One Rough Night

Last year, I entered the One Page Dungeon Contest and was picked as a winner, despite submitting a One Page Haunted Village rather than, well, a dungeon. Rather than doing the sensible thing and quitting while I'm ahead, I've decided to enter this year's contest. Once more, I have failed to produce an actual dungeon, although in my defence, it does feature a map. Sort of.

Long-time fans of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay may find the title and the scenario in general quite familiar, and I must own up; after I came up with the idea, I realised the general similarities to the classic "A Rough Night at the Three Feathers" from White Dwarf #94 and so changed the title as an homage.

In terms of tone, the scenario is somewhat whimsical; my intent was to try and do a fantasy role-playing version of the classic farce, and I hope that comes out in play. There is room for dark intrigue too, and one of the characters is a powerful demon, so there's even potential for a Total Party Kill if the players really mess up or the GM has a thumping hangover.

No statistics are included, so the scenario can be played with any system. WFRP is, of course, recommended. You can download the scenario here (14mb) or here (3mb).

Other Worlds

Stuart has a good post up here in which he digs out a number of historical examples of people of African origin running about mediaeval Europe, thus challenging those who don't want to include such characters in their fantasy role-playing games to come up with a better excuse for the omission than historical accuracy. It's a good, simple post that gets right to the heart of the matter and should wake a few people up.

The thing is that I don't see why Stuart needed to make the point in the first place. I've seen similar arguments come up before about technology levels; whether such and such society would have access to such and such weapon or armour or whatever. If we were setting our games in Northern France in 1450, then I could see the value in pursuing such detail, but for the most part we're not. We're playing in Greyhawk, or Aebrynis, or Titan; I don't see why it's important to know whether crossbows were available in 1450 when said crossbow is going to be used against a mind flayer, a creature I don't think was ever common in Europe, but then I only got a B in my history GCSE.

I know some people do care, and that's fine, but it's not something I think I'll ever understand. It's a fantasy game, it may look like mediaeval Europe from a certain angle, if you squint, but it's not, so go wild and include whatever you like. Exclude whatever you like too, of course, but don't try to hide behind historical accuracy when you do it.

Anyway.

Having put The One Ring aside for a rest, we've been playing a bit of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, set in the Border Princes, the Warhammer World's version of the Balkan region. We've had one session of actual play so far, and I don't know how long we'll play before something new and shiny comes along, but it's been good fun so far, as WFRP tends to be.

It's not quite new -- although it could be argued that "shiny" is an appropriate adjective -- but I've made a bit of progress on my conversion of Dark Sun to Savage Worlds; Savage Sun seems a fitting title. I've got some character generation rules worked out and I think I've come up with a good way to emulate the setting's magic system; my conversions are rather lean, simple even, but seem to do the job. I think my experience of converting Eberron over has helped me understand what's necessary to transfer to maintain the original feel of the setting, rather than fuss about copying every single detail. I need to put the conversion notes together in one place -- at which point I'll post them here -- and come up with a starting adventure, and then Savage Sun will be ready to go!