Sandbox on Rails

Sandbox campaigns are a dream I have chased for years. A campaign where the players participate in the story, create memorable content and I act only as a referee. I know that many people chase the same white rabbit and I’m going to discuss my methods of catching it.

We finished our latest season of Eldritch Sigils just last night. It was one of the most epic season with game starting in 2099 and ending in 1770s after a detour in about 2300. When we started this campaign exactly ten months ago I had no idea where the story would take us. I was once again trying to force my players to play with me on my sandbox.

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The Psychopomp, or My Take on Fall of Magic

We finally managed to play Fall of Magic with the Blog crew. We did have an outside ringer to play this with four players.

What is Fall of Magic? Its actually an interesting concept. The main draw is the scroll, which depicts a map, or more like an itinerary. The idea is that you start from a certain point and you unroll the scroll as you move forwards, thus revealing new places and more information. The plot hook is that there’s a magus, who is on his way to the well of magic, because magic is failing (as per the name). The players represent the maguses entourage. Its a journey, and in fiction journey’s represent personal growth, so in my mind that should be represented in some way, although I chose to take a different route.

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Season of the Witch, Part 2 (and 3)

It took us some time to get back to this (well, actually about two months) but finally returned to colonial America. Since I’m already writing a campaign debrief on this forum I decided that we do not really need another one. Thus this post is mostly about stealing stuff from other games to improve your own.

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Starting “The Season of the Witch”

As roleplaying games go our “Sins of our Fathers” campaign is the longest I have ever participated in. Last Tuesday we started “the sixth season” and this time the action takes place in colonial America right after the raid on Joseph Curwen’s farm in 1772. As with the previous seasons we will use the refined version of my Eldritch Sigils game system that relies heavily on the AWengine.

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Endgame

As our current campaign is drawing closer to the end I feel I could share some thoughts about the endgame of roleplaying campaigns.

Last year Aki wrote a lengthy post about the story arch of his character in the “last season” of this ongoing megabeast. And he got quite deep into the difficulty of ending one of these seasons as I like to call them. Continue reading

Trying Out: Fall of Magic & Archipelago

During last weekend I was lucky enough to get into two games ran by Jason Morningstar at Ropecon; one of which I was not even thinking to get into but managed to get a seat when a player did not turn up. Too bad for him. It was an excellent game and pretty much shook up my whole view of roleplaying (in a similar way that AWengine did a few years ago). In essence this post is about testing Fall of Magic and Archipelago.

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Ropecon, Here We Are

We arrived to Ropecon yesterday. The Sun is shining and it’s almost warm. There are a lot of people but the overall feeling seems to be more mellow than during last year. I managed to get into the Dread game I had hoped for and today my schedule is to be worked around the fact that I get to play Fall of Magic with Jason Morningstar. It is turning out the be an excellent Ropecon, again.

A word about the photographs

I took some photos yesterday and will be taking them through all Ropecon. If you received a calling card that led you to this page I’m grateful for letting me took your picture! I will try to publish some preliminary photos during this weekend but will work on them and publish a gallery as soon as possible. If you don’t see your own photos yet, do not worry. I simply cannot find the time to work on them during the Con. The photos that are published during this weekend can be seen at our Instagram account:

 

First cosplay photo from Ropecon 2015! #ropecon2015 #ropecon #cosplay #commandandconquer #brotherhoodofnod #nod #brotherhood

Kuva, jonka Guild Redemund (@guildredemund) julkaisi


 

A word about our gaming recommendations

We glued some stickers to the gaming sheets. This is mostly done to encourage players to participate into games that have either an entertaining system that you really should try out or that are run by GMs we have played with and can thus recommend as excellent choices as Con-GMs. The games we are recommending can HERE and the most excellent of games, ran by VilleAki and Harri, can be found HERE.

So have a nice Ropecon and give us a word if you happen to see us!