I like my campaign settings to be fluff-only. In my games, players rarely go off to fight the ones in power directly. That’s why I don’t need their stats. And really, why else would I need these stats? Campaign settings are supposed to inspire me when I work on my homebrew adventures.
So when JVisgaitis asked: Fluff only campaign settings?, I responded that I prefer fluff over crunch. Even though I like the Kitsunemori Campaign Setting, it is still very crunchy. :_ The Echoes of Heaven campaign material has some very interesting properties:_
1. Each installment comes with a campaign book and an adventure to match. Perfect! Too often I see campaign books with not enough adventure seeds, or no adventures to purchase along with it.
2. The campaign book is 100% fluff. ✌
3. The adventure is 90% fluff; the crunch comes in four flavors (d20, Rolemaster, HARP, HERO System).
4. The campaign book has notes telling you whether particular pieces are adventure hooks for you to use, or not. Some things belong to a “world thread” and will be expanded upon in future installments. This is exactly the kind of info you need as a DM if you have to write some extra adventures and don’t know all of the campaign.
5. The adventure book has dramatic purpose notes telling you why the encounter is there, eg. why it is supposed to be easy and how the DM should add another even easier figh if it was not easy enough. The notes are backed up by comments on narrative and plot building. Excellent learning-by-doing material!
6. Since this if for beginning DMs, I also appreciate that the first two combats are really simple: As many skeletons as party members + stat block, for example. Very unlike the two combats in the well-received intro adventure by Necromancer Games, The Wizards’s Amulet. There, the second combat has a magic user, animated undead, and thugs with ranged weapons. Not good for the fresh DM.
7. Awesome opening scene in the (optional) teaser.
Check out their Final Redoubt Philosophy page. I like it.
#RPG #thoughts
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I’ve never heard of it, which is odd. I have now, so I’m intrigued. Echoes of Heaven is duely added to my witchlist 😄
Meantime, I’m ploughing through Mythic and giggling uncontrollably. GM-less role-playing/brainstorming at it’s best. Just what my group needs before we start to migrate Ptolus to Warhammer Fantasy Role-play.
– GreyWulf 2007-03-06 01:54 UTC
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Hehe. We played without a DM for three times. The first two occasions were wonderful. We basically had a little token to pass between each other. The token holder was basically the narrator. It was great fun, and I wrote it up, too (in German): RollenspieleOhneMeister. That was in spring of 1999.
When we met for the third time, we were all tired and listless. It fizzled. The fourth time we met in a bar and that was the end of it.
It was rule-less, dice-less, and DM-less roleplaying...
You’re actually going ahead and switching over to WFRP. You wrote about WFRP on your blog, so I knew you were interested. But not *that* interested! I guess now I have to trawl Ebay, too...
Interesting how most players don’t care about rules and settings, where as Dungeon Masters feel a strange obsession with checking out many different systems. I’ll have to look at my copy Mutant Chronicles again one of these days.
– Alex Schroeder 2007-03-06 08:02 UTC
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I’ve played DMless a few times and had a blast. It’s the first time we’ve actually thought to use *rules* to do it though! Heh. Mythic is a great ruleset too, which makes it all the more fun.
We’re going to run a few Ptolus sessions in parallel using D&D and heroic characters doing the saving-the-world stuff, and WFRP for the gritty, street-level aftermath stuff. After all, when the heroes flush out a Vampyr from it’s underground crypt beneath a market, someone has to mop up the mess. Nothing does street-level better than Warhammer. These are the guys who know the victims personally, who bring the problem to the notice of the authorities and do what they can to help where they can. It’s a welcome change of pace to the gung-ho cinematic heroics of D&D, and hopefully will round out the world of Ptolus even more.
That’s the plan, anyhow 😄
– GreyWulf 2007-03-06 12:57 UTC
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Playing without a DM was one of the best RPG experience i ever hade. Alex: i just read RollenspieleOhneMeister: wonderful. Thank you.
– Chris 2007-03-10 20:38 UTC