Virtue: A Homebrew Alignment Variant
There’s an RPG blog carnival going on, and the topic is homebrew. It’s certainly a broad topic. To some extent, every campaign is homebrew. Even if you try to run completely by the book, avoiding house rules, there are still rules interpretations to be made. The interpretations of your table are not going to be the same as the interpretations made by another GM. Roleplaying is an inherently creative activity, and even in a game sticking entirely to published sources — the official rulebooks and official modules and official everything else — differences of interpretation and of player character action and personality are going to lead to differences in play.
This is, I think, the biggest strength of roleplaying. You can play Monopoly or Risk by the book, and it will be the same experience every time. You can run through Keep on the Shadowfell as published, and it will be subtly different every time, because every GM will need to interpret and improvise, and they’ll do so in different ways.
We all homebrew.
Categories: My Campaigns, Original Game Content | Comments (3)
My Elves are… Odd
In an earlier post, I discussed the fact that my dwarves are based roughly on Greek and Roman culture. Among the comments, I mentioned that my elves were a little more nonstandard. Which leads, naturally, to this post.
If nothing else, this is spurring me to update my setting to fourth edition.
I like to draw from real-world societies when defining my nonhuman cultures; it tends to make it easier for the players to grasp them. The elves of Galadria are one of the stranger groups, though. They’re based partly on Native American plains cultures, with flavor drawn from medieval northern Europe and Russia as well.
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My Dwarves are Roman
Well, actually, they’re not. They’re more like a Greek-Roman hybrid.
The stereotypical dwarves these days are vaguely Scottish; prior to that, Germanic-flavored dwarves were in vogue. But mine are inspired by ancient Greece and Rome.
I bring this up because of a recent post at Unclebear regarding the “vanilla”-ness of D&D settings. I disagreed with Berin’s implication that the restrictions on worldbuilding were intrinsic to the D&D system — I believe that such limitations are intrinsic to any system that goes beyond pure storytelling. Systems are made up of assumptions. Some, like the HERO system, make those assumptions primarily in the mechanics; without such assumptions, it’s impossible to model anything. Most assume more about the setting.
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Encountering the Raven Queen
Previously, I looked at some mythological inspirations for D&D’s Raven Queen and considered how those elements might be useful to construct the Raven Queen in-game. There are certainly many possible ways of doing so, given how little there is in the rulebooks about her, but I’ve arrived at something that will work for at least one campaign.
Now it’s time to consider how to use the character as I’ve defined her in that campaign.
Heroic Tier
In the heroic tier, my PCs will probably not have any direct interactions with the gods, or even with direct representatives of the gods. I’ve played in, and run, campaigns where such interaction did occur, but I feel that this is the exception, rather than the norm. I’ll assume a “typical” campaign, if there is such a thing.
Therefore, at heroic levels, the PCs’ main interaction with the Raven Queen will come in the form of interaction with her worshippers and priests. Among the obvious possibilities:
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Defining the Raven Queen
In yesterday’s post, I briefly examined some mythical entities that might serve as inspirations to those who intend to give the Raven Queen a prominent role in their campaigns. Today’s post presents a more fleshed-out, in-game model of the Raven Queen and her domain. Almost none of this is official in any way, of course, but I hope it will prove useful, or at least interesting.
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The being now known as the Raven Queen is the second-oldest entity in the universe. In the moment of the first entity’s creation, death became a possibility, and from that possibility the Raven Queen was born. She became the consort of this entity, of whom little is known other than the titles found in rare and obscure texts: the King Most Ancient or the King of Moments. And when that King died, his passing tore the universe in two, creating the Elemental Chaos and the Astral Sea from what had come before. From the failing sparks of the King’s being arose the first gods and the first primordials.
It’s little known that the Raven Queen is not, properly speaking, a goddess at all. She predates gods and primordials alike, and in many ways she possesses more in common with the latter, those creatures who arose from the Elemental Chaos. When the primordials formed the world, the Raven Queen was among them; it was she who first began to remove the darkest areas, setting into motion the creation of the Shadowfell, the dark echo of the first world.
Categories: My Campaigns, Myth Direction, Original Game Content | Comments (16)
