Category: The Gauntlet: Our Community

There are just a couple of days left on this one. I don’t know much about the 6D6 system, but the campaign looks interesting. Does anyone have any insights here?

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/tregenza/age-of-legends-epic-adventures-small-rules-tableto

We had a great kick-off to The Dark Shard of Nemrath tonight. The characters are terrific; the players deftly handled all my questions; and we are set-up nicely for the dungeon. I can’t wait to see where it goes from here!

Thanks to everyone who joined me: Timothy Bennett Keith Mageau Jeff Burke Jorge Salazar and Aniket Schneider! 

Onward to Bleakwood House!

The Dark Shard of Nemrath and Bleakwood House start this week, and I’m getting really excited!

I’m nearly finished with my stretch goal for Lovecraftesque. I decided to give it an Old Hollywood veneer, in the hopes of capturing some of that David Lynch-style horror. We’ll see how it goes…

Holiday shopping is nearly finished! One of these is my Secret Satan gift for this year’s Krampusnacht, but I can’t decide which…

Juniper & Willow

In roleplaying games, particularly story games, I find people are reluctant to play their characters in a way that is either truly heroic or truly villainous. Most people will play to that gray area in-between. Their character might be a jerk, but they’re fundamentally a good person. Or, their character might be selfish and destructive, but they’re not truly evil. 9 times out of 10, I think this is the right move. It would get really boring, really fast, if every session had a mustache-twirling villain and a holier-than-thou hero. Unless you’re playing something that is inherently campy like, say, Lasers & Feelings, it’s probably going to be really off-putting to have players elevate themselves in one of those ways. 

But sometimes it’s fun to watch players give themselves permission to be truly villainous or truly heroic. In the last two sessions of The Warren, we had a rabbit, Juniper, who was repulsively villainous. His opposite was Willow, a genuine heroine, and his match in every way. My instincts are to resist this sort of play, but the fiction developed in a way that made it feel right to me. This was a true heroine and a true villain, but they weren’t caricatures; they were characters whose circumstances pushed them to be exceptional opposites, and I loved watching it unfold. 

Juniper started as a broken rabbit, marked by Death. In a critical scene, he was left to a terrible fate by the rest of the warren; an apparent end that was marked by high levels of terror and violence. And yet he survived. In fact, he believed he was spared by Death for the purpose of saving the warren from   future destruction. As such, he had an almost theological belief in his rightness; whatever decision he made was correct, so long as it was for the good of the warren. This lead to plenty of deception and violence, and, ultimately, a scheme that saw him sacrificing an immature buck to an owl he hoped would fight alongside the warren in an upcoming turf battle with some other rabbits. 

His opposite number was Willow, a mother who was unable to save her immature buck from Juniper’s twisted scheme. Now, it would be very easy to write this character off as the tropiest of tropes; the mama bear defending her cubs, right? But to do so ignores a couple of really critical components of the story. For a start, the warren had been having difficulty birthing new kits. The last doe to get pregnant lost all her kits during childbirth, and the warren was starting to dwindle. And it was through this frame we were able to understand Willow’s righteous fury. Certainly she had affection for the kit Juniper sacrificed, but in her big confrontation with him, when she bravely called him on the carpet in front of the rest of the warren, it was the twisted logic of sacrificing kits that she clubbed him with. 

In the end, Juniper dropped his moral complexity for low, transparent villainy: an attempt to coerce Willow into mating with him as a way of keeping the peace within the warren. Willow rightly told Juniper to fuck off, leaving him to the tender mercies of the neighboring rabbits who had him under siege, and establishing a new home for her followers in another part of the forest. 

There were a lot of terrific characters in our three sessions of The Warren, but Yoshi Creelman  and David LaFreniere  gave us a pair I’m not going to forget anytime soon; a hero worth rooting for and a villain worth despising. Their story was powerful and, frankly, uncomfortable. It wasn’t the sort of perfect role-playing we’re all supposed to engage in nowadays; the pristine, the safe, the unoffensive. But it was very, very fascinating.