In the Caliphate of Azithan, known to its neighbors as the Necromancer Kingdom ...
Let's talk about roleplaying within this setting. The key parts of the setting are:
1. A society where a single necromancer religion is the government, and allows for freedom of religion.
2. Lifeless undead that are used as workers, and the Faithful are provided a minimum basic income that covers basic food and housing.
3. Cities that act as specific economic zones, creating specialized products. That is, the economy is fairly planned.
4. An arm of this government sends out missionaries in groups of two. Maybe one of these is capable of raising Lifeless, maybe not.
There are a few obvious ways this can go:
Stop The Invasion: A group of player characters reacts to missionaries with violence. This'd be good D&D-style play. After defeating the incursion -- and the undead -- the PCs invade the Caliphate.
This gives the option of making the Caliphate evil, or simply misunderstood by the player characters. Perhaps as the campaign continues, they discover that the lawful good kingdom of necromancers really aren't that bad. Or decide that raising the dead is inherently evil, no matter what the Priests of Azithan say.
Personally, I'd do this with Dungeon World, but D&D is, of course, another good option.
Spread The Caliphate: The PCs are the missionaries, and are strangers in a strange land. This includes a lot of talking, a lot of raising the dead. Maybe also adventuring in a D&D sense, but mostly it'd be the day to day realities of creating a church and raising a flock of believers. Think the musical Book of Mormon, and you're pretty warm.
I'm thinking Apocalypse World: Fallen Empires is a decent place to start. Reasonable playbooks would be Bonepicker (Angel), Mesmerest (Brainer), Hocus. I could see a call for a Wolfhead (chopper), but the Strongholder (Hardholder) would probably be a nonstarter. That being said, the Waterbearer could be a reasonable playbook to port over.
Basically, you are in someone else's land, trying to convert them to your religion.
Build The Cities: The PCs are sent out by the Church to expand the reach of the Kingdom. Maybe this is along the Great River, and they need to create a self-sustaining community. The obvious choice is again Fallen Empires, this time making sure there's a Strongholder or porting over the Waterbearer from AW2e.
It'd be fascinating to see all the PCs be priests with different views, but maybe even better to have some of them not be priests. The class and power differences there would be interesting.
Palace Politics: This version gets into the politics of power, and how the Kingdom functions. Either set in the Capital, or one of the major cities.
I think Urban Shadows is a good fit for this. The Power caste are clearly the priests, the wild are the unbelievers. Remove all the guns, or make them "necromancer guns", and you're pretty much in business. Vampires and Zombies and crap as PCs is perfect, especially as Vamps aren't within the power structures of the church.
What are some other possible campaigns related to Azithan? What system would you use to run it?
Obviously, my recommendations are mostly pbta. That's where my brain is. I'm open to alternatives!
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I put this in the wrong collection! Fixed.
ReplyDeleteMy first thought would be to use the Caliphate as one of a number of nations in an ongoing D&D (or similar) campaign. The PCs are on (or building towards) an epic quest and the Caliphate is just one of the many strange lands which they have to pass through and deal with on their journey.
ReplyDeleteHere's one way it could go: Some of the Caliphate priests are involved with whatever evil the PCs are fighting. As the players investigate they could easily believe that the whole Caliphate is the heart of their problem (because you know, zombies) and after some fun getting into fights, burning down churches and getting captured and interrogated by non-evil members of the caliphate an uneasy alliance could be formed to continue fighting the actual threat.
It would be a lot of fun as some of the players would be totally up for have a contingent of zombies on their side, for the rest of the campaign while others clearly wouldn't. This tension could be compounded by offering to replace any dead PC with a Caliphate Necromancer.
You could run a terrific "Blades in the Dark" sort of campaign centered around law-breakers and miscreants. It wouldn't have much to say (I wouldn't think) about whether the necromancer kingdom was right or wrong ... the kingdom would simply be the respectable-but-hypocritical society that provides the square holes into which our round-peg-PCs cannot or will not fit themselves.
ReplyDeleteAnd, of course, you can always do day-in-the-life RP in the style of Chuubo's. Follow the stories of a gear-wright and a young priest, trying to find their way in a big and mystifying city. Happy picnics in the temple grounds, days spent down by the river fishing, etc.
ReplyDeleteThese would all generate very different games using the same setting.
ReplyDeleteBrian Ashford yours would be fairly trad, right? PCs of increasing murderous capabilities who uncover more knowledge about the world as they eventually change it in some major way. That sounds like a lot of D&D games I've played, and would for sure be fun. Pretty easy for the players, I think.
Tony Lower-Basch BitD is a really neat given, especially given that it by default has spirits being destroyed upon death and where that is clearly violated. That could be a good way to do it as a serious of heists, so you could play in one of the cities within being concerned with the politics of the cities.
Chuubo's could be used anywhere, and means the game is then about how the characters relate to themselves and their world in this nicer way, rater than politics and murder.
Good ideas! I welcome more!
How are undead workers controlled? Who decides the projects, and who implements and who prophets? Er, profits.
ReplyDeletePlay a game on the Shadowrun chassy. Major projects are often built around major resources, magical or mundane, and lots of people have fingers in the pie. With a thief to break locks and a necromancer/cleric to shuffle undead work orders, a bard to talk to the Johnsons and a paladin to lay waste and drive the getaway horse, you can do some serious clandestine damage.
Hi, Jesse Cox !
ReplyDeleteWho controls the Lifeless? Priests. How do they decide? A Parliament made up of priests. Basically. There's a conclave of priests who figure out overall what's going on.
But, of course it can be hacked. Of course it can. Setting it up as a cyberpunk retropast is delightful! Would you use actual shadowrun, or some variant?
Uh, hi? I'm happy that you're glad to see me. I sometimes wonder if social media seems wired to me because I don't know who actually knows each other in person.
ReplyDeleteAnyway. Thank you.
Actual shadowrun has too many fiddly bits that would need re-skinning or rebuilding entirely. To be honest, it has too many for me to play even without any re-skinning.
I'd either homebrew a D&D variant to better handle concepts like "security tally" or scratch something together in Fate, with some specified ways of mechanically holding on to what traces of information people leave behind and some 13th age icon shenanigans to hold onto the broader mess that's in the background at the beginning of the game, but should become foreground by the end.
The D&D feel seems important to the universe, so making the magic and complex crawling consonant with that, if not necessarily exactly compatible, would be important.
I have some old work from #Steamshadows that I never got together -- some of it could probably be recycled.
ReplyDeleteOr Leverage. I would totally hack Leverage for this.
ReplyDeleteJesse Cox I try to say hi to people I've not seen in a while. Brian and Tony post on my stuff pretty frequently. They aren't chopped liver, but neither are they super special.
ReplyDeleteAnyway.
Fate might not have the complexity to make the magic feel like a thing, but 13th age absolutely would. Tying those together sounds nifty.
And, of course, Leverage is always one right answer to do heists.
William Nichols Yes, my concept would be pretty traditional/sandbox. I think it would be fun to run.
ReplyDeleteI would absolutely play in Jesse Cox's Leverage fantasy hackers hack!
The Caliphate had always stuck me as a sci-fi place. You have semiautonomous manufacturing infrastructure (hordes of Lifeless) and discorporated AIs (in the form of ghosts), a firewall between combining them, and Basic Income.
ReplyDeleteMany fantasy worlds have flimsy, irrelevant, or handwaved economics. The Caliphate has a strong economic concept, and you're doing the sci-fi thing of playing out all the consequences of this chunk of facts.
It's my favorite form of social science fiction.
Jesse Cox This may be the nicest comment in the history of comments.
ReplyDeleteThe economics are one of my favorite parts. I've been reading a lot of economics fiction this year, and it is astonishing both how little there is, and how much fun it is.