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Everthorn: The Centre of the World

A once proud city, the centre of an empire, has fallen into disrepute. Its empire gone, its power diminished, it remains a vibrant commercial and cosmopolitan crossroads for trade from around the known world. Its gold still shines, but its streets are darker than ever.

This is Everthorn.

Everthorn is the default setting for Sword Noir and was presented in the original core rules. With the completion of Sword Noir 2E, now would be an excellent time to reconsider Everthorn, re-work it, and present it anew. While the mechanics attached to the setting would be Sword Noir 2E, that system is abstract enough to allow easy adaptation of Everthorn to any setting seeking a major port city in which the PCs find themselves enmeshed in dark and gritty adventures for questionable patrons.

Everthorn: The Centre of the World is one possible project slated for a vote on my Patreon.

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#RPGaDAY2015 Day 21: Favourite RPG Setting

This one is actually quite easy for me: Iron Crown Enterprise’s Middle Earth from the 1980s.

Man, did we play the shit out of those supplements. We didn’t use the Rolemaster rules or the later MERP. It was all D&D all the time back then, but damn did we love those ICE supplement with their gorgeous maps and amazing story hooks. Our campaign was 100 years after the War of the Ring, and was tied both to some resurgent evil and the return of the Blue Wizards from the East. Some of the setting particulars we had to change or adapt, but there was so much good stuff from the two Mirkwood books, the Mines of Moria, the Riders of Rohan, and so many others.

The one I remember as being the most awesome was the Court of Ardor. It had almost no connection to Tolkien’s actual stuff, but it fit really well with what we were doing in the setting.

This is me getting all nostalgic.


#RPGaDAY2015 is the brainchild of game designer Dave Chapman. Basically, each day in August there is a question about RPGs. This is day 21.

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Innocent Guns: A Setting Proposal

In an email exchange, friend of the Accidental Survivors in Germany, Wolf, mentioned Innocent Gun, which another listener had mentioned (for those not in the know, we talk a lot about Innes & Gunn’s line of beers), and I wrote that it would make a good RPG title.

Wolf suggested a western, gothic, cyber-punk. I like that, but I’ll go one further – post-apocalyptic.

Dig this: it’s hundreds of years after a cataclysm that is known in the region in which the PC’s begin as the Event. Every culture has a different myth about it, but it was a huge disaster. The world is only just starting to recover. Part of this new recovery is an organic network into which certain people can tap. It is a decentralized information network that evolved after the Event. Resurrected industry is taking advantage of this much the way it takes advantage of computers and the internet in our world.

From the movie Priest

But this recovery is very localized. Certain places have factories, electricity, transportation and communications, but much of the world remains outside these “points of light.” Yes, “civilization” is advancing, but slowly. Carefully. The people who live on the fringes have civilization, sure, but it’s a frontier civilization. In many places, might makes right.

And there is a secret, whispered about on the network. Something is growing. Something powerful. A global geothermal energy project is coming back online. Its substations are spooling up one by one. An energy grid built to power a world beyond even the 21st-century’s voracious needs could change everything.

In my conception of this, I have no idea what the Event was. It’s unimportant. The network is due to nanobots that existed before the Event and are replicating, but due to the specifics of the ones that survived the Event, they can only work with individuals with very specific genetic markers. The nanobots are also powering up the geothermal grid – working on parameters set hundreds of years ago and happening now because they have replicated enough that there is a cascade, as more power increases production, which allows more power, etc.

Gothic, I think, is generally very intertwined with the aesthetics of cyberpunk. The world is constantly dark as the Event created an almost impenetrable layer of clouds (yes, I know this would have huge environmental repercussions, but so would magic and no one ever seems to care about that ;). It rains all the time. It’s a dark and depressing world in which wealth has created the kind of class divisions known during the Middle Ages (a representation of the current wealth gap).

And the PCs are the ones bringing order to both the cities (protecting the underclass rather than taking the barons coin) and in the frontier (where the network is starting to have a great impact).

They are the Innocent Guns. But how long will they remain so?