So!
While Sean (@Day9tv) is on vacation there’s going to be a side campaign for Court of Swords. Personally, I’m super excited.
One of my favorite things so far about CoS is that we keep seeing fragments. In a way it’s actually awesome that the players keep getting themselves killed, otherwise we wouldn’t be able to see these pieces. Initially we had the magistrates and hints of corruption and hints of something maybe going on with the military and higher up in the government and hints of some evil force in a cave in the mountains. And then we moved on to the ‘current’ scene and got hints of something maybe elf related and the land being poisoned and hints of something corrupting the gnomes or the land in the valley and the gnomes. It’s difficult to tell if you’re looking at individual branches or side branches on a tree and there’s one BIG root to the corruption of if it’s a giant spider web and we’re looking at individual strands or if they’re completely separate instances of corruption by the Mara that aren’t related at all. Even within each snapshot, like the current one, it’s hard to tell where and how and if things are related; BUT it’s really cool.
It makes the world seem much bigger and broader in a way. It breathes. In Swan Song there was a GM turn and the universe seemed to have most of it’s development through that. In Blades the world seems like a drop in and play system and doesn’t really feel like a living breathing thing that the players impact -that’s not a bad thing necessarily it’s just not what it is (at least it doesn’t feel like what it is).
Court of Swords feels like an actual world. Adam had talked previously about kobold tribes and making them into a sort of nation and I feel like that’s what he sort of did with the gnomes (and then sort of scaled it down to give the players a little bit of a prayer of a chance when they decided to just invade their kingdom). Part of that was influenced by the players pushing towards the gnomes to make them a thing, but it adds depth. There’s a kobold thing in a mountain somewhere still that’s ruled by an evil something. There’s some elvish influence somewhere doing something with bugs. There’s a necromancer (or something like that) doing something (don’t know where in relation to where the current campaign is). And then you add in the political situation in the region. The universe feels like a very real persistent being and that’s really cool.
I’ve rambled alot gushing. I am exceptionally hopeful that we’re going to get to see a glimpse of something completely unrelated (or largely unrelated) that will let us see more of this universe. Or something tangentially related. Two weeks of Court of Coins campaign with them having pressure in the region from the Court of Swords and that pressure increasing Mara corruption/influence in the area. Them finding a relic of their own like the thing in the dirt Gideon found. Maybe two more weeks in the Chiu-Lin (spelling?) valley looking at what’s going on over there after the Magistrates died. Maybe two weeks of evil forces.
What does anyone else think or want from this side quest though? That’s the purpose of this hot mess. Praise and curiosity. Do you want to see the Monks from the nearby fortress investigating what happened to Azure Vortex? Would you like to see a band of (what’s-his-face-the-dickhead-cleric-handler)'s A-team handling other issues in the area? What are you excited for in the next two weeks?
Also I still don’t know how we are about talking about patreon videos like character creation in the forum so I left that part of the character creation out.