I’m still working on responding to Sean Holland’s completed Stellar Goblin—which, by the way, is an amazingly complete and interesting creature. I’m more than willing to admit that Sean won this round, largely because I read his description of the Stellar Goblin and immediately said “Oooh, I want to throw that at a low-level party in a Pathfinder game!” Any time something makes you go “Oooh!” as ideas sprout in your brain, it’s a winner. Well done, Sean!
I will have the promised rituals for dealing with goblins in Unknown Armies soon; unfortunately this week has been quite insane (workplace drama and massive crunch time.) Once certain NDAs are no longer relevant, though, I’ll post some details about what I’ve been working on; those of you in the IT field may find it interesting.
Anyways: I did want to piece together a couple of thoughts, because I’ll also be busy this weekend playing in our occasional, recurring game of Birthright D&D. Birthright is an old AD&D setting with unique rules and a truly fascinating world; its primary conceit is that it combines the traditional adventuring character with rulership of provinces, temples and other holdings. Cerilia (the ‘material world’ of Birthright) is a dark place, and a place with extremely few magic items. Whereas the simple longsword +1 would be quickly tossed aside in settings like the Forgotten Realms, in Cerilia that same longsword +1 is a priceless family heirloom proudly guarded and wielded by the head of a noble family. There’s also the matter of one’s Bloodline—how much (if any) of the divine blood of the gods of old flows through your veins and gives you supernatural powers unlike any others found in D&D settings.
Birthright has the interesting distinction of having the most individual publications of any setting in TSR’s or WotC’s history—TSR produced a boatload of small books about individual provinces, and there are dozens and dozens of provinces across one massive continent. In short—it’s a really interesting setting that’s all too often overlooked by fans of “old school” D&D.
The game we’re playing has been pretty heavily modified from the original, however. The fine folks over at the now-defunct birthright.net managed to pull off several iterations of a 3e and 3.5e conversion with complete classes, race writeups, spell lists, feats, bloodline powers, religions, etc.—nine full chapters! However, they still largely stuck with Birthright’s impoverished mass-combat rules, which was odd and somewhat unrelated to what you could actually do in the game. Our group originally bastardized the Warhammer 40K rules for mass combat, but we’ve recently become disillusioned with those. I’m trying to push for the use of the mass combat rules found in Cry Havoc, Skip Williams’ Sword & Sorcery sourcebook (which is well-written and has some really interesting takes on fantasy mass combat. Go get it.)
Despite being able to play with our original group only once every six months or so (due to the group spreading out across several states), the Birthright game remains a favorite of ours. Cerilia, as I said above, is a dark place; the more you know about it, the more hopeless the entire world begins to feel. Elves hunt humans for sport; dark creatures bearing the blood of an ancient evil god have conquered vast stretches of territory; and the lure of political power makes treachery an ever-present threat. But because we decided to play as a single kingdom, dividing responsibilities up amongst ourselves and working for the collective good of our burgeoning nation, we’ve essentially broken out of the every-man-for-himself mindset of most of Cerilia’s rulers. As a result we’ve been quite successful (though not overly so) and interestingly, this has given us a real sense that we’re actually changing Cerilia and giving it hope for the first time. No other RPG I’ve played has ever quite given me that same sensation, and it’s remarkably powerful.
So forgive me if I don’t post much at all this weekend; my compatriots and I really do have a world to save.
