Archetypes Part 3: Cyran Noble

This archetype is also pretty vital to the campaign.  There could be any number of nobles at court who have befriended Oargev, with any combination of classes and some variety of races.  Accordingly, I had 4 of this card in my deck.

Archetype: Cyran Noble

Race: Human, Half-Elf (most common), Elf, Halfling, Changeling, Gnome, Dwarf, Half-Orc (less common)

Class: Any Martial, Arcane, Shadow, or Divine Class.

Religion: Sovereign Host (most common); Dark Six, Blood of Vol, Silver Flame, Spirits of the Past (less common)

Hook: You are a member of one of Cyre's noble families, perhaps even a distant relative of the royal family. You have been raised alongside the crown prince, chosen at a young age to be his life-long companion.  Your family owns land, employs servants, and has a tradition of military service.

Benefits: You gain Noble Protection and one other benefit:

     Noble Protection: As a noble, you are not held to quite the same standards as other Cyrans in legal proceedings. More can be forgiven, and your word is superior to the word of those from lesser stations. If you are recognized as nobility on the battlefield, sentient enemies would much rather take you hostage than kill you.
And one of the following:
Military Service: Gain proficiency with all military melee weapons, all military ranged weapons, any one superior weapon, or any one armor or shield (ignoring ability score prerequisites for the feat, but not other prerequisites). In addition, you have military rank.
Impressive Connections: In any sufficiently large city across Khorvaire, and anywhere in Cyre, you may roll a Streetwise, History, or Insight check to discover if there is someone in town with whome you are connected. The higher your check, the better the connection. The skill you choose to use will determine the sort of help your connection will offer (Streetwise: a merchant connection- benefits to buying and selling in town; History: a family connection- a place to stay, contacts in local society, formal introductions; Insight- Old Friends- a place to stay, contacts in regular society, active help in your affairs in-town.)
Superior Education: Choose 1: You gain +3 in one associated skill, all associated skills as class skills, +1 in three associated skills, or 2 bonus languages. Associated skills: Arcana, Diplomacy, History, Insight, and Religion. Also, you know a handful of gifted scholars and have established connections in one or more educational institutions.
Royal Family: As a member of the royal family, you hold even greater power than a regular noble. Your commands are expected to be followed and anything you say or do has some weight of law behind it.

Commentary:  This role has a lot to work with.  Mostly, they would be playing rather classic DnD races, and certainly would be able to play a huge variety of classes.  I left Psionics off of the list because I felt like it was too exotic for a Cyran lord to be involved in, and when I listed Any Shadow, the Vampire class was not yet out.  I would probably have discouraged that class, as it doesn't seem very good, and also screams Karrnath, not Cyre.  
     If I had only 5 PCs, I would have been happy with Oargev and 4 nobles for a few reasons.  First of all, with a selection of 4 pretty solid benefits, they could differentiate themselves.  Now, in retrospect, I am not sure they could differentiate themselves from Oargev particularly well, but I never ran into that issue.  I figured any of my potential PCs would be happy in this archetype, as they could play an arcane researcher and ritualist, a playboy adventurer, or a hard-boiled career officer.  They could play Eddard Stark or Littlefinger.  They could play any of the Knights of the Round Table.  While this wasn't quite the "play whatever you want" card, it was certainly the "play any mainstream concept you can think of, and a few off the beaten path with mainstream elements" card.
     I ended up with a PC selecting this archetype.  The tactics-loving leader player selected it because it let him play the power behind the throne.  He has decided to play Istav ir'Somme, nephew to the Queen's Consort and, therefore, cousin to the Prince.  He is a Half-Elf Bard who studied at Arcanix in Aundair, giving him many ties to that nation.  He is older than Oargev, and has been asked by the Queen's Council to act as the Prince's chief adviser.  Istav has a good bit of Littlefinger to him.  He is a machine when it comes to diplomacy and politics and is willing to be brutally honest with his cousin, Oargev, when he is about to make a fool of himself in either field.  He selected Impressive Connections as his benefit, but he has only used it once so far.   

Archetypes Part 2: The Prince

This first archetype is the backbone of the campaign.  If he perms, I will likely have problems, though I do have one very useful ace up my sleeve.

Archetype: Prince Oargev ir'Wynarn

Race: Human, Half-Elf

Class: Warlord, Bard, Cleric, Paladin, Fighter, Invoker

Religion: Sovereign Host 

Hook: You are heir to the throne of Cyre.  You lead a band of sworn companions, trusted advisors, and loyal servants on missions of state, aiding your country in the War of Usurpers.  Your ultimate goal is to restore the Kingdom of Galifar under its true and rightful monarch: your mother.

Benefits: You gain all three of the following background benefits:

     Noble Protection: As a noble, you are not held to quite the same standards as other Cyrans in legal proceedings. More can be forgiven, and your word is superior to the word of those from lesser stations. If you are recognized as nobility on the battlefield, sentient enemies would much rather take you hostage than kill you.
Superior Education: Choose 1: You gain +3 in one associated skill, all associated skills as class skills, +1 in three associated skills, or 2 bonus languages. Associated skills: Arcana, Diplomacy, History, Insight, and Religion. Also, you know a handful of gifted scholars and have established connections in one or more educational institutions.
Royal Family: As a member of the royal family, you hold even greater power than a regular noble. Your commands are expected to be followed and anything you say or do has some weight of law behind it.

Commentary:  I knew this role would have the least amount of choice related to it.  With the Half-Elf nobility back-story plot of Eberron, I felt good offering a little selection in race (and seeing as both Human and Half-Elf are really a strong choices in 4ed, it was a truly meaningful selection).
     The limited class list existed for one and only reason: The War Regalia of Galifar.  From the earliest days of planning this campaign, I wanted a search for the royal regalia of the king of the Five Nations to be a plot thread.  So I adapted the War Regalia stats from the 3.5 book, The Forge of War (which will likely get its own post sometime in the future.  Great book!) into 4ed items, and then recreated them in order to match the Set Item rules that came out for 4ed.  However it worked, the war regalia needed to include Heavy Armor and a Mace.  I listed out classes that would, no matter what, be able to use the War Regalia.  You notice that I included Invoker on the list, not to mention the Bard and Cleric which don't necessarily need to use weapons to be effective.  This is because I decided early on the Scepter of Karrnath would have a property that it could always be used as an implement by anyone proficient with any implements.  This made those options work.  I decided against any psionic classes as I felt that I wanted to limit psionics to characters with very specific backgrounds.  I wanted the Prince to be a pretty straightforward Cyran noble with no dark or mysterious powers.
     I also limited his religion, because I felt all of the other major religions were too closely associated with one of the other kingdoms.

     There were a surprising number of my potential players I was comfortable taking this role, but for wildly different reasons.  I thought the guy who liked noble-types would be interested, as would the natural leader/tactitian, or the developing ruthless-roleplayer.  I also thought it was likely that the player who likes winning DnD might be a good option, since, if the PCs are ultimately successful, he very much WOULD Win-while still being a team player, since the team is being put together to ensure his success.  I was, honestly, hoping that the really random player might try out this PC, since, socially, he would have more room to be a little crazy than some other PCs.  Social appropriateness isn't so much an issue for princes.  See Goffery Baratheon.  To attract people to this role, I decided that his benefits needed to be just a hair better than all of the others.  Not so much better that everyone would fight getting to play Oargev, but good enough that whomever ended up playing him wouldn't feel cheated.  Someone HAD to play him.

     Either way, I thought that the PC could play a named character from the campaign setting and still be given enough freedom to make the character his own.  Would Oargev be a naive dilletante craving adventure?  Would he be a dutiful son trying to make his mother proud?  Would he be a bit of a rebel, chafing under expectations?  A cold-blooded warlord-in-the-making?  I couldn't wait to see.

     Eventually, the player who loves iconic roles decided he would play Oargev.  The Oargev I got is a Human Paladin.  He is actually an introvert, but he'll play the extrovert when it is expected of him.  He loves whittling and especially likes carving religious symbols and figures from unusual and exotic woods.  He hand-carved his own holy symbol.  He had never left Metrol before play began, and has only rarely left the palace, as his mother monitors him very closely, considering the tragic death in infancy of his older brother.  He harbors a deep mistrust of Thrane, considering the most recent major incursion into Cyre, The Invasion of the Messengers, has happened fairly recently.  He's a very dedicated servant to the Sovereign Host.

Archetypes: Part 1

A key step to developing a great campaign is putting together a party that will generate plot just by trying to work together. It's also a big plus if the party fits the DM's vision for the campaign and gives him lots of good hooks to latch on to.

When I'd originally started planning this campaign, my probable player base was pretty big. My players ranged across all types, personalities, and play styles.

My Original Players

• We had the guy who likes to role-play interesting takes on iconic character archetypes with fairly straightforward stats to back them up. 
•  We had the guy who likes off-the-wall moments and will never act in anything resembling a predictable way (which has tacked bad endings onto more than one campaign). 
•  We had the guy who like to "win" DnD. 
•  We had the guy who loves playing the smooth-talking noble or scoundrel, but his character's smoothness tends to get lost somewhere between his mind and his tongue. 
• We had the guy who likes strategy and strategic thinking and tends to always take the leadership roles in this group unless he is purposely trying to avoid doing so. 
• We had the guy who has quickly developed over the last few long-term campaigns we have run from a soft-spoken background roll-player to role-player who enjoys somewhat ruthless characters. 
• We had the guy who'd been away from the hobby for a while and was coming back to it by trying to play pretty straightforward and compelling characters. 
•  We had the guy who may or may not show up from week to week.

Anyway, I had up to 8 PCs to plan for, and I wanted to both restrict what sort of PC they could play to fit with-in the concept for the game and also to offer the widest range of character options from the, at this point, rich offerings from D&D 4ed.

My idea was to make a deck of "Archetypes." Each card would have a brief description of a type of person that would be at Cyre's court, in a position to befriend the Prince. Beyond that, it would offer a restriction of races and classes that would make sense within that role. My goal was to cover every single game element anyone could possibly want to play with in 4ed. Also, I wanted the cards to offer roles that would fit with the wide variety of play-styles my players enjoy. I made multiple copies of many of the archetypes, because there were certain archetypes I could see multiple PCs wanting to play, and felt there was room within the archetype for them to do so with satisfying variety.

The plan was to deal the deck of archetypes to my players and play some sort of modified Old Maid, leaving each player with a hand of 2 archetypes from which to choose (except the Prince, who would just have 1 card) Whomever is stuck with Oargev, plays the prince.

That's not what happened. First of all, I decided these archetypes would replace Backgrounds, but be BETTER. I gave them each a flavorful and useful ability to represent their role at court. Secondly, our group fell apart leaving me with only 3 PCs (tactics guy, developing role-player, and iconic role-player) to run the game with. I just handed the stack of cards to the PCs and let them pick what they wanted to play.

Over the next week or so, I'll post each of the cards and the benefit that went with each.

Until then:
The Deck
1. Prince Oargev
2. Cyran Noble
3. Cyran Noble
4. Cyran Noble
5. Cyran Noble
6. Cyran Patriot
7. Cyran Patriot
8. Cyran Patriot
9. Warforged Servant
10. Dragonmarked Scion
11. Dragonmarked Scion
12. Foreign National
13. Foreign National
14. Sovereign Priest
15. Druidic Initiate

Blog: The Repurposing

Okay, so my Noir Game stopped a little while back. We told some good stories, but the DM of our old FR game decided not to continue the game after our missing player returned, so we decided to do something else after giving the Noir game 1 story-arc as a Trio of PCs. Wimbert Garwinkle, Morgrave Professor, was a fun addition to the group, but after his case was solved, moving forward with the campaign seemed a little hard to do with all three PCs. It just didn't feel right in the Detective Noir genre.

That's not to say we'll never come back to Sharn...just not for now.

So now we are doing something else, and if I do say so myself, as DM, I am doing some pretty neat things and I think I want to share. Harbinger of Doom urged me to do this, and I will try and do it.

Origins of the new Game:
We have 3 players and 1 DM. 4ed is not designed for this, but we are adapting. Also, one of our players has a job that involves heavy travel for 4-5 months, divided into two big chunks, over the course of the year. This is a killer for campaign momentum, and we've come up with schemes to survive this absence in the past, but it isn't easy. Many of my choices for this campaign were influenced by these circumstances.

Every year, I assign myself themed summer reading. A few years ago, I read as many interpretations of Arthurian Legend as I could. Somewhere late in the Once and Future King or in the middle of The Mists of Avalon, I don't remember which, it occurred to me that this could be some seriously interesting campaign material: a story of a young ruler (and his closest friends) trying to get his feet under himself, navigate a rapidly changing world, and become the king his country needs. I immediately connected this concept to the hinted at story of Prince Oargev of Cyre in Eberron. According to the campaign book, he has the fortune of being out of the country when The Mourning happens, leaving him a king without a country. He is, at start of the default campaign, governing the remnants of Cyre from the town of New Cyre in Breland.

So that's the campaign I have been working on, innovating with, and (finally) running.

I started the game on Prince Oargev's 18th birthday, a handful of years before The Last War ends. Heroic Tier will take place during the Last War. The PCs will hit level 11 when their nation blows up. Paragon and Epic tiers will, hopefully, follow the restablishment of Cyre, either in the reclaimed Mournland, or carved out of one of the remaining nations.

The PCs:
-Prince Oargev ir'Wynarn: A young, sheltered, idealistic Prince. He's a dedicate of the Soverign Host and has trained in their mysteries along with combat (Human Paladin).
-Istav ir'Somme: Prince Oargev's cousin. He has recently returned from Aundair, where he attended Arcanix. He intends to serve as Oargev's chief advisor. (Half-elf Bard)
-Art: Marten ir'Dallis was Istav's best friend at court. Carter, the steward's assistant, was always underfoot, running errands and messages. The Amazing Bartholomew was always fun to watch on Feast Days. On Oargev's 18th birthday, he learned that all of these people (and more) were actually the changeling named Art, trained from birth to serve as the true heir of Galifar's protector, confidant, spy, and if need be, replacement. (Changeling e-Rogue)

Next time: We'll look at how I moved past backgrounds towards something I called "archetypes."