This fantasy campaign will play-test the rules for a custom RPG system, Epic Power. What is the idea behind the system? Epic characters are set apart by their level of epic power. That is what gives them better luck than a mundane character and lets them do more than a mundane character ... until they have used up their epic power for the day. How is the system organized? It is skill based. There are no classes or levels. You choose your character's capabilities, rather than picking a class or sub-class that largely determines them. Of course, you can build the traditional kinds of characters, if that is what you want. This does mean that building a character involves more decisions than in a class based system. Similarly, there are more choices during play. Do you use epic power to avoid that hit, or save it to make a better attack or to avoid a worse hit? But play, itself, is not very complicated: one die roll per action. But is the system any good? It has been used for one run of the campaign, and the players had fun. So, at least, it didn't get in the way of good players enjoying a campaign. Since then, the system has gotten better. I have no experience in game design, but I have made a career out of making rules and formulas for other purposes, and have learned as I worked on these rules. After almost every session of the first run through, I made rule adjustments or expansions to account for issues that came up, and for suggestions from the players. After the full run through, the rules got a total make-over, taking the overall experience into account. I've simulated tens of thousands of combats under the current version, and adjusted to make them balanced. The current rules should work well for the situations I've anticipated. Creative players will no doubt come up with ideas that I haven't anticipated. I expect revisions during this campaign, though not nearly as many as the first time. The reward for a good idea will be it getting incorporated. The reward for finding an exploit will be bragging rights, and your exploit getting nerfed. The rules are not huge. The first 25 or so pages give enough information to play. Another 80 pages or so cover more situations and more things to do with epic power, including magic. What is the campaign like? It is a low to moderate fantasy campaign: humans, orcs, some undead, spell casting, and a few magic items. Don't expect high elves to wander through. It is set in the small, casually organized, peaceful land of Alanya, which is only a few days across. Alanya is protected from the tyranny of Hosur to the South by the Great Gorge. (The bridge to Hosur is well guarded.) It is protected from the fetid swamps to the North by another branch of the Great Gorge. It is protected to the East by the Great Desert. To the West, things are a bit less settled. In fact, the Fire Guild is looking for some guards for the supply wagons to their forge at the base of the Rumbling Mountain. It should all be routine. The mountain hasn't had a serious eruption since the one centuries ago that destroyed the Old Empire. And you should get there well before the Strools swarm. (Think a cross between trolls and lemmings.) While there are orcs out that way, they haven't been seen on your route. You have heard stories of the various bad things that have been happening to peaceful people out that way, but it is probably just bad luck, not the result of some evil plan or anything. Really, you are along mostly just for show. I hope for about 50% combat and 50% role playing and exploring. The campaign will play out in spaced out locations, whose relationships will gradually become apparent. It's not a dungeon crawl. At any given time, the party will have several options for where to head next. Since the campaign takes place in a small setting, the party will become a force to be reckoned with. The setting will react to what the party does, and various people, some nice, and some not nice, will try to get the party to act in their interest. The party will have to choose which, if any, to work with, and so shouldn't have wildly divergent sensibilities. Evil player characters would be a problem. I don't like killing characters, but I am fine with temporarily defeating a party. I like to set challenges where the party may have to do something that I hadn't anticipated to be able to win. But I will leave a way to get out of those situations if they go badly, to return when the party has a better plan, or is more powerful. Characters can still die if they get very unlucky, or if their players push their luck too far. In the first run-through, two characters died, one because the party put their unconscious, but living, body across a horse, and headed back to town with them. Their flaw was a deadly allergy to horses. I started playing RPGs on a tabletop, using a marker to draw maps. The campaign's maps in Roll20 don't look much different from that. If you are looking for beautiful maps, you will be disappointed. When will the campaign run? The players will have a say, but I'm envisioning every week or two on a weeknight, for three or so hours, starting around 6:00 PM Pacific Time. It will probably run about 20 sessions. It will use Roll20 for the tabletop. (There is a custom character sheet that handles the arithmetic.) It will use Discord for audio. OK, this might be interesting. What is next? Here is a short overview of the rules: <a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-YK8Mne_haI8nk8ytbDa8VbkYzVOiyn7xuedwETsCiU/edit?usp=sharing" rel="nofollow">https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-YK8Mne_haI8nk8ytbDa8VbkYzVOiyn7xuedwETsCiU/edit?usp=sharing</a> If this still sounds interesting, message me, say why you are interested, and I can point you to the full rules and to what a beginning character will know about the campaign world. You can then decide if it is still for you. After the first session, everybody gets another chance to drop out with no hard feelings. People who stay after that should be committed to the campaign.
