Friday, September 26, 2014

Eyeballing Runequest 6 for the next alt-night Fantasy Campaign

Source!
Magic World has been on hold for a few weeks due to thw whole D&D 5E thing sucking up everyone's game time, but I am getting a serious itch to return to the split game nights, in which we rotate campaigns with D&D one week and "something else" the next. My plans currently are as follows: introduce the Wednesday night crowd to The Void, and expose the Saturday night crew to Runequest 6. The Saturday group has already got a decent Magic World campaign under their belts, but I think they are ready to graduate to the Big Boy of the BRP family of games now. This will open them up to the full range of exotic magic in Runequest, as well as the more tactical/maneuver based combat system which is where RQ6 has a definite leg up on MW.

Apparently Design Mechanism has been busy when I wasn't paying attention, because there's a short "Ships & Shield Walls" supplement out as well as a campaign setting book. I've ordered a copy of the former in print through frpgames, and the latter may be nabbed in the future, if only for the fun of reading it.

For many GMs, the question of "what campaign to run" is a matter of what resource you want to read, or whatever setting you devise in conjunction with your campaign. For me it boils down to which one one of my existing worlds I would like to exploit for my RQ6 campaign. Right now I'm using Enzada for my Wednesday D&D setting, Chirak for my Saturday D&D setting, and was using my newly created world of Pergerron for Magic World. Pergerron, being customized for MW already might be a very easy fit for RQ6, and could in fact benefit from the additional magic systems. However, if I were to run it, then I would have to explain why we were using RQ6 and not just continuing with the MW characters where they left off. So.....

There's my old venerable setting for Lingusia. The World of Lingusia has received so much weird attention from me in the last few years that it's timeline and setting details are all over the place now. I used it most recently for my 13th Age games, but decided that ultimately 13th Age is a little too epic and super-heroic for a world that was originally grounded in a mixture of AD&D 1st edition, T&T 5th edition and Runequest 2. So now, with my latest "update" to that setting I'm thinking maybe Runequest 6 would be a fine choice.

D&D 5E would be, too....but I don't want to just run D&D into infinity anymore. I was to keep it mixed up  a bit.

What I think I'll do going forward is devise the new setting (a revisionist timeline of Lingusia set in the year 2,090 AW for those actually familiar with the setting) with RQ6 as the focus. Make RQ6 the de facto engine for Lingusia going forward, essentially. Given how much I've used time traveling campaigns to revise the setting, this may be more than a little appropriate....and the grittier RQ6 mechanics will be more than sufficient to handle the Age of Strife era I am working on for the next iteration of the world.

So....goal now: try to develop this setting and campaign with RQ6 in mind, and sprinkle blog with liberal doses of both!

No comments:

Post a Comment