I've a great admiration for what Joe McCullough has done for fantasy gaming. Of course, he has taken the eminently sensible route of giving each of his games a separate world, each of which is open enough to be used differently by different gamers, yet coherent enough to make the game elements meaningful.
As a result, new gamers can simply follow his lead, while those with a little more experience of other systems or other fantasy interests can take his outlines, and push them in directions that please them most. He has also said several times that he's okay with - even keen on - players treating his systems as open games, so gamers can take or leave whatever they want, add details or house rules, change whatever they see fit - and so on. This makes his games on the one hand rich resources which gamers can tweak or transform to their own preferences, or on the other, nicely worked out sets of rules which deliver games in consistent and entertaining ways, without any further imaginative work.
All of this speaks of wisdom, in my view. Wargamers and RPGers will always do their own thing whatever a game system says, so if the designer explicitly recognises that, it's a win-win. Moreover, it makes good business sense - yes, use all my books and buy all the recommended figures, by all means - but you don't have to. Use existing figures. Take ideas from the books and create new worlds of your own. Make the games into what works for you.
For me, with a certain touch of OCD, my slant is an attempt to unite all the games into a single "world-view". I want to play them all, but I want them all to exist within my own world, Ird. This, I think, is perfectly possible.
Frostgrave is an ancient city, Felstad, once frozen, now re-emerging, and inhabited by all sorts of creatures and magics into which exploring parties led by wizards venture for exploration and profit.
Frostgrave Archipelago uses similar mechanisms, apart from the core notion of "heritors" rather than wizards, in the setting of a magical group of lost islands.
Rangers of the Shadow Deep also uses similar mechanisms, but this time offering solo and cooperative, rather than competitive, gaming, in a world where the Shadow Deep, an enveloping mystery of chaos and evil, is gradually encroaching on the borders of all that is good and needs protecting.
Finally Oathmark also retains a few of the core concepts from the other games, but has worked them into a mass battle game, set in the "Marches" - a vague area perhaps a little like Southern England - where various minor kingdoms of the four game-traditional post-Tolkienic races (human, elf, dwarf and orc/goblin) exchange blows as well as territories. The key innovation here is that armies may mix and match between the races - like all great concepts, very simple, but wonderfully rich with possibilities.
Rhyndareas is a place in which all four of these ideas can find their own homes - tweaked, of course, but giving me lots of imaginative nudges. I don't see any incompatibility between the four ideas and, indeed, looking for ways to connect them, as with all constraints, tends to boost creativity.
As game systems, unification is less plausible, especially "up" from the skirmish games to Oathmark. I'm not intending to link the games in practical terms, though I do have some ideas on how the Frostgrave/Rangers concept might also work alongside Oathmark in a campaign setting and this could lead to something more extensive. Essentially it would need a campaign structure which passed the outcomes of games at one level to the other (e.g. relating the treasures found in a Frostgrave adventure to the spells available to an Oathmark army).
No comments:
Post a Comment