A brief introduction

Hello, friends, fans and readers! All of the three categories might be one and the same, but I still like saying that.

This is the post where I greet you for coming to my blog. Here’s the short version of what this blog’s about: Lions of the North is a tabletop RPG, that takes place in a strange 24th century long after our current civilization has ended. A new one emerged in it’s place, of course, but it’s nothing like the world of today. There’s also scary dark things in the deep forests of the Baltic and the ruins of the old cities. The world is technologically closer to 18th-century Europe than the 21st century we live in.

The game is funded through Kickstarter, which means you pledge a sum of money in support of the game, and once the game is done, you get a product. If the Kickstarter isn’t successful, Lions of the North doesn’t get published.

Here’s the Kickstarter! 

I hope you enjoy reading the blog and if you like what you see, pledge! Thank you in advance, and let’s get this done!

A good tumblr for you to look at and news

This is a blatant shill, but take a look at Candy Sorcerers of the Scrumptious Kingdoms!

It’s about a new game my colleague Andri Erlingsson is working on. While you’re at it, check out his previous game, Sub Rosa.

News on the LotN front: not much by now, actually. I’ve been working on a little side project called Red Right Hand. You might be interested in that one if you enjoy stuff like Hellboy, the X-files, David Fincher’s Zodiac or James Ellroy books.

The project has two purposes: for one, it keeps me from burning out on LotN and second, I’ll use it as a trial for a new production model. And of course, I’m trying to make it a good game.

 

 

Lions of the North ain’t dead!

Hello friends and fans,

Like I suspected, the Kickstarter didn’t go through, which is kind of sad, but understandable. I’ll probably write a longer post on the subject later but suffice to say, it serves as an important reminder of how hard releasing a product “cold” is. At least me and the guys at Goblinworks didn’t spend 12k (the approximate cost of doing a traditional RPG release) at something that would fail commercially! 

So, what’s next? I made a plan B a while back, and here’s a few things for you. You can expect a free version of Lions of the North to be released towards the end of summer, so we get some product into your hands as soon as possible. We’ll try to make sure that quality doesn’t suffer too much for this. 

Once that’s done, we’ll be unveiling some new plans for the game. Meanwhile, follow the blog, I’ll start posting updates again. Had to take some time off for health reasons, and I hope you understand.

See you in a while!

 

Just a quick update

You might have noticed I didn’t make any post over the weekend. This is because of some minor health issues I’m dealing with, nothing serious but I don’t really have energy to write right now. I’ll give you more stuff as soon as I feel well again.

Focus on rules and more rules

Well, I’m happy to say we’ve got some feedback on the little manifesto thing we wrote. Specifically, the discussion forum The Gaming Den discussed it and the discussion turned towards the lack of maths I do when designing.

In general, I really don’t feel like I’m a great master at rules design. I’d rather go out there, find what others do, adapt it and mash it together into something new. There’s just that many ways to roll dice, anyway. The OSR guys have at least figured it out, since there’s an awful lot of AD&D and D&D clones out there. I’d rather do work on a setting than work on rules.

However, if it’s something I’ve learned from my experience at TGD, beyond the fact that some people have terribly awful manners, it’s that it’s hard to talk about rules when you’ve only got so much material ready to be presented. So, I think I shall put in some effort now to have a distilled, almost-ready-to-play (if you’re willing to put in a bit of effort yourself) version up by this weekend. It should give people something to sink their teeth into.

I also found it rather strange that a mechanic where you match up dice you’ve rolled is apparently rather baffling to many RPG fans. I personally like it for a multitude of reasons, the most important perhaps being that we humans have amazing abilities when it comes to recognizing patterns. Building on pattern recognition instead of pure mathematics seems to make playing a game a lot simpler and faster.

 

Revisiting sorcery, and some new sorcery stuff

There’s been lots of talk about the magic rules in LotN since I posted that manifesto thing. Who knows why, but the magic rules are what people have focused on.

So, I thought I’d make a simple summary of how magic works.

- What we call hedge magic are simple rituals that can be learned without any magical talent whatsoever. It has no chance of going bad, it just doesn’t work if you make a bad roll.

-Magical disciplines are what actual sorcerers use. They are broken up into levels or tiers.

-Low tiers contain simple spells which have no drawback if you fail. Failure is just failure.

-Higher tiers contain complex spells which have more effect and are dangerous. Failure when casting might be dangerous.

-Every discipline has a method of preparing a spell to avoid or mitigate the chance of disaster when casting. Preparation takes time.

In conclusion, a sorcerer has to rely on minor effects most of the time unless they’re willing to take a huge risk. Why do we do this? I dislike the idea of magic as a universal tool or the best tool for a job. Older editions of D&D were built like this: a wizard could at almost any time replicate something that was another character’s focus. It’s boring, since why would you really play anything except a wizard in such a game?

Instead, you get narrow disciplines that can be very powerful. However, being the best skin-changer or doomsayer in the North doesn’t make you all-powerful: you can do something no one else can, but it doesn’t mean you can apply it to all situations.

Calling down lightning or making someone kill themselves with their own sword is a fairly powerful effect. That’s why we want to make it into something that you don’t do on the fly. You need to prep, unless you’re willing to take a huge risk. I think this gives magic more impact on the whole, especially considering the role of magic in the setting.

What’s the role then? Simple. Magic is mostly unknown in the civilized world. Magic is a function of the Unnatural, stemming from the same source from where the malicious skogsrå and the murderous näcken comes from: the unnatural bleeding into the empty spaces of the world. The further away from civilization you go, the more you get people who can work with forces like this. It’s something to be discovered, maybe sometimes fought and maybe it’s not even a good thing for people to be messing around with. It resists definition to some degree.

And here’s a few teasers of magical disciplines I’ve been working on.

• Fire magic
• Skin-changing
• Doomsaying
• Divination
• Dream magic
• Blood-stopping

 

 

Brawlers and bawlers: stuff about combat

It’s sunday, so I’ll just type up a brief post about some basics of combat.

First off, I’ve always kinda disliked having to drawn maps for combat. So, for Lions of the North, we do this instead. We have different stances to represent how combat flows around the characters and their opponents: three stances to melee with and one to hang back with,

Per every two characters in a a melee stance, one character can hang back and most of the time, the character who hangs back can’t be attacked by melee weapons. Good for someone who needs to load their pistol or something and doesn’t want to get hit with a sword or a club while doing it.

Melee stances come in three varieties: Aggressive, Defensive and On Guard. Aggressive means you get to add one dice to your pool for melee attacks but lose one from your defensive pools. Defensive means you get to add one dice to your defensive pools but lose one from your attack pools. On Guard is neutral. There are some combat maneuvers you can only do while using a specific stance, but we’ll get deeper into that later.

Then, action economies. I’ve always disliked the idea of having categories of actions you can do in combat, because that’s frequently really hard to get as a new player. So, every turn, you get one significant action, period. You can still try to attack multiple opponents or try to dodge and stab at the same time, but there are no rules about “you can stab this much and move this much and drink this many beers in one turn”.

To represent how hard it’s to try to do other stuff when people are trying to stab you or shoot you, all non-combat-related actions, like trying to force open a door when your friends are holding back monsters, needs two turns to succeed: you declare it on the first turn and do it on the second.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Rumors, half-truths and the ramblings of madmen

Thought I’d do another kind of post today. Instead of detailing some aspect of the setting for you readers, you get kind of brief teasers and glimpses of things to come. There are the kind of things you might hear in dockside bars, roadside inns and in smoking rooms anywhere.

The Pomeranian league traders from Flensburg tell about meeting African traders in Bremerhafen. They had sails on their ships that were decorated with the letters  S.P.Q.R.

Something strange is happening far to the north, beyond the Bay of Bothnia. Voices from far away are carried by the northern winds.

A tinkerer called Sybourne lives in southern Hanö, and his house is always guarded by the Exceptionals of the Republic. There’s rumors about some sort of chronograph he’s built.

Kirkoslet ships leave for the western seas and never return. There’s talk about a far-away colony.  To what end?

Travelling musician Delia St. Claire knows the paths through the great Southern Ruins. Talk to her if you want to go through them.

Don’t make landfall beyond the Red Beacon Fort in Dal Riada. Everything southwards from there is a dangerous land. The Crannogmen will never venture beyond the Shaugn’s Dyke to save your skin. 

The Kings of Svea and Göte pay good cash for mapping the interior of former Sweden. You can make even more money by selling maps to the Fellowship of Pathfinders and Explorers  on Bornholm. 

There’s a few exiled Dal Riadans on the Åland islands who are trying to raise an army against the Crannogmen. 

Brewers in Revallin are talking about meeting nomads from the south. There’s talk about opening trade southwards to get access to the coffee trade.