As The Wheel Burns

Since last September we've been playing Paizo's Kingmaker adventure path using Strands of Fate rules.  It had its highs and lows, survived the Christmas/New Year season and all that.  What really stuck us, though, was flu season.  Between my daughter being sick, my wife being sick, and our GM being sick, as we approached our fourth Sunday with no Kingmaker (we did take some of those sessions to get some much-needed board game time in) it was decided that the campaign was going back on the shelf for a while.  The GM, belonging to a theater company, was about to start a show anyhow and that was going to take much of his time.

We hadn't really made firm plans going forward as far as roleplaying was concerned.  One of the players that used to GM and I discussed an anthology campaign where we all had the same characters but we'd rotate GMs for short story arcs.  But we never really nailed anything down.

Then I had an idea.  I texted it out to the group to see what they thought of it. 

"I had an idea for a Burning Wheel game. Make it close to late medieval/early renaissance in tech. Strip the fantasy races, maybe a little magic, but use the corruption rules. Maybe some faith magic too, or maybe not. The game would be set in a huge port city on a Mediterranean-like sea that acts as the trade hub between the different cultures that have developed on this sea.

There was a guy in the city that had managed to bring all of the city's underworld guilds, gangs, and pirates under his control. This ended decades of lawless chaos, but made crime nearly impossible to combat.

Yesterday was that man's funeral."

I learned about Burning Wheel about five years ago from a mention on the Dragon's Landing Inn podcast.  It was the first game I learned about from a podcast that really grabbed my attention.  Keep in mind that although I have the five core Revised Edition books and the Gold edition of Burning Wheel, I've still never had the chance to play it. 

As we got together this week we played some boardgames as well as Microscope.  Microscope is RPG-ish, it's really a set of cooperative world-building rules.  You establish the premise, set up a beginning and and ending to the era of time you're creating, set up some of the world's dos and don'ts, and then take turns establishing themes, periods of time, and events to that era.  It's fun.  We ran my short, little text through the Microscope machine to help define the setting that we'll soon be playing in.

Below are the results of our Microscope session.  There's some jargon involved, if curious feel free to ask what it means.

Premise
A port city thrives through corruption and crime.

Add:
-Criminal Guilds
-Tall ships
-Early gunpowder
-Fantastic races
-Slavery
-Social castes
-External political pressure
-Zealots

Ban:
-Non-corrupting magic
-Fantastic creatures
-Monotheism

Legacies
The Plentiful Catch; The Corruption Goes Unnoticed; Marriage Between Social Castes

Period 1: Traders establish settlement at natural harbor. (Good)
   Event 1.1: Arrival of the "Dark Swords" crime syndicate. (Bad)
   Event 1.2: The traders arm select men with newly imported blunderbusses to protect the citizens. (Good)

Period 2: Era of the Plentiful Catch. (Good)
   Event 2.1: The early seers point toward the richest and most plentiful fishing waters. (Good)
      Scene 2.1.1: Who convinced the fishers' guild to haul in the fish despite them knowing they had been corrupted?   A traveller from the distant lands, doubted  due to his mysterious nature.  But the results of his methods speak for themselves. (Good)
   Event 2.2: The boom in the fishing trade creates wealthy families from fishers and merchants.  (Good)
   Event 2.3: "The Plentiful Catch" was the groundwork for the power structure in the city. (Good)
   Event 2.4: The Waterman's marry their daughter to the Lancaster's son. (Good)
      Scene 2.4.1: Why did the Waterman's refuse to marry their daughter to the son of Ohmid?  Ohmid's son, Corva, is a "renowned" thief in the minds of the populace. (Bad)
   Event 2.5: The first great storm.  Many blame it on the fishermen seeking dark methods to increase  their catch.  (Bad)

Period 3: War Amongst the Guilds. (Bad)
   Event 3.1: As the waters become overfished, the fishermans' guild turns its eyes to maintaining  control of the city. (Bad)
   Event 3.2: Young Ewan learns bookkeeping from his father, a clerk for the fishermans' guild.  (Good)
   Event 3.3: A fire burns most of the city to the ground. (Bad)
   Event 3.4: Using what he learned from his late father, Ewan founds the Tradesmens' Guild to unite assorted tradesmen against the aristocracy. (Good)
   Event 3.5: Ewan befriends a man named Ajan, known in his homeland as Ajan the Dark, the man that helps him further his control into the darker guilds. (Good)

Period 4: Death of "Lord" Ewan. (Bad)
   Event 4.1: Seeking allies in the struggle against the workers, the nobles turn to the dark magic of the old gods. (Bad)
      Scene 4.1.1: Why would nobles embrace old magic?  The influence of an overseas cult recently arrived.  The nobles did not see the havoc caused by the cult in their homeland.  (Bad)
   Event 4.2: The renegade arm of the "Dark Swords" are defeated by the assasination of their leader, Relath IV. (Good)
   Event 4.3: The people riot when inter-caste marriages are declared annulled. (Bad)

And that's where we left.  It was a relatively short session of Microscope, we each only took one pass as the Lens.  There's so much left to be explored in the back story and we haven't even established a scale for the timeline.  And if we decide to come back to it with Microscope, we'll be adding events and periods in between the ones we have now, changing the context of what we have.  But for now I'm going to begin piecing this together for our campaign.  It will be a challenge because Burning Wheel is very outside of the box for what I'm used to.  But it should be fun.

Burning Wheel's website
Microscope's website

WorldMaker: Settling on Setting and Merging Ideas

Hey everyone!  I hope your 2013 has started off with great games, or at least the anticipation of them.

In my last WorldMaker post I talked about having two world ideas that were competing for my immediate attention. One being my take on an all-comers D&Desque world, and the second being a more intimate setting focused on intrigue. I decided to begin developing the second world. I'm calling it Drann. Oh, and Drann is on Aedora (my D&D world, a-yeh-dora). THAT'S MADNESS!!! Probably, but there's actually a solid reason for it. Drann fits perfectly into Aedora's prehistory.

A bit on Aedora's creation: it was formed by an overdeity. This overdeity was a PC of mine long, long ago that gained omnipotence. Once that happened he ceased being a PC or even an NPC in that GM's cosmology. No record of him ever existing because he never did as far as the current fiction of those realities are concerned (though our gaming stories certainly say otherwise). He became the overdeity of my cosmology. He has complete agency and omnipotence in my world, though he lacks omniscience. His name is Tsalmaveth (sal-muh-veth).

As he created the universe in which Aedora exists, he created for himself a companion named Naldrea (nal-dray-uh). He creates a celestial plane for her to live in, gives her the essence of Creation, and then leaves “for a short while” (eons and eons, but what's that to an eternal agent). Naldrea, feeling the instinct of motherhood, creates a race of beings called the oestaua (oh-es-ta-wa). After millions of years the oestaua plan a conspiracy to claim Naldrea's godhood for themselves. Upon Tsalmaveth's return...well, let's just say bad things happen to them. It's the fallout from this that creates the New World, elves, man, dwarves, gods, planes, dragons, magic; all that good stuff that we already know and love.

While this will still technically be the same planet, the two “worlds” will be very far apart in time and tone that each one could be ran for a number of years in real time and would never intrude on one another. The biggest mechanical change will be in character options which right now are ideas that have not yet been given form by way of mechanics.

Now I've settled the wheres and the whens. Next time I'll start lining up the things that I'm looking to do in building the race and giving the different bloodlines some thematic and mechanical distinctions.

WorldMaker: In Which I Mull My Two Competing World Ideas

I've neglected this blog with its..both posts for far too long. And since I'm in need of a creative outlet I'm resurrecting it to write about some world-building I want to do. I've tried this kind of thing before on another blog that I failed to update (breaking the cycle!), but I think I'm in more of the headspace (pardon the pun, or don't) so I'm taking another stab at it.

I have a couple of different world ideas that I've recently been considering. The first one is my White Whale, Aedora. It's a world I named better than 10 years ago, but never really gave it “final” form. I've drawn and redrawn maps. Developed and redeveloped its origin. Drafted lists of deities. Redrafted lists of deities. Same with races and nations and magic, etc. And each time I decide that this is it, I'm going to finally sit down and make this thing work, I go back to the ever-growing notebooks-turned-computer-files of notes. Each edition's worth of notes being added to the collection. The idea is that with enough time and drafting I can turn it all into a cohesive thing.

My problem is one of scope. In its current form Aedora has three continents, all three with their long histories, kingdoms, legends, myths. Well, that's the idea. I don't actually have them. I want it to be my iconic world, my Forgotten Realms. I want to make that world that my friends and I are still playing in when we're in our 40's and 50's (since we're all in our early 30's now, with one guy being in his early 40's). I'm not under any illusion that this is going to be some huge, published phenomenon. I just want a huge tapestry to call my own. Realistically, I'm approaching it wrong and I know that. My biggest stumbling block is the fact that I have no restrictions. The canvas is wide open to do what I want with as many little building blocks as I can get my hands on, but the sheer number of options is overwhelming.

The second of my ideas is really just me stealing a bunch of stuff from other people (which is pretty much what having an idea is anyhow). The scope of this world is far, far smaller and is happy to be about one thing to the exclusion of all the other types of fantasy. It's essentially what I imagine Houses of the Blooded more or less is in tone based on what I've heard and what little I've read. Take in some of the structure of Vampire: The Requiem, and shades of A Song of Ice and Fire (or Game of Thrones by its more popular name) mix it all up and that's what you get.

From Houses I'm taking the idea that the PCs are playing a literally superior race. They're smarter, stronger, (you can make the argument that they won't be wiser). From Vampire I'm taking the notions of Clans and Covenants. Though I'll probably use the term bloodlines instead of clans, royal families will have some kind of powers prescribed to them on top of having superior stats. Covenants are something that I really like from VTR. They are the political and philosophical affiliations you have. There's so much potential in pitting characters' personal beliefs and affiliations against family obligations in a culture where bloodlines are ostensibly the thrust of political power (which is where you get your Game of Thrones).

Those are the two competing ideas I'm thinking about right now. The first one is largely inspired by my gaming history. My cousin was (and still is) my GM, and he's got 25 years worth of binders full of histories and gaming sessions to fill out his worlds. Huge, epic stories full of fighting gods, becoming gods, destroying and birthing planes, getting duped by demons, become Dark Lords (and thus becoming NPCs). And I know these stories start small and end up huge organically, at least when you're building worlds for the purpose of campaigns. The second idea is designed to ratchet up the intrigue. It's not meant to be an expansive world. On the power scale it's much smaller. Grounded in the real with just a touch of something extra. One built on plot, the other built on relationships.