Washington State as a Fantasy Setting Pt. 1, The Idea

Washington? You mean "Olympia", right?

I was thinking recently how much I love expansive settings in fantasy. I love kitchen sink settings; I like exploring India, Mesoamerica, Germany and so on, allowing characters and locations of all stripes.

However, I hate how large those settings are. They are just too massive; it could literally take in game months to travel to another country, or even real life months. I ain't got time for that. I like condensed settings size wise, but the problem is they generally aren't too diverse.

So I decided to make my own, and instead of a map, I'm using one that exists: the good ol' state of Washington.

"That's dumb," you may say. But to that I say "No!". Washington is the US state with the most varied terrain, the only state in the lower 48 with a rainforest AND its a perfect size for a campaign setting (70k square miles). Characters could walk from west to east in roughly 10 days, but they would pass through mountains, swamps, forests and deserts to do it.

I also have started to become quite fond of Swords and Sorcery, Lost World type settings. I love the forbidden magic, the dark gods, and the epic stories. I'm cribbing from Primeval Thule, where this Washington was real but was destroyed as the glaciers crept in during the last Ice Age.

There are no countries, but 13 city states, each with their own cultural flavor. For example, Agartha is built into primeval, extremely active Mt. Saint Helens, and is based on Greco-Roman and Mesopotamian civilizations. On the other hand, Hyperboria is built high in the Cascades near the Great Glacier, and they are extremely Norse, Scandinavian and Russian influenced.

I'm debating what system to use for this if I run it, but it may either be Blood, Guts and Glory, ACKS, or D&D 5e, or maybe even B&T. If I write this up, which I hope to do, maybe I'll provide mechanics for all those games and more.

Anyway, I'm going to chronicle its creation on here. I'm also gonna go back and work on some of my other "chronicle the setting here" stuff, which I've been slacking on.

Til next time!

FASERIP Settings - Age of Rebirth Pt.1

Just a quick recap, I said before that I was writing some settings for the upcoming FASERIP game by Blacky the Blackball (the game rules by the way), and I actually made a last minute change.

Originally, one of my settings was going to be a modified cyberpunk setting, and this one still exists. However, the other was going to be post apocalypse, and while I wrote up a brief for it, it felt way too loose and boring for me to want to put in the game.

So I did a heel turn, and decided instead to write something called Age of Rebirth.

I didn't grow up playing things like Baldur's Gate or Wizardry; my exposure to roleplaying games was Final Fantasy, Tales of Symphonia, Golden Sun, Kingdom Hearts and Shin Megami Tensei. It wasn't boots on the ground soldiers plunging into dangerous dungeons; it was acrobatic warriors screaming out the names of their special attacks as they basically waded through gods like an ankle-high stream.

Age of Rebirth is my answer to want to play such a game on the tabletop. A lot of games try to harp on this style (Exalted, Anima, Weapons of the Gods), and while they aren't bad, they kind of get caught up in their own butts. You will notice that some of the setting harps on Exalted, which is intentional, but I feel like I've made it my own.

The setting will feature magical gear called Instruments, the ability to summon otherwordly creatures, a Limit Break-esque Overdrive, and the ability to manipulate ambient Mana.

A setting summary will come soon, but thought I'd start out with just a light teaser!

Keep watch, the game is very close to finished

Instruments of Om - Modern Occult Setting Overview

So I thought I'd start off this modern occult setting by giving you a broad overview of the setting. It cribs a bunch of ideas from WoD Mage (mostly Awakening), but I feel like I made it my own and is cool/metaphysical enough to stand by itself.

The basic idea is that the universe is sentient, kind of. It's more like the fabric of the universe is all powerful and somewhat knowing, and the term for this power is "Om" (after the 'noise of the universe' of a lot of Eastern religions).

The Om is the entire universe, but it can't really influence anything; it's just there. So the Om created the Councils and the Fundaments.

The Fundaments are inherently 'human' realms, related to the four classical elements. The Fundaments are really the 'make up' of Om, and these Fundaments created humanity. These are the most basic building blocks of reality, with Om representing a kind of 'quintessence'.

The Councils control the more fringe, but still important, aspects of reality. There are three Councils, each ruled by an Arcana. The Arcana are indeed based off the Major Tarot, but the actual Arcana existed before their labels did. Each Council (named The Court, The Forum and The Judge) has three Houses underneath them, each of which is ruled by two more Arcana. Thus, each Council has seven Arcana.

Each House also controls a Realm Beyond, a metaphysical realm where their chosen aspect derives from. Those will come in later when I describe each Council in turn.

So for millions of years, this worked. Then humans gained sentience, and things went to pot really quickly. The Fundaments grew much more powerful than the Arcana, and they became capricious and jealous. They basically fractured off and started an all-out war versus Om and its Fundaments. This war was staged both on the cosmic arena and on Earth. The Arcana released all manner of terrible creatures, fell magic and disasters across the universe.

The Om was losing, so to remedy this, it invested some of its power in both chosen humans and rebellious creatures of the Arcana. These champions became known as Instruments, but there was inevtiable infighting both within the factions and between the humans and the otherworlders (their factions called the Order and the Cabal, respectively)

The Instruments needed humanity for one reason or another, so though they often fought during lulls in Arcana attacks, they would still band together in unlikely teams to stave off these cosmic threats to humanity. What's worse is these attacks came in waves, and many Instrument leaders fear the largest attack ever is just around the corner.

So that's where the game starts. You are a human/monster/mage/whatever, who get together in ragtag groups to fight the Arcana for the good of the Earth and the good of the universe. Ideally, you start off with only knowing that you are fighting creatures from other worlds; as your characters reach higher levels, you learn more about the 'truth' of Om and the Arcana.

Expect Settings Soon

Good news, everyone! (Hope you read that in Prof. Farnsworth's voice)

I'll be churning out some setting stuff soon for some excellent games. I'll have two settings in Blacky the Blackball's upcoming FASERIP game (I'm also drawing an alternate cover, which rules), and I'm also going to be banging out a modern occult setting using the game Sigil and Shadow, which is still in beta but is based on the same system as Barebones Fantasy and Covert Ops.

All three are very cool and its nice to write/think about this stuff again. I am actually going to chronicle the occult setting here, which should be a good bit of content

Thanks for sticking around, everyone!

Blood and Justice - Character Creation

I'm currently working on a Google Doc (private at the moment) laying out the bare changes and mechanics of Blood and Justice: Superheroic Roleplaying Game, so I thought I'd take you as I go along.

For those of you that don't know, Mutants and Masterminds, the game B&J will be based on (Yes, I'm aware of the risque acronym, but I like the title Blood and Justice too much to give it up), uses a point buy system to build your characters. M&M calls them Power Points, but since that term is not OGL, I have renamed them into Justice Points.

You get an amount of JP based on the Power Level of the campaign, which at the standard Level 10 is 150 JP. These points can be spent to increase your attributes, buy skills, feats and powers, and attack and defense bonuses.

I'm changing some stuff around, though. In M&M, improving your saves (Fort, Reflex and Will) was a power, which is very silly to me. Instead, I've made increasing your save bonus part of the core JP purchase.

I've also added the Soak value, which was originally Amazing Save (Defense). Since I plan to use damage dice in B&J, this Soak value is basically a passive defense that will eat up damage inflicted on you. 1 JP will give you two points in Soak, meaning if you spend 8 JP on Soak, you'll have 16 Soak (ignoring the first 16 points of any attack).

Most of the JP costs have remained the same from M&M, but I am currently trying to figure out skills. Instead of the 40 skills in M&M 1e, I am going to use 14 skills from the 3rd edition of M&M (not including the combat skills). This means that less skills do more, so I'm altering the JP cost for 1 point of skill rank to either cost 2 or 3 JP (leaning more towards 3)

Anyway, this will all come out in testing, but it seems fairly solid to me. Next up I'll talk about attributes, which aren't too different

Blood and Justice - Planning

So like I said, I am starting some preliminary work on a rules-lite hack of Mutants and Masterminds 1e for Blood & Treasure, and though try as I might, some things in B&T just can't work on the levels that M&M can escalate too.

So what's staying in B&T?

- All of the combat system, including movement, encumbrance and so on
- Status and environmental effects
- Advantage/Disadvantage

And what's not

- Reverting to 3.5 skill ranks
- Reverting to 3.5 saves

And what's new!

- A full adaptation of the HP damage rules from M&M, including Soak rules and better integration of knockback
- Possibly a sample setting
- Hopefully reduced feats as well
- Removal of Amazing Save as a power and being a core component (ala M&M 2e)

I tried hard to keep ranks and saves and rolls as is, but it's not really feasible, especially at higher levels. So really, I'm just standardizing skill rolls, which I don't feel is a large issue

For feats, I'm going to do away with pure skill bonus feats, as the system can already hit high levels without them. I'll also knock out any feats that don't apply by being too specific (like Blind Fight)

Stay tuned as I figure out more

What Do You Get...

When you combine Blood and Treasure with Mutants and Masterminds 1e?

A little something called Blood and Justice.

Keep your eyes peeled to this space for more