#trade you a silmaril for this mox diamond

[fantasyfantasygames]

Beyond the Shield of Time

Beyond the Shield of Time, Titania, 2005

If you own entirely too many RPGs, Beyond the Shield of Time (BtSoT) wants to leverage that.

The basic premise goes like this: Someone is stealing major artifacts from across a number of worlds. Your characters have been drawn into their "slipstream", pulled from their own world into a new one where the thief is their only way home. The game hops from world to world as you track down the villain, they escape you, you fall through another portal, and you slowly gain what you need to get ahead of them. Eventually, you confront them and their secret is revealed, and the game ends soon thereafter.

The coolest and most difficult part of BtSoT is that it's not a game. It's a framework for running a campaign across multiple games. They provide a semi-universal character description template that works across a wide variety of fantasy RPGs, and you reference that in order to make new characters in each world you fall into. Your characters are changed in the process - someone built as an assassin in Burning Wheel might end up as a bard in Dark Sun D&D, because that's the role that bards have in that setting.

BtSoT has guidelines for conversion from their template into D&D (Rules Cyclopedia, 2e, and 3e), Burning Wheel, Dark Hammer, MERP, WFRP 1e, GURPS, HERO, and a handful of others. There are examples of suitable artifacts in each one, from the Silmarils to the Eye of Vecna. It's a shame Glasswork wasn't published for another two years, because it would have been a perfect world to pop through. It has recommendations for what other games will work well with this system and which won't. I appreciate that BtSoT isn't one of those books that claims to be universal even within the fantasy genre. For instance, it excludes Exalted on purpose rather than by accident, for reasons of power level. It's going to be a lot of work between sessions, but I feel like it would be a hell of a cool game. Then again, I'm the guy who's reviewed almost 100 games so far, so, grain of salt.

The art is fairly good. I think it might be Storn? There's more than one piece with the heroes walking through a portal and coming out changed, with two different worlds on the opposing sides of the page. There's another that's very reminiscent of the "Frodo reaching for the ring" image, but with a Dark Sun halfling reaching for what is still clearly the One Ring.

I feel like the reveal of the secret doesn't 100% work any more. Social values and expectations have changed since 2001, and people are familiar with different cultural touchstones. Much as I love the Amber setting (which is half of the reveal), I'd probably want to rewrite the ending for a more modern audience.

Titania was one of the first game designers to publish as herself (or even a pseudonym) rather than as a company name. Even Monte Cook was still "Monte Cook Games" rather than just his name. Now that's basically the standard if you're in the younger bracket of game designers. There were some rumors that Titania left the industry, but there have been some more recent books with her trademark writing style, so I think she's still out there somewhere.