I have returned to fantasy RPGs.
I previously mentioned how I had to split the Ottawa Warband. I now have two groups for which I run games. One group picked the post-apocalyptic offering and the other picked the fantasy one.
This fantasy is urban-based as have been most of my fantasy games. Sword Noir‘s setting is the city of Everthorn. This new game is based on an old setting of mine, one which I had used for many years before moving to Ottawa, a place called Hadrapole.
The game still uses the Riggers system, which continues to evolve, though now in baby-steps rather than major changes to the system. It also isn’t straight up sword & sorcery. It has a bit of horror, or at least threatening magical darkness. This is also a common theme in my fantasy games, and I blame that on Glen Cook. Both his novels Shadows Linger and Tower of Fear focused on structures that evoked dread, though for different reasons.
In Shadows Linger, the second book in the Black Company series, an ex-Company mercenary is selling bodies to the denizens of a mysterious ruin, and that ruin is slowly growing into a tower, though no one is every seen working on it. Tower of Fear centres on a conquered city, the Imperials and mercenaries who conquered it, and a resistance movement trying to get in the eponymous tower in order to wake the wizard sleeping there.
The idea of a mysterious tower or castle is nothing new, but I think that one within a large urban setting provide some level of novelty. These players, also, have never encountered this particular fondness of mine, so they are facing a very new and different situation from the other games which I have run.
Hadrapole, in this incarnation, is also recovering from a great plague which has left large swaths of o the city depopulated. This gives the mysterious forces against whom the PCs are vying space to operate unseen, and it is not that different from a shadowy jungle or an uncharted cave complex in providing a dungeon to the dread force’s dragon (metaphorical, not actual).
You can find our more about Shadows Linger here.
You can find out more about Tower of Fear here.