| Trigger Warning: |
| As an adult game, our story may at times include elements of graphic sexuality or violence, as described within the parameters of RPoL�s Adult Games Policy. While these are never primary game components, players should be aware that characters can potentially encounter them. You are encouraged to roleplay responsibly and maturely when faced with graphic sexuality or violence, and to respect that certain threads within the game (those visible to all players) should never contain these elements unless they are included by me, for plot reasons, and preceded by an appropriate trigger warning. |
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| Safe Space: |
 This game is a place where anyone can relax and be fully self-expressed, without fear of being made to feel uncomfortable, unwelcome, or unsafe on account of race/ethnicity, sexual or gender identity or expression, cultural background, native language or ability to communicate, age, or physical or mental ability; a place where the rules guard each person's self-respect and dignity and strongly encourage everyone to respect others. Harassment and discrimination receive zero tolerance in this game. |
Once you've read everything on this page and feel confident you understand it, follow the links below for more. These links are also reproduced at the bottom of this page:
Rules
Setting
What is Reactive Storytelling?
| Disclaimer: |
| This campaign is probably a little different than many you might have played, although you may have experienced something similar, too. Regardless, the ideas documented here are my own and not taken from any particular game system or play experience, but rather assembled from years of playing many games with many people, so any resemblance to a specific mechanic or setting is coincidental. |
Over many years, I have found that the most common and major flaw in prefab adventures is that we are often left with the feeling that the scenario in question would have eventually happened to somebody, somewhere�your party was simply in the right/wrong place at the right/wrong time, and was lucky/unlucky enough to be the ones caught up in events. Had you been elsewhere, though, or had you perhaps even been somebody else, the adventure would still have occurred�just to other people. Prefab adventures are not personal enough, because they must by market necessity be designed to accommodate the possibility of any group, from generic to unlikely, and cannot be too specially tailored to reward a specific class, race, or party combination.
This campaign utilizes what I like to call "reactive storytelling." It is not simply a sandbox game, where characters are allowed to wander at will through a nonlinear world; nor is it a "choose-your-own" adventure, where you are presented with the illusion of choice and consequence. Rather, the world is somewhat nebulous, left deliberately undefined in places so that you, as players, can help to shape it. You will be presented with a clear beginning to your story that will provide you with some possible end goals and the motivation to strike out and accomplish those goals, and you will encounter villains and obstacles along the way that will, like the campaign's ending, already be given a recognizable shape. It is the middle bits�how you get from A to B�that are left blank for you.
What, specifically, does this mean for you? You will not be writing the story, yourselves, in the sense that you will be laying down words and arbitrarily deciding what happens to you next, or what the outcomes of your own choices are. This is not freeform, and you will still face a world monitored and operated by a GM. What you will be doing is giving the GM material to work with that helps to solidify and populate the world with details: Naming names, remembering legends, describing places that all will (or can) eventually appear in the campaign.
How does this work? During the adventure, your character(s) will be forced to make decisions�not preprogrammed options fed to you by the GM, but real-life ones that someone in their situation would face. In other words, I will put you in situations where your choices determine what happens next�but those choices are yours and yours alone, and I will have no idea what they may be or where they will take the game next, any more than you might. There are no cohesive plot points for you to be steered towards, no obvious leads for you to grab onto to haul the saga forward (beyond the minimum necessary to jumpstart the story); it will just be you and the consequences of your actions, whatever they are, until you finally reach the end of your journey.
As an example: Let's say the group agrees you have arrived at a point where you must travel elsewhere to locate some form of assistance in your quest. Where will you go? I don't know, either! I guess that means you'll have to invent somewhere. Sam the sorcerer wracks his brain and, finally, suggests that you travel northward, to the distant city of Kelthorn whose name you have heard once or twice�the great city in the mountains, built by the hero-king of legend, Athwulf.
Congratulations, Sam; what have you just done to the game world? Let's evaluate:
- There is a large city called Kelthorn.
- Kelthorn is far away to the north of your current location.
- There is now a legendary hero in the world's history�Athwulf�who supposedly founded Kelthorn.
- Athwulf was a king.
That's impressive enough, but take a close look:
- If Kelthorn really is a major city, it probably lies along at least one trade route or primary road.
- There is not just a city to the north, but a whole mountain range, as well.
- If Athwulf was a king, he had a kingdom, and Kelthorn was part of it. There must now be other evidence of Athwulf somewhere, if he was real: Monuments, a tomb, stories. Perhaps his kingdom still exists today; if not, it certainly must have been influential, if Kelthorn still stands after all this time.
Look how careless Sam was... He's invented an entire kingdom with just one sentence. I wonder if he meant to do that...?
Now, it's important to keep in mind that most of the additions you'll be making to the world will happen through your characters, not directly from you, as players. One of many benefits to beginning the game as borderline NPCs is that you can charge at the world with fewer preconceived notions of how it should operate than a well-traveled and experienced PC�or at least, any ideas you may already have are more easily shattered and displaced by new experiences. As you progress and tack on further details to the environment, I will generally be the one to stat and develop them in the background and to produce an end result in line with the needs of the game as much as the intent of the character. So, the downside of being practically nobody? Things may not always be what you think, and the world will be full of surprises, many of them unpleasant. After all, if your entire life has been spent in a village so small it doesn't even have a name, then it would be difficult to conceive of a bustling, stone-walled metropolis�you may get to Kelthorn and discover that the "great city" is actually just a town of four or five hundred people with only two paved roads. Disappointing to a player, perhaps�but maybe still equally impressive to a character that knows no better.
Game World
PCs will begin the game largely as green nobodies, so you will not know everything about your own world. However, there are some details that you will need to know, as players, in order to build PCs and develop goals and plans for them.
First (and perhaps most important, to some): This is a medium-magic setting. Your choices in spellcasting classes are somewhat restricted, the availability of new spells and magic items a little more so. However, these limitations also apply to your enemies, so when you encounter a villain capable of wielding magic of any sort or strength, you will know you are up against someone who is to be taken seriously, regardless of their actual ECL.
How low-magic is it? A +1 weapon might be a treasure you should cherish and never lightly trade, sell, throw away, or perhaps even make publicly known�but it will still likely be a nameless magical blade with no real historical significance that you know of or will discover. On the other hand, any weapon or armor of +3 or higher total enhancement, as well as most rings, staves, and major wondrous items, will likely be a unique item with a history and probably even a name; learning these could be fun and give you expanded opportunities for enriching the setting. Potions, scrolls, wands, and minor to medium wondrous items will be more readily available, but rods will be precious and rare to nonexistent, and other types of magic items (such as runes) may never even appear in the game.
Spellcasters are not unknown, but they are still significantly less common than mundane character classes, so new spells will be harder-fought and -won and will come more slowly than you are probably used to. Only the largest cities may have "magic shops" or mage guilds, and displays of magical power�even cantrips and orisons�might be considered impressive and treated with more than a little superstition, especially in rural areas.
Secondly, geography: Since the world is nebulous by design and left partly up to the players to flesh out, there will be no firm points of reference for travel until some are established. At the beginning, you will have only the immediate surroundings and little else; where we will go from there remains to be seen. I will make a reasonable attempt to maintain an in-game map if the PCs do so, as well, updating it in response to your travels (like a video game automap), filling it in with only what you have discovered or been told about and leaving the rest blank until it is explored.
Thirdly, nonhuman races will be present, but severely limited, in this campaign. The dwarves, famous for their manufacture of fantastic magical items, might be no more than distant legend to you, as are the immortal and otherworldly elves. Just as with magical items and spells, any encounter with a nonhuman race should be roleplayed with appropriate awe, curiosity, skepticism, distrust, superstition, or whatever other qualities best fit the role of "inexperienced character." Players may apply for tiefling, half-elf, halfling, and other nonhuman character concepts, but should be prepared to pitch ideas about where they fit into the game world and why having a nonhuman PC in the party is more appropriate than a human.
When creating your character, you should keep in mind both that you will not be starting out as a veteran PC. Feat selection should reflect both your available resources and what is reasonable for the setting and character, and although we can certainly discuss it before a decision is made, I reserve the right to disallow any feat at any point (at least temporarily), if I feel it is not currently appropriate for a PC to have it.
For instance, a good argument can easily be made that Power Attack is relatively intuitive, and ought to be available early on to combat-oriented characters, but even something as seemingly mundane as Improved Unarmed Strike just might not be genuinely explicable until further down the line. A good rule of thumb is to consider how "technical" the feat seems, and if it is something that requires a lot of practice and expertise in a certain field, you should consider how well your character qualifies on that basis, rather than just mechanically, before petitioning to take the feat.
This also goes for prestige classes. If you intend to include a prestige class in your plans for advancing your character, that should be brought to my attention in your initial application, so we can discuss the concept and so that I have sufficient time to think about how it can be included in the adventure. Prestige classes do not simply fall from the sky, even if your character is fully qualified to enter them.
Finally, during creation and the initial stages of gameplay, you have some liberty to expand on the initial world and help make it more concrete by naming people relevant to your character, historical events that might be common knowledge to citizens of your home country (holidays or festivals, for instance), and so on. Feel free to create families for yourselves, to mention so-and-so and their habits or work, or to discuss going out to perform specific tasks and so on in character. This will provide a background for your PC, and the claims and statements you make will establish customs and traditions in your own part of the world, at least.
For example, how does your culture feel about the gods? Does your nation worship a single deity, or a pantheon, or no one? How are child-rearing, crime and punishment, same-sex relationships, leadership, trade, and maintenance handled? Is your society similar to a typical medieval fantasy standard, a renaissance culture with a thin layer of steampunk, or something else? Is your land primarily woods, mountainous, desert, or an island? All of these things are yours to decide, though you might want to discuss some of them with each other and come to a consensus after being accepted into the game�or, at the very least, be aware of what others have already added to the world and don't flatly contradict it!
Once you've read everything above and feel confident you understand it, follow the links below for more:
Rules
Setting