In one of the threads I saw when I was catching up, SineNomine tossed out this offhand remark:

Quote from: SineNomine;829008I've even toyed with it for my Tudor England game that I'll be working on later this year.

So.. please, speak to us of your plans for Henry VII through Elizabeth I.  Will it be another Kickstarter?  What's the timeline for it?  Is it going to be under your OSR system, the more heroic system you brought out in Scarlet Heroes, or something new?  I'm always eager to hear what you're up to.

This is the information that was released about the project with the Silent Legions Kickstarter (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1637945166/silent-legions-a-sandbox-horror-rpg/description).

QuoteAn alt-history OSR game compatible with Scarlet Heroes, set in the England of 1555. Red-handed Queen Mary sits upon the throne, supported by her Catholic subjects and their firm belief that the perils of magic should be reserved to the ordained priesthood. Yet the sullen Protestant masses murmur against the queen, demanding the right to take up sorcery to defend their people against the depredations of the Fae kingdoms and the diabolic powers of Hell. And all the while, courtiers and rebellious peasants scheme to usurp Queen Mary's precarious rule, while hungry foreign eyes turn toward England's green shores....

I believe Starvation Cheap got the vote for what should be worked on next, but I expect the 1555 England game won't be far behind.

I just want to say kraken, your sig quote really speaks to me at this stage in my life.

Wow... with 18,000$ I could live for one full year, dedicating all my time to a project. I will have to think about it...

Anyway, Dark Albion (by RPGpundit and myself) is now close to be released. By the end of this month it is sent to RPGpundit for proofreading, and then I guess one more month before it can be released both as PDF and POD. Now you might ask why I am mentioning this here? In fact because Dark Albion covers almost the same subject, though 100 years before (i.e. during the Rose War). It is a 260 pages campaign setting book, with 80% of it dedicated to the setting itself. And no less than a dozen maps.

Quote from: Turanil;830364In fact because Dark Albion covers almost the same subject, though 100 years before (i.e. during the Rose War). It is a 260 pages campaign setting book, with 80% of it dedicated to the setting itself. And no less than a dozen maps.

My game is gonna be so full of spoilers for the War of the Roses.


The ruthless bastard beats the murderous asshole.


Anyway, while Starvation Cheap is indeed on the front burner right now, I've been turning back to this game when mil-sf gets to be too much for me. Right now most of the work consists of gathering information. The game is intended to be strictly historical save for those elements of fantasy and alt-hist specifically inserted, so getting the facts right matters a great deal to me. I spent most of the day today cataloging the active peerage of England in 1555 and figuring out who had what office or title as of July 1st of that year.

In one sense, a historical game is easy. You just go to history, pick it up, and put it in the book. That, however, tends to make a really lousy historical game, because it provides no clear handholds for a GM or players to grip the material. It's even less helpful when you're dealing with such a fundamentally chaotic setting as you have in England of 1555. It's not enough to just write a historical sourcebook, you need to assimilate the material and render it in a shape that the players and GM can recognize. You have to point up the interesting conflicts and give them a clear entry point for getting involved in things.

For example, the game's using the basic Stars Without Number system so you can haul in generic old-school material or use my other stuff along with it. But instead of SWN's character creation system, this game uses a lifepath system. The specific intent is to handhold the player through creating a Tudor adventurer, showing them the conflicts in society and their relationship to the world as part of creating their character. You don't learn about the setting conflicts from the gazetteer chapter, you learn about them from the chargen table that says you were driven off your farm by a rich gentleman's engrossing of the land, or forced to flee your village after the three years of terrible harvests that plagued the end of King Edward's reign, or brought to England last year in the Spanish fleet that escorted Phillip II to wed Queen Mary. I'm trying to plug the character creation process directly into the world.

Magic isn't really going to be Vancian- it's based more on alchemy, natural philosophy and angelic (or demonic) pacts. In the current draft state, magi have a very limited number of marvels available at any one moment for quick deployment, a larger selection of slow rituals that can be used whenever time allows, and a very few active pacts which confer special blessings or abilities on them, but have a cumulatively greater risk of exhausting themselves and requiring re-dedication the more that they're used.

The chief monstrous perils are from Faerie or Hell, though the ancient Romans (who were famous wizards of especial virtue at building) also left some surprises around the countryside. Dungeon analogues tend to be annexes of Faerie, irruptions of Hell, or ancient Roman villas with cloaking-magic that's finally wearing out after centuries of concealment.

I'm also taking a risk in making this a full-color book with stylistic hints taken from 16th-century print forms. Here's an example chapter-intro spread, with dummy text and illustration. The chapter intros will have the borders, with the floral tinting set to complement the illustration colors and the rubication color of the chapter title. The chapter interior pages will have much more restrained corner bosses, rubicated running heads, drop caps for the sections, and a few 16th-century tricks for text interjections.

It sounds like your game will practically be a sequel to Dark Albion: the Rose War.


Which is cool.  Albion is set up to be run from 1454 to 1485. So it ends with the dawn of the Tudor Dynasty (of course, in theory in some types of campaigns the PCs might just be able to change history, and the House of York might continue along, with the Tudors as just a footnote).

Anyways, it sounds like your game is set up to be focused entirely on that one year?  That might be the biggest difference.

Quote from: RPGPundit;830890Anyways, it sounds like your game is set up to be focused entirely on that one year?  That might be the biggest difference.

It's got a specific "Present Day", yes- July 1st, 1555. Trying to handle the full scope of Tudor England from 1485 until Elizabeth's death is just too much- things changed too drastically for a single manageable volume to cover everything a GM would need to know to handle the setting. By setting a single specific date, I can give exact details of the political and economic situation to the reader, and set up particular situations as hooks for PC engagement.

I picked Marian England because everything's going to Hell in an interesting way. You've got foreign entanglements, local rebellions, famines, ruinous inflation, and Protestant-burning, and that's just the mundane problems facing the nation. Slather on problems with the ambassador from Faerie, incursions of Hell in Exeter, reckless Lollard sorcerers, and an Unseelie army marshaling in Scotland and the GM should have enough big-picture problems to provide sufficient grist for play.

I'm sticking tightly to historicity for the non-fantastic parts of the setting, but that may just be an England thing. I know the history in the New World is drastically different by 1555, so you've got Incan Republic privateers preying on Spanish trade, and the magically-radioactive hellscape of Tenochtitlan  dominated by a plague-god summoned by the conquistadors' attempt to seize the city. There won't be a whole lot of detailing on this in the book, but if the thing sells well enough I might do a standalone game set along the Spanish Main at the same time.

Quote from: SineNomine;830926It's got a specific "Present Day", yes- July 1st, 1555. Trying to handle the full scope of Tudor England from 1485 until Elizabeth's death is just too much- things changed too drastically for a single manageable volume to cover everything a GM would need to know to handle the setting. By setting a single specific date, I can give exact details of the political and economic situation to the reader, and set up particular situations as hooks for PC engagement.

It's definitely true that the span of the 16th century changed England far more radically than the span of the 15th.

QuoteI picked Marian England because everything's going to Hell in an interesting way. You've got foreign entanglements, local rebellions, famines, ruinous inflation, and Protestant-burning, and that's just the mundane problems facing the nation. Slather on problems with the ambassador from Faerie, incursions of Hell in Exeter, reckless Lollard sorcerers, and an Unseelie army marshaling in Scotland and the GM should have enough big-picture problems to provide sufficient grist for play.

Mary's catholic restoration period is interesting to be sure, particularly at the early period and right at the end, because everything was more uncertain and up in the air than it had been at any time since the War of the Roses.

It also sounds like you're doing a lot of similar things to what I've done with Albion, that mix of focused historicity with fantasy elements, including Fae stuff, demons and witchcraft, etc.

QuoteI'm sticking tightly to historicity for the non-fantastic parts of the setting, but that may just be an England thing. I know the history in the New World is drastically different by 1555, so you've got Incan Republic privateers preying on Spanish trade, and the magically-radioactive hellscape of Tenochtitlan  dominated by a plague-god summoned by the conquistadors' attempt to seize the city. There won't be a whole lot of detailing on this in the book, but if the thing sells well enough I might do a standalone game set along the Spanish Main at the same time.

Yeah, well, I haven't got anything in the new world in Albion because, you know, it hadn't been invented yet.  But I did pretty much the same thing, of ramping up the Fantasy, in Scots' Land (giants, mythos-worshipping Picts, etc.) and especially on the Continent (Frogmen, Vlad Tepes/Dracula).  I also implied that Eire Land and the Orkneys were absolutely crawling with fantasy-stuff (and in the latter case, a thousand-year old Morgan Le Fay), though neither of those get fleshed out the way Scots Land and the Continent do.