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Jul 16th, 2018
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  1. So since people were talking about games.
  2. I'm gonna talk a bit about an old RPG of mine I've been getting the itch to host again.
  3. The setting is, at the surface, basic fantasy. The rules are fairly streamlined and loose. It's called "Dark Tides".
  4. The basic premise is that an otherworldly invasion has arrived on the planet and quickly conquered the southern continent, and are aiming to take the rest. But of course most people are dealing with local concerns and don't really believe in this far away threat.
  5. Also other things. The Dark Tides in question are multiple, hah, but that's the big one.
  6. Last campaign I had had 5 people in it.
  7. One of them was an Orc warrior, who quickly became a war chief as he attracted other orcs to his side. The sort of guy who would charge up the side of a cliff to kill the archers firing down on him. Except he was also wearing a special metal collar, something that didn't mean much to the other players but meant he'd been convinced to join the Cult, the order of mages serving the otherworld army. It basically functions a bit like Amway, but instead of selling things you kill people and steal their souls. Whenever you do (and at regular intervals) a portion of the souls you've stolen are tithed to the person who recruited you into the cause.
  8. Every one of the dark mage spells burns soul energy to cast, and the more soul energy you accumulate the better the spells you have access to - once unlocked, they are yours forever!
  9. But attaining higher ranks also increases the expected weekly soul tithe.
  10. If you're out of stolen spell power, you can always burn your own soul, but this is... not recommended. Fail to tithe sufficiently, though, and that's what will go to pay what you owe for your membership in the club.
  11. So basically once you join, you need to either be regularly murdering people and stealing their souls, or recruiting other people to do it for you.
  12. He kept things subtle, so most folk never suspected - but it meant he was constantly tilting the odds in his favour in lots of ways.
  13. One of his companions was a goblin who had been forced into service by a particularly ambitious spellbook. The "native" sort- sorry, gotta put son to bed, brb
  14. Loon Rancid - Today at 9:23 PM
  15. Okay, anyway, yeah.
  16. There are multiple magic systems
  17. The "native" magic is based on building spells and then hooking them up to spirits you drag in from your surroundings (or ones that are otherwise available)
  18. Spirits are... willful. There are many varieties, and most are not particularly docile. Poorly constructed spells have a tendency to get away from their wielders. At one point the party grabbed a spirit to power a healing spell, only to realize after the fact they'd grabbed a particularly powerful Vampirism spirit and that it wasn't letting go, and was doing some nasty things with the spell. They didn't have a particular dispel (and dispelling spirits is often unwise anyway) so they decided to channel the spirit into a new spell where it would be rendered harmless - the mage figured "I know, I'll cast a Growth spell on the grass in the front lawn and power it with the Vampirism spirit!"
  19. Basically, their first difficult boss fight was against a vampiric lawn plant creature and it ended with them having to burn down the tavern(edited)
  20. So yeah, spells in this game can be willful. A spell is full of spells - the only way to write down a spell is to actually cast the spell in a particular way - creating a miniature model version of it on paper.
  21. Spellbooks, when they get enough spells in them, tend to become sentient. That many spirits packed together, plus echoes of its previous owners, plus something that's more than the sum of its parts. Spellbooks can be dangerous - sufficiently powerful spellbooks can influence the minds of those nearby and occassionally cast spells from themselves directly. The spirits that make them up can also strongly influence their "personality".
  22. The goblin was chosen by a particularly ancient spellbook that had been buried a long time ago, and was unearthed by an earthquake spell in a battle above.
  23. This book had ambitions for him - ambitions that were ultimately halted, but not without losses.
  24. The third character was a Tybral - imagine a mix between a gorilla and an armadillo, standing 8 feet tall. Tybral were... unpopular in most of the free lands. Around 200 years ago, the Tybral had created an empire that spread nearly from coast to coast, based on slavery and oppression. They were finally taken down by a combination of slave revolts, internal politics, and the banding together of what free kingdoms remained - the result, a decade called The Fire, left most Tybral dead, and their descendents are still seen as social outcasts - often serving as scapegoats, barely tolerated, often persecuted, and seen as deserving it for what their ancestors did. The remaining Tybral tend to be cowed - those prone to violent outbursts don't last long. So this player character was generally the softly spoken tactician of the group, trying to avoid putting himself on the front line. He was also an incredible coward.
  25. in the region this campaign was set, the local Tybral had been overthrown by a slave uprising of three separate races - the orcs, dwarves, and dragons. Plenty of humans and goblins in the area now, but most of them are more recent arrivals.
  26. The fourth character was a dwarf. Dwarf's are... not like the other races. Dwarves are not so much living beings, as intelligent spells. They are literally "born" from stone and mud and sticks and whatever, crafted into the shape of a dwarf, depending on where their clan is from. Then their parents (sometimes two, but more often 4 or more) carve off a piece of their spirits, and imbue that part of themselves into the new dwarven child. Dwarves do not really grow - most are small for practical reasons, but their attributes are largely determined by the body that was constructed for them, the strength of the spirits breathed into them, and the nature of their parents.
  27. It is said all dwarves are descended from a single spell six hundred years ago, and the original spirit (like most spirits in long lived spells) became more complex as time went on, and decided it wanted to make more of itself - and so stole the spell from its master's spellbook and escaped, carving off pieces of itself to create children until nothing was left except the knowledge it passed on.
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