The State of the Blog (and the Tim)

In the process of looking up something that I had shared here a couple of years ago, I realized that I had not posted anything new since August. I've been meaning to post a few things during that time, but lacked the motivation to make it happen. So here's a very quick update of where things stand in the many lands of Studded Plate. (Warning: There's a bit about a friend I lost very recently at the end of this column. I'm still figuring out how to talk about it online...or in general) 

Freeport and 5E: The 5E and Fantasy AGE versions of Death in Freeport were released just as I was finishing up that last post in August. I intend to run one version or the other sometime this year. I also have a few items to compose "Freeport and..." articles about at some point: the latest Unearthed Arcana articles (only two since August), Ghosts of Saltmarsh, and possibly Kobold Press's Tome of Beasts (which I'm slowly making my way through). And whenever I acquire Tasha's Cauldron of Everything, I will almost certainly have something to say about using that book with Freeport.

Time of the Tarrasque: This Pathfinder campaign went on hiatus back in 2019, and to be very honest, I'm not sure if it will ever restart at this point. 

The Kynthiad: The solo Greek myth BESM game that I run for my wife Erika is still going, though the end of the campaign is finally approaching. In our last few sessions, Kynthia has been instrumental in definitively ending the Trojan War--with Troy emerging victorious, and many Greek going home without their kings. Now we just have to figure out how she's going to stop Typhon's return, which will make a fitting conclusion to the story--and free up some headspace for me to run other games. 

Building the Bestiary: I would almost certainly have added another installment or two of this series by now, except that the pandemic has forced us to go online for most of our gaming, which means I'm producing far fewer LEGO minis for games. (We do play occasional games in person within our "bubble," but I've been GMing far fewer of those than I used to.)

On a related note, I have not purchased any of the new Minifigures series that have been released since the pandemic started. If and when I do, I will post reviews, but I don't know if that will happen before the end of mandatory social distancing.

Pathfinder Society and Starfinder Society: Erika and I are still heavily involved in organized play for Pathfinder (1E & 2E) and Starfinder. All of these games have been strictly online since March or so, except for occasional games within our "bubble" (such as the Starfinder AP we started recently). I earned my third GM Star for Pathfinder Society 1E just before the end of 2020, but Erika has shot way ahead of me there, and is closing in on her fifth (and final!) GM Star. She became a Venture Officer for our local store about a year ago, so has been running a lot of games for that venue, as well as for several online conventions. We're both playing a lot more PFS 2E and Starfinder now than we have in the past, because it's easier to find games to play in now that we're online. Erika has GMed a couple of 2E scenarios so far, and her first Starfinder game this past month. I haven't tried GMing 2E yet, but have a few Starfinder games under my belt, and intend to run more as I get more familiar with the system. (I still have a ways to go before my first GM Nova, though.)

Grey Angels: I have been intending to write more about the (new and old) adventures of Trick Tillinghast, one of my characters in the long-running "Grey Angels" campaign (using Buffy/Angel Unisystem) that revived for a "reunion arc" at the end of 2019. Sadly, our main GM, Cassandra Lease, died rather suddenly at the beginning of this month. All of us in the game have been close friends with her for upwards of 15 years, so we're all still reeling from this loss. At some future date, we may try to find some way to continue playing in the world that she invited us to help her create, because it would be a damn shame to never again revisit those characters. But we're nowhere near ready to contemplate how to do that yet, apart from agreeing that some day, when we're ready, we very much want to have a long, involved discussion about it. Sharing stories about Cass among her circle of friends has been very helpful to us, and very necessary. When I'm ready to, I will probably share some more stories from the game here, in her memory. She would have liked that. 

I received this Abe Sapien figure as a gift from Cass early on in the Grey Angels game. She used the movie version of Abe as the visual reference for the Tritons, the sea demon race from which my very first GA character, the mage Baz Olmstead, was descended.

The Kynthiad: Sources for reference and inspiration

Artemis, goddess of the hunt

For the past 11 years, I have been running a solo RPG campaign for my wife Erika, using the Big Eyes Small Mouth rules. "The Nine Journeys of Kynthia," AKA "The Kynthiad," is set in the world of ancient Greek mythology, with a certain amount of real-world Bronze Age history mixed in with the purely fantasy elements. Over the course of the game, I have drawn details and inspiration from a great many sources, the most important ones of which I'll briefly touch on here.

A more complete bibliography of the game's sources can be found here, but that page lacks the commentary I'm giving in this column.

The Game System

The campaign uses BESM Third Edition. The Second Edition BESM Fantasy Bestiary includes a large number of creatures based on Greek mythology, many of which I have converted to Third Edition or used as a benchmark for my own versions. Big Ears, Small Mouse has also been invaluable in designing smaller creatures, and animals in general.

Other RPG Sourcebooks

My lifelong interest in history and mythology has resulted in a good-sized collection of sourcebooks for other game systems that I've been able to use as reference for The Kynthiad. To start with, I have a large GURPS library of over 40 titles. The research put into that game's historical and genre sourcebooks is pretty solid, and most of the subject matter is system-neutral. Unsurprisingly, GURPS Greece and Egypt have seen the most use, but Bestiary, Fantasy Bestiary, Monsters, Places of Mystery, Timeline, and even Celtic Myth have all been very useful, too. In GURPS Greece, author Jon Ziegler even provides a timeline that tries to make sense of the often-contradictory sequencing of the major myths, which I've adopted mostly intact as a framework for the recent history and current events of The Kynthiad.

Green Ronin Publishing's "Mythic Vistas" product line includes a couple titles that are great references for this game: Trojan War covers the most famous conflict of the period, and Testament provides information on the ancient Hebrews, Canaanites, Egyptians, and Mesopotamians.

There are also a few older D&D sources that I've used in my research for the game. I own the Dragon Magazine CD Archive--which includes occasional mythology-themed gems such as Michael Parkinson's "The Blood of Medusa"--and the Age of Heroes Historical Reference sourcebook. (I also own the deities sourcebooks for 1st, 2nd, and 3rd edition, but I find the treatments of the Greek gods in books such as Trojan War to be far preferable to these versions, all of which devote far more space to game mechanics than to divine lore.)

History

I have used a combination of ancient and modern texts to research the ancient Near East. Herodotus's Histories provide a wealth of detail about the world of his time (circa 440 BC), and he isn't stingy about relating myths tied to the events, people, and places he'd writing about. Even though he's writing several centuries after the "Heroic Age," the Histories have provided me with a wealth of details to flesh out obscure parts of the world such as the Scythians, Amazons, Medes, and Hyperboreans.

Probably the most important scholarly text that I've read in preparing this game has been The End of the Bronze Age: Changes in Warfare and the Catastrophe ca. 1200 B.C., by Robert Drews (Princeton University Press, 1993). This book takes a detailed look at the widespread sacking of Mediterranean cities contemporary with historical Troy, and the technology and tactics that contributed to it. The section on chariot design and tactics alone is worth the read, just to dispel a lot of common misunderstandings about how war was conducted at that time.

Mythology

My collection of translations and retellings of Greek mythology is far too large to catalog briefly, but a few items stand out as most useful to a GM trying to run a roleplaying campaign in this setting.

Robert Graves' Greek Myths is one of my primary reference works for quickly finding summaries of many stories, and following connections between them. My copy (The Folio Society, 1966) has an index of names which includes the meanings of many of them. Each section of the main text is followed by Graves' notes on sources, and his theories about the origins and meaning of the myths. Many of these notes are typical scholarly glosses, but in some passages, Graves expounds on his own bizarre pet theories about the subject at hand (however tenuously linked that subject and his theory might be). To give just a couple examples, he shares Frazer's obsession with attributing everything to sacred kings and fertility cults, and he has some very radical (many would say crazypants) ideas about the secret tree lore of the Druids. However, I have managed to distill a number of very useful ideas for use in my RPG campaign from his weirder ramblings.

My other favorite reference is Carlos Parada's Greek Mythology Link website, which is a massively hyperlinked database of people and places in Greek myths, including footnotes giving the original period sources for each page's topic. Special features of the site include genealogical charts, contextual charts (e.g., events before, during, and after the Trojan War), and detailed maps. These graphics are often limited in resolution on the website, but can be purchased as high-resolution PDFs. I acquired my copies several years ago, back when a handy and inexpensive archive of the complete database was available for purchase on CD.

Film

Naturally, movies and television have provided a great deal of inspiration for The Kynthiad. Series like Hercules and Xena play much more "fast and loose" with historical periods than I'm ever going to in this campaign, but they're still good for mining for story ideas. Movies like Clash of the Titans, Jason and the Argonauts, Troy, and Gods of Egypt provide great over-the-top battle scenes to use as models for RPGs involving gods and monsters, despite their many deviations from the classical versions of those stories. (I used to get much more bent out of shape over the liberties the screenwriters take with the source material, until I realized that the ancients were just as guilty of it.)

As I mentioned in an earlier column, I cast most characters in The Kynthiad using real-world actors so that my wife and I have a common frame of reference for them. The movie Troy was released just a few years before we started the campaign, and I knew that many of those characters would appear in the game, so it was easy to just keep the same casting for most of them. To cast other roles, I've drawn from a wide variety of other movies and TV shows--many but far from all of them being period pieces or fantasy films--to find suitable actors. In most cases, I limited myself to living actors whose current ages fit the parts I choose for them, but I have made a few exceptions. For example, Jolene Blalock played Medea in a TV movie of Jason and the Argonauts in 2000. My game is set a generation later, but Medea is a demigoddess who doesn't age as quickly as mortals do, so my reference photos for her include that costume as well as more recent headshots. Similarly, a handful of actors have died since I started the campaign (most notably Alan Rickman and Peter O'Toole), but I continue to use them in the game.


If you have a favorite source for information on the ancient Near East and its history and mythology, please share a link in the comments!

Past posts about "The Kynthiad"

• The Kynthiad: Solo adventures in the world of ancient Greek mythology (7/23/2015)
• The Kynthiad: How many gods? (7/30/2015)
• The Kynthiad: The borders of the world (8/6/2015)
• The Kynthiad: The Witches (10/27/2016)
• #RPGaDay2018: Days 4-5, 11-12 (Day 5 briefly discusses Thaleia; 8/16/2018) 

#RPGaDay2018: Days 4-5, 11-12

As I mentioned in my post earlier today, I participated in #RPGaDay in 2015, 2016, and 2017, but this year, I wasn't reminded of it until the middle of the month. So, to start with, I'm going to choose a handful of questions from the first two weeks. I may or not return to the skipped ones later in the month.

WEEK ONE: WHAT...
1) ...do you love about RPGs?
2) ...do you look for in an RPG?
3) ...gives a game "staying power"?
I'm going to skip these three, at least for now.

4) Most memorable NPC?
That would have to be one of the witches from my "Kynthiad" BESM campaign who I've talked about here. Medea, Archemora, or Luscina all made a lasting impression on Kynthia, and she's had to deal with each of them on multiple occasions by now.

5) Favorite recurring NPC?
In the distant past, that would definitely be Thastygliax, an NPC from my "Arcadayn" campaign (GURPS 3E). He was a young dragon who was curious enough about humans that he had learned a spell to adopt human form at will. It was in this form, using the name "Al-Zaki," that he met the party and started traveling with them.

More recently, it would be one of many of the recurring NPCs in the "Kynthiad," but I would have trouble choosing a favorite. One of the more interesting from an overall story arc perspective is  Thaleia. This beautiful Hyperborean princess had been romantically involved with Kynthia's beloved Anahodios some years before the campaign started. Thaleia started as a jealous bitch who enjoyed making Kynthia feel drab and unworthy. She eventually went too far and was exiled after Anahodios's sister consumed a nasty drug concealed in a gift meant for Kynthia. The next time Kynthia encountered her, Thaleia had taken over part of a distant tribe, and was using them to carve out a kingdom for herself in the Tin Isles. They made an uneasy truce, because they had a common enemy: the witch Luscina. Years later, Kynthia returned to the Tin Isles because a vision warned her that Thaleia's life was in danger. She saved her old rival (and her newborn daughter), and in the process, the two earned each other's grudging respect. Thalaia's exile had been revoked by then, but the princess refused to return home: she was a queen in her own right now, and felt responsible to the people she ruled.

WEEK TWO: HOW...
6) ...can players make a world seem real?
7) ...can a GM make the stakes important?
8) ...can we get more people playing?
9) ...has a game surprised you?
10) ...has gaming changed you?
I may get back to these later.

11) Wildest character name?
Finnilish Tremolile Boggarty Quince. He was an ugly, dwarfish half-elf mage who I played briefly in my friend Rich Feitelberg's GURPS 3E fantasy campaign. He was physically quite weak, and his spells were more trickery-oriented than battle magic, so he was rarely effective at anything. He was not nearly as much fun as my previous character, Sura El-Khadijah, a Muslim weapon master, had been.

12) Wildest character concept?
For a one-shot BESM (1E) game, I created Aldebaran Alamut, an genetically-engineered anthropomorphic albino alligator who worked as a plumber in the sewers. (Considering that one of the other PCs' concept was a retired "last year's model" sex droid, "Al's" origin was not that outre, in context.)

#RPGaDay 2017: Day 11

11th) Which 'dead game' would you like to see reborn?

Big Eyes Small Mouth. When Guardians of Order folded due to financial troubles, the Third Edition of the game had not yet been printed. White Wolf finally published the book under their Arthaus imprint, but no support for the new edition was ever produced.

For the past decade, I've been using BESM 3E for "The Kynthiad," a solo Greek myth campaign that I run for my wife Erika. I would like to try it out in the context of another campaign (either as player or GM), but haven't had the opportunity yet. I considered BESM for my "Winds of Freeport" campaign before settling on D&D v.3.5. (You can see my preliminary conversion notes for that here.) If I ever return to my "Adventures of Arcadayn" setting, BESM is one of the systems that I would consider using instead of GURPS (and the wiki already has some partial conversion notes for BESM 3E).

Some Big Anniversaries as a Game Master

2017 brings three significant anniversaries for me as a Game Master.

First, I have been running RPGs for my kids (now 13 and 11) since sometime in 2012--five years! It's been very on and off again over that time, but now that I'm running some D&D 5E modules for them, it should be a much more regular part of our lives.

Second, the end of July will mark 10 years since I started "The Kynthiad," the solo Greek myth BESM game that I run for my wife Erika. I wrote about this game at some length around its anniversary two years ago, and a few times since.

Third, 20 years ago this May, I GMed my first game for Erika and her best friend, Seanna Lea--both of whom still plays in most of my games to this day. That "Cthulhu 2000 AD" campaign was a modern-day Lovecraftian game using GURPS CthulhuPunk, and was my second attempt at running GURPS. I had first tried the system--briefly--in college, and it was the system of choice for the first regular gaming group that I joined after moving to Boston. I decided to use GURPS rather than Call of Cthulhu because I was more familiar with that system, and because I preferred to have more fully developed characters then was possible with CoC's very simple character generation. I made a number of mistakes, mostly in ensuring party cohesion, and in balancing "waking world" vs. Dreamlands adventures, but we all had fun over those 15 months. A couple of years later, I ran a one-shot for Erika and Seanna Lea's characters in order to provide them better closure than I had able to do before the campaign's end. (By then, I had also been running a GURPS fantasy campaign--"Adventures in Arcadayn"--for Erika, Seanna Lea, and another friend for a couple years, but that is, as they say, another story.)

Shortly after that final one-shot, I posted some of my notes on this campaign (and the previous one, which was also a Cthulhu game) to my gaming website. That was on Yahoo! Geocities at the time, and I migrated those notes to Wikispaces when I had to switch hosts some years later. By the time I migrated Thastygliax's Vault to Google Sites in 2014, I had so many different campaign archives to move that the GURPS Cthulhu games were among the lowest in priority, so they did not get moved at that time. While working on that migration, I discovered that many (but not all) of those pages could be found on the Internet Archive Wayback Machine*. That meant that I could still post a link to that content until I got around to posting it on my new site. I did so, but included a caveat about the Wayback Machine's archive not being 100% complete.

Then I didn't think about those pages again for a couple years, expect for the briefest of moments every time I opened the Vault's homepage. Those Cthulhu games are the oldest campaigns that I have listed there, so are at the top of the list of links. This past week, I finally took the time to add My GURPS Cthulhu Campaigns to the Vault, so that I could delete that annoying little caveat. It was while I was preparing those pages for their new home that I realized that I had started my "Cthulhu 2000 AD" campaign 20 years (and a few weeks) ago.

Erika and Seanna Lea are certainly open to me running more Lovecraftian games, evidenced by the fact that they've played in all three of my campaigns set in Green Ronin Publishing's Mythos-tainted Freeport: The City of Adventure. There is a chance, albeit a very slim one, that we may revisit their "Cthulhu 2000 AD" characters someday, for nostalgia's sake. But it would almost certainly be in a different game system, and might not have much continuity with the original campaign. The most obvious choice of system is GURPS Fourth Edition (which I own but have never had a chance to try out) but their characters would work just as well (if not better?) in the Buffy/Angel version of Unisystem.

Happy anniversaries, Erika and Seanna Lea!


* Another old project of mine that I found on the Wayback Machine was GURPS Sluggy Freelance, which I briefly posted about this past weekend after copying it to the Vault.

The Kynthiad: The Witches

Hecate, the witch goddess

With Halloween just around the corner, I thought I'd devote this week's column to that theme and talk about witches. Not just any witches, mind you, but the witches featured in "The Kynthiad," the Greek mythology solo campaign that I run for my wife Erika. Her character, Kynthia, is a champion of the goddess Artemis, who travels about the world on quests given to her through visions or other messages from the gods. The witches who Kynthia has encountered have proven to be some of the most memorable recurring characters in this campaign.

The witches of Greek myth were always powerful and terrifying. The ability to wield magic was rare, but was dangerous because it was capable of nearly anything, though each witch had her own particular area of expertise. A strong will was necessary to wield such power, and in the ancient world, such independent women were almost universally feared and hated. They were typically described as beautiful enchantresses, who wielded their sex appeal as proficiently--and as wantonly--as their spells. Unsurprisingly, the most powerful witches were demigoddesses in their own right: Circe and Medea were descendants of Helios, Titan of the Sun, and received their first instruction in magic from that god.

Medea (Jolene Blalock)

The first witch that Kynthia ever met was Medea herself. By that time, Kynthia had met and fallen in love with Anahodios, the handsome winged grandson of Boreas, the North Wind, who accompanied her on her quests ever since their first meeting. While seeking out Prometheus in the Causasus, the two took shelter in a cave. Kynthia woke during the night to find a mysterious woman sitting by their fire, while Anahodios had fallen into an abnormally deep sleep. Medea quizzed her about her business in this part of the world, then departed. Kynthia was left shaken by the encounter, knowing Medea's reputation all too well--Anahodios was, after all, the son of an Argonaut (Zetes).

Later, when traveling across northern Africa, Kynthia and Anahodios were captured by a band of women warriors who took them to the camp of their mistress, Archemora. This witch attempted to seduce Anahodios and nearly succeeded. Kynthia managed to break free and rescue her beloved, then they (literally) took flight before the witch had another chance to weave any more spells. After this encounter, Kynthia was justifiably paranoid about witches stealing her man!

While traveling near Sicily and the Strait of Messina, Kynthia learned the story of the nymph Scylla, who had been cursed into monster form by Circe. Of her own initiative--and encouraged by Scylla's mother, the goddess Hecate--Kynthia set herself the task of restoring the nymph to her proper form. This required visiting Circe to ask the witch to lift her curse. Kynthia's knowledge of the voyage of the Argo allowed her to approach the witch as a suppliant who could not be harmed without angering the gods. Naturally, Circe was loathe to release her victim, so she set Kynthia three impossible tasks in order to get the necessary ingredients for the antidote: an Erinyes's tears, a kiss from the nymph of the pool of Lethe, and the caul from a virgin birth. This required Kynthia to enter the underworld, a harrowing journey that still haunts her. But to Circe's surprise, she succeeded--returning with Lethe's newborn son Scotius, marked by the kiss and tears, and his caul. Because Kynthia was woefully unprepared to care for a chthonic goddess's ill-omened child, she left him with Circe and took the cure to Scylla.

Kynthia met even more witches in the Tin Isles (modern Britain). She discovered that the Hyperborean princess Thaleia (an old rival for Anahodios's affections) had led an invasion of the island and taken control of the Atrebates, one of the Celtic tribes there. This led to a clash with two other tribes, the Silures (who Kynthia made peaceful contact with) and the Dumnonii, that was decided by a contest of seers at the Giant's Dance (Stonehenge). This contest was orchestrated by Luscina, a Dumnonii sorceress, whose plans failed when Kynthia took the place of the Silures tribe's witch and divined the answers to the tests she posed.

Archemora (Kelly Hu)

Both Archemora and Luscina became recurring villains who Kynthia grew to hate more passionately with each encounter. Archemora next showed up in the mountains near Hyperborea (Kynthia's new home after marrying Anahodios), but was left stranded there after Kynthia shot down her pet griffin. The witch later appeared in Cimmeria, where Kynthia's distant cousin Ophiophane was waging war to claim her late father's throne. Archemora had insinuated herself into the usurper's court (and his son's bed), so while Ophiophane faced off against the king in the final battle, Kynthia and Anahodios took on their old enemy. The witch escaped thanks to her magic cloak, which allowed her to take the form of a flock of crows--which made it impossible for a single arrow to kill her. Years later, Kynthia encountered her one last time, near the witch's original home in Scythia. This time, her target was the king of the Medes (and Medea's grandson). When Kynthia and Anahodios discovered her there, they pursued her doggedly until they had shot every crow in the cloak's swarm, which finally killed the sorceress. At this point, Medea arrived on the scene and thanked Kynthia for disposing of the other witch, as she had other plans for who her grandson should marry to carry on the Heliad dynasty.

Luscina (Christina Hendricks)

Unlike Archemora, Luscina still lives, and Kynthia has yet to engage in actual combat with her. A vision of Thaleia in childbirth dying sent Kynthia back to the Tin Isles. The people of Thaleia's consort's tribe spend a few days of each year as wolves, but this "gift" normally doesn't manifest until puberty. Thaleia's child had been cursed to be born in wolf form, and only Kynthia's miraculous healing powers allowed her old rival to survive the bloody birth. They determined that Luscina was responsible, so Kynthia went in search of the witch in order to force her to lift the curse. Along the way, Anahodios fell prey to a wasting curse, which also proved to be the Dumnonii woman's fault. It was also the only reason that Kynthia didn't shoot her on sight, because (as with Circe's work) only the witch who bestowed the curse could lift it. Luscina demanded a terrible price for Anahodios's cure: a night alone with him, and he would have to do his best to please her. This ordeal left both Anahodios and Kynthia traumatized...but he lived. If Kynthia and Luscina ever cross paths again, the witch will not.

More recently, the campaign has taken a new turn, with Kynthia trying to find allies against the danger posed by the impending return of the monstrous god Typhon. Most of the Olympian gods are currently distracted by an unfortunate little squabble known as the Trojan War, so Kynthia has had to seek help elsewhere. An Egyptian sorcerer revealed to Kynthia much of the secret history behind Typhon's first war against the gods, and suggested that she help him seek out other magicians for help in determining how to avoid (or if necessary, fight) a second one. As a result, Kynthia has introduced Hori to Medea--a very momentous occasion, given how little trust there is between practitioners of magic. But even with Medea as an apparent ally, Kynthia was grateful to part ways with the witch again--the woman still unnerves her like no other, except maybe her aunt Circe.

Meanwhile, Kynthia has learned that the baby she helped deliver in the underworld is actually Typhon's son. Scotius has grown to adult size in just a few years, and has developed powerful magical abilities of his own. Kynthia now has to determine what part Scotius is destined to play in his father's return--and what to do about it when she does...

#RPGaDay 2016: Days 15-17

Day 15: Your best source of inspiration for RPGs?

I don't have one "best" source of inspiration, but draw from a broad range of sources: RPG sourcebooks, novels, movies, comics, mythology, history, and art. Just to give an example, I run a solo BESM game for my wife that is set in the heroic age of Greece. The primary source for that game is Greek and Roman mythology, so I've drawn from retellings of those myth in prose, fiction, film, and comics, as well as nonfiction histories and RPG sourcebooks about Greece and neighboring cultures of the period. I've also poked around various online sites such as Wikipedia, theoi.com, and Greek Mythology Link to mine them for ideas to work into the game. I've also taken ideas from artwork related to Greek history and mythology, whether it's an image from one of the sources I've already mentioned, something I find by browsing Pinterest or deviantART, or an intriguing piece I see in person at a museum.

Day 16: Historical person you'd like in your group? What game?

Gary Gygax. I met him once at a book signing back in 1993, and have always been curious what it must have been like to be a apart of one of his games.  He was promoting Dangerous Journeys: Mythus at the time I met him, but the obvious system to play with him would be AD&D (1E or 2E).

Day 17: What fictional character would best fit in your group?

Daphne, from The Gamers: Dorkness Rising. A smart woman gamer who puts effort into mastering the rules, can build interesting and effective characters, enjoys role-playing, gives constructive feedback to her GM, and doesn't suffer fools gladly? What's not to like?

#RPGaDay2015: Days 25-27

25th) Favorite Revolutionary Game Mechanic
The Earthdawn RPG might not have been the first system to include a mechanic for "karma," "fate points," "hero points," or "drama points," but it was definitely the first one that I ever played any significant amount. These points give the players more control over the fate of their characters, which encourages taking bigger risks and thus creating more exciting games. In my experience, the idea works better when the mechanic is a central element of the game, as it is in Earthdawn, as well as Cinematic Unisystem and Cortex-based games.

In contrast, I own sourcebooks with optional rules for action points for D&D v.3.5 and hero points for Pathfinder. I find those rules clunky and awkward to use because they were designed after the fact, rather than as a part of the core game.

26th) Favorite inspiration for your game
For The Kynthiad, I draw inspiration from a wide variety of sources: museum artifacts, collections of Greek myths, historical texts, and "sword & sandals" movies. The last of these is probably the most useful for working out the look I want for a monster or character, because of the wealth of movie stills available online. As I've mentioned in an earlier column, I cast characters using real actors, so finding a good photo of an actor in costume can often suggest an entire character to me. And sometimes I find something that makes me curious enough to track down a new movie or series to watch--and if I'm lucky, enjoy.

27th) Favorite idea for merging two games into one
In one of Kenneth Hite's Suppressed Tranmission columns, he suggested that GMs who needed a quick idea for a new campaign could just pick two random GURPS sourcebooks and mash them together. Many of his columns do exactly that, but "Uncle Ken" has a knack for making such random-seeming hybrids sound far more exciting than you might think. One of my favorites combined supers with the Cthulhu Mythos: contact with eldritch entities and energies provides the origin stories for superhuman heroes. In this world, the line between the heroes and the monsters they fight is far blurrier than in conventional four-color comics.

#RPGaDay2015: Days 14-15

14th) Favorite RPG Accessory
This is a hard call, because I tend not to use a lot of accessories beyond the basics of dice and minis. I prefer to invest in more gaming sourcebooks instead. But the most consistently used accessory I have isn't a product from any game company--it's the 1" gridded easel pads that I use to draw out the battle maps.

I used to be able to find them at just about any office supply store, and they were reasonably priced. But sadly, but in the past year or so (at least around here, in Lexington, KY), they seem to be disappearing in favor of Post-It Note versions, which are much more expensive and have far fewer sheets per pad. Boo.

15th) Longest campaign played
"The Kynthiad," the solo BESM 3E campaign that I've been running for my wife since 2007. We've had some periods where the game was on hold for a few months, but it's still going strong, and we've racked up over 200 sessions so far.

If you limit this question to games with a more traditionally sized group, then the longest one I've played was "Grey Angels," an alternate-Buffyverse series by Autumn Riordan and Katie Hallahan. I was an active player for 3-1/2 years (and it had been going for a season or so before I joined in). It was later revived as a forum-based game for a couple more years, but then it was shelved for good.

The longest non-solo campaign that I've GMed was "Adventures in Arcadayn," a medieval fantasy GURPS campaign that lasted just over 3 years (late 1998 to early 2002). And I'm still gaming regularly with two of those players--my wife (who I married during that time) and her best friend since college.

The Kynthiad: The borders of the world

Over several years of game play, Kynthia has visited the far extremes of the known world, in all four cardinal directions--and even found a new home (and started a family) in one of those exotic lands.

For this campaign, the world's borders are roughly those known to Herodotus (from whose Histories I've drawn a great deal of detail and inspiration about exotic and/or legendary places and cultures), and includes all of Europe except Scandinavia, Africa as far south as the Congo, and Asia as far east as the Caspian Sea and Mesopotamia. The following legendary lands also exist:

• Cimmeria, the westernmost region of the world, located in Iberia. The isle of the Hesperides lies off its coast. 
• Colchis, the home of King Aeetes and Medea, at the foot of the Caucasus. The palace of Helios lies to the east of those mountains. 
• Ethiopia, at the far southern edge of Africa, beyond Nubia and the land of the Pygmies (the latter also being legendary). 
• Hyperborea, at the far north of the world, approximately where Scandinavia would be. 
• The River Oceanus, which surrounds the entire world (and thus touches Hyperborea, Cimmeria, and Ethiopia). 

As a side note, I've been casting NPCs as real-world actors, so that we have an easy visual reference for each character. (This is a trick I picked up from a long-running Buffy game I played in years ago.) Hyperboreans are almost all white, apart from a handful of characters who immigrated from elsewhere (or whose ancestors did). Cimmerians are a mixture of blacks, whites, and mixed heritage (much as Moorish Spain was). And because I've cut most of Asia off the map, I'm using Indians to cast Ethiopians, and East Asians for Scythians. For most "real world" locations, I've been trying to keep my casting close to what the people there should look like, though that's often pretty loose (ala Xena or Hercules).

Kynthia is originally from Colophon, in Lydia (on the Aegean coast of Asia Minor). During her travels, she fell in love with Anahodios, a winged demigod from Hyperborea. She made several visits to his homeland between other quests, and that part of the setting definitely took on a life of its own. Hyperborea became a permanent focus of the game once she married her beloved and made it her home as well. 

Besides Herodotus, I've used ideas teased from the (often eccentric) footnotes in Robert Graves' The Greek Myths to flesh out Hyperborea. His notes point out connections between stories and themes, and often elaborate on alternate versions of stories mentioned in the main text. While Hyperborea rarely features prominently in the best-known Greek myths, there are connections to that fabulous land through many of the stories. (For example, Perseus and Heracles both visited it, or lands near it.) Hyperborea filled much the same niche for the ancient Greeks that Atlantis did for everyone after Plato: it was a distant paradise blessed by the gods, from which came many of the secrets of early civilization. This is one of the chief reasons that I decided against including Atlantis in the Kynthiad. 

The Kynthiad: How many gods?

From the very first, The Kynthiad was never intended to be exclusively derived from Greek mythology, though that would be the primary source. The Bronze Age Near East was chock full of competing cultures and religions, such as Egypt, Canaan, and the Hittites, and it would be unrealistic to ignore them all. (I realize that "unrealistic" is a slippery word when you're talking about a fantasy setting featuring monsters, gods, and magic. I simply mean that Greece did not exist in a bubble.) My research also suggested that the most likely dates for the historical basis of the Trojan War and the Hebrew Exodus roughly coincided with the long reign of Ramesses II. Or close enough to make for a very interesting background to the game, without resorting to the violent mashing of timelines that, say, Xena: Warrior Princess regularly indulged in.

One of the first issues I had to address was how many of those other cultures, and their pantheons, to include in the game. To start with, Egypt was irresistible--it seemed as old and exotic to the "heroic age" Greeks as it does to us now. The Hellenistic Greeks' attempts to syncretize their gods with the Egyptians' raised some relevant questions for the game: Were different cultures' gods actually the same gods, or truly distinct and separate pantheons, or some combination of the two?

For the purposes of the Kynthiad, I decided early on that the Egyptian and Greek gods would be two separate pantheons. I did choose one point of overlap, inspired by the Greek story of Typhon, a terrible monster who almost overthrew the gods. One late version of this tale claimed that the animal-headed gods of the Egyptians were actually inspired by the Olympians, who had fled in fear from Typhon and disguised themselves as animals to hide in the far south. Typhon is equated with Set in this version of the story, and many English translations of Egyptian myths use both names interchangeably for Osiris's brother. For my game, I decided that Typhon and Set were indeed the same entity. Kynthia has recently learned during play that it took the combined might of both the Greek and Egyptian pantheons to stop him. This is a secret that both families of proud gods would prefer be forever forgotten--but with our heroine experiencing visions suggesting that Typhon is working free from his prison, it's one they will not be able to ignore for long.

The world of the Kynthiad is full of fictional lands drawn from Greek mythology, such as Ethiopia, Hyperborea, the Amazons, and Cimmeria. Because of their literary origins, these regions usually worship the same gods as the Greeks--or a subset of them, at least. Most seem to prefer the Olympians, but some honor Titans, Winds, or other gods instead. (Kynthia has found a second--or third?--home among the Amazons in part due to their shared reverence for Artemis.)

In other regions, such as Scythia and the Tin Isles [modern Britain and Ireland], the exact nature of the local gods is not always so clear cut. As Kynthia travels through foreign lands, I occasionally provide names and portfolios for gods worshiped in the area. I try to leave some mystery about whether those gods can be mapped to the Greek pantheon. or to any other. Very few of those gods will ever play as critical a part in the story as the Greek and Egyptian gods do, so definite answers are unnecessary for now. And for those that will, Kynthia will learn more in due time.

The Kynthiad: Solo adventures in the world of ancient Greek mythology

I have been a fan of Greek mythology since early childhood. I read Edith Hamilton's Mythology before the end of elementary school and Bulfinch's Age of Fable during high school, and took a Classical Mythology class early in my college career. Between that and my passion for game mastering RPGs, it was inevitable that I would eventually run a campaign based on these myths. The surprising part is that I didn't start planning such a game in earnest until my 30s.

In the early 2000s, I mentioned to some of my gaming buddies that I wanted to run a mythology-based game. At the time, GURPS was my system of choice for anything that wasn't D&D, so I started working on ideas using those rules, and my wife Erika and another friend even started working out character concepts. However, that campaign never happened, in part because I couldn't settle on a coherent focus or frame for the story. (Classical mythology covers a vast body of texts, many of them blatantly contradictory!) 

A few years later, Erika and I became parents, and having two small children greatly curtailed our gaming schedule. Erika requested that I run some kind of solo game for her, so that she could get her RPG fix more often. I realized that this would be an excellent opportunity for me to finally run a Greek myth game, without any of the potential headaches of scheduling a full-sized group and balancing spotlight time for multiple PCs. 

We decided against GURPS as being too crunchy, and chose Big Eyes Small Mouth instead. BESM was designed as a rules-light system allowing play in any genre of anime, which means that it also works well for most genres of non-anime gaming, too. A few years before, I had run a successful medieval fantasy mini-campaign using BESM Second Edition, and now (in 2007) wanted to try out the newly-released Third Edition. 

The campaign was set in the Bronze Age Greek world, circa 1200 BC, during the first couple years of the Trojan War. Kynthia began play as an acolyte in a temple of Artemis in Colophon, one of the many smaller cities along the Aegean coast of Asia Minor. This city appears in the Iliad as one of many cities sacked by the Achilles to collect supplies for the siege of Troy and weaken any potential allies to that city. During the first session, a group of Greek ships attacked the city, and Kynthia joined the defense of the goddess's temple. She experienced intense headaches just before the raid, which only grew as the Greeks broke into the sanctuary itself. Kynthia prayed to the goddess for protection--and the ground shook, dropping pieces of the roof upon the intruders and frightening away any Greeks who were not instantly killed. The priestesses were saved, and the city was spared a full sacking. 

Up to now, Kynthia had been an indifferent acolyte--one of many who assumed their parents would find them a wealthy husband before taking their final vows--but this miracle demonstrated that Artemis had other ideas for her life. And so began "The Nine Journeys of Kynthia," AKA The Kynthiad. Our heroine would go on to become a world-traveling seeress and champion for the goddess, and--after performing her first few quests--formally becoming Her priestess. 

We've had a few hiatuses along the way--the longest being prompted by our cross-country move a couple years ago--but the game is still going strong many years later. In fact, one week from today will be the 8th anniversary of our very first session--and we've just recently passed the 200 mark. 

Emmy Rossum, cast as our heroine, Kynthia of Colophon

Now that I've posted this introduction, I intend to write more about this campaign in future columns. This campaign has far too much history to try to chronicle it all here, but it does provide plenty of material for discussing various challenges and decisions I faced in preparing and running the game. Some of the topics I plan to touch on include:

• Combining mythology with real-world history to create a consistent and authentic-feeling fantasy world.
• Portraying the gods, who interfere constantly in the myths--and deciding how many of them to use, in a world with many different cultures and pantheons.
• Reference works and other inspiration for background, characters, and plots.
• Casting characters using real actors, to provide a convenient photo reference.