FORUM

1) What is your game about?

Fantasy adventurers. The unofficial subtitle for the game is Love, Fear, and Magic. Love and fear play a central role in a character’s story, and magic shapes society and the physical world. The core of the game is the development of each character’s story. The game is designed to support many different types of fantasy adventure stories: dungeon exploration, wars, court intrigues, ancient prophecies whose hour comes round at last.

2) What do the characters do?

The characters go on adventures and pursue happiness. Usually the happiness takes the form of something that the character loves, like gold or an NPC. It may require overcoming something that the character fears, like a kobold or a Port Governor who's angry about you spending time with his daughter. And sometimes the happiness is just killing monsters and taking their stuff.

3) What do the players do?

The players play their characters through dialogue, combat, chases, explorations, and investigations, and the GM GMs. Depending on the group and the campaign, the players may also engage in player-vs.-player activity and/or cooperative worldbuilding. There is more rules-supported player-vs.-player and cooperative worldbuilding in SK than in many other RPGs.

4) How does your setting reinforce what the game is about?

Both the social and physical settings reinforce the themes of adventure, love, fear, and magic. Because of the nature of magic, secrecy and tyranny are common. Fear is a constant for many. When a character’s loves are threatened – and threats are plentiful in this brink-of-the-renaissance society - there is an impetus to adventure.

The physical setting is informed by magic, although the actual practice of magic is made less than common by both politics and nature. The setting picks up at an age of discovery, and there are newly discovered fantastic locations to explore. When combat (physical, social, mass) or a cooperative encounter occurs in a location, the environment in that location colors the scene and provides bonuses and penalties. SK also supports the apparatus of literary art - foreshadowing, symbolism, metonymy, and the like - and the setting is a means to convey this support.

5) How does character creation reinforce what the game is about?

Character creation gives players a chance to define not only how they will accomplish their adventuring goals – their abilities, talents, and so on – but it also helps them to define what their adventuring goals are. The character creation process makes a player think about what type of adventures his character is suited for, and it makes him codify that in a concrete way so that the rest of the players and the GM can understand this character’s role in any party. Specifically stating some of a character’s motivations during creation also helps the GM understand what the player is looking for out of his gaming time.

6) What types of behavior does your game reward or punish?

The game rewards play that is adventurous and risky. The rewards take standard forms such as experience, treasure, and reputation, as well as non-standard forms such as increased security, the ability to appear in more scenes, and increased narrative control. The game punishes boring and non-participatory play. It does so chiefly through opportunity costs in the form of missed rewards.
Play also rewards non-disruptive player-vs.-player action. In most campaigns, players will still be working together toward an ultimate goal, but they compete against each other for glory, influence, NPC relationships, and more.

7) How is behavior rewarded or punished?

I included that info in #6 above. Though there is a “kill things and take their stuff” component to the game, experience is not generated solely by beating down monsters. Hacking the eyestalks off a beholder might earn a character some experience, but so could dialogue, espionage, trade, or many other scenes. A character may not earn full experience if he does not participate in enough scenes – or enough of the right type of scenes (the theme of the adventure determines the “right” type).

8) How are responsibilities of narration and credibility divided in your game?

The players have somewhat more narrative control than in many RPGs. The GM is the final arbiter. Players take turns picking scenes and stakes. For example, the GM opens an adventure with a scene where manticores provide cover fire to a team of Fury thieves who break into a character's home and attempt to steal or destroy a painting that he thought was worthless. After running this combat, control passes to the first player. He chooses what his character does next, and other players can choose to have their characters participate. For example, he might ask around in the underworld if anyone knows these particular trolls (Furies are a race of trolls). If he succeeds, he gains information, if he fails, his reputation is harmed (or he pays some other price). There are no meaningless scenes. There are always consequences. Then the next player chooses a scene and the stakes of that scene. As mentioned above, the GM maintains final say over the feasibility of actions and likelihood of success.

9) What does your game do to command players’ attention?

Pace is the most important thing. Sometimes RPGs get bogged down by dice or inconsequential scenes, and they end up moving at the pace of an opera. That slow pace usually hurts the game. Spellbound Kingdoms is designed so that play is speedy and multiple players are participating at once.

In addition to the pace, the standard attention-getting devices are here: thrilling combat, dangerous journeys, lurking evil, non-lurking evil, the promise of treasure and power, and the threat of death and dishonor.

Finally, the rules help form the game into a story (with a real beginning-middle-end plot), and the story helps to keep players’ attention.

10) What are the resolution mechanics of your game like?

The core is a roll-over-target-number dice-based mechanic. The dice are in increasing sizes, somewhat like Savage Worlds (or even Shab al-Hiri Roach).

11) How do the resolution mechanics reinforce what your game is about?

The core resolution mechanic ignores unimportant things. There’s no Use Rope skill: if you want to tie a rope, then you can tie a rope, no mechanics needed. If you want to escape from the Devil of Marigar’s manacles, on the other hand, then there is a resolution because there’s a conflict. First and foremost, the mechanics support the game’s theme of adventure by only coming in to play when there’s actually an exciting conflict to resolve. Everything else just goes according to the narration of the GM or player who is in control of the scene. It’s kind of like My Life with Master in that regard: the story’s the thing.
The action points mechanic allows a character’s loves and fears to influence his rolls. Even the most mundane sword strike can be colored by love, and the mightiest spell can fail because of fear. This mechanic constantly points to the emotions and values at the heart of the game.

12) How do characters in your game advance?

Characters earn experience from adventures. All kinds of adventures. Slaying monsters is an adventure, but so is flirting with the queen while the king is at the war front. So is talking to a mad god. So is leading an army across the mountains to lay siege to the Ris temple.
As characters gain experience, they gain new abilities. There is a class and level system. There are also talents that reach across class boundaries. Organizing groups - armed legions, churches, secret societies - is also a fundamental feature of advancement.

13) How does the character advancement reinforce what your game is about?

Character advancement requires participation in adventure of some sort.

14) What kind of effect do you want the game to produce in players?

Fun. However they define it. I’m working hard to make the system flexible enough that it can accommodate different notions of fun. But fun is definitely the goal: fun from the story, fun from combat, fun from roleplaying, and fun from creating and exploring a world with your friends.

15) What areas of your game receive extra attention and color?

Dialogue is colorful and distinct from social combat in most other RPGs. Combat also gets a lot of attention, as it is a perennial high point in RPGs. Character development, too. It’s a balance because if you’re bogged down in the details, then you’re not playing, and if you run out of interesting choices, then you run out of game. The environments have also received a lot of attention, as has mass combat.

16) Which part of your game are you most excited or interested about?

That is a very hard question, of course! If I had to pick just one feature, it would be the game’s ability to support dramatically relevant scenes at both the individual level and the regional level. The rules are light, but they cover mass combat, politics, shadow wars, guilds, and governance while also detailing individual armed combat, social combat, and emotions such as love and fear.

17) Where does your game take players that other games can't/won't?

I hope it takes people to a place of emotion while simultaneously leaving them with a feeling of going on a rip-roaring adventure. The dialogue system takes them to a “Whose Line Is It Anyway?” place of fun, humor, and dramatic improv if the group chooses to play it that way. Combat feels less like a wargame and more like a case of “opponents measure each other, feint and jab to expose weaknesses, then clash, then retreat, re-assess, circle warily, and then clash again.” The game also guides players toward a literary story: environments and adventures have themes and motifs, and players are rewarded for embracing this symbolism in dialogue and action. Finally, the design goal is to build a system with one of the highest rules-depth to rules-complexity ratios in the industry, that is, a system with light or light-medium rules with deep strategic space to explore.

18) What are your publishing goals for this game?

Possibly Lulu, but I know that some games have had bad luck there. I like the idea of a print-on-demand service for all the obvious reasons, but if the quality isn’t there, then I may spring for a traditional publisher. Or perhaps I will go for a two-tier print run, with a short run from a known publisher and further copies available from Lulu. Regardless of what happens in print, I also plan to have .pdfs for sale through the usual channels (drivethrurpg and rpgnow, e23, et al.). There will also be a free Quick Start – Basic Rules guide online.

19) Who is your target audience?

My target audience is current gamers and their friends. Ideally, I’d like to reach their currently non-gaming friends too. I think that keeping Spellbound Kingdoms toward the rules-light end of the spectrum will help bring those NGFs into the fold.

Hey thanks for checking in! Love the name by the way (I wrote the Robilar's Gambit feat that is in the 3.5e PHBII if you know that one :), although of course I took the name from Greyhawk).

Release date is Gen Con of this year. I am hoping to have a playtest version of the rules released in March or April. That will be the standard indie playtest-type document. Meaning, don't expect any fancy layout or anything. But it will give you a good idea of the rules and hopefully whet your appetite for the full system to come.

SK is in the middle of the spectrum as far as being setting-neutral. Basically, everything about it is setting neutral except for the "magic hates magic" idea. In other words, magic is balanced according to the principle that one caster's magic interferes with another caster's magic. If you remove that - and you easily can, just ignore the interference rules - then SK is completely setting-neutral. However, you then will have some pretty powerful magic running unchecked. This is no different from the situation in most versions of D&D, actually, but a lot of folks don't like how powerful magic is in D&D.

SK isn't Tolkienesque. For a grim-n-gritty Conan-esque vibe, it could work. Default out-of-the-box equipment lists, weapons, vehicles, etc. are more suited for a Renaissance-Enlightenment period. But grim-n-gritty is certainly there: even very experienced characters can be dropped by "just" a couple of sword blows. And swords-and-sorcery style magic, with mysterious wizards working alone in towers in the middle of nowhere, is practically required.

Time scale is another feature of SK different from a lot of games. It's easy for years to pass quickly. There are numerous powers that only work once per season (fall/winter/spring/summer). Organizations act on a weekly basis. So time does pass, and it takes a while before characters reach their full potential.

Glad you like the sound of the love and fear system. I think the closest thing out there to it right now is probably the relationship system from Monsters and Other Childish Things. But SK is different from that. Also, since I wrote the Power 19, there are now six inspirations: love, fear, faith, ambition, madness, and vengeance. Whether that survives the current round of playtesting is still to be seen, but it looks like a winner.

Poor Daisy!

Yes, the playtest version of the combat rules is almost set for release. We were playing from copies of it last Saturday. Unfortunately, I've decided to go with just releasing the combat rules ahead of August. Magic, social encounters, guild and kingdom rules, chases, etc. have to wait. That's mainly due to time contraints.

But you can get a small idea of how "magic hates magic" works from the different combat styles. There is one style, for example, called Parapet Defense. It was originally developed by defenders on walls with parapets (duh), but now it has wider use. The defenders had to withstand the rare magic assault (or try to), and so they discovered patterns of swordplay, footwork, and timing that contain hints, mockeries, and rudiments of arcane casting. There is nothing overtly magical about it. But the way the sword is gripped, the arc of the blocking swings and the shuffle of the feet all combine to touch on magic, if not awaken it. But a touch is enough, and other magic hates it. That is exactly the idea, of course, and helps to protect the individual defender. Of course, it also makes a wild magic surge in the area more likely.