Being in the Main the Mouth of Olde House Rules

Wednesday, June 17, 2015

Blood of Pangea (Coming Soon)...

Blood of Pangea is in the proofreading stages and soon to be unleashed on the world!  So what is it?  Well, it's all about sword and sorcery from the pulp era (the 1930s to be exact).  Of course, we've already got a fantasy product; Pits & Perils, and that should be enough to do the genre, right?  Right...

But the truth is, sword and sorcery; TRUE sword and sorcery, is altogether different from the typical dungeon romp.  Years of gaming culture and memories of 1980s Conan movies have muddied the water here, and we recommend reading the first stories and contemplating their feeling and general subtext.

This upcoming release does more than eliminate demi-humans, it embraces the fact that these original stories imagined an entirely different world shaped by the views of writers who may have been alive in the 19th century!  This sensibility isn't just aesthetics or affectations either (as in some of steampunk)...


James listened to Robert E. Howard
audio books while putting this thing together...

It also recognizes the literary nature of the original genre in several keys ways, meaning that players can approach gameplay almost as if writing a story instead of assigning character points or choosing a class, etc.  But this isn't story-gaming either; every traditional division of labor between the players and judge are all intact and carefully (lovingly) preserved...

So here's what you get...

(1) Narrative character creation and advancement.  Once you understand the rules, you're almost writing a story, which is kinda what Howard and friends were doing... 

(2) An intuitive and effective magic system with NO SPELL LISTS required in keeping with how sorcery was employed in those original pulp adventures - but also without complexity!

(3) Monsters are treated like the singular abominations they typically were, and with simple rules for "writing" them, sometimes on the spot if need be.  Scary!

(4) Tips for setting up a campaign, plus some details from our eponymous Pangea setting.  But don't worry, we've left plenty of room for judges to do their own stuff...

(5) And finally, all of this is anchored in simple, but solid mechanics minus the subjective "wonk" that accompanies some of these games and scares people off.  It's proper old-school.
     
So we'll finish by offering the first page of the Introduction, which explains the genre as we've come to understand it, and in all of it's lurid glory and antiquated sensibilities...




Of course, we're still proofreading this thing, so please excuse any typos; our editor got eaten by some great nameless horror...

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