Campaign Pitch: Djinni Unchained

As May draws to a close I have decided to squeeze in a post for this month's RPG Blog Carnival, hosted over at the always entertaining Age of Ravens. This month's carnival topic is games that you would like to run, so now is as good a time as any for me to do another campaign pitch.

Al-Qadim was always one of WotC/TSR's more interesting settings and it has been heartbreaking to watch it get left to languish in a dusty old corner of the Forgotten Realms. I was happy to see that Paizo touched on the setting briefly with the off-brand Legacy of Fire, but they have since moved away from there to focus on other parts of Golarion. I bring this up because I have long wanted to do an Arabian Nights style fantasy campaign. Desert and middle eastern inspired settings have been overlooked in my gaming circles and I think it would be a lot of fun to play in my own spin on the setting and mix in some old published adventure modules.

Digital Art by João Paulo

Djinni Unchained

My Arabian Nights campaign would start with a bang or, rather, a puff of smoke (bang sold separately) when an old bottle falls off a shelf in a dungeon and shatters on the floor. This, of course, frees whatever was trapped inside the container. In this case the bottle contained our group of player characters which, due to a clumsily worded wish in the past, have been sitting in a bottle for a hundred years.

The PC's will need to climb their way out of the bottom of a dungeon and when they reach the surface they will find the world has radically changed in their absence. The Djinn they accidentally freed has been running rampant across the country, passing out twisted wishes left and right and freeing his magical brethren. Wishes are common place and feared by all. A wish uttered in exasperation could end in disaster and many avaricious men have tried to take advantage of unrestrained wishing, often to their own downfall.

 What will the heroes do in this new world? Will they journey the fantastic desert palace of the djinn they switched places with? Will they set out to explore the new world and right the twisted wishes along the way?

I don't know the answers to those questions, but I do want to find out.

How I'd Run It

This would be a sandbox game. 100 years of indiscriminate wish granting could make for a very unusual world for a group of heroes to explore. I also think there is a strong chance that the party would be motivated by revenge and will seek to take down the djinn that condemned them to a lifetime of prison. Even if they aren't, I think much of the game will involve recapturing djinni and saving people from their wishes.

This would definitely be a campaign with a heroic mood and I would pull a lot of from the source material that inspires an Arabian Nights setting. There would be a lot of magic, but it would be unpredictable and rarely in the control of the heroes.

What Game Would I Use?

Dungeon World, probably; however, any edition of D&D or D&D style game would do the trick. Maybe it would be fun to dust off AD&D 2e and go full Al-Qadim. I might also take the campaign as an opportunity to run one of the few RPGs designed for an Arabian Nights setting and I think Legend of the Burning Sands would be at the top of that list. I would be also be interested in trying 1001 Nights, but I don't think it is the right game for the style of play I imagine this campaign having.

Categories: Age of Ravens, Al-Qadim, Arabian Nights, Campaign Pitch, Dungeon World, Legacy of Fire, RPG Blog Carnival

The Pale Forest (My 2012 RPG Geek 24 RPG)

The dust has settled and this year's 24 Hour RPG Competition at RPG Geek is now over. I threw my hat into the ring this time around with a game called The Pale Forest, but with 37 other great entries I didn't expect to win (and I didn't). That honour goes to the much more popular (and presumably handsome) RPG blogger Lowell Francis.

If you are unfamiliar with the special kind of "fun" that is the 24 hour RPG, let me explain it to you. A bunch of crazy game designers get together and decide that it would be a good idea to create a game with no prior work and no outside help in just 24 hours. There is no stopping the clock, once you start you have exactly 24 hours to finish the thing. It's a mad dash and a lot of fun provided you have a masochistic streak.

This was my first time entering a 24 hour RPG competition and I really didn't put as much of the 24 hours into it as I would have liked. I think my break down was 1-2 hours brainstorming, 3 hours designing and then throwing away my first idea, 3 hours on my second idea and 1 hour layout. Then probably another 1-2 hours of  hanging out in the official thread and otherwise procrastinating when I should have been working. All things said, I probably spent 10 of my 24 hours actually at my computer "working" on the game.

You can view/download The Pale Forest here.

My cover design skills aren't great, but this
one was terrible even by my standards.

Now that the contest is over I'm allowed to talk about my game a little. It's not actually against the rules to do so, but there's a kind of gentleman's agreement not to for fear of influencing voters. Here are some rapid-fire thoughts on The Pale Forest:

• I went with a kind of mad-libs style of character creation, mainly because I couldn't think of a way to marry character creation with game play. I'm not particularly happy with it.
• The big mechanical idea I wanted to play with was a built in time limit and a mechanical resources that run out. I accomplished this with a spindown die that represents health/gear/sanity and so on. It decreases with each scene and action and players gamble it to overcome obstacles. I think there is more that can be done with the idea, but I'd need more than 24 hours to truly make it work. I'm really interested in the feedback on this one.
• I was also interested in experimenting with gambling as a mechanic and I tried to tie that with the resources. I like the idea that players set their own risk/reward as it frees things for the GM and makes for an unpredictable game.
• When the aforementioned resource runs out something bad happens. I think the game is going to be rather CoC-esque in that there is rarely a happy ending.
• The game is very freeform with the only guidance being in random tables and a few paragraphs of exposition. With the mad-lib character creation someone should be able to get it up and playing in less than 10 minutes. I'm worried that there might not be enough guidance, but an experienced GM should be able to accomplish a lot with just the random tables and the way the gambling/resource mechanic works.

I don't think that I will be returning to this game to flesh it out and otherwise improve it. The reason? I don't really like it. I like the setting and I like the ideas that birthed the game, but I don't really like the result. I will continue to experiment with gambling mechanics with Rollplay Engine and I'm not convinced that a limited resource really works in an RPG without giving it more teeth and turning it into a competitive or very short game.

If you do end up reading or trying The Pale Forest please let me know how it goes. I am always curious about people's experiences and I haven't even had a chance to play the game myself.

Categories: 24 hour rpg, Age of Ravens, Game Design, RPG Geek, The Pale Forest