Real 8: Bioforge and Willpower Month

After hiking through a snow swept winterscape of pine and birch trees our beleaguered, lazy college physique sporting party of extra dimensional wanderers spies a plume of smoke rising from the forest to the west. Keane is ready to spring into action, always eager to save those in danger in real life as well as in his teleported alter-self. Sam, his girlfriend, is not having it. He can’t go risk himself like that he could die. Keane runs off anyway, accompanied by Billy, Scott, and Ashley. Will, Sam, Liz, Jacob, and Annika stay on the path because Will got saddled with a severe penalty to long distance travel. And short distance travel. And all travel. Asthma’s a bitch.

The party of four comes upon a woodcutter’s house ablaze! Coughing from inside reveals a man trapped beneath a fallen support beam. Keane’s not supposed to do anything dangerous. Billy either. Scott is sensible. Ashley is there for moral support. So what do they do?

Of course Billy and Keane run into the building. Where did you think this was going? Keane hefts the beam up with an incredible Strength roll. Billy hauls the trapped woodcutter, Carver, out into the snow while Keane catches up. They cough up huge lungfuls of smoke and watch the small cabin smolder and turn to ash. Keane’s gonna be in so much trouble when Sam finds out …

This is all inside a game, remember that. The real life player was upset at her real life boyfriend for risking his in game self to rescue a woodcutter. Some people would mock a person for doing that. I wanted to reward it.

The thing that made us all really interested in devoting portions of our time and lives to this Real 8 experiment was the idea of playing ourselves and getting to explore a unique fantasy world while our actual, real life skills would guide us and give us the tools needed to continue ever onward.

I gotta tell you, folks, people got into it. People forgot that they were playing a game as soon as their lives were on the line. Not on the line for reals. On the line for fakes.

In the entire six month span of playing Real 8 we got into exactly 1 fight. We avoided fights, we provoked armored guards into taking a fight for us, and we intimidated bandits through clever use of archery and in-world lore that we had picked up. We did not want to fight. We did not want to die.

This all ties into the rule system that my friend and player Keane helped devise for the Real 8 setting. He called it Bioforge. Basically, we would analyze our abilities out of game and use them to generate the statistics we would need to figure things out.

Let me explain the system a bit further.

There are 8 Ability scores in Real 8:

Strength (how hard I hit and how much I can carry)

Dexterity (how skilled I am with my hands and with small scale tasks)

Agility (how skilled I am with my body *wink* and large scale tasks)

Constitution (how much physical energy I have and how much can I resist attacks)

Intelligence (how much I know and how easy it is for me to process new information)

Wisdom (how much I perceive and can infer from prior knowledge and my surroundings)

Charisma (how strong my personality is and how it affects others)

Willpower (how much mental energy I have and how much can I resist mental attacks)

These scores are on a range from 1-20. If your score is 1 you are the least possibly skilled in this ability. You aren’t dead but you’re not going to ever win any awards or impress anyone. If your score is 5 you are an average human being. It is expected that most people would have this score. If your score is 10 you are an exceptional human being that must put a lot of time and effort into this ability, to the point that you are at a peak in regards to this ability.

The range of 11-20 was reserved for monsters, mutated creatures, and any creature that had been altered by alchemy or magic. No person was ever supposed to be able to reach those scores without help from magical means. Let me give you a real life example:

A bodybuilder that does everything right, eats the correct mixture of macros to get their protein intake perfect, exercises daily and does a beautiful job targeting muscle groups, should have a 10 in Strength. A bodybuilder that does Steroids should be able to get higher than this. A bodybuilder that has a wizard work on their muscles daily to cause safe growth should get pretty dang close to a 20.

But we’re regular humans that don’t take steroids and, before entering the world of Real 8, didn’t have magic. Most of us were pretty sedentary. So we all knew our ability scores would be somewhere in the range of 3-8. We just needed a way to test this.

So we devised a series of tests. I’m going to go in-depth on 1 of the tests but I’ll explain them all.

Strength: We wanted to figure out how much weight a person could lift and carry for a period of time but we never had a chance to test this so we all just did Maximum numbers of the following exercises and Keane did some math for us to get good numbers: Squats, Sit-ups, Push-ups, Pull-ups. We did our best to estimate numbers. We weren’t perfect. Stop judging us!

Dexterity: I was really pleased with the test I designed for this one. I was going to fill a bowl with various sized beads, around 50, and your task was to use a pair of pliers to move the 50 beads to a nearby bowl. Then, once the beads had been transferred, you would switch hands and move them back. Both of these would be timed, giving you a clear indication of how dextrous your two hands were. We never got to do it! But I totally still want to do it.

Agility: Timed obstacle course. Never happened. We did visit one of those Trampoline centers where you can bounce around and they had a trampoline obstacle course that we all ran. We mostly learned that we all get tired really easily and are out of shape. We also learned that foam pits suck.

Constitution: We actually did this test! But we got bad data from it. We played the same track of Mario Kart sober, slightly tipsy, and drunk and recorded our times and how much alcohol we consumed to see how the alcohol affected our systems. We all got better at Mario Kart the drunker we got. So … bad data. Should have gone with the tear gas option one of my military buddies suggested. Would have worked so much better.

Intelligence: I was going to write a multiple choice test based on a 20 page packet of world information the party would have gotten while spending time at the big magical University we wound up at. The players would have had a week to prepare for the test. I never wrote the packet. Nobody bugged me about it. It just fell apart. We all agreed to take the average score for intelligence because we didn’t want to fight about it anymore.

Wisdom: I’m very proud of this test. My co-writer on this blog used to work at the local game store so we had access to it overnight. I chose 8 large landmark type items in the store and told everyone to memorize their locations. Then, one at a time, a person would be blindfolded, spun around in the middle of the store, and told to touch one of those items. The idea was to test our ability to perceive our environment and remember the locations of objects. It worked pretty good! We got good data!

Charisma: Our group had the largest fight over this score. I wanted everyone to make a prepared speech that would be judged by three other party members and then make up an impromptu speech on the spot after being given a topic. Everyone was … on board but not enthusiastic. Never got scheduled. Never got done. Life happened.

Willpower: This test not only happened but gave us the best data, in my humble opinion. We decided to really test our Willpower by doing it over the course of a month. Last August, every member of the group agreed to give up Recreational Internet use and Videogames. This means no streaming services, no Tumblr or Reddit, no Facebook, nothing that required an internet connection and was fun. We could still check email and if our work required it we could use the internet but for one month we had to record every infraction. It worked amazingly! A lot of us kicked some addictive habits, some of us got crazy productive with projects, some of us even got healthier. It was nuts. We definitely hated it a bit but it was good for us in the long run. Some notable things that happened:

Scott: Scott’s fiance wasn’t involved in our Willpower month so he broke constantly to play video games with her. We didn’t judge him for that. He just got a low Willpower score.

Keane: Didn’t break at all. Zero infractions. Amazing.

Billy: Most major infraction was that Google Chrome dinosaur game where your internet isn’t working and you jump over cactuses. He forgot it was Willpower month and played for a full minute.

At the end of all of our science and dedication we really only had good data on 2 scores, bad data on a couple scores, and 0 data on most scores. We self-assessed and ran with it to get the game moving and that turned out to be for the best. We just needed to play and get out of our heads about how much science should be involved in making a game fun.

So if you are reading this and are interested in game design and game creation then I hope you take this lesson to heart. If you have dedicated friends that are willing to help you, cut them some slack after they willingly give up internet and video games for an entire month to help your tabletop gaming experiment.

Remember to pledge a little bit of support if you like the blog! Thank you everybody!

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Game of Tones

Our party of wayward, island hopping swashbucklers has arrived at the city and island of Severanthor. After week long voyage they wish to know the interesting sights and sounds of the island. But before they can hear about the wonders they spot trouble on the coastline! Kua-Toa slavers are dragging people out of the docks, wrapping them in rope, and taking them back to the sea.

They load into their small sailboat and thanks to a bit of wind magic are hurtling toward the shore at breakneck speeds. The hull hits the shallow sands and the party’s orc flies off toward the Kua-Toa for dramatic, acrobatic action!

They fight off the Kua-Toa and save the people. Heroes are rewarded a small purse of gold and the people return to their lives as though nothing had happened. Then I get the chance to tell them about Severanthor.

A city of seven temples, built in a spoke-wheel fashion with one temple in the center and the other six on the outer edges. Elven terrorists are being hunted throughout the city by Dragonborn special forces. There are rumors of a powerful lich living in the city.

The party is amazed! What a rich and vibrant place. Thank goodness they think so. I made all of that up while they were fighting the Kua-Toas.

I am very much an improvisational Dungeon Master and I learned that I preferred that style of gameplay after my first campaign. Like many foolish youths in college I believed that my ideas and stories were perfect and that everyone was blessed to have a chance to hear them play out. I realized, fairly quickly, that unless I was writing a 14-book series about dark fighting light that I was wrong.

I suffered from railroading issues. Driving the players from event to event, city to city, encounter to encounter, without really giving them a chance to choice. I gave them the illusion of choice, sure, but nothing ever substantial.

My second successful campaign was a healthy mix. I made it clear to the party that they were being sent on missions for a faction they belonged to and that those missions had a goal but they were free to choose what to do and how to do it within that context. It led to some of the most amazing gaming sessions I have ever experienced. Most of them have already been recounted on this very blog.

My third successful campaign was player driven. I sat down with only the knowledge of the world in my head. We made characters and through that I realized a good place to drop them would be a gangster controlled island where slavery was prominent. They rose up and freed slaves, took advantage of foolish tavern patrons to acquire a ship, and headed for the high seas to find adventure and plunder. I did zero planning between sessions. I made everything up as it happened.

The city of Severanthor, a place they came to love and explore, was created because of a few rolls on the city creator in the Dungeon Master’s Guide for 5th edition. They had a few intense sessions there, some battles with elven barbarians, and left for the promise of treasure elsewhere.

Improvising that much turned out to be kind of stressful, though. I started to get worried that I wouldn’t be able to come up with new and interesting things on the spot. I needed a solution to this problem and it presented itself when the co-author of this blog and I remembered that we like dragons.

The title of this blog entry is about to make sense, I promise.

Work gets in the way of creative enterprise. Whether you’re teaching students history they don’t care about or answering phones and fixing the problems of people who actually do have access to Google to search their own shit, work keeps creativity from being expressed and expanded on easily.

My co-author and I accidently started playing writing games via text message (Game of Tones!) while at work. Through the wonders of a list I am going to introduce you to those writing games!

• Dragon Creator: Make some strange, garbled syllables. Type them out. Fix some of the vowels and the flow so that it looks like a reasonable dragon name. Like Vixrathes or Casrothrang. Got a good dragon name? Awesome. Choose a descriptive word, location, item it hoards, or whatever. Vixrathes, Playing Cards. Casrothrang, Deep Forest Cave. Here’s an example one:
• Authzavan is a trickster dragon, often taking the form of an ancient old elf woman. In this form, she sells magic monkey paw candles at markets that cause mischief, disappearing as soon as the market closes. She does, however, actually possess real useful magical candles and if you venture to her hut deep in her swamp island, you can barter with her. (I'm totally picturing old crotchety Toph)
• Dungeon Creator: Give your writing friend a location for your dungeon and a kind of dungeon that they need to write about. Like an Underground Lost City. Or a Jungle Temple. Then they have to provide you with a description of the dungeon, the main boss, and a weird feature. You won’t be able to run the dungeon in the next hour but you’ll have a good enough idea that you could make it a full fledged one in the future. Here’s an example:
• Description: at the base of the world's tallest mountain pilgrims meet to attempt a dangerous climb up the mountain slopes. A stairway was carved there eons ago but no one knows by whom. Most pilgrims make it to the first landing of the steps before ominous warnings turn them back. Climbers are constantly assaulted by snow storms, ice elementals, and the reanimated bodies of those who have died on the slopes.
  Main boss: at the top of the stairs is a humble temple where an abandoned Angel has waited for someone to challenge them for a relic that allows the bearer to speak to the gods. The angel is joined by a series of angelic hounds.
  Halfway up the mountain magic will create a physical representative of every persons worst fear to make them turn back.
  Weird feature: a Pilgrim that nearly made the journey but was driven mad stalks the stairway, hunting pilgrims it deems strong enough to make it to the top.
• Set Piece Generator: This one started as an item creation game but evolved to include locations and NPCs. You provide your writing friend with the basic description of an object and they have to come up with why it looks the way it does and how it is a magical item or a part of a D&D style world. Same with people or locations. I’m gonna give you two examples:
• Your set piece: a cursed dagger with a vine motif handle that wraps around the user's wrist and will continue to grow up the arm. The dagger is a relic of an ancient tribe or forest people who were slowly being wiped out by a werewolf curse. Their greatest sorcerer created the knife to protect the user from the curse but it came with a curse of its own, driving the user to become one with the forest. The curse can be fought but eventually the bearer will be driven to return the dagger to the final Glade of the forest people where it was found. At that point they will realize that all the nearby trees are actually the former dagger bearers who have become entombed in vines forever. The dagger itself is powerful, dealing double damage to lycanthropes. It can be thrown and returned because it is attached to the vines that have rooted into the bearers arm. The longer the dagger is held the more benefits given. Natural armor, resistance to poison, and eventually healing through sunlight. But it is a death sentence no one has lifted yet. The dagger is found by the party in the depths of a dungeon where its last user was liked before it could take him back to the forest.
• Your set piece: an antique Bell from a sailing ship that emits the most alluring sound when rung. Some would say too alluring. Decorated along the bell are waves and shoals and cliffs with just the hint of something hiding among them. The captain of the ship was a lovely selkie and the gift was given to her by her family to both remind her of her home (hoping to convince her to come back home) and give her safe passage around unfriendly sea beasts with its calming tones. It was so effective that many captains hired the selkie to guide their ships through the most dangerous areas of the sea. But this angered the sirens of the rocky cliffs who fed on the crashed ships. They began a struggle against the sailors and the selkie captain, fighting the charm magic of the bell and capturing the selkie. The bell had not just been charming the sirens though. A sea lich, long living beneath the waves, had been soothed by the bell as well. He rose up from the sea and used his magic to save the selkie, binding the leader of the sirens to the bell. The selkie returned home, giving the bell which now rang on its own with a more sinister sound to the lich. It has a stronger pull, allowing the holder to draw in and hold in thrall creatures of the sea.

We have another game that is simply for creating materials and resources for the Japanese Tabletop RPG Ryuutama but I would rather save posting about that game until my co-author has revealed how amazing that game is in a post of her own.

In the meantime! Monday means the Patreon should be updated today with new resources. Continuing the theme of Random Generators I will be posting a few tables to help Dungeon Masters create Nemeses for their characters, Friends for their backstories, and Traits to flesh those people out and make them interesting.

Remember to pledge a little bit of support if you like the blog! Thank you everybody!

https://www.patreon.com/Farmane?alert=2

Iron Dungeon Master

The party of mismatched races and adventuring archetypes had traversed the dreaded dungeon of Wrathrone, the Dragon Aspect of the Night. After a dangerous corridor collapse leaves them stranded in the dungeon’s depths they discover the throne room of Wrathrone is largely abandoned. A young girl with cyan skin cries in a cage. A mound of treasure waits for an eager hand to take it. A dragon sized pathway leads behind the throne.

The party’s wizard and druid investigate the strange girl, learning that she is also a dragon and the Aspect of Knowledge, capable of knowing all things. They are hesitant to release her.

Behind them, the bard starts playing a song to calm everyone’s nerves and the rogue starts dipping his hands into the treasure pile. What’s this? The treasure pile is a mimic! Time for action! The party burns the mimic down quickly, It really only got about a turn to act. Why did it back into a corner and whimper? Was it scared? Was it trying to escape? Wait … are we the baddies?!

Phoenix Comic Con can be a real hoot and a half (that’s nearly two full owls worth). Last year I got to stalk Patrick Rothfuss at his many panels and buy some cool artwork and basically waste a weekend doing nothing important in an awesome way. It was great.

This most recent Comic Con was bogged down by security issues, the banishment of lightsaber vendors, and a series of guests that I just couldn’t get excited about (got to shake Timothy Zahn’s hand, though. That was sweeeeeet).

What I did get excited about was the Charity Poker tournament (23rd place!) and the Iron Dungeon Master competition. Today, we will be discussing the latter event.

If you’ve ever seen the Food Network Channel original television drama known as “Chopped” then you understand a group of cooks with tragic backstories are given wild and outrageous ingredients and asked to turn them into various meals for a panel of judges that are able to discern tastes I have never heard of. The ice cream machine is usually broken. Someone usually cuts themselves. Their plating is terrible. Oh no! One of them forgot one of the ingredients. Now they’ll never get the $10,000 prize to appease the ghost of their grandmother that haunts their kitchen until they get a better island and a gas range. Grandma ghost’s are picky about kitchens.

At Comic Con they did a similar style of competition but for Dungeon Masters. Eight of us were corralled together against our better judgment and presented with ingredients we would have to mix into a 4 hour long D&D/Pathfinder adventure to entertain and entice a group of players that were randomly selected for us. I didn’t get to hear anyone else’s tragic backstory but I just really needed to win this year so that my Dungeon and Dragon’s themed food truck, Rolling for Initiative, could get off the ground and I could take my traveling tavern on the road.

The ingredients:

• A picture featuring a beautiful sunlit forest scape. Within the forest there was a mighty tortoise, trudging along. Within the turtle’s shell was a starlit, red veined mountain with a great and mighty dragon surging alongside it.
• A phrase. I don’t remember it exactly but something along the lines of “who are the true villains?”
• An NPC: “The child that knows.”

We got 30 minutes to help players make characters using our preferred system. I had a great group of men and women who were excited to play and had very wide ranging degrees of familiarity with Dungeons and Dragons.

We then got 30 minutes to design our campaign. I decided to drop them in the lair of a mighty Dragon that was also the spiritual embodiment of the Night who had captured and imprisoned the childlike embodiment of Knowledge. In the dungeon the player’s found a turtle statuette that turned out to be the embodiment of the Day, imprisoned by the dragon to maintain his control over the darkness. Darkness had overtaken the land for days and weeks at this point and they were hoping to find a way to cure this problem.

Every conflict or NPC they interacted with was largely neutral or just doing their own thing. The mimic they murdered wanted to be left alone. They didn’t give it a chance to really show that, being a bloodthirsty group of murder hobos like any good Dungeons and Dragons group, but they definitely felt bad after the fact.

The next major conflict they ran into was a room filled with Wrathrone’s dragon eggs. Anytime they got too close to one or touched one it made that egg more likely to hatch. They had a fun time trying to figure out ways to safely cross this room and when the rogue landed face first in an egg they started to figure out that this wasn’t a usual “good vs evil” kind of campaign. The baby dragons had no scales and couldn’t see. They whimpered and whined and were easily hurt. They attacked the group but it was wild and uncontrolled. They wound up healing the baby dragon more than they hurt it.

When they came upon the cultists that worship Wrathrone they learned that they really just enjoyed the beauty of night time. They didn’t despise the day and they knew that the day would have to return at some point. They just wanted the world to see that the night is beautiful and to appreciate it. So the players snuck past them, pretending to be cultists.

When they released an illithid prisoner from an eternal magical cell they didn’t kill it. They just pointed it toward a room of unsuspecting cultists. Morally grey, right?

They added a plot twist in the final hour and half that we had to incorporate: “The players will learn the true cost of friendship.” What am I supposed to do with that right? Force one of them to sacrifice their identity to gain dragon powers and fight a larger dragon? That’s totally what I did it was awesome.

The finale was an intense dragon battle. The dragon child revealed that one of the party members could take on her aspect, becoming the embodiment of Knowledge and gaining a dragon form, while other aspects arrived to help them battle Wrathrone long enough for the turtle statuette to hatch and bring about the new day.

Players got to ride on dragons and use their breath and claws as though they were their own. One player got to turn into a dragon. They fought a creature way, way above their skill set and brought it down. It was rad and climactic and awesome.

I got 2nd place.

Still netted me a butt ton of swag (books, dice, some minis, some more dice, a DM screen, some dice). It is the main reason I’m going back to Comic Con next year and I hope as many of you go out as well. They need players as much as they need DM’s and the players got prizes for creative thinking and being valuable at the table. The co-writer of this blog won MVP at her table and got a dice necklace and a gift certificate. It was pretty sweet.

Here’s what I learned and what I want you to learn from that awesome day.

• Improvisation can lead to some really cool moments: I had a full hour of prep time for this and I had to make up a lot of stuff on the fly. I realized I wasn’t going to make it the full four hours and had to invent a puzzle room on the spot. Seven orbs, each with a strange descriptive term, and one alcove in the wall that an orb could fit into. Each orb was cursed, though, and would do something horrible to a player that touched one. They wound up touching them all and getting cursed in fun ways. My group thought it was one of the best parts of the dungeon. An Orb Room is something I’m going to devote its own article to at some point so look forward to that.
• Playing with new players gives you perspective: I have a very tight knit group of nerds that I play Tabletop Gaming with. For my One-Shot Verse Campaign the same group of 4 people played weekly for a year and a half. I ran a random bunch of players through Hoard of the Dragon Queen at my local game store and had a blast. I had never met the players for my Iron Dungeon Master competition but I had a great time getting to know them and seeing what was important to them. It was a struggle to find ways to incorporate each and every person in the party when I barely knew them. One player had literally never played Dungeons and Dragons before and was just there with her boyfriend. She wound up having the most fun and was the person that sacrificed herself to become a dragon.
• Giving yourself random elements and making a story from them is really, really fun: Creativity is a game, sometimes. My brain loves to come up with cool ideas but it needs catalysts. I need a kick to get my brain turning a puzzle piece over to figure out the rest of the puzzle based on it. My co-writer and I play a series of writing games while working in order to keep ourselves from being bored out of our skulls and to create resources for our various Tabletop Endeavors (yes, this will be an article soon). Taking a random element, like a picture, and making an entire D&D game based on it sounds like a daunting task but it was great inspiration. I encourage any and all creative peoples to give themselves little writing games to help spur their mind into creating.

Iron Dungeon Master was awesome. I wish there were weekly versions of it. Weekend time!

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Real 8: Worldbuilding

The party of wayward, extra dimensionally displaced wanderers survived their first frigid nights in a strange land. Jacob knew how to make an igloo and after the party argued for a solid 30 minutes about whether 25 degrees fahrenheit was too cold to reasonably move around in (it is) they worked together to make that igloo.

The next morning Keane discovered a knight in chainmail armor and a full helmet standing in the frozen clearing, investigating the body of the dead, tattooed man in a robe. The party had him outnumbered but none of us had any weapons. An unsharp training rapier, a basket of crocheting supplies, a few aluminum shields, and some sticks of rattan. Nothing that could actually threaten a person.

The Knight, Tavon Elgas, revealed that he was an investigator of magical persons that were operating outside the scope of the law. That the wizard in this clearing was a Recreant, a runaway wizard that was breaking the law. He had tried to create a portal to another realm and the spell hadn’t worked. The other bodies were the other investigators sent with Tavon.

He was a kind, cautious man investigating people that could sunder and alter reality, manipulate energy at an atomic level, and control minds if they wanted to. He faced down danger on a daily basis. But confronted with 9 strangers in a frozen clearing he still acted calmly and cautiously and waited for us to move first.

Intimidating as hell.

The world of Real 8, the tabletop gaming system I’m working to finish and publish, is a brainchild of my favorite stories, genres, and tropes. An entire planet with cultures from every continent interacting with a unique religion and a series of magic systems that are familiar but unique.

Demon hunters wear leather long-coats and use alchemy to alter themselves to fight dark beings. Wizards are overly powerful, terrifying to behold, and capable of apocalyptic catastrophes. Knights are noble and held in high esteem, not feared. Empires seek the best for their people. The Gods are real but aren’t really Gods. Swashbucklers and duelists are beholden to no one and feared for their boldness. An entire faction of knights trains and exists to hunt down magic users that threaten the world.

When I sat down to create the world of Real 8 I thought about my favorite stories and I took the parts of them that I liked to mold them for my own purposes. No idea survived the transfer perfectly because no idea borrowed ever should.

• The politics of George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones, where noble houses and knights vie for power in a feudal system, but where the players of that game aren’t cruel and vicious. They play the game to make things better for people and keep things secure.
• The Mage/Templar conflict from Dragon Age, where magic users are oppressed by vicious magical knights, but in my world the mages are so powerful that very few people feel bad about locking them up. I tried to take a realistic approach to how people would react to walking atomic bombs that could turn people into blood batteries or puppet soldiers and I realized that was very scary. If you’ve ever read the Lies of Locke Lamora you understand why I don’t particularly like wizards when thinking about them realistically.
• The Sympathetic Magic of Patrick Rothfuss’ and his approach to mechanical magic systems, where the magic has rules like science that the magic must follow, but I don’t want to plagiarize so I had to change it slightly so that someone can only affect things that are actively affecting themselves. Lame, right? But I’m no thief. Well … I’m not a bad thief.

I wanted to create a realistic fantasy world, where actions have consequences and heroes are the people that survive. The common people are terrified of magic but feel safe with their knightly protectors exactly because they keep the people safe from the magic they fear. Gives the knights a vested interest in making sure people fear magic, doesn’t it?

Fantasy worlds are built on magic. Magic is prominent and important and separates the fantasy world from the regular world. Without magic it’s just an alternate world. Nothing wrong with that but it takes away a storyteller’s ability to use magic to create the conflicts they want to examine. It takes away a bit of the wonder everyone feels when they first see the Pyramids of Egypt or a skyscraper or one of those sinkholes that goes on forever into the Earth.

I wanted to reexamine the concept of Gods and Devils and give them a realistic spin. This world was created by all-powerful beings? They aren’t all powerful they’re just more powerful. Beings on a higher plane than the beings we are. Godly, sure. God with a small “g” maybe. But they’re not omniscient. They’re not all powerful. They aren’t everywhere at once at all times. At the end of the day the gods of Real 8 really don’t care about the sentient beings they birthed into existence. They wanted to see what they could do and so they made something to watch.

As for the Devils, I took an approach that isn’t unique but I personally love. Kevin Smith, famed director of Clerks, made a movie examining Catholic religion called Dogma. In the film, a demon named Asrael, explains that Hell used to be a place where people simply couldn’t feel God’s love and that was punishment enough. But when humans started going there, bringing their fear and self-loathing, they perverted the place into the nightmare realm of fire and torture that people tend to be afraid of. I love the idea of humans being the cause of their own suffering because we all kind of are.

So when the humans of Real 8 first got their hands on magic they got greedy. They reached too far for too much power and became the Devils of the world. And the Gods of Real 8 took pity on their poor creations and locked those Devils away. People can still contact those Devils and they still mess with the world. Why, you ask? Why would I create Gods that take pity on people but still let them ruin their lives? Because free will, ladies and gentlemen.

Allow me to summarize some ideas I learned about world building:

• Magic needs to mean something in the world: The people of your world should have opinions about the magic and the monsters and the wonders that exist in this world. Are they afraid of it? In awe of it? Can they buy it? Can anyone learn it? These are all important questions when you want to make a Fantasy world feel real and not two dimensional. It’s easy to hand wave around magic, saying magic can do what it wants and everyone just has to accept that. Those games are fun but they won’t ever feel as satisfying as a game where the magic matters.
• The Gods need to mean something in the world: The interaction between sentient beings and the gods they worship is a big deal. Wars are fought over belief. If a god of death exists in your world do people worship them? Do they kill people for them? If a god of light and good exists why do any people not worship them? Are all your gods dead? What killed them? Do different races have different pantheons? Why? Are those gods ever fighting? Do gods have wars? Do the gods care? So many questions! I should do a set of generator charts based on these questions alone, to help flesh out how to approach religion in gaming if you have never done so. I’m gonna do that later. Thanks blog!
• Where does evil come from? Evil leads to conflict. Either the party is evil and they are killing and stealing or they are good and they’re keeping the evil people from killing and stealing. Are people evil just because they are? Are people evil because a God of Evil corrupts people? Are people evil because magic corrupts them? Why are people evil? Why do people turn to evil deeds? This could be a simple question or a remarkably complex one but it’s a question worth answering.

Next week I’ll go more in depth on what we called the “Bioforge” system for Real 8. In other words, I’m gonna tell you all a bunch of stories about how 9 nerds in their twenties realized exactly how out of shape and uncoordinated we all were.

Patreon Account

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Rules and Riddles on Patreon!

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• Random generators and charts
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Imagine your favorite Sarah McLachlan song and think about the poor D&D writer you could help for pennies a day :)