A Toil of Two Worlds

As some who read this blog know, I have for the past few years maintained the Trollhalla web site for my good friend Ken St. Andre in support of his role playing game Tunnels and Trolls (T&T). T&T was the first role playing game I ever played, and will always be one of my favorite RPGs. So why step down as chief wizard? you may ask.

The answer is simple: I am no longer a spring chicken, parts of my body are behaving badly, and there are so many more things I want to do before I kick the bucket. So it’s a matter of where I put my focus, and what my goals are. My focus will now be on Eposic publications and products, and my goals are to have complete creative control in what I do henceforth and to make enough money from Eposic projects to afford to do more Eposic projects. My online  support henceforth will go to Eposic projects and to role playing games in general, rather than to specific RPG brands. The plan is for Eposic to release a new RPG system most favorable to the style of play I enjoy and to the easy creation of online tools and games in support of the new RPG.

Two projects that have special places in my story telling and role playing heart are the worlds of Yurik and Pharas, two worlds of my own creation which have been at the center of nearly all of my role playing campaigns from the mid-70s on. Yurik was the first of these two worlds, and is almost as old as Trollworld itself, as it was the setting for my first T&T campaign, over 30 years ago, near the dawn of RPGs. I ran that campaign for two different groups, for a few years each. Later I ran a portion of it a third time for a D&D gaming buddy so he could compare the styles of play between D&D and T&T (he still liked D&D better, but he’d been playing D&D for as long as I’d been playing T&T, so it’s no great surprise that he continued to like what he’d been doing all along for so many years).

Pharas sprung from a scene in a dream that another friend of mine related one day, a scene which so fired my imagination that I wrote an outline for an as yet unpublished three-book fantasy saga based on elements of that one scene. When my friend read my outline, he said that he didn’t recognize any of it as his dream, but of course my imagination had gone off in its own direction once it got started. That was in the late 70s. In the early 90s, I started an AD&D campaign based in Pharas (for my previously mentioned D&D buddy and other friends); the campaign ran for several years.

After the Pharas campaign ended, I ran a d20 campaign based in Yurik. This campaign lasted for a couple of years and tied together the two worlds. The time came when I moved out of state and had to cut the campaign short, but there was still so much I had planned for the PCs to do. So I came up with an idea for bringing the campaign to a satisfactory close for the players. The last gaming night began with a special story building session, where each of the players had X “plot points” to spend bidding for “situation” cards. I, the GM, had Y plot points to spend (more than X, as I recall, but less than the total plot points the players had amongst them). I wrote up a number of cards describing situations where the outcomes normally would have been determined through the normal course of playing the game, and we each bid on the cards.

Whoever won the bid for a card would spend the points they’d bid and state the outcome of the situation. This was not to say that the players knew whether the outcome they chose would be beneficial to them in the end or not. If a player won the bid, that player had to determine what the most beneficial outcome would be for the group, and choose that outcome.

Of course, if I won the bid, I got to state the outcome, and the players had no idea of what criteria I used to make my decisions. I remember in one instance that I won the bid and chose an outcome that was in the end beneficial for the players, though they at the time thought it was to their detriment. I spent a good deal of my points to control this particular situation, because I wanted them to see how wrong they were about the NPC involved. For me, it was not about “beating” the players, but all about creating a story experience that they would enjoy, would enter with a high degree of tension, and would have a hand in crafting—something memorable.

When the bidding was done and all of the outcomes decided, I collected all of the situation cards, noted their outcomes, and told the players a story. Champions they had only heard of in rumors were rescued or slain, artifacts yet to be found were acquired or destroyed, wars yet to be fought were won or lost, all based on the chosen outcomes from the story building session. What would have taken years for the group at their normal gaming rate to have role played was boiled down to an hour.

This, then, decided the make-up of the NPCs on both sides of the final conflict. The PCs had managed to survive until the end, and now it was time for the showdown. I granted each PC a goodly number of XP to use to represent what they would have earned over the years of gaming that we didn’t play through, and they had fun building up their characters to what they had dreamed for them to eventually become.

The players who were responsible (due to their earlier bids) for certain NPCs being present on their side were allowed to run those NPCs if they so desired. So not only did the players get to play their own high level characters, they also got to play other high level characters with classes different from that of their own PCs. And they got control of whatever artifacts they’d bid on to acquire. It wasn’t the best idea to have the players suddenly jump into the shoes of high level characters loaded down with artifacts, but I’d been interested in running some high level stuff, so I figured this was my chance. I had equipped the bad guys heavily, too.

After all the story telling and character advancement, we had this major battle that took up the remainder of the evening, using miniatures and counters and a large map. I opened some boxes of creature counters I’d made especially for the game, decorated with art licensed from clipart.com, and watched the eyes of the players go wide at all of the monsters they had to defeat. They noticed I had more boxes yet to open.

Of course, quantity isn’t everything. Some of the monsters fell almost as soon as they were placed on the map. Others were quickly determined to be the real threats. Yet others that were serious threats weren’t identified so quickly as such; some of these threats were the sources of additional monsters being summoned to join the fray (and thus the additional boxes of counters).

In the end, the NPC that I’d bid many plot points on shows up and plays a pivotal role in the ending, and the players look at me like Oh, so that’s what she was up to all the time (because the PCs didn’t trust her, but she’d been trying to gain the trust of the bad guys, to make it possible for her to learn what the PCs couldn’t and now needed to know). So the PCs manage to finally defeat the main bad guys. The really evil guy from Pharas is revealed to be behind the main bad guys, in a ploy to take over Yurik, and the PCs are left with knowing that what has transpired here will continue to deceive the really evil guy and make him think that his plans in Yurik have succeeded whereas they have not. And so the really evil guy turns his attentions elsewhere, and Yurik lives in peace. For now.

I’d like to make the worlds of Yurik and Pharas come to life for others. I’m considering publishing fiction based on these worlds, but I also want to bring out a gaming system that will support them and many adventures, both GM-moderated and solo.

As you can perhaps tell from my discourse above, I like games with plots, with a story behind them. But I don’t shy away from huge miniatures battles, either. I think they can each have their place in a great gaming experience. I also like the players and PCs to be involved in directing the plot, because I believe this makes it more enjoyable and memorable for the players.

So these are some of my basic tenets and goals for the RPG that Eposic will release. I have a number of designs that I want to implement in the new game, but not every thing is set in stone. I’ll eventually be looking for play testers, both in a GM-moderated venue and a solitaire venue. It will take some time, and first I am committed to publishing Eposic’s second speculative fiction anthology, Out of Order (based on the theme of reality rearranged, which you may think of as time travel if you must). Once Eposic releases OoO, I’ll be focusing on the new gaming system. At that time, I’ll set up a forum for discussions of the new system. If any of you are interested in taking part, you’re welcome to do so; I’ll give credit where credit is due in the finished product. Stay tuned here on the blog for developments as they occur.