19th Level

"Forward, as occasion offers. Never look round to see whether any shall note it... Be satisfied with success in even the smallest matter, and think that even such a result is no trifle." - Marcus Aurelius I've been going through some of my newer stuff for the Adventurer Conqueror King System (ACKS) over the past week or two. Of late I've been thinking of fantasy RPGs, especially with a focus on the ability for characters to be movers and shakers of the world. (I've also been reading the new Laundry novel by Charles Stross and checking out some of the newer DCC stuff - the fun of being scatter-brained... Though in Icons our heroes have met their first aliens. More on that in a few days I think...) One of the things I liked about ACKS was its implied setting, one that has begun getting more fleshed out with the ACKS Player's Companion , The Sinister Stone of Sakkara , and the quarterly Axioms  digital magazine. The ten thousand foot view is it is a...

As I've been thinking about a fantasy game with domain management and/or generational play, for some reason I've also been thinking about time periods before the typical medieval-inspired settings - from Westeros to Greyhawk to Middle Earth. I've begun reading Susan Wise Bauer's The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome . Mind you the pace is slow, between grad school, work, family, and prepping for superhero adventures (next game - an invasion from spaaace!!!) What I've been finding in the earliest period is a much smaller and more person world. Kings rule over city-states. Uruk's population at its height was perhaps fifty to eighty thousand. Compare that with the million who would live in Rome during the height of the Roman Empire (though it would be near modern times when a city would again reach such a population!) The potential I see in such an environment is it becomes possible to imagine PCs rising to impor...

My last post on Domain Play in Superhero RPGs  received a fair amount of discussion which gave me some additional food for thought. One of the biggest takeaways is there are two primary ways of handling a PC or major NPC ruling over a nation in a superhero game (or any other genre as well). The easiest way would be to simply make it a point of the character's background. In many comic books, the fact that a character rules or is royalty in a far-off land is perhaps an interesting plot point that gets used every once in a while. This is fairly common in comic books, particularly in the Silver and Bronze Ages. If, on the other hand, domain play were to be a major point in the game, then you would want to have rules that facilitate such a game. You would want to manage the domain's resources, be able to generate events, handle conflicts/alliances/wars with other domains, managing espionage, etc. You'd certainly want this to be superhero-centric. For example, a dispute o...

Given I've been thinking a lot about domain play lately, I had a passing thought this evening as to whether or not such play is applicable to superhero gaming - given I'm running an Icons game at present. After a little reflection I realized it absolutely is. As seen by the image at the top of this post, superheroes and supervillains are often at the heads of nations and organizations. There's a number of ways to realize this in play. At the most obvious there is the example of superpowered beings ruling over entire nations. You have Black Panther's Wakanda, Namor's Atlantis, Doctor Doom's Latveria, etc. The nation of Genosha has gone from a mutant-dominating apartheid state to a mutant sanctuary ruled by Magneto to being destroyed. Beyond nations are entities beyond Earth - Asgard, the Skrull Empire, etc. One thing worth noting is the rulership of such nations tends to be a bit on the unstable side. All of the examples I listed above have their...

You have read that Muad’Dib had no playmates his own age on Caladan. The dangers were too great. But Muad’Dib did have wonderful companion-teachers. There was Gurney Halleck, the troubadour-warrior. You will sing some of Gurney’s songs as you read along in this book. There was Thufir Hawat, the old Mentat Master of Assassins, who struck fear even into the heart of the Padishah Emperor. There were Duncan Idaho, the Swordmaster of the Ginaz; Dr. Wellington Yueh, a name black in treachery but bright in knowledge; the Lady Jessica, who guided her son in the Bene Gesserit Way, and—of course—the Duke Leto, whose qualities as a father have long been overlooked.  Dune  by Frank Herbert Right now I've got a decent Icons game going and with the summer semester at Brandeis having kicked off I'm likely safe from jumping into a new campaign for at least a little while. But I do have time to think about possible campaigns. With the new season of Game of Thrones on I've been thi...