Dragons of Tirenia

 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...

 The Siege of Medilano was a giant experimental campaign that I ran at Armageddon Expo last year. It was about the battle between the bronze and silver dragons. Players could sign up for one side and earn points, and play in daily 1-1.5 hour games, with a different story per faction per day. The results of the choices made by the players each day, and the points scored per day, influenced the day-by-day outcome, and the ultimate course of the war. It was a very cool game, but a lot  of work - ultimately, there was no way for one Dungeon Master to reach the amount of people I'd need to in order to make it a success. Because multiple groups ran each scenario each day and made different decisions and named their own characters, it's impossible for me to give a really definitive 'this is exactly what happened' account. As a result, this is a little vaguer on the specifics than a lot of the session reports. Here goes! The great and fair silver dragon city of Medilano was sur...

 I am behind on the times! We've had two more sessions of The Ruins of Auromia  since my last post. (I'd hoped for more, but scheduling got difficult over Christmas and we had more lockdowns with which to contend.) As a result, the summary of these ones is going to be a bit briefer... Forza had drawn the sword of the faerie 'goddess of war' Bellona and become fully possessed. They now turned on their former companions. Ilaria tried to buy the group's freedom by offering her cat to Bellona as a new host. For unknown reasons, this enraged Bellona beyond measure, and she slew Ilaria, before turning on the others. She summoned her vulture-headed griffin, which Noke slew at the cost of his own life. Sorrel tried to channel the power of her floral crown to summon Tellaia to fight for her, but the nature 'goddess' did not want to challenge Bellona at this time. In desperation, Sorrel drank the vial of liquid moss she had found, but rather than helping, it wound up ...

 It's been a while since I posted here!  Time to do wrap-ups of a few Tirenian odds and ends.  Street Rat is completed! All twelve chapters are now done, forming the complete story of Ratto and Piccino. The final chapter has multiple branching endings, so that players can contact us and let us know what happened. As is our custom, this will affect what happens in our ongoing games set in Tirenia. You can find all twelve chapters at https://skybeargames.itch.io/

 Street Rat is starting to move towards its conclusion! Only three chapters to go... https://skybeargames.itch.io/street-rat-ix

 Act Two of Street Rat comes to a close with the thematic prompt, "Ghost Ship"! You can play it here: https://skybeargames.itch.io/street-rat-viii