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Front Matter - Campaigning

This chapter is a summation of notes for the Story Guide working with TSoY. This material might not be that interesting or necessary for a player-type, but you’ll of course make your own call.

The First Session

The basic procedure for starting a TSoY campaign is for the whole group to gather for a planning session, just like I describe in SOLAR SYSTEM. When using TSoY, the Story Guide often ends up being the person who has studied the setting a bit and imagined using it, so he is in a good position to tell about it to the other players. Tell small, general stories, one might say. Answer questions. Provide a picture of the sort of stories that will be created and the characters that will perform the main roles.

Many groups go into this sort of process topdown, by describing a setting in general terms of setting history first and continuing to the details. That’s fine if the group works well with that sort of approach, but I’ve personally found that an ordered top-down process is more for the comfort of the person explaining things than for utility: the rest of the group won’t really care and perhaps shouldn’t care of the generalities before you’ve nailed down the particulars.

As an alternative, consider leaving history and geography at the door and working with concrete images and concrete situations. What the players need to know and want to know is not necessarily the history of Absolon and Hanish (page 56), but the fact that now a people lies in slavery while black hearted men reach for immortality. If the latter is what excites the group, then perhaps that is what should be offered first.

When the group has latched onto a FOCAL POINT of the setting, such as the ever-popular Zaru slavery issue (chapter 10), character generation can commence in relation to this common situation. Players can choose to create characters who are directly involved, or they can choose to play outsiders, but the important thing is that they know which their character will be by figuring out the character’s relationship to the focal point. I’ve managed to make a mess of TSoY myself by going into the game characters first, so I can’t stress enough the importance of first having the group (or, conceivably, the Story Guide alone) choose the focal point around which the campaign will revolve.

Near is a big place full of possibilities for play, so an individual campaign will never need to have an integral relationship to everything in this book. Let go of any need to cross-reference your chosen material any further than seems fruitful for actual play. Ignore the parts that seem irrelevant to this particular campaign. Embrace setting-definition through the process of play, rather than looking for answers in a book.

Everything in this setting book is written with a dual purpose: on the one hand it is for the players to create their characters, the protagonists of the story world the players will create. On the other hand, all the material is usable for the Story Guide in preparing the situations he needs to conduct the campaign.

The Terse Near

I am not sure if this is actually necessary for understanding what is to come, but in case it is, here is a very compact explanation for the setting of Near, the world that is the home for the Empire of Maldor, jungles of Qek and other miracles that come later. A Story Guide who prefers a top-down approach might start with this when introducing the game to a new group.

What Came Before

Not much is known of Near before the Skyfire. This was the age of myth for most cultures on the planet. The most prominent of these myths from Before is the Empire of Maldor, to which we’ll return later on.

The Skyfire

When a fiery dot appeared on the sky, people all over the world were alarmed. When it grew larger, they were agitated. The giant asteroid, as such it likely was, struck the planet and nearly destroyed everything. If the Myth of the Skyfire is to be believed, the Last Emperor and Hanish the foreign magician saved the world then.

The Year of Darkness

After the Skyfire disappeared, the world was cast in darkness as clouds of ash rose to the skies. The earth first broke, and then froze. The darkness lasted a full year, or perhaps a generation. Nine tenths of the population of Near perished, and the survivors were left with nothing.

The Moon

When the Year of Darkness ended, the Moon rose to the skies for the first time. It was received with fear, and quickly it became the object of superstition and magic. The Moon is the part of the world that is now lost, for it broke away from Near into a world of its own.

What is Now

Now is perhaps a hundred years after the Skyfire. The myth of the Skyfire says 300 years. The world is being rebuilt, or rediscovered, as only the mightiest powers withstood the Year of Darkness unscathed. The world is in flux, civilization and life itself still in danger of extinguishing. The world is broken, and only courage may rebuild it.

I will be providing similar run-downs of individual concepts through the book for the benefit of a setting-introducing-person; I know personally how annoying it can be to try to info-dump even the bare necessities of a setting to a new group. Hopefully some pre-thought paragraphs that can be directly read out will help in this a bit.

Using the Crunch

Having a book full of rules material makes for a quite different play experience with the SOLAR SYSTEM than starting from an empty table would. Consequently, the Story Guide might consider how to best leverage the resources under his guidance.

One thing I myself tend to do is to discourage players from seeing the setting material as a selection of character options: not only (as I’ve been repeating already in the book) are all the materials in the book only suggestions, but the purpose of the setting materials is not so much to encourage character optimization as to provide ideas for how to express the fiction of the game in the rules mechanics. Sometimes I get players who presume that everything in the book is to be considered as resources characters are entitled to, and I think that this sort of thing tends to lessen the experience a bit.

So what I do instead is to encourage the players to start with simple characters that’ll then grow organically through the game into whatever direction fate and player choices dictate. As the Story Guide I like to take on the job of consulting with the players on how their characters grow and develop: the players do not need to go through long lists of character options because I’ll be throwing things out for them in the fiction of the game. Instead of going through a list of options for what he’d like to spend his Advances on, I like to see players work with what the setting is offering: a character might encounter an Uptenbo master who offers to teach him, or he might decide to become a wizard and seek tutelage in that, or he might have to learn advanced survival skills and knot-making in the jungles of Qek just because he happened to get stranded there. All of these options and more are so much more interesting when they follow and inspire the fiction of the game rather than being necessitated by a systematic study of crunch materials conducted by a player.

Often you need to do nothing more complex than utilize the crunch fully in creating secondary characters, and make sure that those characters get to engage the game mechanically. For example, a great way to introduce a new culture into the game is to create some characters that use the new crunch and have them come into contact with a player character. This allows the players to see how the new crunch works, inspiring them to consider new options for their own character.

My point in this is not to ask the Story Guide to limit other players in how they engage with the game (this book, as all materials, is for everybody), but rather to ask him to consider his responsibilities in the SOLAR SYSTEM to be expanded when this sort of crunch-heavy setting is dropped onto his lap: in addition to everything else, the Story Guide should now make sure that the players do not need to make the reference book their best ally in providing exciting character development options. There’s even no need to create your own additions to the crunch, just being active and inventive in bringing the existing material to the fore is enough. There’s quite a difference in just having a given Secret sit on the page as compared to having a character in the game actually possess it and be willing to teach it to your character.

Campaign Themes

Near is a fantasy world with the makings of your typical historical romance – there are humble farmers, evil tyrants, high mountains, wide rivers and all that stuff you’d expect. The world is just recovering from disaster as fractured societies slowly knit themselves back together, often in completely new forms. It’s a time of heroes, as the direction of the world and even its very survival are at stake.

The numerous cultures of Near have many differences. Their differing values and material lifestyles take them into conflict as old routes of travel are opened. A big part of the game is to create characters that represent or contrast with cultures in the focal point of the campaign; player characters can clash with each other as representatives of different cultures, or they can come as strangers into such situations.

Another large theme of Near is humanity; no gods, no monster as I explained in the Introduction. The so-called “old species” are a number of drastically different creatures such as humans, goblins and elves, all of which share the world and society with each other. Then there are the new creatures that have come with the broken world, in their own way both human and bestial. All of these people have identity issues that need to be resolved for a hero to truly emerge.

Finally, Near has magic. Amazing feats are possible for heroes, but only at the price of their identity: all magics and other sources of personal power are rooted in culture or even species, making the choice of tools a choice of values for a hero.

Themes in Conflict

While TSoY doesn’t fit directly into a given genre, it has a certain feel that the Story Guide will do well to consider. TSoY is a very human fantasy, which leads to certain rules of thumb when the Story Guide executes his responsibilities in dramatic coordination. For instance:

Death

It is usually not proper in TSoY to have stakes in conflict concern outright death of another character. Extended conflicts or helplessness due to Harm are thus needed to permanently kill named characters, while extras may die as part of narration on the way to objectives. (Note that somebody a player character specifically wants to kill can hardly be an extra, can they?) This means that usually the Story Guide may only declare player character death as conflict issue after a player decides to extend the conflict, not before. Seeming death (dropping into a gorge and never leaving a body) is still very much on the table, of course.

Human worth

Extras are only extras as long as they don’t have names or stated interests. There are no social classes or types of people constrained into insignificance by genre stricture, as tends to be the case in chivalric romance and most other fantasy genres ever since. What this means is that there are no object people that are systematically victimized and ignored as sources of conflict without dramatic concern for their individuality and intent; anybody may prove important, be they slave or king.

Of Cultural Sources

As TSoY is a shared endeavor, I can’t really give a definite list of useful sources. I could make a list of the sorts of culture that have influenced me on my part when playing in Near, but I desist: it’d just be that same list of seminal fantasy literature you’d get from Wikipedia and any number of other fantasy roleplaying games: just look for “sword & sorcery”, “pulp fantasy”, “pulp horror”, “Tolkien”, “feminist science fiction”, “military scifi”, “Glorantha”, “Dungeons & Dragons”, “historical novel”, “libertarianism”, “Romanticism”, “neopaganism”.

You probably know the seminal authors already, or if you’re young and don’t – I can’t guarantee it, but you’ll probably have a much better time reading the Masters than my book. In any case TSoY is for me a very wide organic writing and playing experience, one that allows me to detach from formulaic expectations of genre and just play the setting and rules, playfully shifting from genre to genre and throwing cultural references like they were cherry pits. I hope the game works the same way for you.

I should mention that Clinton gives Robert E. Howard and Fritz Leiber as the main influences of the original TSoY book. You will certainly not be far off if that’s the sort of setting you expect, although there are many other things here as well.

Character Creation

The next couple of chapters introduce the core CRUNCH LANDSCAPE for a campaign set in Near. There are Abilities, Secrets and Keys that are usually available to all characters that want them. Many cultures in the setting use their own, more specific crunch for accomplishing some of the things covered here, but many concerns are shared by all.

When creating characters for THE SHADOW OF YESTERDAY, the convention is for the player to choose one specific CULTURE his character belongs to. The player then creates the character using only the general crunch and the culture-specific material for the culture in question. What is a “culture” in this sense is up to the group – I could see prohibiting a mixture of crunch specific to certain social classes in some lands of Near, for example. The book doesn’t make a big deal of this, it doesn’t specifically list which cultures are enough of traders to wield the trading crunch in chapter 9, for example. You’ll just have to pay attention to the fiction and make choices that fit with your campaign’s intent.

The player may also choose to make his character non-human (as opposed to the human default, chapter 22), in which case they may not access the human-specific crunch but have additional options related to their species. Nonhuman characters are still members of a culture just like humans, so they can use that crunch as well.

I should emphasize that the culture limitation does not mean that characters can’t adopt another culture during play; to the contrary, this is often a matter of great emphasis in the character’s story. During play crunch is chosen normally, so characters can learn anything they have the reasonable background or mentors for. The culture limitation is there to emphasize the cultural theme, not to limit the fiction itself.

It is not uncommon for the group to coordinate so that all the player characters are members of the same 1-2 cultures at the focal point of the campaign. For example, players might all agree to create characters living in the same town in Maldor. The choice to play an outsider in this set-up is a strong one as well, for such outsiders naturally become pivots and judges of the local situation.

Another approach is the classical adventure fantasy paradigm: have all players create characters out of the material they are most interested in, getting a mix of cultures from all over Near, but also require the characters to be severed from their society and already adrift, looking for purpose; some heavy-handed dramatic coordination from the Story Guide will then get all of these colorful, idiosyncratic individuals mixed up with the focal point of the campaign, at which point they can take sides and proceed with the scenario. Even a traditional adventure party is a possibility here, at least for a time.

Default Pools

Characters for the Shadow of Yesterday are customarily created with 11 Pool points distributed between the three default Pools of VIGOR, INSTINCT and REASON. They are accompanied by the default PASSIVE ABILITIES, as we’ll see in the next chapter.