speaking with the voice of God, can give you that authoritative answer of firmly knowing that person X did for Y reason. Any person speaking with limited knowledge in your setting can only speculate what made your game's bogeyman don a slicker and go on a killing-spree, and that will make the thrill of hunting him down all the more tense for them.

Secret Dice Rolls

This is a simple one. I'm a firm believer in hiding things from players, especially to create a scary atmosphere. This dovetails with not sharing your monster's names with your players, as it's often important that your players don't know what certain dice results are. For example, if your players are making a check to detect whether that suspicious groundskeeper is telling the truth, it'd be pretty pointless if they got to see if their dice results yielded a success of failure in the 'detect lies' skill. Roll those dice in secret and then accordingly lie to the players about how charismatic and helpful the scraggly man is, and about how his offer of hospitality seems totally genuine. One of the potentially most immersion-breaking aspects of a tabletop RPG is getting to see how your dice fare--a meta-game indicator--rather than having to rely on the subjective report of actual effects--an in-game indicator.

I also like to sometimes extend this to making extra rolls in secret--that is, I roll the dice behind my GM screen for no point other than to make my players anxious. What was Ben rolling? Did we just spring a trap? If we did, why aren't we being attacked yet? What's following us? We should explore this room more. Maybe this NPC isn't everything he said he was. It's a way of subverting some of the mechanics of the tabletop experience to create a pavlovian response in your game group--secret rolls are a source of player-based tension, so it can be used to enhance the fear the characters should be exhibiting. Use sparingly--and not too much immediately after blogging about it.

Minimize Mechanics

Dice rolling and game mechanics are fun and deserve to form the lynchpin of your average RPG. But they're logical (hopefully), fair (most of the time), and balanced (somewhat), which are not really conducive to fear. When your players are thinking of game mechanics, they're thinking about modifiers, odds, and binary choices to narrow down the most likely route to success. They aren't thinking about mysteries or the mental image of the floating corpse with its lungs ripped out through his throat. And that's too bad. So do yourself a favor as a GM trying to scare your players by minimizing mechanics. Try not to look into your ten-pound gaming encyclopedia at the game table--if you can't remember a rule, wing it and double-check later. This won't work with some players without a good amount of persuasion, but I find it's a super helpful way to get players invested in the mood you're creating.

Add variety to the stakes

I hate saving the world. It seems like every movie, television show, comic, and game out there is interested in saving the world. Don't get me wrong, the world has some nice things to offer, but it's pretty boring to have stakes that are consistently raised to the max all the time. And it's also kind of hard to imagine what saving the world feels like, really. It ends up just being a ham-handed way for GMs to say that the players are now "Over 9,000!!!" How do they know they've reached the final boss? The GM gives them a narrative that it's all come down to this, the armies of the world are arrayed, and the final battle is about to begin. Then Shang Tsung descends and says "Fight!" and the players wade into a big arena fight with an over-powered yet obviously flawed boss character.

No thank you. How about a campaign to save only yourselves? That's a great horror objective. Or to save a loved one, if you have characters who aren't orphan-murder-hobos like those that are typically played in your average RPG? Or what about when the stakes are uncertain? Is this hostile trying to rob us, mug us, murder us, or kidnap us? Making the objective of the enemy uncertain throws a wrench into what retaliation is acceptable for the players, and that not only makes them hesitate but makes them internalize the details of the plot to digest the fearful elements better.

Also, the big bad doesn't need to be more powerful than the players. Making a threat boil down to someone who's simply more ruthless than everyone around him, or who has a better plan, or is more tactically cowardly, can be a lot more interesting than the huge thing that trades blows with the four champions of the free peoples of the world.

Control (or at least be mindful of) Ambience

I never GM a game without music in the background. I use it to set the mood of the game and also to fill in the silences in the action of game sessions. It's important to pick music that is spooky, scary, or terrifying and queue it up as needed to give your players the creeps, but I also think it's equally important to pick something that isn't too on the nose and overly popular. The Halloween theme is chilling, but everyone knows it and is inured to it, whether from seeing the movie too many times or from going to one too many Fright-Fests at Six Flags. Pick something relatively obscure and let it fine-tune your ambience. Also, remember that ambience is about more than just music. If you can, think about changing around your game room to make it spookier--dimmer lighting, closed doors, and even what's on your game shelf behind you can modify players' moods in your gaming space.



So those are my quick and dirty tips for GMs interested in scaring their players. Take your time to tell your story, go out of your way not to label your threats, use secret dice rolls, minimize the game and maximize the story, add variety to the stakes, and remember your ambience.

A Pregnant Pause in the Blog Sprint

Man, I take a week off and quite a lot of things happen. We had CliffyB proving he's the popped collar of the gaming industry, E3, more dismal Xbox One news followed by a surprise reversal, a couple of interesting new Kickstarter projects, and Free RPG Day this past week. Now, since I'm a little behind, I'm going to try to cover all these things briefly in one post, so I won't forget to mention them.

On the running Xbox One debacle, there's some mixed news. Specifically, on the questions of DRM, Xbox had been looking more and more arrogant and defensive. Enter E3 and Angry Joe, from the Angry Joe Show.

If you check out Angry Joe's (remarkably diplomatic with a low cuss-count) interview with Larry Hryb (Xbox's Major Nelson), you get a real good view of the sarcastic, patronizing, and disrespectful way Xbox is handling the concerns of consumers:

"Xbox One is the future. Do you want to come with me to the future?"

"I'm not a lawyer--are you a lawyer?"

"You're not on the development team, are you?"

And so forth in response to Joe's questions on the key concerns of the Xbox One's DRM policies. It's really worrisome, and the fact that convivial Major Nelson is shilling so hard for Xbox that he becomes this abrasive makes it all the more shocking to me. I mean, Angry Joe may be known for curse-filled rants and ripping apart bad games, but I think he's a teddy bear overall, and he's surprisingly forgiving of a lot of video games and their companies (I really think he drank Bioware's Kool-Aid on the Mass Effect 3 "extended ending"), and his interviews are really polite and respectful. Even when he's asking hard questions like he did of Major Nelson. Plus, Joe hasn't even gotten around to the really big implications of the Xbox plan. They are:

1) Microsoft's goal is to price control the console game market through trust-like activity between Xbox and game publishers. If Microsoft can make consumers swallow their DRM pill and anti-ownership assault on consumers, then age will be the only practical factor in determining the cost of a game. As it is, when a AAA game tanks, second-hand retailers get a surplus of returns that drive down not only the cost of used games but the new products as well. If they can cut out that consumer-based check on game quality, then Microsoft and Developers could form a closed loop for pricing their games so that you'd never be able to find a good deal for a game, no matter how bad it is. Heck, if price control wasn't the point of this policy, it'd be pretty silly of Microsoft to invest in developing their own re-vamped digital distribution system when they could've saved a lot of money by porting other services like Desura or Steam to their box. But by keeping it all in their hands, they control the prices of their games, and the only reason to lower prices would be to stay competitive with Sony and Nintendo. Maybe.

2) The daily check-in policy, while trumped up as an anti-piracy measure, is almost certainly a method to farm customer usage information. Let's just think about this for a second--there are a lot of ways to accomplish what Xbox claims to be trying to do: combat piracy through online verification. A daily online check-in is not necessary. Most simply, you could make it where installing a game from the disc itself requires an online handshake that flags that game as the 'active' version of the game, and deactivate any other installs from that game CD. So why have the daily online policy? To upload a cache of your Xbox's activity. Now, I'm not talking about some conspiracy theory where Xbox is interested in stealing your identity or anything, but the Xbox's TV and game-playing activity for millions of users would be tremendously valuable marketing demographics they could easily sell to advertisers, publishers, whoever. And don't bet the farm that Xbox would ever pass those new profits on to consumers through cheaper prices.


Then the heavens lifted and Microsoft's collective voice boomed from their emerald fortress: they would reverse their DRM and online policies, including their region lock, apparently. First of all, let that be a lesson to all you corporate apologists out there: us entitled raging nerds can make a difference. Maybe. Personally, I think it's just as likely that Microsoft backed down through a combination of investor pressure and the dire predictions of lawyers that they were going to get caught with their briefs down.

More importantly, however, look at Larry Hryb's comments, quoted above, just one week before the whole company reversed course. Granted he's a paid cheer-leader for Microsoft, but that kind of arrogance behind the project doesn't just go away. The certainty that these draconian measures are the "future of gaming" doesn't just go away. And the dishonest implication that this would be a difficult policy to reverse hints at a more insidious truth: if Microsoft decides that it's worth it, after the bad PR dies down and the first few waves of Xbox Ones have been purchased, to try to quietly reinstitute these or similar measures on a captive audience, they'll try. The way they're pulling back their vaunted Family Sharing Plan--which was generating some excited buzz--smacks of a bargaining chip to give customers when the other shoe drops.

And if you need anymore reason to retroactively hate Microsoft for what they almost did or might try to do again, here's some chaw in your maw: Cliff Bleszinski, the popped collar of the gaming industry, jumped in to defend Microsoft's plan to prune-squeeze gamers. CliffyB, as the wannabe Situation is known, is the creative "mind" behind the Gears of War franchise, and he recently stepped down from Epic Games to basically not shut up about his stupid cult-of-the-game-developer ideals. Now that Microsoft has about-faced despite his eloquent erroneous defense of their plans, he's sounding off that these developments will be bad for the industry and the consumer, predicting: "More studios WILL close and you'll see more PC and mobile games" Dun-dun-DUN!!! Wow, Cliffy, thanks for that realization, and thanks for trying to pin long-standing consumer patterns on consumers' reactions from last week. Cliff Bleszinski: don't be that guy. Also, don't be on the same issue as him. And if you're in the same region as him, check out the real estate market elsewhere.




Kickstart: Fanciful Bloodsport, Musical Mystics, & Frigid Freaks

Fairytale Games

What it is: Fairytale Games is a character-based card game of survival, exploration, and battles to the death. Set in a world run by the evil trinity of the Dark Queen, the Queen of Hearts, and the Snow Queen, the three tyrants secure their rule by persecuting any upstarts, especially those associated with the Enchanted Forest. Their method of persecution? A public bloodsport set in the wilderness of their kingdoms, pitting all sorts of classic fairytale figures like the Beast, Red Riding Hood, Alice, Pinocchio and 36 more in a Hunger Games sort of scenario.

Why it's exciting: The game promises to be a unique take on a lot of familiar figures, turning Pinocchio, for instance, into a tortured sort of Frankenstein's monster, and making the damsels into hardened survivalists that would make the originators of these violent fairytales proud (because most of the original fairytales are way more violent than Disney's sterilized versions). The mechanics involve laying out cards in a freely expanding grid as you explore the world, recruiting or killing off other survivors, finishing quests, and gaining items. And since it promises to support 1 to 10 players it is a rare game indeed that both features solo play and stabbing up to 9 buddies in the back in the course of one game. Very fun. They're nearly funded, and the stretch goals will potentially unlock a huge number of extra cards for backers--including a zombie version, or miniatures at the very highest stretch goal. I'm not a huge card gamer, but this set looks more like a dynamic battle game than a shuffle-fest, so I'm already in on it.



Anthymn

What it is: Anthymn is a typical Massively Multiplayer Online Role-playing Game (MMORPG), where players take on the roles of heroes in a fantasy land in the midst of turmoil. Except all the players are mages in this game. And all magic is tied to music. So spells are actually uniquely composed tunes, and battles are actually special effects duels of music and fire. Players choose a faction based not only on gameplay style, but on musical play style--picking from classical, electronic, tribal, or other styles that have a specific look, culture, and magical power associated with them.

Why it's exciting: This Kickstarter campaign is not looking healthy. With less than two weeks to go, they are at less than $30,000 of their $600,000 goal. Which is a real shame, as this game shows a lot more imagination and guile than almost any other game being crowdfunded right now--they promise a rich, dynamic, player-created soundscape where players trade and teach others their battle-songs, and the core mechanics of the game sound like they will educate people on the basics of musical theory. Even if you aren't going to back this project, you should really consider spreading the word so they have good exposure and support should the worst happen. But seriously, back this. Where else can you be this frakkin' cool playing a trumpet? (Four years of band camp will tell you: nowhere--unless you count that football game where you finished half-time with the Braveheart speech and a trumpet blast)

Frozen State

What it is: Take a bunch of Russians in a necessarily wintry setting, add in some critters from John Carpenter's The Thing, throw in a global apocalypse and old school Fallout-style gameplay, and you have Frozen State, the best thing to come out of Moscow since Sean Connery. Created by Snow Arc, the computer game features an older style of RPG campaign, where you pick one of three preset characters and run them through an RPG where you battle the elements in addition to hostile survivors and things-with-too-many-mouths/limbs/bumpy-bits. The game will involve a non-linear campaign where seeking out resources and loot in devastated Siberia is a constant lure.

Why it's exciting: I really like the wintry setting, and the fact that survival will be a central element is cool. They're talking about making a meaningful day/night cycle where going out at night is dangerous due to weather and the creatures drawn out by darkness, which sounds atmospheric and crunchy. I haven't pulled the trigger on this one yet, though, as its funding is in British Pounds, and I've yet to back a pounds-based project. But with all the cool goodies they've got and the fact they're shooting for a Windows/Mac/Linux release, this might be the time to do it.



Free RPG Day

Last Saturday was Free RPG Day 2013. An annual observance since 2007, it's a chance for RPG publishers and retailers to team up to give players free demos, supplements, and teasers of their games in an effort to spread awareness of their games and promote the hobby in general. This year Pathfinder, Battletech, Star Wars, Cosmic Patrol, and more all got their free on at your Friendly Local Game Shop (FLGS). Make sure to keep an eye out for freebies next year, and support your FLGS. It's a great way to browse other systems and maybe add a few new games to your hit-list.




So what have I been doing while all this stuff was going down?

Getting daddied up.

Again.

Once more my irresistible procrastinator genes have so infected my offspring that my son cruised past his due date. So once more we got to schedule our son's birthday, essentially, by going in to the hospital to get induced. Man, you do not sleep well once your pregnant wife gets to her due date. Throughout the later stages of the pregnancy you start to look at her like a damp, full grocery bag--any sudden movement could tear out her bottom and wreck a whole lot of perishables. But once you hit that final week to deadline and go past it, things take on new severity. Like when Sylvester the Cat drinks the nitroglycerine in the old 1940s cartoon, every movement is sudden death. Needless to say, it's hard to sleep in that kind of environment. (And adding a second boy under 3 years old to our household probably won't help!)

Then, the next day, you go through a weirdly calm morning of getting things ready, shipping the kid off to the grandparents, and then try to have a nice brunch before going in to the hospital for the scheduled horror show. Few things in life are quite so unpleasant as trying to eat with a woman who's pregnant with a child other than their first. Something about that first birth and the 20 or so hospital staff touring her monstrous hoo-hah gives a woman the impression that everyone wants to hear about what's going on with their sensitives forever. For at least one year per kid, everything is mucous, membranes, and fluids, and any time you try to gracefully bow out of the all-access experience, you're instead rewarded with an eye and earful of something you'd rather believe was only the province of R-rated movies. There is no escape.

The build up is kind of mesmerizingly complex, but also tediously long, and you don't really feel like much of what's happening relates to what's about to occur. The little lady is thrown into a flattering hospital ensemble, hooked up to machines, and set on display in the middle of a sci-fi creche. It's like the Disney Alien Encounter, except the lights are on, nothing is sanitary, and the grotesque monstrosity in the middle of the room is the one doing most of the screaming.

And the main event--whew. First, there's a whole lot of doctors and nurses taking the Livingston tour of your baby's den, and then when he comes out, you're suddenly surprised that your huge wife was able to hold, feed, and pass the little Roswell alien. It's like Mary Poppins' hand-bag, except when it starts, everything improbable is going in, and then when something comes out it's totally different--though no less improbable.

So that's been my week. That, and spending the past week fending my two year-old away from the fascinating newborn. On the hospital ride home, he calmly tried to convince us that the new addition would be more comfortable back in mom's belly. But since she nixed that plan, he's stuck with a little brother. Poor guy.

Myth Map Released

Just 'Cuz

Over the past week I had come to the decision, with a little encouragement, to release the full resolution version of my Myth map. Now, this might not seem too relevant, but as I quickly summarize my process and decision-making it might help you flesh out your own world-building process. You can feel free to use these maps for your own fantasy RPG--better than the generic D&D worlds, in my vitriolic opinion--or you can just use this as inspiration for one GM's process for map-making and world-building. First, a reminder of the official map with which I started:

I love this map. It's characterful and has a great texture to it, and the cartography does a great job of evoking the hand-made qualities of ancient map-making. Tolkien-forgive-me, but I think I like looking at this map more than most of the original Middle Earth maps. At the same time, however, it's an incredibly game-y and contrived map. Maps traditionally fit as much detail as possible into a confined space, and the sort of large gaps that define the map above would normally be indicative of a wild, uncharted region. And in the lore of Myth, that doesn't quite jive. So I'm left with a map that is attractive and evocative, but that at the same time pulls me back and says it's a game map.

When I sat down to change the world map, then, I wanted to ensure that there'd be a good and representative density to the map. If something was particularly bare, I wanted that bareness to say something about the setting. My tweak of the map was also going to be perfectly consistent: every civilized settlement of more than two thousand people would be on the map. This would assuage my anal-retentive GM obsessive compulsion, and it would mean that I could use the settlements on the map to estimate the population of the free world--very useful when your major antagonist is on a ten year plan to make it all burn. And finally, I wanted the map to be functional for journey-charting for the party. So this meant that as dense as I might make it, the map would still need to have enough space to mark it up.

Step one was figuring out the scale of the official Myth map. In The Fallen Lords, there's a quote that a runner from Willow traveled fourteen hundred miles to Rhi'anon. Of course, the quote might be dead reckoning or it might estimate the path the runner took. More useful, however, is another line that says Silvermines is one hundred miles away from Bagrada, the southernmost pass through the Cloudspine mountains. That let me scale the map and feel confident in slapping a scale key on it. Then, in determining how big the map would physically be, I wanted the map to be overlaid with a one-inch hex grid. Based on the width of the regions represented, I decided to make each hex 20 miles across. This would be an average day's travel, so for convenience the party might travel 1 hex per day.

The next major creative hurdle was filling in all the details. And that meant kicking up the number of named settlements on the map from about a dozen on the official map up to over 150 on the oh-my-gosh-how-long-does-Ben-plan-on-running-this-campaign map. First I had to add lots of small rivers and lakes to the map, though, because pre-industrial villages generally gravitate towards bodies of water. Yes, I really thought that far ahead. Once I had plunked down all the little land features however, I had a list of about 200 geographic sites waiting to be named. Poop. I hate being me. This is when a sane person would seek help and try to overcome their obsessive tendencies. But I just called it good GMing and started categorizing each feature by fictional ethnicity parallel. Yep, that simple. For instance, the Cath Bruig are the dominant human ethnicity in the setting. They have a number of character and place names gleaned from Celtic and Gaelic folklore, so I started pulling a list of other names I liked from there. I also happen to be madly in love with the Welsh language though, and it gives my inner sadist a GM-happy whenever I watch my players try to pronounce Welsh names, so I threw a ton of Welsh-inspired locations in the middle region of the map. The west was going to be a semi-independent former colony of the Cath Bruig, so I went the English route by bastardizing and crassifying the Bruig language to populate the Province. Yes, I meant to say crassifying. The northern tribes were straight-up Norse in their influence, and the easternmost kingdom of Gower was built around my wiki-knowledge of historical Turkish traditions. The dwarf kingdom and the forest kingdom of The Ermine required me to extrapolate my own language conventions based on what little we get in the official lore, in order to create a consistent standard.

Overall, it's a lot of work, and if you end up using it for your own games I'd love to hear that my GM lunacy saved you at least a little effort. So here's the long-previewed full resolution Myth map.

With Hex Grid overlay added

Note that I had kept this world map secret from my players until their characters bought a regional map at the first market town they came upon. This helped to reinforce the feudal ignorance I wanted to emphasize in my game, helped keep the players from feeling too overwhelmed, and made for a nice one-page print-up at full-resolution.

And yes, as I've reviewed the map for this post, it's dawned on me that I need to add more details here and there. I'm a sick, sick nerd.

UPDATE 7/31/2013: if the above images still aren't big enough for you, try this link.

Kickstart Your Weekend: Mighty Morphin' Weekend!

Kickstart Your Weekend: A series in which I occasionally spotlight Kickstarter projects that are ending soon and deserve a little nerd love. Also, I'll highlight some past projects as well, as you never know when these enterprises are going to turn up again.

Another busy week for Kickstarter nerds. While I said from the start that Kickstart Your Weekend wouldn't be a weekly feature, it sure is shaping up that way. This week we've got updates on past projects and a new set of highlights. Next week I anticipate doing a highlights selection of past projects, and after that it looks like there may be a lull in truly exciting Kickstarter projects, though you never know when a new campaign might pop up. Kind of like pseudo-nazi societies in science-fiction, they turn up whenever things get stale. And, if you're lucky, they're worth the effort to vanquish them rather than becoming just another clumsy cash-in for some bland action scenes and ham-fisted morality tale (I'm looking at you, Stargate SG-1's Eurondans).

Sorry about that, back to Kickstarter stuff...

Jagged Alliance: Flashback--which I was most worried about over the past week--finished its campaign well, just squeaking by to collect its first stretch goal. I'd waited on this one until the last minute, but in the end the promise of Mac support plus the fun skin packs they were previewing helped secure my moneys. They also have a slacker backer program in the works at their main site, which will give users the chance to belatedly pre-order now that the Kickstarter campaign is finished.The steampunk air skirmisher Guns of Icarus: Adventure Mode funded at just over two hundred grand with outside supporters included, punting their MMO dreams a little further down the development gridiron. You can keep following their puffs of white steam and black smoke over at the Guns of Icarus site. Robotech RPG Tactics blew through stretch goal after stretch goal to claim a massive 1.442 million dollars, making it one of the most successful projects in the board game category on Kickstarter. Anime mecha fans should pop on over to Palladium Books to check out their RPG products and watch for the release of Robotech RPG Tactics in early 2014.

Bear: A First Time Parent's Continuing Journey is doing solidly well and is on track to get funded in twelve days.  Browncoats: Independence War just achieved full funding with 3 days to go, so I'd say they'll hit a stretch goal or two. And keep in mind that unless you back and get a download or DVD of the movie, it probably won't be available to see outside of con and special event screenings. So something to ponder, that. Finally, Deadzone is over $500,000 pledged with 9 days left, meaning it is almost guaranteed to be Mantic Games' most successful KS campaign yet. Seriously, don't forget about them and their enkindled Chovar model.

So with the past campaigns' roundups out of the way, I've got another set of three projects for you, this time featuring a second edition for a successful RPG, a superhero board/miniatures game mash-up, and a dark revival of a Saturday morning dynasty as a web series. Woot woot.

OVA: The Anime Role-playing Game

The art looks beautiful and perfectly evokes classic anime tropes.

What it is: OVA is an RPG tailored and streamlined to put players in anime-style adventures quickly and with a minimum of effort. Written by Clay Gardner, OVA (Open Versatile Anime) was originally published in 2005 and though it was a very small release, the unique and straightforward approach to the genre was fairly well-received. Eight years later, a wiser and more seasoned Clay Gardner is returning to his first effort with an eye to refine and deepen the rules and throw a hefty amount of artist glamour over the whole effort. The most interesting aspect of the game is the elegantly simple character creation process, which is supposed to take only a matter of minutes if you want. You design only the remarkable aspects of your character--there are no specified stats, no core abilities you need to define whether or not they're important to the character concept. If they're very good or very bad at something, that is what defines them, and that is what shows up on the character sheet. It's a novel approach and perfectly fits the anime genre, where mundane activities and attributes are hand-waved as a matter of course.

Why it's exciting: I'm a fan of GURPS, a point I've belabored on this blog several times already. But I have also said just as often that I'm a sucker for great art and for eccentric game mechanics. And OVA has both in spades. Mr. Gardner has also put up a couple of character books on his campaign's main page. I love character books--they're a combination of character background, detailed character sheet and illustration, and a summary of the core rules that apply to playing that character. It's a great play aid for learning the system, looks terribly attractive, and is useful for convention purposes for getting players into the game quickly. They're already fully funded and past a long list of stretch goals that include a mobile app to support the game. So OVA has definitely secured my pledge. And, as I said in my GM Tips post last week, a well-constructed system with a narrow focus trumps the best generic system in its realm of specialization, and OVA has me really excited to play some bright frenetic anime action. And, due to come out by the end of the year, I hopefully won't have to wait long.



Guardians Chronicles

What it is: Guardians Chronicles is an ambitious board game coming from Iello Games. In it, players take up dice, cards, miniatures, and play heroes assaulting the lair of the mastermind Professor Skarov. One player takes control of the villain and his base full of henchmen, trying to hold off the heroes while they vie to foil each other and score the most headlines by the game's end. The characters are all original heroes inspired by classic heroic paragons and villainous archetypes. And by that I mean they're totally defensible and creative designs that are obviously inspired by Dr. Strange, Captain America, Iron Man, and so forth. The play mechanics involve each hero wielding a small hand of cards to upgrade their hero with abilities and stat boosts on a turn-by-turn basis, battling robots, ninjas, and supervillains on their way.

Why it's exciting: Iello Games has already produced some very well-received, albeit more shallow, board games in the past. King of Tokyo in particular got a lot of great reviews over the past year. Guardians Chronicles looks like a colorful super-powered riff on the asymmetrical gameplay of Descent, with up to four players ganging up on a powerful mastermind controlling multiple characters of lesser ability. I love the artwork, and now that the game is fully funded with 24 days to go, I bet we'll see all or most of the stretch goals they've laid out funded before the end, which will unlock a dozen heroes and villains and bonus henchman for the larger pledges. I haven't pledged to them yet myself, but the colorful characters and action-packed game mechanics have me tempted.



MMPR

What it is: When you consider all the iterations as one, the Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers has been one of the longest running shows for kids. And that goes back to my generation, with the show premiering on Fox Kids in 1993. Twenty years later, the Power Rangers are still doing their thing. Still appealing to the same age demographic with the same pratfalls, bad comedy, and cheesy but kinetic action sequences. We all grew up, but the Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers didn't. That's where MMPR comes in. A fan tribute web series, MMPR aims to bring our Saturday morning fondest memories into a contemporary light with a post-apocalyptic, more serious tone. Their campaign aims to fund the fan-series pilot episode to the series, plus any further episodes they might get via stretch goals.

Why it's exciting: Honestly, I want to see some of the action for this show before I get too excited, but that little teaser and the synopsis has got me perked up. A post-heroic, blasted setting that is somehow the result of evil being defeated in the past also strikes me as an interesting and unexpected angle to take. And I was always a dork for the Green Ranger, which means I'm fairly hooked by the plot conceit of a new generation of Rangers looking for Tommy, who's now in hiding. If MMPR can just give me a little bit of that old spark I used to feel when I'd watch the Green Dragon Zord rise up out of the water without making me feel like a dork? I'd get on board. Heck, who am I kidding--I've watched old episodes of Fraggle Rock on my own in the past few years--I'm not afraid of feeling like a dork.