Shattered America World-Building Thread

Blackest Wizardry

When I was in college, we used to play a tabletop role-playing game. Essentially, the idea was that people would create characters and go through elaborate scenarios and storylines created by one player, the "Archwizard". Players can pick separate roles, such as a Sorcerer, an Archer (Known as a Bowman in the first printing of the game), a Slayer, or the "roleplaying class", the Nobleman. Numerous other classes also populated the many sourcebooks. In addition, players can play numerous character species as well, such as Highborn (Originally known as High Men), Lowborn (Originally known as Low Men), Sidhe, Pixies, Dryads, Dragonborn (Originally known as Dragon-Men), Devils, and Angels, though, obviously, certain races were de-facto mutually exclusive.

Personally, I always enjoyed playing Sidhe, as they followed some interesting rules unique to them. Namely, they cannot lie, but they can and are expected to mislead, they cannot go back on the letter of an oath, but they can break the spirit of one, and they must honor any debts made with them or of them. Of course, this meant that most people tended to get kind of annoyed when a bad Sidhe player was in the adventuring party, but I honestly at least tried to be socially aboveboard with them. When it came to the Archwizard's characters, though...everything was fair game.

The game was created by Donovan L. Kozlovsky, a son of Russian immigrants, and was inspired by the wargaming of the mid 1970s, as well as the writings of John Tolkien and other fantasy novelists, the idea being that Kozlovsky would allow players to play not an army but a single character. Things kind of developed from there, and the game became exceptionally popular across the North American continent by the late-80s, owing to its darkly cynical tone, creative applications of myth and folklore, and, after the second printing, its generally solid gameplay mechanics.

Several attempts have been made to try and convert the mechanics to a video game format over the years, however, none have been commercially successful, owing to all of them being absolute horseshit. Several "Adventure Paths" such as Doom at the Crystal Kingdom, Lights above Faemar, Bloody Song of the Winter Court, and other such things have become staples, justly regarded as classics. Doom at the Crystal Kingdom is widely regarded as a storytelling gem, presenting an interesting and at times quite creepy castle made of spreading pink tourmaline. Lights above Faemar is...weird, but fun to play. I don't know what was in Kozlovsky's mind when he authored this one, but it is one of his final Adventure Paths, and it shows. The plot is essentially that above the small town of Faemar, a race of cybernetic aliens has descended upon the world. It's...very silly, but presented as a normal Adventure Path for about the first third of it, and so the blindside alone has something of a reputation as an oddity among gaming groups.

Finally, Bloody Song of the Winter Court was written not by D. L. Kozlovsky but by his wife, Marie Kozlovsky, and it shows. Unlike the...silly Lights Above Faemar or the threatening and detailed Doom at the Crystal Kingdom, Bloody Song of the Winter Court is about intrigue, court politics, and not-quite-lies. It's a thinking person's Blackest Wizardry game, and one wrong move can lead to a sacrifice...or an assassination. However, personally, I always preferred the expansion set Modern Times, bringing the roles of Blackest Wizardry and some of the species into a more urban fantasy setting, authored in late 1991 by one third-party developer known as Burvju Publishing, though I did play a lot of "standard" Blackest Wizardry, as frankly not many people knew about the Modern Times rules.

Elevator Wizardry, Part 1

Elevator Wizardry is a podcast created by three brothers, Travis, Griffin, and Justin McElroy, and their father, Clint McElroy, who play the latest edition of Blackest Wizardry in a specific campaign setting created by Justin McElroy. Travis plays the stout Archer Killian Fangbattle, an Angel with a allegedly ruthless sense of duty and a tendency to fuck around and joke all the time, Griffin plays Edward Summer, a somewhat flamboyant elevator-loving Sorceror Sidhe specializing in necromancy, who's sister, Lydia, has gone insane and begun a murderous game show (Yes, it's that sort of campaign), and Clint plays an old man named John. Just John. He doesn't really have a last name, and he may or may not be an agent of the dark god known as the All-Hunger, though he's really more of a slightly annoying door-to-door proselytizer more than anything else, and, like Edward and Killian, enjoys fucking around.

The first plotline of Elevator Wizardry, so named because of Griffin's character's fascination with elevators that manifested first in an in-joke in their test session before the first session and then as an actual plotline when Justin hinted and later stated that one of the characters stole the idea for elevators from our world, is titled Horseshit Adventurers, and consists of a simple dungeon crawl through a sea of Feral People (Sort of a stock enemy in Blackest Wizardry, people driven murderously mad by magic so they're OK to kill), followed by the discovering of the Water Gauntlet, an iron gauntlet that grants its wielder the power to control oceans, though it also...turns them into a Feral Person.

This leads to Elevator Team (As they would later be called) finding a strange man named Magnus, wearing a bracelet with faintly glowing lapis lazuli on it. After they defeat the High Chief of the Feral People in the dungeon crawl, and watch the person they were attempting to rescue, a dwarf named Merle Rockseeker, go insane, destroy the seaside town above the dungeon in a tidal wave, and end up impaling himself on massive created icicles, Magnus tells the Elevator Crew that they need to come with him, especially once he sees Edward Summer almost effortlessly resist the all-consuming corruption of the Water Gauntlet. Magnus uses a magic item to teleport them to the Space Station, where they learn about the Red Robes, an order of wizards and their agents who seek to keep Grand Relics like the Water Gauntlet (Each Grand Relic representing a school of magic, the Water Gauntlet representing Elementalism) out of the hands of the world, for those items were created as weapons in a long-lost war and have caused trouble ever since.

The highest Red Robe, a man named Brian Aranea who gives Edward Summer a run for his money in terms of flamboyance, more or less forces the three of them to become Reclaimers due to their odd status as being incorruptible, turned into agents meant to find other Grand Relics and either ensure their destruction or bring them back to the Red Robes at the Space Station. After this, we enter the next storyline, titled Murder on the Goldcliffe Express, a simple murder mystery involving a Grand Relic of Illusionism known as the Redeye and a serial killer known as the Goldcliffe Killer, who turns out to be the perpetually annoyed train attendant Jenkins. Lots of hijinks are had, we're introduced to Angus MacDango, Mystery Solving Child, a recurring character, Jenkins gets thrown off of the train and hit with a Banishment spell by Edward, killing him, and we go back to the Space Station, where we're introduced to the Fantasy Costco. The Fantasy Costco is ran by a completely untrustworthy cat man in a robe named Jon the Deals Warlock. Jon spelled with no "h", to differentiate him from "John", Clint's character. It's as confusing as it sounds.

At the Fantasy Costco, they play Pachinko for magical items and purchase some other items, before beginning the next storyline, Petals to the Metal, taking place in the wealthy town of Rockport, where a woman going by the alias of "The Raven" has gotten a hold of a magical item known as the Sash of Pan, an item allowing the wielder to control nature, from storm clouds to plants, though, of course, the item corrupts the user's mind, much like the Redeye and Water Gauntlet before it. After Edward succeeds at getting through a thick screen of vines by...flirting with the vines, the group ascends the Central Bank's tower of Rockport and encounters the Raven, who tells the group that even if she wanted to give up the Sash of Pan, she couldn't, and at this point, she just wants to get defeated so she can lose it.

Meanwhile, they get involved...somehow, it's honestly very complicated...in "Battle Wagon" racing, a sort of Death Race sort of thing with magical cars, in which people race magic fantasy not-cars and try to disable one another's cars with weapons. After the hijacking of a Battle Wagon from a garage, an extended Battle Wagon scene and an introduction to Hurley, a Battle Wagon racer known as "The Ram", the Raven's car starts to be enveloped in vines and dark clouds, creating a strange whirlwind around it. The Elevator Team jump off of their Battle Wagon into the whirlwind, where they face off against the Raven once and for all, eventually taking the Sash from her in combat. After a cloud of pink petals envelops everything, mysteriously, the Elevator Team finds themselves in the town square of Rockport, where a tree in the shape of Hurley has begun to grow. Some quite touching sad music begins to play, and later it's implied that Lucretia, a later character, did the teleport, with the Sash turning Hurley into a tree, but Sloane, previously known as the Raven, now played by Dr. Sydney McElroy (and yes, they do joke about her changed voice) joins the party, as a rogue.

After this and another round of dicking around at the Fantasy Costco, the next storyline, Journey to the Planes begins, and...I'll save that for when I'm finished with it, I'm not exactly caught up on the podcast.
 
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OOC: I'd love to hear thoughts on the Black Wizardry/Elevator Wizardry Part 1 post, also, I can make a full annotated post explaining how Elevator Wizardry TTL differs from The Adventure Zone ATL, as there's a lot of little differences and nuances. Not quite as much as with Recollections in the other worldbuilding thread (Southern Aggression), but still.

But yeah, if anyone has any thoughts I'd love to hear them. :)
 
OOC: @ArborMortis - I like it :D Especially how the races are different to the fantasy classic triad :D

IC: I do tabletop role-playing too. Started when I was in school, then...well, kept it up.

My first posting was HMS Polyphemus - light aeromobile carrier. Myself and a few other junior officers would play in the wardroom when we were off-duty. We...needed it, I'll admit. When you're stuck on a ship for months on end, you need to keep yourself distracted. Though we played Gods of All Stars - it's based on the wargame Starlance. Set in the far future, in the benevolent but sprawling Galactic Imperium made up of humanity and allied aliens, whose frontiers are beset by various hostile aliens and the Seven Lords of the Abyss. It combines spacebuckler with cosmic horror - the Seven Lords of the Abyss are these horrifically powerful 'alien starfish' creatures that have each taken on a facet of the worst attributes of organic life, and they corrupt organic beings to their will, creating 'demons' and such. It's an interesting setting, has some truly unnerving horror...yet at the same time, somehow manages to have this message of hope in it.

OOC: Given that this Britain probably never had the post-war nihilistic streak of Action Comic and 2000AD, their version of Warhammer 40,000 is decidedly more optimistic :D
 
OOC: @ArborMortis - I like it :D Especially how the races are different to the fantasy classic triad :D

IC: I do tabletop role-playing too. Started when I was in school, then...well, kept it up.

My first posting was HMS Polyphemus - light aeromobile carrier. Myself and a few other junior officers would play in the wardroom when we were off-duty. We...needed it, I'll admit. When you're stuck on a ship for months on end, you need to keep yourself distracted. Though we played Gods of All Stars - it's based on the wargame Starlance. Set in the far future, in the benevolent but sprawling Galactic Imperium made up of humanity and allied aliens, whose frontiers are beset by various hostile aliens and the Seven Lords of the Abyss. It combines spacebuckler with cosmic horror - the Seven Lords of the Abyss are these horrifically powerful 'alien starfish' creatures that have each taken on a facet of the worst attributes of organic life, and they corrupt organic beings to their will, creating 'demons' and such. It's an interesting setting, has some truly unnerving horror...yet at the same time, somehow manages to have this message of hope in it.

OOC: Given that this Britain probably never had the post-war nihilistic streak of Action Comic and 2000AD, their version of Warhammer 40,000 is decidedly more optimistic :D

Oh, I always found Starlance to be kind of interesting, if quintessentially British, though they didn't really sell Starlance figures in Violet City. Gods of All Stars looked interesting as well, if a little bit cliché.
 
OOC: @ArborMortis - I like it :D Especially how the races are different to the fantasy classic triad :D

IC: I do tabletop role-playing too. Started when I was in school, then...well, kept it up.

My first posting was HMS Polyphemus - light aeromobile carrier. Myself and a few other junior officers would play in the wardroom when we were off-duty. We...needed it, I'll admit. When you're stuck on a ship for months on end, you need to keep yourself distracted. Though we played Gods of All Stars - it's based on the wargame Starlance. Set in the far future, in the benevolent but sprawling Galactic Imperium made up of humanity and allied aliens, whose frontiers are beset by various hostile aliens and the Seven Lords of the Abyss. It combines spacebuckler with cosmic horror - the Seven Lords of the Abyss are these horrifically powerful 'alien starfish' creatures that have each taken on a facet of the worst attributes of organic life, and they corrupt organic beings to their will, creating 'demons' and such. It's an interesting setting, has some truly unnerving horror...yet at the same time, somehow manages to have this message of hope in it.

OOC: Given that this Britain probably never had the post-war nihilistic streak of Action Comic and 2000AD, their version of Warhammer 40,000 is decidedly more optimistic :D
Yeah. I remember the game of Dragonborn I'd been playing with friends in college. For those who don't know, it's set in a feudal-ish world where the "meatbags" are ruled by dragons. Some are benevolent, some are evil, some are just in for the advantages. It so happens that any child of a dragon and a member of another race is a member of the latter race, but anyone with dragon blood in the past thirteen generations - dragons are big on number thirteen - are known as "dragonborn" and can use magic. And in the prosperous realm of Avenia, the lazy dragon monarch has been overthrown and killed, along with his family. And we're a group of adventurers trying to gather support for Avenia or gain a part in its fall. We can fight dragons, and there is a fabled place that allows powerful enough dragonborns to become dragons. We'd gone the Avenian route and been this close to defeating the Dark Dragon of Taeta before we had to end the campaign.
OOC : Of course there would be games inspiring themselves in the Revolutionnary Wars ITTL, with Taeta being a Russia expy (named based of Tartaria) and Avenia the equivalent of France (name based off the Arverni).
 
Yeah. I remember the game of Dragonborn I'd been playing with friends in college. For those who don't know, it's set in a feudal-ish world where the "meatbags" are ruled by dragons. Some are benevolent, some are evil, some are just in for the advantages. It so happens that any child of a dragon and a member of another race is a member of the latter race, but anyone with dragon blood in the past thirteen generations - dragons are big on number thirteen - are known as "dragonborn" and can use magic. And in the prosperous realm of Avenia, the lazy dragon monarch has been overthrown and killed, along with his family. And we're a group of adventurers trying to gather support for Avenia or gain a part in its fall. We can fight dragons, and there is a fabled place that allows powerful enough dragonborns to become dragons. We'd gone the Avenian route and been this close to defeating the Dark Dragon of Taeta before we had to end the campaign.
OOC : Of course there would be games inspiring themselves in the Revolutionnary Wars ITTL, with Taeta being a Russia expy (named based of Tartaria) and Avenia the equivalent of France (name based off the Arverni).

To be honest, I tried playing Dragonborn, but the Narrator system never really worked for me, the rules were far too different to Blackest Wizardry for me to really sink my teeth into it, and honestly, it seemed kind of broken. Taetan Dragonborn that go through the Resilience and Honor skill trees get access to Winter's Wrath at level 9, which a character in my group got and honestly it broke the game, given the fact that WW stacks with Icy Grasp, Paralyzing Strike, and Deadly Poison, and honestly that player kind of minmaxed it. It wasn't just Taeta, though, the rules often seemed pretty untested and certain classes like the Meatbag Savant seemed kind of broken, while meatbags as a whole were so underpowered as to be totally unfun playing.

We played for about a year on the side of our normal Blackest Wizardry campaign and eventually went back to Blackest Wizardry.
 
The Kingdom of Baru Belanda* is a nation founded by supporters of the House of Orange following the conquest of the Netherlands by the French Empire. It eventually united the archipelago under their control with a combination of diplomacy and warfare. The nation's distinctive combination of Old Dutch and local culture results in a rather successful tourist trade.

*literally "New Netherlands" in Indonesian. I didn't use "Indonesia" since it wouldn't be used for decades after the POD.

OOC: I know it might not be all that plausible, I just thought it would be interesting.
 
The Kingdom of Baru Belanda* is a nation founded by supporters of the House of Orange following the conquest of the Netherlands by the French Empire. It eventually united the archipelago under their control with a combination of diplomacy and warfare. The nation's distinctive combination of Old Dutch and local culture results in a rather successful tourist trade.

*literally "New Netherlands" in Indonesian. I didn't use "Indonesia" since it wouldn't be used for decades after the POD.

OOC: I know it might not be all that plausible, I just thought it would be interesting.

Isn't that that place that's struggling with integrating Muslim and Christian populations? Like, struggling really badly?
 
Isn't that that place that's struggling with integrating Muslim and Christian populations? Like, struggling really badly?
Yeah, but they've made a lot of progress over the years. While there have been more than a few riots there hasn't been a coordinated terror attack since the Orange Square bombing of '87. The process is long, slow, and difficult but they're making progress. Djakarta has actually become quite a thriving tourist destination in the last couple of years.
 
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