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Last year: I think I outsmarted myself. |
When I finish up the current chapter in my AD&D game, Matt's going to run a 7th Sea game. So yesterday, anticipating being pretty bored at work, I took Matt's copy of the player's guide to work and started reading through it. It's a pretty information-intensive world, and a lot of that information is important to know.
By the time I'd finished reading through the list of countries, I'd picked three of them that I especially liked. By the time I'd finished with the basic descriptions of them, I'd come up with sortof sketchy backgrounds for one character. By the time I got to the chapter on character generation, I had backgrounds and at least short-term goals for all three of them.
I've never had character concepts come to me this easily before. It was a real hat trick for me to have come up with three character concepts that I found not only acceptable, but exciting. These characters all have something to offer any group with which they travel; they have reasons for having left home to go adventuring; they have specific goals in mind; and they think they know what they want to do when they reach those goals (though they might change their minds if adventuring turns out to be fun).
I told Matt my concepts yesterday evening, and he thought they were all pretty good - even the sortof cheesy one. "This game," he reminded me, "lends itself to a certain amount of cheesiness, if it's dramatic enough." Well, that's true. If you're not familiar with the 7th Sea system, and you're a gamer or at all interested in gaming, I highly recommend you check it out. It's loosely based on Eurasia in the 1600's - the Rennaissance, the Inquisition, pirates and buccaneers secretly and not-so-secretly backed by governments... Now toss in a little magic for those with noble blood in their veins. It's every Errol Flynn movie ever made; it's the Three Musketeers and Blackbeard and Robin Hood all rolled up into one. Game sessions are meant to play more or less like dramatic action-adventure movies.
The game mechanics are a little arithmetic-intensive, but not overly so. It's similar to the White Wolf system, for those of you familiar with that, but fixes the White Wolf problem of being statistically more likely to botch the better your scores are.
Anyway. I don't usually rave about games, so I should probably shut up. If you're curious about my character concepts and you're not going to be in Matt's game, ask and I'll tell you. (If you're going to be in Matt's game, you'll find out the one I finally pick when we get to it, and you'll have to learn about the character's background after earning her trust.)
Anyway, we haven't played yet, so we'll see how excited I am after a few sessions. That arithmetic may still trip me up!
- The River of Blue Fire by Tad Williams
- Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Current Projects:
- 7th Sea character generation
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