Tuesday, August 11, 2009

An all begger campaign

Jame Maliszewsk is talking about Chaosium's Stormbringer here.

This quote leaps out at me,
Maybe it's final, definitive proof that I'm as mentally deranged as some have claimed, but I think that's one of the more awesome bits of text I've read in any gaming rulebook lately. Makes me want to run an all-beggar mini-campaign set in Nadsokor.
I talked before about but all mage campaign I ran for my Majestic Wilderlands. In this campaign everybody play a magic user with no exception. I ran other campaign where everybody was a thief and where everybody was a member of the city guards. Never did one where everybody was a cleric tho.

If you are committed to running your setting home-brew or published there is no better way of fleshing out your setting's background than to do this. The players will invent all kinds of things during the campaign it will be pure gold to use as background for a later game.

My games were run with GURPS, so it was somewhat easy to come up with characters that were diffeent yet mages. The same for the other two campaigns. Even the fact that a player wanted to play a mage in the thief campaign led to some great background material. I developed this group of illegal mages that call themselves foggers. They were mostly self-taught and oriented towards magics that helped the criminal elements particularly anti-divination spells from what they get their name.

Because Stormbringer is based on the Basic Roleplaying System James should have no trouble in helping his players come up with character that different yet all are still beggars. My recommendation is to look at the elements that make up the World of Elric and ask how would this impact the culture of beggars. Who do they worship, and how do the priest operated. What kind of magic they teach themselves. What their relationship with the established thieves guild. And so on. The answers will enrich the background for the next time he runs a game in that setting.

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