Dresden Files RPG

For the first new years resolution, I would like to inform everyone that I will be play testing The Dresden Files Roleplaying Game. I don't know much about the game other than it is a dark fantasy in a contemporary setting. The system uses the Fate version of the Fudge system. A system I have never tried so it will be interesting to play.

Our particular game will be set in Pittsburgh amidst the declining steel industry and the current economic recession. We are still in the preliminary stages as we are learning the rules and this will be the game masters first foray into running a game.

I have watched two of the episodes of the Dresden Files TV Show, and I have been informed they do not do justice to the series; which is probably why the show was cancelled in the first season. The game master ensures me that the game will have a much darker and grittier feel.

My character will be an vampire infected human, conflicted with the blood lust urges of becoming a full vampire and deprecating desire to retain his humanity. I find the character concept intriguing as well as the creators take on the different vampire 'courts'. Ironically (or maybe not), I have never really been interested in playing Vampire, the Masquerade. After a few sessions, I will try to revisit the entry and give my opinion of the Fudge system.

Gaming is in the Air

I hope everyone had a festive and fruitful holiday season. Next up is the new year and with it comes new gaming opportunities. I am excited to say that I have a new game starting up on January 7th, and the reason I have not updated the blog is due to my work on the game. It is more of a sandbox adventure that is set inside a kear, read dungeon crawl, in the setting of Earthdawn.

For anyone familiar with my last campaign, it is a specialized segment of that game. The character's will not have the far reaching goals that I had hopped for in that campaign, but this campaign should prove interesting. I do hope the players will take some interest in the politics of the game and choose sides accordingly, but if not, the adventure serves well as a dungeon smash.

On a similar note, as with most of endeavors, this particular game has a quasi-epic story arc. I know many people like to you use long term bad guys in their games. I received the D&D 3.5 supplement "Elder Evils" for Christmas. I've been wanting it for a while because when I flipped through it, I saw a pic of "Zargon, the Returner". This was an iconic monster from my younger days of D&D and while the original adventure, B4: The Lost City, was a nice dungeon tromp for my adolescent mind, there was little explanation of the full story or how all the creatures got there. Elder Evils expound on the Lost City and helps bring the epic story arc into light, as well specific encounters at various points of the character's level advancement. It gives blanket rules on how to use 'signs' to herald the coming Evil as well a giving you some lesser adversaries and maps of locations key to that Eldar Evil's rise to power. While Zargon is what piqued my interest, the four other I have read so far are also interesting. I would encourage anyone crafting a long term campaign, with an epic battle of good and evil, to take a look at a few of the entries.

Anyone wishing to read more on the adventure can go here:

http://www.obsidianportal.com/campaigns/korinth

Lolth vs Arachne

The gods are mean and spiteful entities that show little compassion for the hard work of others. As game masters, we put much into our games and give very little credit to those inspirations. We are the gods of our worlds. The weaver of tales for the amusement of other gods, we transmute the work of others to weave a tapestry to our liking.

Well, that may be a little much, and many of us like to give credit where credit is due, but, in the heat of the story, we often fail to cite the sources of inspiration. This is not a fault; breaking the storyline to explain the history of your story/creature/etc would detract from the game. And remembering to credit everything that happened after 8+ hours of gaming is excessive. Still, I often like to explain my reasonings after the game to those interested.

While sitting about on this lazy Saturday afternoon I came upon the 1985 movie 'The Adventures of Hercules'. Watching the scene where Hercules fights Aracne, the Spider Queen, I thought of Lolth, the Demon Queen of Spiders, and made me think if the two were related in any way. The original story of Arachne was a human weaver so skilled she challenged Athena herself. Although she did not loose the challange, her pride was her downfall and Arachne killed herself when Athena destroyed her work. Athena took pity on Arachne and turned her into a spider.

In this version, and the version in 'Hercules: The Legendary Journeys', Aracne/Arachne is the queen of spiders (pictured here). This can hardly be considered the source for Lolth since the adventure 'Descent into the Depths of the Earth' came out in 1978. Even still, Dungeons and Dragons is rooted in mythology and greek is not the only one around. Africans have a trickster that is a spider by the name of Anansi, the aztecs have Teotihuacan, the spider woman, and Peru has a spider god in its mythology (I tried to find the name, but it eluded me).

My final question would be, if the two would fight who would win? I would have to say that Arachne would be an elder god, around since the times of the Greeks, but her powers are weak and her followers are few, if any. The upstart Lolth is new, not even a hundred years old, but her following is vastly greater due to gamers around the world. This fuels her power and presents her as a threat to Arachne. If it were put into my world, Lolth would be defeated in a climatic battle with Arachne, who used her guile and wisdom to defeat the young upstart and take back her rightful place among the gods and renewing her followers from the ranks of the drow, but that's just me.