Blog, Jvstin Style

Role Call: DIY

This week James asks:
Can you summarize two campaign concepts you'd create for player with identical tastes to your own?

I am with Ginger on this one, I tend to create games that I myself want to play in, as I have noted previously..

So, just about any of my unfinished game ideas would be perfect for a player with identical tastes to myself.

So, I will dig back to the old blog on mindspring, and present a couple of the ideas that I've mentioned in the past. I'll just post it here rather than linking to it.

Status Quo Ante Bellum

It's an alternate Amber, where the War turned out somewhat differently. During the attack on Chaos, when Amber's forces were at the Courts, a expeditionary force from one of the aquaphilic Chaosian Houses made a bold strike on Amber...specifically on Rebma. Moire was killed, LLewella has fled, and these Chaosians now rule Rebma.
The War has ended, and Amber has demanded, as part of the peace treaty, a status quo ante bellum...a return to the way things were, before the War. However, the Chaosians in Rebma refuse to leave. What's more, not everyone in Rebma is unhappy at the change in administration either, especially the males, since the new Chaosian overlords do not like the matriarchial system of Rebma and have begun making moves toward more egalitarianism. Plus, Rebma was very much the dependency of Amber before the War, and the new rulers want Rebma to be a free and independent power of its own.
So...Amber is unhappy at this state of affairs, LLewella herself hosting a "Rebman government in exile", Chaos is unhappy at these renegades, and Rebma itself is fractured between those who like the new Rebma and its promises of becoming an independent state, and those who want things to return to the way they were. A game heavy on intrigue, spying, and diplomacy, the player characters could be from one of any number of factions, or pretending to be with their own hidden agendas.

Borders of Eternity

Inspired at first by Arref's successful creation of the Empire of the Gleaming Banner, the opening image is what drew me to this and its stayed with me since. One of the player characters, on a private secluded beach in shadow, a shadow no one else in their family knows about, finds a set of footprints where none should be. Not Amberian, not Chaosian...someone else.
In its most epic and ambitious form, this would be a three sided game with characters from the three poles of the universe...Amber, Chaos and the third pole, hitherto unknown, in a direction perpendicular to Amber and Chaos both. My mental modeling of this third world is a quartet of shadows influenced heavily by Elizabeth Willey's books. They have a quartet of elemental powers, scions of them able to travel shadow, and an even match for Pattern and Logrus masters and mistresses. They are just as real.
What happens in the contacts between these worlds? Intrigue, adventure, conflict, and exploring new worlds and lands. Expanding one's vision of just how large the universe is. Finding the borders of Eternity.

And there are other ideas out there, too, that I have not detailed, in other genres as well. But I will hold here, today

Posted by Jvstin at August 4, 2003 1:31 PM