#and to think there’s a chance I’m one of the first people to play grick music live during a concert is so crazy

[sheepb1t]

Still so happy that I got to play The Night Ends for my orchestra :) I insisted on drawing the thumbnail for the video too of course (will hopefully update this video with a link at a later date tee hee)

[i-just-like-commenting]

Blue Rose RPG second edition: the Narrator’s section

So I have administrative privileges to make an event to start running a Blue Rose series, and after reading the final Narrator’s section of the guidebook, I feel as though I’m ready to. I’ve even made a minor financial investment in it to try to make my decision more permanent by buying the gorgeous tarot deck designed Stephanie Pui-Mun Law, the cover artist for the guidebook:

You use the tarot cards for more than just randomizing personality traits; the book suggests using it as inspiration for coming up with plot ideas, as you can randomize events from a table they give as well. This of course also allows you to use tarot in-universe as “The Royal Road” by matching up events and character insights to cards if a character with a Visionary Talent gets their hands on a deck.

Indeed, this section is full of helpful hints on how to run the game while at the same time leaving a lot up to the Narrator to figure out. Dungeons and Dragons, for example, will give you lists of hazards with their respective challenge ratings and all the stats that you need to face each encounter – which of course lets them sell extra sourcebooks for different climates, says my cynical side. For Blue Rose, though, you’re basically given the numbers for varying degrees of difficulty, how to do one-time versus ongoing tests, and after that it’s up to you to decide how challenging whatever obstacle is you place in your players’ path. Ditto on monsters, who are lumped into the broad categories of minor, moderate, major, and dire rather than getting challenge ratings, a change from the first edition where creatures had “levels.”

Above all, the most interesting thing is how much it encourages you to cheat. This was a philosophy of narration in the first edition as well; since story is paramount, you’re supposed to bend the rules to make things dramatically satisfying. Did somebody just roll something terrible trying to make a jump to a cliff? Well, you could make them randomly fall to their death, but if you reading that in a book, you’d hate that stupid twist. Better to leave them hanging by their fingertips and give their companions a chance to rescue them. Don’t let NPCs be the ones to deal the final blow to monsters, even if their dice roll let them; avoid letting characters die unless it’s suitably heroic or tragic.

Another big part of the Narrator section is made of ideas for campaigns. The most basic setup is called “For Aldis and the Queen!” where you’re all members of the Sovereign’s Finest going around on missions for the good of the country. Other setups include: being a set of travelers who keep running into trouble as they go from land to land; a coming of age story where your protagonists begin very young; a “Game of Thorns” setup (get it? because roses?) where the focus is on political factions vying for power; playing a team of knights with disabilities; and several ideas that involve the power of Shadowgates that I don’t want to spoil should your Narrator ever choose them.

But let’s face it, for all the story stuff, as an RPGer you’re probably most interested in the other parts of the Narrator section: the stuff you can get and the enemies you can face.

Rewards and Intentional Vagueness

Many RPGs have fairly lengthy lists of special items that you can find in your quests. Blue Rose has never been like this, because again it’s more story than game. In this edition, rewards are divided into five categories. By your actions you earn special bonuses as an honor, titles that you give you status in your society but no gameplay bonuses, memberships in societies that you can advance through, companions who are loyal to you whether human or animal, and stuff.

Stuff can be further divided into ceremonial, masterwork, and arcane items. Ceremonial items aren’t a part of the gameplay, and they usually come along with titles and memberships. Masterwork items are a series of bonuses that the Narrator can add to weapons or armor. There are also rules for how to make masterwork items, as well as how difficult they can be.

This is not the case with arcane items, of which the most common are simply listed. No information on how much they cost or how difficult they are to make. This latter is a little frustrating because the Artificer Talent allows adepts with focuses in Artisan and Craftsmanship to make elixirs, stones, and weapons, in that order, as they advance through levels. Presumably this is a measure of their difficulty to make, but that also means that by only level eight you could be making crystons, which are pretty much laser guns. If they were that simple, wouldn’t they be ubiquitous, rather than rare as they are in the world guide?

What’s missing, I suppose, is the difficulty of each item within a category. Crystons are presumably much harder to make, even for a master artificer, than a general arcane weapon that overcome certain resistances. Otherwise, though, it falls to the Narrator to make up the rules, perhaps using the masterwork item guidelines as a model. I don’t need everything spelled out for me, but even just a designation of “easy” or “difficult” to give me a rough idea of the challenge rating would be nice.

Wealth has been eliminated in this edition. In the first edition, you had a wealth score that went up as you advanced and presumably had more access to funds. Now, as with equipment, the Narrator gets to choose whether something is reasonable for a character to afford given on their background. You can give wealth as bonuses (the world guide has a box on money in different kingdoms) but it argues that in general it’s more fun to give people something tangible, like a masterwork weapon or a horse or even land and a manor to use as a base.

Bestiary and the Need for Expansion

The other element I find rather lacking in this book is the bestiary in the back. This was somewhat true of the first edition as well, but it’s even more pronounced here. I know that the game isn’t driven by battling monsters, but I have more other reasons for wishing it had a few more creatures to incorporate into stories. Fortunately they are ways of creating creatures yourself. I’ll talk about all this after giving a quick look at the bestiary as it stands.

The original Blue Rose bestiary was very much a D&D clone following the SRD, featuring D&D-original creatures like assassin vines, shamblers, treants, ettercaps, chokers, chuuls, gricks, and otyughs. A lot of the other creatures who derived from mythology strongly resembled their D&D counterparts, and included the very D&D category of “aberrations.”

The D&D influence is still there in the second edition, but they’ve tried to make it a little bit more their own this time around. Most of the D&D-originals are gone, albeit not all, and there has been re-categorization as well, with aberrations going out the window.

The first category of creature are beasts, which is to say animals, mostly non-sentient. They’re included to give you a few more options for making rhydan, to be animal companions or familiars, and to be converted into other monsters through add-ons and templates. Most of these are real world animals with the exception of winged cats called “falcats” and drakes, miniature dragons who are sentient but mute and not psychic like rhydan. Their giant squids are also a little more like legendary (not D&D) krakens then an Architeuthis.

Rhydan are their own separate category, and the bestiary lists the most common rhydan as well as the two species that have no non-sentient counterparts, griffons and unicorns. Unlike in the first edition, whales and falcats are no longer considered automatically rhydan; in fact, whales aren’t even in the bestiary.

After this are nature spirits, where you find elementals. Elementals are the main thing you summon with the “Summon Spirits” spell if you’re not evil (if you are, it’s darkfiends). There are the four basic kinds (air, earth, fire, and water) from the first edition (and D&D) but now there is also a fifth, the wood elemental, that’s a bit like a treant or a shambler. The big addition, though, are the fae. Sprites, revelers, and nobles all come in different varieties, although there’s only one model for each that you can tweak depending on what you want your faeries to be like.

After this are shadowspawn, the corrupt creations of the Sorcerer Kings. This category includes one or two creatures formerly classified as aberrations. Ettercaps, troglodyes, and mongrels (who resemble gnolls) are presented as the most typical forms of “beastfolk,” with the Narrator allowed to make up their own versions as well. The other main change here is including all the creatures that were scattered in the two supplements: chaos beasts, mock hounds, white howlers, and wyverns.

Worse than shadowspawn are the unliving, aka the undead. Here the D&D influence is pretty strong in the naming, though less so in the creatures themselves. If you assume a lich or a ghoul or a specter is going to be exactly like its D&D namesake, you will be in for some surprises. Zombies have been renamed the walking dead for whatever reason, whether to capitalize on the show or get away from the negative stereotypes of vodou.

Finally, darkfiends serve as the demons of the series. Stats are given for watchers, soldiers, and whisperers, but servitors (a dire threat) are left for Narrators to construct themselves from scratch. Each servitor is supposed to be unique based on the Exarch they derive from. The end of the bestiary gives a number of stat-mods that you can give to creatures of all kinds to make them more dangerous or just unique, which also presents the tantalizing possibility of making your own creatures.

Because there are two reasons why I think there’s not enough creatures in this book. First, there could really stand to be more animals. This includes creatures you’d find in Aldis, like deer or badgers, but it’s especially lacking for tropical creatures like you’d find in Lar’tya or Wyss. Where are my tigers, jaguars, antelope, elephants, tapirs, and monkeys? You can’t give us two regions with rain forests and not give us creatures to inhabit them!

On a more personal note, though, you know that tarot deck that I bought and love? It has a number of creatures that don’t appear in the book. The guide literally recommends that we use this deck as a representative for the Royal Road, the religious iconography of the Faenari, and yet the creatures don’t match? Okay, granted, I can believed that the horned lions and phoenixes might have been native to Faenaria and went extinct in the disaster that turned it into the Shadow Barrens. But merfolk? I would love merfolk to live further out in the deeps, related to the sea folk yet separate from them.

And dragons. The absence of dragons was even worse in the first edition where drakes are called “pocket dragons”…only there are no dragons for them to be compared to! Wyverns exist, and are evil, but there are no true dragons. Perhaps they’re legends, a rhydan species that existed in the time of the Old Kingdom but supposedly were wiped out like the vatazin…only for our heroes to discover the last of them?

I’m biased because I like dragons, and always have. I’m addicted to A Song of Ice and Fire, sure, but it goes back way before that, to Pern, to Earthsea, to the Enchanted Forest, to Austar IV. My fantasy (and sci-fi) has dragons, damn it, and I was Blue Rose to have some too, somewhere. Not D&D style dragons, who come with a multitude of magical powers, including the ability to change shape, but the dragons I grew up on. I just have to figure out how to make them using what the book gives me, probably starting with wyverns as a template and assuming they are corrupted versions of that.

Final Words

The module at the end of the book was what pushed me over the edge of wanting to run a series. Not only is it easy to follow and use, it reminded me of how much fun it is to do this kind of game, even just reading it. I’m psyched to return to Aldea, and to introduce new people tot it.