My Ironsworn campaign titled “Reynir” with Cheeki is still in its beginnings. We just wrapped up the first season, spring, and are about to record our 5th—I think—session this coming Saturday. We’re hoping to (finally) start publishing sessions on our Youtube by April. Cheeki is our video editor and she’s been dealing with a severe health problem lately. I also got hit with a fun little infection in January, so it’s been a blast.
But anyway! Here we are, watching Zakkarii do what they do best: have zero chill and go off the rails on a new project, which is a new fantasy setting. It’ll be used for my next campaign after Cheeki gets a chance to GM her first games, and possibly for some written fiction materials. The plan is to make it large with plenty of points of interests and plot hooks that we can get a lot of mileage out of it, unlike Reynir. Reynir’s setting was based off the Ironlands concept from Ironsworn, and it’s limited to one island. It depends on how our campaign goes and ends, but I currently don’t have plans to play in the setting again when it’s done.
This urge to create a new world came from my recent addiction to The Story Engine decks. I bought the story deck last fall, fell in love with it, and then treated myself to the worldbuilding and lore decks as a Christmas gift to myself. Soon after I got them, I popped them open and started crafting a new world.
Thanks to the decks, I’ve gotten a start on the world. I’m not sure how much to share yet, which is why the above image is partially blurred. You could probably read the rest if you tried hard enough. Everything is still in its infancy that it won’t matter. I just haven’t decided if Cheeki should see everything yet. I’m very keen on protecting spoilers! But it may be a moot point because after all, just because she knows this setting is actually two inhabited planets, doesn’t mean her character knows.
Because yeah. There’s two planets involved in this setting. No chill, remember?
Besides the worldbuilding itself, I also spent some time doing a bit of research into which RPG system we’d use for my next campaign. We both agreed that we want to roll more dice. Ironsworn is heavy on narrative and Reynir is a pretty social-heavy game since it’s themed around community building. There aren’t any skill checks and there’s few actions. We don’t make many dice rolls unless combat happens or if Cheeki is rolling for my custom mechanics. I don’t get to roll dice at all, most of the time. My dice are so lonely in their tray….
So I shopped around, curious about D100 and dice pool systems. It needed to be a system that I could tinker with, because I knew I was going to have my own non-human playable species and I’d want to make custom creatures or items easily. I don’t remember how, I think it was a Reddit post about D100 systems, but I came upon Chaosium’s Basic Roleplaying Universal Game Engine. I read some comments about it, watched/listen to some Youtube reviews, and I was sold. I bought it last weekend, actually, hardcover from my local gaming store with the free PDF through Bits & Mortar.
So far, it looks and sounds like something I can use. It’s advertised as a stripped down setting-agnostic game engine. The biggest complaints I’ve heard are that it doesn’t include some stuff from other games that are based on the original BRP system and have since evolved. Truthfully, this doesn’t matter to me, because I haven’t played those games. You can’t miss what you never had. And, to me, it sounds like this is an actual game engine, like if you took Unreal or Unity and turned it into a tabletop game. It sounds more like a tool than an actual game—it’s up to you to make it into a game. And that’s exactly what I was looking for, a tool to help me make a game in my own setting, because I am not smart enough to create ALL of the mechanics needed for a game.
For Reynir, I did create some custom mechanics. Depending on how this weekend’s session goes, we may even test out a custom Pay the Price table for combat, because we mutually agreed that there wasn’t enough damage being dealt, which felt odd when fighting giant crystal moles. Sessions are episodic and based on random event rolls from a pool of scenarios I’ve written and continue to write to keep the pool replenished. Cheeki’s success during events will impact the roll to determine if the settlement succeeded in building, say, a blacksmith’s workshop. I’ve had to alter some details as we play when they don’t work out, so it’d be nice if I had a larger system to work with.
And, so far, BRP is looking like a good fit. I haven’t gotten too far into the book—I’m writing this post instead of reading it, haha—but I’ve already identified two optional mechanics it mentioned already, Passions and Allegiances. Allegiances would work great in this new setting, and Passions just sounds really interesting to work with. There’s also the Sanity mechanic, of course, but this isn’t a horror campaign, so I will probably save it for extreme events. There’s a Fatigue mechanic, too, but that one sounds less fun and boring when we’re playing in a fantasy setting with bear people.
As a summary:
- Zakkarii got hooked on The Story Engine decks and needed an excuse to play with them
- Zakkarii has zero chill and decided to make a big world for them and Cheeki to play and write in
- Basic Roleplaying Universal Engine was chosen as the RPG system for Zakkarii’s next campaign
This devlog is going to cover some of my development of the setting and campaign. This is because there aren’t enough videos covering the actual use of the BRP engine, which bothers me greatly because I’d love to see some use cases. I don’t have the time to make videos though, so I’m doing blog posts instead.
If you’ve used the BRP engine for your own homebrewed game, tell me! I wanna hear what you made and how it went.