If so, how's it going? Any pitfalls? Cool elements?

Also, how did you get the players up on the cultural aspects so they could pick and play characters?

Never played it.

I've contemplated running it with 5e because
A) It would be a refreshing change of pace culturally, B) Sine Nomine has the Midas touch, C) the reviews and summaries are tantalizing, and D) fuck anyone who tells me I'm not allowed to explore African fantasy landscapes because I'm too white.

The reasons I haven't launched myself into it is A) The main villains are undead and I dislike undead, B) my French patriotism keeps pulling me back to euro-fantasy, C) I'm still debating moving out of medieval fantasy for a while, and D) I want to experiment with domain-level play in D&D soon and expecting players to swallow an unusual setting along with the expectations of running a realm feels like a bit much.

I'd like to play it.

Quote from: Shipyard Locked;876060The reasons I haven't launched myself into it is A) The main villains are undead and I dislike undead

I felt the same way, then I got Silent Legions, and using the tables to create critters, etc in that, you can ignore the undead (or change them into something more to your taste)

There is a brief section in Spears addressing setting and cultural unfamiliarity, which boils down to "everyone expects Spears to lack social graces etc etc."

I don't really think that beyond the history that you really need to make the undead the primary villians. There is definitely room to have the night-men or the snake-men be the main villians.

Quote from: AxesnOrcs;876182There is a brief section in Spears addressing setting and cultural unfamiliarity, which boils down to "everyone expects Spears to lack social graces etc etc."

I have to say I don't really dig that as a solution to the cultural-ignorance problem.  Not that I dig the answer that says "you have to take an anthropology class before playing this game" either.

Quote from: RPGPundit;876972I have to say I don't really dig that as a solution to the cultural-ignorance problem.  Not that I dig the answer that says "you have to take an anthropology class before playing this game" either.

Surely one class isn't enough to overcome your preexisting ignorance and cultural misconceptions.


For pretty much any second person value of "your."

Quote from: RPGPundit;876972I have to say I don't really dig that as a solution to the cultural-ignorance problem.  Not that I dig the answer that says "you have to take an anthropology class before playing this game" either.

Me either,

Of course actually getting anyone to be interested in Not-Africa as a setting is pretty challenging and I can't get my group to read rule books  or research things they are actually interested in  much less do research on something kind of alien to our ways of seeing things.

Still  If I were to play SPOTD or a game like it, I'd really prefer to understand the culture and do it right. Heck I feel that way about games set in Feudal Japan or something like Privateers and Gentlemen or our very own hosts Arrows of Indra  and I have at least some knowledge of those  cultures and groups .

Making an enjoyable game from foreign cultures is is hard especially when only a few of the players have clue one.

In my experience, you have precisely one text page worth of attention from any randomly-selected potential player. If your setting or game requires more than one page worth of buy-in before they can start playing, the GM is going to have a bad time. If the players get hooked after that point, it's all well and good and they can go all Tekumel on things, but if you can't equip them to play the game with only a trivial amount of invested effort, you're going to cut your potential player base enormously.

When you're dealing with an intimidating setting, the very last thing you want to do is build your default campaign setup to require substantial setting mastery from the players. You're already going to have a hard time finding people to give the setting a spin; you can't afford to raise the barriers any higher than they have to be for the default entry point into the world.

Quote from: SineNomine;877000In my experience, you have precisely one text page worth of attention from any randomly-selected potential player. If your setting or game requires more than one page worth of buy-in before they can start playing, the GM is going to have a bad time. If the players get hooked after that point, it's all well and good and they can go all Tekumel on things, but if you can't equip them to play the game with only a trivial amount of invested effort, you're going to cut your potential player base enormously.

When you're dealing with an intimidating setting, the very last thing you want to do is build your default campaign setup to require substantial setting mastery from the players. You're already going to have a hard time finding people to give the setting a spin; you can't afford to raise the barriers any higher than they have to be for the default entry point into the world.

Agreed, but as a new player in Spears I need at least a basic grasp on the setting, highlights of my home culture and an idea of what the different classes are so I can make a sensible choice. Is there a one-pgaer for that stuff? I don't recall it.

By the way, I'm not trying to throw rocks. I'm asking as I want to run it.

Quote from: D-503;877253Agreed, but as a new player in Spears I need at least a basic grasp on the setting, highlights of my home culture and an idea of what the different classes are so I can make a sensible choice. Is there a one-pgaer for that stuff? I don't recall it.

I parcel out the attention budget in chargen by wrapping the background listings into the world description. Each nation has a 2-page spread in the character creation chapter, where the PC backgrounds for it implicitly embed the culture. On page 11-12, for example, I've got a half-page Kirsi culture overview, and then ten background packages that encapsulate the basic traits of the culture. The idea is to give the reader the idea, "Okay, these guys are hard-ass martial rider-types who worship the Sun Faith." without having to make them consciously sit down and read a large chunk of exposition.

In terms of the general world setting, that's the first page of text in the game. Since Spears of the Dawn, I always stick a one-page summary of what a game's about as the first page in the book. A player who reads that gets an idea of what the game's about, the basic shtick of each of the five kingdoms, and the idea that being a Spear of the Dawn is what they're probably going to do.

I'm currently running a campaign set in 1876 in the United States. The amount of cultural information that players require is ENORMOUS.  And that's nothing compared to medieval Europe, which is nothing compared to India or Africa or China.

But I think the best solution to this is a process of "learn while you play".  As the GM you should be able to differentiate between what the player may or may not know yet, and what the PC OUGHT TO KNOW.  Then whenever it comes up, stop the player and explain some detail about culture that his PC knows but he didn't yet.  In this tutorial style, we can actually get to playing, and after a few sessions, they'll get acclimatized for the most part, in a mostly painless way.

Character choices sound pretty easy though Pundy. East-coast tenderfoot fleeing his debts. Grizzled trapper. Civil war veteran turned private security contractor.

Spears has classes with inbuilt cultural concepts. Medieval Europe you could play a forester then learn culture as you play. Any western gamer will know roughly what a forester is.

So the point is the first challenge comes before play with each player deciding what to play.

Of course the thing is, when you are playing in a game, you aren't really playing in that setting, you are playing in the version of the setting as defined by the GM's knowledge of it.

Sometimes what the GM knows is from the setting in the rulebook (or setting books), sometimes it's just made up, sometimes it's from things he's read or watched.


Anyway, the thing with Spears is that while it's African inspired (as opposed to Europe), it's also pretty firmly based on standard swords & sorcery tropes. One of the bigger inspirations for it was Charles Saunders' writings and they read very much like Robert Howard (if he weren't a racist/ignorant).

Indeed, Mr Saunders apparently wrote two '80s sword & sorcery movies.