Dragons of Tirenia

 Hi everyone - I'm putting this blog on hiatus while we're in lockdown. I've got an idea for a new RPG article series, which will start when lockdown levels drop and stress levels drop!  Stay safe everyone! Image: 'Doctor Beak.' Paul Furst, c. 1650.

Giving players control over the story has always been a great interest of mine. Like many of us, I was raised on games like D&D which have a strict division of authority: one player creates the world, while the other players interact with it. However, over time I got to try different, more indie systems which distribute narrative control more widely. I played games like Doctor Who, which uses story points to give players limited control over what happens, and gives weaker characters far greater narrative agency than powerful ones for the sake of game play. There are games like Fiasco, which dispense of the narrator rule entirely, making all players equally responsible for what happens in the game. I decided that I wanted to try some of that in Tirenia. In the first Tirenian campaign, The Company of the Wolf,  I tried taking a page from Doctor Who. The players were part of an elite mercenary company who were routinely hired to do the impossible. I let them use Inspiration, gaine...

It's an odd thing to admit, when you're making a game about the Renaissance... that there's really no such thing. The popular conception of the Renaissance is that in the 15th Century, starting in Florence and then spreading across Europe, there was a time of great art and culture, as people looked back to Roman times to begin developing again after the squalor of the Middle Ages. Everyone can name some of the great artists, if only because they're named after Ninja Turtles: Leonardo da Vinci, Donato di Niccolo di Betto Bardi, Raffaelo Sanzio da Urbino, and Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni.  The problem is that none of this is really true. Well, it is true that there were some great artists named after Ninja Turtles, and that they have really amazing art. But the Renaissance stretches over a truly immense time period: some people include Dante Alighieri in the early 1300s, to William Shakespeare in the early 1600s. It presupposes that there was no art or cultu...

 This weekend, I'm going down to ConVergence in Hamilton to run The Fall of the House of Della Squama! I thought that I'd take this opportunity to talk about the genesis of the adventure and how it evolved over time. The Fall of the House of Della Squama  is set in the city of Verrazza, heavily inspired by Verona. The red dragons of Selenizia are advancing inland, and your city is in the firing line. However, you've just discovered that your dragon Prince has died, and, furthermore, was never a dragon in the first place! Now you've got three hours in real time during which you have to keep up the hoax and either defend the city or escape it with enough money to settle comfortably somewhere else. One of the early problems that I found when creating Tirenia was that there were far more awesome Italian city-states than there were dragons to go around. I knew that I could always have the same dragons in multiple cities, but that never seemed like a good solution. Verona was...

Now that I've got a couple of Tirenian campaigns under my belt, and another about to wrap up shortly, I thought that you might find it interesting how I go about writing a Tirenian campaign! I prefer to run shorter games with a strong story arc running through them. with multiple mini-campaigns building towards the larger story. I'll use my Carnevale  campaign as an example. During Session 0, I'll hash out the idea for a story based on what I'm interested in doing and what the players are telling me. I'll be upfront with the premise, which might be as simple as just the setting for the adventure, or a simple scenario. Once we've negotiated the premise and the players are happy, they can create their characters, figure out how they relate to that initial pitch. For the session 0, the high pitch was just 'it's Fantasy Italy.' Nice and broad. The players liked Venice, so we set the game in Vanzenia (which has since been renamed Selenizia - Vanzenia was ...

Dungeons & Dragons  usually cover a very small spectrum of human activity. There are, officially, three 'pillars' of activity - interaction, exploration, and combat. Two of the pillars (exploration and interaction) have fairly minimal rules, but there are exhaustive rules for killing things you don't like, and the vast majority of abilities improve your abilities in a fight. As I talked about last time, there's a place for that, but I don't think it's the be-all and end-all like many adventures would have you believe. I can understand why there's this focus though - fighting has the highest stakes, your character's life, so it's the one that everyone needs to be good at. But then if everyone's good at it, it becomes the preferred option. When you have a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail. One of our goals for Dragons of Tirenia  is to have a wider range of genres and experiences in our adventures. One of the first ways I'm movi...

 I remember when I first read The Lord of the Rings. I was blown away by the elves. Ancient and ethereal, majestic but humble, wise but sad. I feel like Dungeons & Dragons  (and not just Dungeons & Dragons!)  sometimes loses that sense of wonder. An elf or a dwarf is no longer different, mysterious and mythic - they're your neighbour, and they're either a racist stereotype or a human with plastic surgery. When a dragon-man sells you apples in the morning, how special is it to meet a dragon-man? When Doctor Dolittle  came out in the 1920s, the idea of a man who could talk to animals was fantastical. Now, Speak With Animals  is just a minor spell that many character optimization guides say isn't even worth taking. Fantasy as a genre is all about showing us wonders that are different to the world as we know it. If we travel to the great torus-shaped city of Sigil at the centre of the planes, what is our base-line expectation? For the players who've been wor...

 I don't like fighting in RPGs. Heresy! How can I play Dungeons & Dragons , a game all about hurting strange animals with sharp implements, and not like fighting? I have a couple of reasons why I don't like fights. For the first thing, traditionally many fights were for very low stakes. The orcs are in the room, and you want to get past  the room. The bandits want your money, and are terrible at threat assessment. The owlbear is hungry, and you're made of meat. None of these have any sort of emotional heft. You're further incentivized to violence because your enemy has two valuable commodities - experience points and treasure. Experience points in particular led towards multiple 'disposable' fights, since you had to get enough of them to go up a level. In the move towards milestone levelling, this part of the problem is starting to go away, at least. Furthermore, many of the alternatives to fighting aren't very well developed. You could make a Persuasion...

  In many ways, Dragons of Tirenia is a love letter to classic RPG settings that I grew up with, such as Dragonlance, Dark Sun and Legend of the Five Rings. One of the problems that each of these worlds struggled with was their metaplot: their ongoing storyline that changed the world from book to book. I loved these metaplots because I enjoyed seeing these stories unfold, but I also hated it. You’d fall in love with a character, a place, or an idea, and then a year later the timeline had jumped forward and the thing that you loved had changed or was gone.  Dragons of Tirenia was never originally intended to have a metaplot. However, I really liked the idea that the actions of my players should permanently affect the world and the future games set in it. I’ve never liked the traditional idea that starting characters should do minor, irrelevant things, and only experienced and powerful characters should save the world; it’s much truer to the fantasy genre if beginning, inexper...

 When designing Tirenia, I knew I wanted it to have a different feel to your standard fantasy RPG campaign. In many of them, all characters are exceptional, magical beings. This is a wonderful, empowering thing, and something that I wanted to keep. What I wanted to change was how magical the world around them was. If magic is commonplace, commodified, and readily accessible, is magic really magical? Citizens of a standard D&D world might not be surprised to see a monster in a zoo or circus, while historically Florence went crazy when they got a giraffe! There's famous essays out there which you can search up about how even Gandalf, one of the greatest wizards in fantasy fiction, only needs to be about 5 th level, and he's regarded with awe by everyone around him. It's the intention of Tirenia to be more strongly inspired by history than a typical game, with magic that's rarer but more powerful when it shows up. Keeping the game at low levels lets the players feel...

  It all started when I worked at a local hobby store, running Dungeons & Dragons night. We’d done all the Adventurers’ League modules to which we had access, and now we wanted something new. I had the idea of having our own consistent world in which our players could adventure and leave their own stamp upon. I surveyed our player base to find out what they wanted: something European, but different from the medieval English pastiche; something where all the rules they knew still applied, but where the flavour had changed to make things different; something that could be explained easily, but with the depth to sustain multiple campaigns by different Dungeon Masters. My wife and I went out to dinner and came up with the basic idea: a world inspired by the Italian Renaissance, a highly civilized world with feuding city-states, each led by a different type of dragon. The players would be elite mercenaries, free to travel across the land fulfilling contracts, while secretly working...