Approximate time to read: 1 minutes.
As touched upon in this when chatting with The Iron Pact Patrons late last year, I’m open to ideas on where to go with future posts on the blog — not that I’m short of ideas.
At the moment, I’m conscious that I still haven’t given the A-to-Z Challenge much thought (and April isn’t far off), but beyond that I have a shortlist of To Do ideas:
- The Unseen Sanctuary (continuation)
- Elixirs of Davokar (continuation)
- Character Generation Walk-through
- The Mountain Pass (detailing/hex map, continuation)
- The Sleepless Path (continuation, landscape)
- The Order (The Long and Varied Game – part II, landscape)
- Masks (I is for Identity Magic, etc.)
In addition, I have some general ideas on adventure landscape and some thoughts running around inside my head on tabletop tools and bling to make your Symbaroum game more engaging and tactile.
As before, I remain open to your ideas — but, I also appreciate comments on existing articles and adventures. I never assume I’m any kind of authority on matters of Symbaroum — I’m never going to be more right than the core team and I’m ultimately just a really enthusiastic home brewer, so take anything and everything I say with a pinch of salt. If you have thoughts on my thoughts, I would love to hear them.
Is it worth having a Google+ Community for The Iron Pact to engage in weird and wonderful discussion that you don’t feel comfortable posting to the ‘official’ Google+ Symbaroum Community?
I have tried to create a forum on the Pact before, but it didn’t really work out as planned; comments on The Iron Pact tend to get lost (although I welcome them in response to this post!).
Something that I always find incredibly useful, and on which the Rulebook is unfortunately rather short, is advice for GMs new to the setting on how to set up campaigns and prepare content for the players to interact with.
Symbaroum is a setting that has it’s main themes in the exploration of ruins and the conflicts that arise from expanding into an already settled territory. And then you have corruption and blight as a complication on top of that.
Advice on how to design and populate dungeons and how to make NPCs with strong motivations and active plans that are well integrated into the Symbaroum setting would be a really useful thing. Same with advice on how to handle certain things differently than in generic fantasy campaig settings and how to handle players interacting with the world.
All good ideas. I have considered the addition of an insanity system, ala CoC, WFRP & SOE sort of thing. I am aware that it may not have been included to avoid too much book keeping, but I feel the setting and game premise is ripe for such things. Would be glad to hear you opinion on it.
Also, personally I have put a lot of time into considering the cultural differences between the various races in the game, particularly those that co-inhabit, like the Goblins, Barbarians and Ambrians. Another potential topic to consider I think.
Despair and Dismay deals with a system that mirrors a form of sanity tracking — http://www.theironpact.com/d-is-for-despair-and-dismay/ — though I’m not averse to offering alternatives to my own alternatives!
The silly thing here is I read that months ago and completely forgot about it!
I will probably use that as a base for a house rule Ill be putting in regarding psychological conditions beyond just despair I think. One of my fave WFRP mechanics over the years was how an experienced party started to pick up various “ticks” like fear of the dark, alcoholism or kleptomania as the world wore them down. Will probably put them in effect as burdens on the characters or some such.
I’m completely making this up on the fly, but before you could award anti-experience points. Bad things happening leads to their award and the GM can spend them to force a re-roll on a player, burning the point. If the GM accumulates 5 anti-XP, they can trade them in for a Burden on the affected player.
That’s interesting. Yeah I can see that working. Requires a bit of bookwork from the GM, but considering they dont need to roll dice etc they have more time for that in this game at least.
I was going to use Xaras’s wrath points as something similar, but I may track individual strain as well for more narrative effects. My party is pretty keen on a strong narrative so I am sure they will happily roll with it. I may play test a few things with them and see what shakes out in the long run.
I’ll be interested to hear about it.
For sure. Ill keep you in the loop. I will be starting my new campaign with copper crown and working from there. I imagine the Mark of the Beast will have a few moments to test out an insanity like system, as the state they find the master in would rock all but the most steadfast people. Would be a good chance to set the tone I want from the game, that DnD meets Lovecraft feeling.