A repository for Tabletop RPG Materials for my gaming group.
In the world of our campaign, most people know that workers of magic—witches, mages, warlocks, sorcerors, conjurers: all these names are interchangeable to common folk—tend to live in special buildings infused with magic… places into which it is dangerous for mere mortals to trespass.
They are right. But in adventuring circles, a little more is known of such places.
Here are some guidelines for character creation, in terms of how to do it, and in terms of what classes and races you have to choose from.
Continue reading “Character Creation, Available Races & Classes”
In this game world, clerics are not simply clergy members with divine magic. Rather, they are very rare individuals who are more like messianic figures, bodhisattvas and saints, monks to whom mystical feats are attributed, but also random people who seem touched by transcendent, mystical power.
Alright, in the wake of the playtest, let’s try get a campaign going.
Finally: yes, the playtest is canon, and forms the backdrop of the beginnings of our campaign. Which is to say, that tower and the monastery? They’re both still there… muhahaha.
And there’s other various rumors floating around. You know where to look for that.
I woke already in the ground. I knew that I ought to have been terrified, to be frightened that I might die in my coffin, and yet I was calm. In my very depths, some part of me felt assured that I would emerge from the ground, and return to my home, and see my husband, and all would be well.
As I clawed my way through the wood of the coffin, and burrowed by body up out of the ground—my lungs burning, my fingers bleeding, and my eyes blinded by dirt—something else stirred within me. It was… I can only call it a conviction that there was something I had to do. Something I absolutely had to do. But I could not remember what it was, or why I had to do it. It was like a name forgotten, one you are certain will return to your memories at any moment. I put it out of my mind, and, finding myself in the churchyard outside my village, I hurried home with only the light of the moon to guide me.
When I got there, I found my husband with another woman… another wife. “Where have you been?” he cried, and then, “Is it really you…” He hesitated, and I saw it then: he was older. He had aged, even in the time I’d been unconscious. There was grey in his hair, and lines on his face. How long had I slept? Why had I not woken sooner?
Then he answered my question for me, his voice shaking as he whispered, “But you’ve been dead for ten years…”
The Revenant is an alternate PC race for our campaign—a replacement for the demi-humans we won’t be using.
Though it is undead, it’s not a “revenant” of the sort that’s traditional in D&D—another flavor of undead antaognist, that is. The PC revenant is undead, and it is driven by some unfulfilled impetus that drove it in life: to protect a loved one, to finish a project, to save a village, to destroy a specific enemy, but that vengeful impulse doesn’t define the revenant one-dimensionally.
Some thoughts on Vancian magic, alternate magic systems, and a stab at some house rules.
Here are some notes on The Elsewhere, a reality that adjoins with the world in which our campaign is played; the realities intersect, as most adventurers have reason to suspect, but your characters will probably only know hints and rumors about the following. (Still, they’ll know more than the average person.)
Your characters’ Europe is not our Europe. It’s… worse. I mean, Europe wasn’t a particularly fun place to be in the 168os: religious strife, horrible and persistent disease outbreaks, religious intolerance, plenty of mercenary and criminal activity, religious and social repression, the rising pressures of colonial expansion and of the growth of mercantile capitalism, and much more.
Wait, that’s our Europe.
Here are some resources you may, as a player, find useful:
I will add resources when I come across them, so check back later!
Though your characters are free to roam the world—and I’ve made a big effort to make the PC races be non-specific to Western cultures—we’ll be starting off the campaign somewhere in Europe, specifically at Bad Aachen, a hot springs resort town-turned-Early Modern “Babylon North” near the border between what’s now Germany and Belgium.
That’s just an easy jumping-off point, though, and while there’s plenty of adventure hooks in the area, including the setting of the playtest adventure we’ll be trying for our first meetup, it’s not like your characters are chained up there. (At least not yet!)
Which is to say, if you folks feel eager to have your characters wander off to parts unknown? All the better… and I have some ideas about places where fruitful adventures might be had. (See A Little Weird World Geography for some hints about those locales.) Here’s some info about the general area.
