Dragons of Tirenia

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...

 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...