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!

There and (Maybe) Back Again

After a few weeks of giving it a try, we've decided to put The One Ring aside for a while; I was running the game, and I do have to admit to pressing the issue a little, as I was becoming more and more dissatisfied with it. I do like the general design of the rules, as it's a clever and robust system, but it also feels a little detached, as if the players are not in direct control of their characters. This is evident to some extent in the abstract combat system -- which I liked more than the players did -- but is even more prominent in the travel rules; they are very good rules but they feel more like a strategic board game than anything, and while I'm confident that we could in time get used to this feeling of detachment, the game has another problem that has prevented us putting in that time.

From the perspective of the GM, the game seems quite limited in scope. Although The One Ring comes with a large map of the Mirkwood region, the GM's book contains very little information on what lurks under the eaves of the great forest, and seems to expect the GM to either make up the rest, or have extensive knowledge of Tolkien's works; from my I admit limited knowledge of the canon, it seems as if there never was much detail on the Mirkwood area. So what's the problem? Why not just make it up? Well, the challenge is in inventing new elements while maintaining the tone of Middle-Earth -- it's not the kind of setting where a hex can be populated with 2d12 kobolds -- but at the same time keeping things a bit more interesting than "oh look, more orcs!" I struggled with that challenge -- a hunting expedition for a psychedelic human-owl hybrid thing was, in hindsight, perhaps not in keeping with the good professor's works -- and the GM's book was of little help. Perhaps indicative of the haphazard GM support is the fact that the two introductory adventures -- one in the book and one available online -- are set at opposite ends of Mirkwood, making their integration into a single campaign rather difficult.

All that said, Cubicle 7 have at last announced their plans for expanding the game and it's good to see that they're going to provide some more adventure material, including two campaigns; perhaps when these are released, my group will return to Middle-Earth and give things another go. In the meantime, we're investigating other options while our regular group is disrupted by summer trips and the like, and looking forward, we've decided to try the remake of The Enemy Within when it comes out, albeit with WFRP2, since co-author Graeme Davis says it should be easy to convert back to the older ruleset. I've also got a half-formed inclination to run TSR's classic sword-and-sand Dark Sun setting under Savage Worlds but I often come up with ideas of that sort -- such as an ill-fated attempt to run a Ravenloft game using the SAGA system -- and not all of them make it to the table. I think a bit of post-apocalyptic swords and sandery might be quite fun, so I'm keen to give it a go, unless the boxed set is a complete turn off.