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Front Matter - Introduction

THE SHADOW OF YESTERDAY (known as TSoY among friends) is a roleplaying game of fantastic, passionate adventure in a world struggling to knit itself together after everything almost ended. Players of the game create a world of stories about the brave people who join this struggle and shape the face of the world to come. TSoY uses a rules system called SOLAR SYSTEM, a game of dramatic adventure. The Solar System is a generic rules system, which means that it can be used for many different stories in all sorts of imaginary worlds. It was, however, originally created for The Shadow of Yesterday, for which it is uniquely suited. The Solar System is available in many different forms and languages on the Internet and in game stores. In TSoY the Solar System is used in conjunction with the SETTING of NEAR, an original fantasy world custom-built for the personable, passionate stories TSoY is about. This book provides the setting in a language compatible with the Solar System rules. We also discuss how the setting can be used when playing a Solar System campaign set in Near.

History of Near

The Shadow of Yesterday was originally selfpublished in 2004 by Clinton R. Nixon, a canny roleplaying game designer and IT professional. At this time the game book included both setting and rules in one book. The second edition followed pretty quickly in 2005, as Clinton honed the rules system, now also published separately under the moniker of “Solar System”. The game has been pretty widely available both in game stores and the Internet in different forms since then.

Clinton as a programmer is an ardent supporter of the open source movement, which has through the years weighted increasingly on his work as a game designer as well. TSoY has from its first edition on been available for free under the CREATIVE COMMONS licensing scheme, first under the non-commercial license, then without even that limitation. In 2008 Clinton released all of his other game designs under similar terms, completing his move towards pure open culture.

The open nature of TSoY has helped it become a relatively successful game in terms of popularity. I myself published a Finnish translation of the game in 2006 with Clinton’s support, and the game has been translated to other languages as well. Perhaps even more significantly, Clinton has been steadfast in his support of not only freedom from expense, but also freedom in thought: The Shadow of Yesterday has developed through these few short years into a community project, with many people all over the world interpreting the game and reinventing it to their needs.

What is TSoY?

The Shadow of Yesterday is a fantasy roleplaying game that is very much defined by its peculiar setting, NEAR. Clinton characterizes it as “pumpkin fantasy”, akin to that genre of fantasy literature in which young boys leave the farm, take up the sword, learn of their world and their place in it, and ultimately redeem everything.

Aside from pumpkin fantasy, a major influence for many of us working on TSoY has been the idea of pulp aesthetics as a counterpoint to genrified post-Tolkien, post-D&D fantasy literature: Near is a very organic world (some would call it “gritty”) that draws pretty freely from sword & sorcery imagery and encourages stories to go where they will regardless of conventional structure. So there is a definite tension between uplifting heroism and literary realism in this material. It is a fruitful tension that I have seen no need to resolve: TSoY is at once sentimental and pragmatic; it is always exciting to sit down to play and see what we bring to being this time.

This is not to say that The Shadow of Yesterday is a generic fantasy game that suits anything and everything. To the contrary, Near has a very definite feel, one that is easy to recognize, as anybody who’s witnessed our frequent forum discussions on expanding and detailing Near can attest. To wit, Clinton even wrote these principles into his book:

Stories of Near are humanistic stories, and even when the protagonists might not be human, they are still people, and their fates speak to us on that level. Read this as a refutation of certain sorts of fantasy literature and roleplaying if you will.

There is more to Near in general, such as the Sky Fire and the Year of Shadow, but those are incidental matters of history, not underlying thematic purpose.

Acknowledging Sources

I should note that much in this book derives from the community of interested roleplayers. While I’ve written the words, often the ideas come from other works or discussions we’ve had over the years with others enticed by The Shadow of Yesterday. Many of the words I’ve even borrowed directly from others, especially Clinton’s to-the-point prose in the original THE SHADOW OF YESTERDAY.

Aside from Clinton, whose influence is obvious, I have to commend Josh Culbertson, a long-term contributor in related forums. His “southern initiative”, as I’ve come to call a spate of discussion threads in the spring of 2008, was central in inspiring me to take up this work. With Josh’s kind permission I’ve adapted freely from his vision in bringing the southern continent and other ideas of his into this new form. Anybody interested in the origins of many ideas in this book should visit the forums at the Forge (http://www.indie-rpgs.com) for the original discussions that gave rise to what we have here.

In addition to Clinton and Josh there are of course many others whose ideas, critique and imagination have contributed in different ways and degrees to my work here. At least Troels, Harald Wagener, Dave Michael, Sami Koponen, João Mendes and my brother Jari are easy to name, and there are likely many others whose names escape me at the moment.

Another set of acknowledgement goes to the various people who have helped me playtest the materials in the book. These are mostly my local friends who have graciously helped out. At least Jari and Sami above, Markku, A-P Lappi, Henrik Mikkonen, Pyry and Peitsa Veteli, Satu and Timo Eskelinen, Sipi Myllynen are easy to name, and there are probably others I forget. As this book largely consists of an editorial reworking of multiple sources mixed with original writing and design, I make a point of indicating the main sources of each individual chapter in rough terms at the beginning of each. I don’t nitpick obsessively over the matter, but that should be enough to help direct the reader towards the original sources in each case, if he’s interested.

Using this text

First off, if you’re new to the game and don’t have the Solar System yet, we’ll need to fix that. The Solar System is available on the Internet for free, as befits its open nature, and you can also buy it in a cheap booklet from yours truly. There are several different versions out there from when Clinton actively revised the game – look for the “2008 edition” if you can, as that uses the same terminology I use here. Easier to follow that way.

Looking at the Solar System, it already advises quite a bit in how to latch a ready-made setting into the game. Actually, I write about setting up a game in general there, so I won’t repeat all that now. This book is special, though, in that it has been written with the Solar System in mind. This makes using the setting most straightforward.

I recommend reading or at least browsing through the whole book before going to the game table, especially if you’re the Story Guide. I’ve tried to write this in an entertaining manner, and to sort the material so it makes sense as a reading experience. The indexes at the end of the book are there to make referencing various details easier in play.

Traditionally roleplaying settings have been presented in gazetteer format, so I should note that this book is arranged a bit differently: TSoY is as a matter of method a random-access work wherein geographical logic is not nearly definitive: rather, players need to mix and match the material for use in their own campaign, connecting the dots between different parts of the book. For this reason I decided to arrange the book with readability in mind: in actual play you’re going to be skipping all over the place anyway, utilizing the index and your own bookmarks heavily, so I might as well organize the book logically as a reading experience, thus:

Front Matter of the book includes introductory material, Story Guiding advice and the default CRUNCH LANDSCAPE of TSoY; all material that is necessary for most campaigns using this book. Study it well.

1st Movement consists of the material I think of as the “short Near”: it tells of Maldor, the empire, and what became of it after the Year of Shadow. I’ve arranged this material with internal coherence in mind: if you’re overwhelmed by the extent of the setting in whole, the 1st Movement is actually a sort of mini-setting in its own right, perfectly playable. 2nd Movement concerns the “Matter of Ammeni”, the steamy northern Near. Although Clinton didn’t originally plan it this way, in practical play the Matter of Maldor and Matter of Ammeni tend to become sort of separate: a given campaign in my experience rarely tries to encompass material from both, it would simply be too sweeping. [[3rd_Movement?|3rd Movement]] is practically Josh Culbertson’s “Southern Initiative” edited through my own lens and connected with the rest of the setting. It concerns the lands of the southern continent, a Nordic fantasy wilderness that connects and impacts the Ruined Empire from across the ocean in unpredictable ways. [[4th_Movement?|4th Movement]] presents a powerful general theme of the game, the issue of the Human Equation. The different intelligent species of Near are introduced and their place in the world discussed. It is a rich and useful additional angle on everything that came before. Not mandatory for a lighter campaign by any means, but useful for everybody. [[5th_Movement?|5th Movement]] finally, is a segue of possibilities. I’ve written this book with an eye towards the future and inclusiveness, with no regard for a setting canon. This part consequently gathers in one place various ideas, shards and notions that might prove fruitful in the future as we continue play and work on this imaginary playground of ours.

Although I’ve made a point of grouping the material a bit in the above manner, do not for a moment entertain the idea that I’d want you to limit your practical play to one or two parts of the book. I just found that the book made a better reading experience when I gave it slightly more structure than a huge dictionary of articles in alphabetic order would have had.

To interpret Canon

While writing this book I have had to think a lot about what roleplaying game settings mean and how my and others’ play of TSoY differs from how setting material is usually used in roleplaying. Issues such as “gregging” (the actual verb used by Glorantha fans when the canonical setting is changed by Greg Stafford) or “metaplot” (a big issue with many ‘90s roleplaying games that included a prose narrative that progressed and made changes to the setting of the game through various sourcebooks) have made me wonder how come our attitude in playing TSoY with its relatively elaborate setting has never stumbled on these kinds of issues.

I remember vividly how in 2006 or so somebody asked on Clinton’s forums about “Oran”, a vaguely referenced land and people that gains hardly a mention in Clinton’s TSoY. The answers to that thread consisted of no less than three separate visions of what Oran might be – one of them by the creator of the setting. Not once in that discussion did we have any confusion about the truth of the matter: Oran would have to be, by necessity, whatever a given campaign or writer would want it to be, whether that’d be savage falconers, homosexual Arabs or a lost colony of the empire. (Check [[Oran?]] for what I ultimately made of that discussion.)

This is a lesson in using setting material in roleplaying, one that TSoY puts to use in a most fruitful manner: Near as a literary entity is strictly secondary to the art performed upon this stage we craft in words and pictures. A roleplaying setting must be solid in play, but this does not mean that a setting book has to have automatic credibility against the desires of the players: the group and the Story Guide (according to his task as backstory authority) should consider a setting book, no matter how well-crafted, a series of inspiration and suggestions only.

I do not write about this because I’d need to explain this ethos to old friends of TSoY. I’m explaining a fundamental difference in attitude to new readers so that you may understand why there are references never explained, why the seemingly objective descriptions differ in content, why all rules systems are partially unfinished and why I break immersion all the time to talk about why the setting is built the way it is. There simply isn’t any more objective reality behind the curtain than we please to pretend from moment to moment in our play.

Nature of the Beast

Based on the above, a necessity occurs: just as I don’t consider this book a canon to follow, I do not consider it a product so much as a source. By this I mean that I find more value in this book as a source of inspiration than as a complete, pre-packaged gaming experience.

I struggled for a while to find words for what exactly I mean here, so I devised a simile: when somebody writes a book about Chess, we do not say that his book is Chess. In the exact same way, while this book gives you everything you need to start playing TSoY, the book is not THE SHADOW OF YESTERDAY itself. It’s just a source, of which there are quite a few nowadays, starting with Clinton’s original books and ranging through various web materials to translated language editions. My hope is that you approach this book like a book on Chess: it explains the rules and helps you begin, but it’s not everything there is to the game, and it’s certainly not the final authority on it. That authority is the Grandmaster who schools you at the board in actual play.

Continuing from Here

This book is full of material, enough for a hundred campaigns. If there is anything you don’t understand, want examples for or want to know more about, don’t hesitate to ask me or other TSoY players about our own notions. I love to speculate about the Worst War or the Abandoned Coast or how equipment rules can be abused, or what lies beyond the Eastern Ocean, and why its name has a compass direction when it’s the only Ocean out there. Alongside other things this book being a reference work means that it’s supposed to be used in conjunction with your real play and other sources, not as a solitary canon.

Define external redirect: Oran 4th Movement 5th Movement 3rd Movement