Saturday, July 28, 2012

Quick Play ORPGS Ancient Era - The First Crusade

I gave it a lot of thought and decided to work on that quick play bundle inspired by how thorough I made that GURPS lite for low tech I made. I decided to start on something I can do and wing: the first crusade.

I was looking through GURPS crusade, I gave it a good rating but I felt like it lacked a lot of stuff. The rating was more for the gratitude of just having something low tech authentic.

The list of the things it needed were the following:

  1. basic history up to this point
  2. Introduction to medieval life 
  3. further readings
  4. First crusade in a level of detail that would GMs to run campaigns of it OR at least the tools to do so with principalities, towns, armies, and events generators and rulesets. 

What i want out of a Crusades game module, one for a generic system, is the tools to introduce Players into the Crusades and the kind of medieval world those exposed to Pop and High Fantasy may learn to like. Its not trying not about grognards hating on Pop or High Fantasy, but using the difference of the genre to explore another face of RPing.

So I'm Doing my Fluff Outline.
  • Basic understanding of the 11C. 5-8 Pages in all 
    • The Imagery (if i had an art budget) - Matured Feudalism as a result to combat the Dark Ages. A two page spread of the lower section of the booklet that has professional warriors fighting of raiders.  
    • Introduction to the Dark Ages and recovering from it, notes for further reading.
    • Intro the Feudalism and the Social Order
      • Manor, Town, and Court Life.   
  • The Cast of peoples found in the era. 12-15 pages in all.  
    • The Imagery A BW cultural and territorial Map with patterns that mark out peoples and their territories. 
    • The Cast of Peoples - simplify to 7-8 major peoples. Notes on the many others.
    • Part of the Appendix
      • The Cast of Characters of the First Crusade and notes to randomize them for replay-ability
      • The Territories and of course the Stats - for replay-ability a way to randomize resources. Randomize Armies Sizes, Composition and Strength; as well as towns being larger, smaller, wealthier or poorer. 
      • The character creation tool as a quick NPC generator. 
      • Maps of Asia Minor to the Levant and Egypt at hex scales of 10miles or 16km, good for 1 days marching. 
  • The First Crusade.
    • Re-playable Module Instructions - the Players has changed the game, thus so are the characters different, but the core circumstance: is the same you have a crusade.
    • How to Prepare:
      • Mind or Event Mapping after generating the new NPCs, and various other stats. 
      • Party Scale adventure (default) - large scale has mass combat, party scale only focuses on the core individuals.  
      • Game budget - creating an exit strategy to better assess the game and how to maximize satisfaction. 
To follow as a Plug in - Large Scale adventure. Making this game mass combat, allowing players control of armies, towns, and vassals and the kind of GMing of such a game. Sample Time and motion.

maybe as a future format and standard: everything is party based, replayable, and has the option to be large scale. It is complete with maps, quick character and NPC creation, templates, and tools. The Game Map is changable as towns and cities stats may change and thus tactics may change as well. Forts , forests, crossings can pop up and disappear, screwing up the any strategy that worked in the previous play and opening up opportunities not found then as well.  

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