Sabledrake Magazine
August, 2001
Feature Articles
Diary of a PBeM, Pt 1: Foundations
Down and Out in Wren's Crossing, Pt.3
Regular Articles
Resources
Diary of a PBeM: Foundations
Copyright © 2001 by Eric Lofgren
Welcome to the first of what will hopefully be many installments of Diary of a PBeM, a running series of articles exploring the evolution and development of The Summer Kings, a freeform play by email (PBeM) game designed and administered by yours truly. This particular game seems to lend itself particularly well to a study in the development of a game because the realm in which it takes place was designed from scratch, without the years of refinement the realms created by companies like TSR or LucasArts enjoy. What this means is the game undergoes a almost constant set of changes as players come up with situations and ideas that I as the GM never thought of, and the realm itself becomes far deeper than anything I could have managed to create in a vacuum. And now, a brief description of the story thus far, so what I'm writing makes sense to you intrepid souls who have hung on up to this point. Those who are truly curious can visit the website, which will be updated shortly at http://www.panzerstudios.com/kings for more information, or to sign up to play; we are still welcoming newcomers.
The story itself focuses on the beginnings of the reign of Prince Bowen I, the 19 year-old son of the former king, who ascends to the throne of his father after the king dies in a hunting accident (this rather ignoble end was inspired incidentally by a painting of a Boar hunt in a German art museum). His kingdom, the nation of Termania, is beset by problems stemming from his father's good-hearted, but ineffective, overextension of the nations resources trying to bring law and order to a group of cities, villages, bandit forts and slave markets known as the Free Lands. Despite the lawless lands being the perfect setting for adventures with less-than-Lawful characters, Bowen attempts to withdraw the army and economy of his kingdom from the useless wars that threaten to upend his rule, while to the north the exiled Dragon Lords build their forces to retake the nation that was once theirs. As they do this, each character in the game, with a few exceptions, has the potential to influence the entire course of the game. Below is a brief summery of each character, and what I think they will be able to do to influence the course of the game:
Prince Bowen: Being the ruler of Termania, as well as one of the feared GM front men, I think Bowen's potential role to decide the fate of his nation and the course of the game is fairly self-explanatory .
General Adrian: Another puppet of the GM, as well as Bowen's most able commander, who has spent much of his time as the officer in charge of the Termanian campaign in the Free Lands, General Adrian will be most likely to take the reigns of the army and deal with threats Bowen cannot attend to on his own.
Lady Gaea: Bowen's chief, if unofficial, advisor, as well as the closest thing he has to an older sister, Gaea is Bowen's bodyguard, and more importantly the voice of reason when Bowen takes his sense of honor, justice or simple duty a little to far. Not to mention her rapidly forming relationship with General Adrian.
Talia: The leader of the Dragon Lords in exile, as well as the last remaining legitimate heiress to the Dragon Lord throne among the survivors of the Great War and the hard winters that followed it, Talia poses perhaps the greatest, if as yet unrealized, threat to the Termanian kingdom. There are rumors of a terrible bargain she made to secure the loyalty and obedience of the last surviving War Dragon, a massive beast of fire and muscle that once formed the backbone of the mighty Dragon Lord Empire.
Roderic: Trained in the ancient ways of the Dragon Lord warriors, and filled with the desire to return his family to their holdings and restore their good name, glory and power, he is profoundly loyal to Talia and the restoration of her throne.
Kishoree: One of the great wildcards of the realm, the captain of a pirate vessel of much renown, and perhaps one of the finest crews of the realm, she presents both an obstacle and an opportunity for both sides of the conflict. The presence of such a powerful ship, and others of her kind, pose a significant threat to naval operations . . . and the only reliable mode of transportation during the rainy season that turns the west into a sea of mud.
Sharan: Another great wildcard, Sharan is the young leader, or "Alpha" or a group of Direwolves, bandits and former slaves that have been driven south by the rise of Talia in their wooded northern homelands. The presence of such a powerful, unpredictable and generally unusual force within Termanian borders mean that the balance of power could tip without Bowen or Talia undertaking any action.
With the introductions out of the way, we move on to the foundation of the game itself. It is axiomatic that in any game, if the players are expected to both enjoy and participate in some meaningful way, a plot is required, and that plot needs to involve action. Loafing around the castle is a marvelous way to build up romances, hidden agendas and feuds the players have been itching to form between their characters, not to mention providing a much needed rest after a tiring bout of Ogre slaying, but after awhile the players will get bored, and get into mischief. With this in mind, I designed The Summer Kings to be a game about a realm in transition, fighting between the prosperity of the modern era, where the land of Termania enjoys a prospering economy and a progressive king, with the devastation of a ruinous war that seems to be slowly emerging, threatening the future. As this issue of Sabledrake does have Villains as its theme, and the creation of the antagonist shaped the entire form of the game (Talia being developed as a character even before Bowen was), the "villains" seem like a good place to begin examining the design of The Summer Kings.
Originally, I thought to make the menace to Termania some otherworldly force, meddlesome god or malevolent demoness bent on revenge, or simply disrupting the peace that exists for the sport of it, descending in all their fury to rape, pillage and plunder helpless, unsuspecting villages of the nation for their amusement. This was originally because The Summer Kings started originally in my head as the PBeM version of my unfinished pet project RPG, which eventually frustrated me to the point that I abandoned it but kept the villain, who I had become very much attached to. Based on a character I had played with some time ago in Ayenee (the Yahoo! Chat RPG community for those of you who don't know), the demoness was a very icy, very professional type who occasionally journeys into the realm of men to make sure petty kings and knights know their place. But, as fate would have it, I began to write the initial plot for The Summer Kings right as another game I had been playing for awhile (and one that had seemed like a strong and solid game for some time) began a slow, sickening spiral towards nothingness, or at least life-support, where it resides today.
One of the reasons I suspect was the sudden and arguably irreplaceable loss of several core players who had been with the game since the start and were forced to leave for entirely different, but unfortunately-timed reasons. There were still several old players, but it meant the game had to be rebuilt from the ground up by myself, who had accepted the post of GM. The other reason, which I think was a bit more controllable and more significant to the death of the game, was the lack of a clearly defined antagonist. This was mostly my fault, as I failed to clearly communicate my ideas for the campaign to the players, which resulted in a small-bush war where the players, a group of mercenaries from the MechWarrior universe were fairly evenly matched by irregular local opposition into a full-scale invasion where, because our opponents originally had big name backers, my players assumed the worst and committed their characters, as well as the game itself, to a hopeless war against a nearly insurmountable foe who seemed to both have far greater resources than the single regiment we had landed, as well as being far more clever and devious than the players themselves, who were supposed to be running the game, and incidentally winning the war. By this time my own life had gotten busier and I passed the torch of the GM to another player, quietly suggesting he might want to consider a change of plot, but the idea of a hulking, monolithic foe seemed to appeal to him, and he ran with it. It began to feel that the players, no matter what they did or how well they wrote or how creative they got, were always checkmated by an overwhelming opposition. I wanted a game where my players felt like they had some control over the events of the game. and not merely spectators in it.
I was determined not to let The Summer Kings, fall to the same problems as the other game, so I played around with the current concept I had for the villain, morphing her from the original demoness model to merely another ruler bent on power and jealous of the relative prosperity of the kingdom where the players resided. This didn't fit my concept of the character either because, while I tend to favor realism in fantasy games, a simple power struggle between two kingdoms was a little too mundane for my tastes, so I went back to the drawing board. I suppose I should mention I enjoy world building a little more than is entirely healthy, and as a result, I am constantly surrounded by half-baked, unfinished worlds that exist in various states of readiness, or lack thereof. So I took a break from actually creating the villain and began to draw the map of the realm I wanted my players to play in. For many people, including myself for some of my more elaborate creations, the making of the world in which a game or story is set begins with tracing its geological history, following the migration patters of the intelligent species of the world as the planet's plates shift before they finally settle down in their distinctive communities. This does let a game reside in an intensely "real" realm, feeling like the same forces that shaped our own Earth formed it. But for The Summer Kings I used the method I enjoy the most: a fine-point pen and a blank piece of paper, slowly drawing out the coastline as I see it forming. A divot created by the pen becomes a pay, and the world forms almost of its own free will. Once a coast has been drawn, a few major landforms such as mountains, rivers and forests are drawn in, and the land is divided according to the geographical boundaries that appear in the world, waiting for a place where a villain could make a place for themselves, rather than creating a place for them. And out of this came Talia and the Dragon Lords.
I have, I confess, always been a big fan of dragons. but I hardly ever read fiction about them because I always end up disagreeing with how the author rendered the magnificent beasts. But the mere presence of our fire-breathing friends gives any story an inherently epic scale, and the closest thing I could think of to a demon without throwing off the balance of the game, pitching it headlong into the "looming darkness" plot line was a dragon. The Dragons came as the first antagonist, the most powerful underlings of the one true villain, and a mighty force that would keep the good guys from simply sweeping aside any opposition to lawfulness and order. I also wanted the villain to be an unknown, rising from beneath the prospering lands to attack its weakened roots, and the mountains that had "formed" on my map between the kingdoms of Arcadia and Tennania seemed to be a perfect place. A hostile land of forests and mountains between two powerful, and rather hostile kingdoms, the mountains give the villain and her army (by this time I had signed up a player, a very good friend of mine who I've RP'd with before to play the villain, and I knew it would be a "she") an almost elemental quality, like a storm descending from the distant peaks, masked by trees and snow. Again based on the name of the game, I wanted a pattern of property and violence within the realm, and to have the exchange between the two be cyclic, like the seasons, so I made the enemy one that the
kingdoms have faced before, an ancient enemy returned. I talked this idea over with some of my friends, and spent my traditional several days on a beanbag chair trying to iron out why this ancient menace would travel down from its mountain hideaway.
A good villain in my opinion, one who the audience, or in this case the players, would sympathize with just enough to enjoy the unfolding of events has to have a true reason for being evil, and the scariest villains are those who are just as firm in their convictions of justice and rightness as the "good guys," they just happen to come off the wrong way. Sure they have a massive black war dragon, they burned some villages and made a deal with a dark god, but so what? It was all in the name of right and law and other such high-minded ideals. And what better reason to invade a prosperous realm, and pay dearly for the power to even consider such a plan than the restoration of the kingdom's rightful rulers? Yes, you read that right; the powers in Termania aren't the original, or strictly the lawful rulers. Who exactly are the bad guys now? The idea began to snowball into a great war between the old powers, who held the Dragons at their command, and ruled the continent versus the upstarts, filled with their own sense of justice and morality, who finally defeat the rather arrogant powers in charge, driving their former oppressors northward with the intent of ridding the land of the terrifying shadow of the War Dragons and their rulers. But, like most of history, the victorious power becomes preoccupied with its winnings, dismissing the shattered, exiled remnants of the once great empire that stream broken and tom into the forest and mountains of an uncharted land as nothing more than a vague memory of history, something to be put onto victory tapestries and nothing more. The wall that was built to keep the surviving foes out is largely forgotten, its garrisons slowly pulled away to other, more pressing duties in the newly forming nations, each with its own culture and nobility, who were held together once only by the collective power of the dragons and those who controlled them. Places like the Free Cities and the Slavers Coast began to form in my mind, places where even the best intentions and plenty of armored horsemen are unable to bring peace and order. The exiles became jealous of the new ruling family's power, their wounds still stinging. The songs and tales from when they still had power, when their rule extended over farms and river valleys echoed in their minds, faded by only a few short generations of exile in the hard northern wilderness, which has hardened them as well. They see what they have built falling into ruin; lawless countryside overrun by bandits threatens lands that were safe and prosperous. It seems the perfect time to return to the lands they ruled, restore their own families and allies to their places, slay the traitors who sacrificed the glory of the empire for more land or horses or gold, and to remind the world why those who possess a War Dragon hold the right to rule the land. All that is between the exiled Dragon Lords and their restored throne under the last of the royal bloodline, Queen Talia, is one young prince who's rule is not yet solid, his generals and friends, and the finest mounted soldiers the world has ever known. It is said it is a curse to live in interesting times, and as The Summer Kings develops and grows, we shall see to what extent that is true.