Chronicles of the Realm: Terminus Zol

I'm figuring out a little more about the game I'm going to run in the Realm this summer. At least one of them.
It sounds crazy, but I know I can make it work.

I'm going to dish out artifacts at first level.

It sounds like a hopeless ploy to lure players in, but considering how many people I have on this list, its not about that. Its about power. And when to use it.

The premise is as follows. Characters get gear. Player Characters get good gear. Player Characters in epic stories should get epic story gear.

Each player, after deep discussion about background, concept, identity and so on, will be given a specially crafted magic item of unbelievable power. The stipulation? It almost kills him or her every time its used.

The example I thought up was a man who keeps his left arm wrapped up and never uses it to fight with. But when he unveils it (Possibly the coolest part of the scenario) He kills people. Simple as that. Some kind of death touch effect with an effectively ridiculous DC.

How will this NOT unbalance the game Arc? Well, I never said it would unbalance the game. The trick is, that each item will have a trigger, or rather, the characters will have triggers, similar to the limit break philosophy of Final Fantasy VII. You can't really use the item until its Do or Die time. Then, the encounter is completed (whether or not the player wins) and experience is dished out based on the story, not necessarily based on the CR of the monster involved. That way, I can actually throw huge creatures and adversaries at the characters, and they'll be able (and willing) to handle them.

Obviously, key parts of the game would be as follows:

• Hiding the items until they're needed
• Using the possibility of of their use as a very convincing threat
• Heightening the character's reputations, while keeping levels low, allowing for a more dynamic power structure
• A strong tie that binds the PCs together, preventing (or limiting) PC conflict
• Keeping the players the absolute stars
• Carefully crafting each interaction between the characters, PC and NPC alike
• Slotting the game nicely into the Realm's background
• Creating a system for building such potent items for use in other GM's games
• Exploring more territory, social dynamics, class and race options specific to the Realm
• Creation of new material for the Realm

The name is a working title.

Game Over

Well, one of my favorite games of all time has come to a close. In a good way at least. The Shirow game, technically "Chronicles of the Realm: Shirow" has finally wrapped up. While it only lasted two semesters, we went from young kids playing with sticks to epic level power houses who managed to cash out almost 60 THOUSAND damage in the final boss battle. It was beautiful. Sad that it has to end, but it ended well. Everybody really kinda does live happily ever after. We will miss you Shirow.

It Works!!!

Alright, I've managed to plummet from a post every week to about 3 posts a semester. I plan on using Arcandio.com over the summer to keep people in contact with my stuff and to talk about RPGs.

In other news, I have facebook now, at a friend's request and I've started an RPG group for the Stevens Point area. Its called SP RPG if people are interested.

As for the Realm and what I'm doing this summer, I plan on running at least one game, which is already full with people from the Shirow campaign. I'm not even sure what that game will be about. So far my ideas range from a Psi campaign in the Realm to Heroes of Battle type stuff. We'll see. I'll have to wrangle everyone and see what people think. Maybe we'll even vote.

I'm taking an independent study to map every country of the Realm. There are 89 countries. It could take a while. The class is whenever I can work on it so long as I accomplish my goals. The point is to create simple maps of every country so that a player can easily look up where a few cities are in each country. They'll probably be pen and ink.