Renegade Horizon!

Last Friday I finally got a chance to try out the Spirit of the Century rules in the first session of Renegade Horizon, a game set in our gamemaster’s homebrew world of Aria, and really enjoyed it. The game mechanics for SotC have proven quick and simple but with a depth that both encourages and rewards creativity and narration. However none of us were overly interested in the default setting of SotC – we wanted a world of high action but without the pulpiness of giant gorillas flying biplanes.

Because of the genre-mashing involved, it’s difficult to give a one-sentence summary of Aria. The closest RPG comparisons I can come up with would have to be Privateer Press’s Iron Kingdoms, which they describe as Full Metal Fantasy, and Misguided Games’ dieselpunk game Children of the Sun. A fantasy world at his heart, it does have some basic technology. The most advanced branch of science is aonics – the use of sigils and runes to bind minor “demons” to objects to create a specific effect. This new field has opened new avenues of technology such as limb replacement or airships. In addition men have learned that inscribing certain sigils onto themselves allows them access to a form of sorcery. However such sorcerers must constantly fight a losing battle against the bound demons for control and thus have been labeled heretics by the rest of the civilized world.

Our game started a few years after Jedon, the great war, and centered around a small airship owned and operated by the player characters. After a quick discussion where we assigned crew rolls and started character generation. This was the first time creating SotC characters for all of us involved and things went a little slow. Skills and Stunts were relatively easy to assign but Aspects took a little more work – we had to try to figure out where the line between Stunt and Aspect lay and decided what was too broad and what was too specific. I expect things to go much faster in the future.

We wound up with a captain from the Empire of the Vale (similar to the Roman empire), a mechanic from the Valerian Highlands (British Isles), and a my character, a Kishian (Turkish) cook. As we discussed the novels that made up our character backgrounds, we decided on a ship stolen from the Forsaken – the evil corrupt empires in Aria – which was inhabited by an Aonic intelligence. While the technology of an aonic intelligence isn’t anywhere near a typical Ship’s AI from more traditional SciFi settings, it does provide some interesting feel to the ship as well as a little creepiness as it regularly requests we return the sacrificial alter we dismantled in the engine room so that it can be “fueled properly.”

The game itself was fast and smooth on the whole, although we did have to stop and reference a few rules now and then. Not that the rules are complex, just that this session was our first use of them and we were double checking ourselves in a few points. It helped once I was able to reference the SRD for the Gamemaster while he was running the game so he didn’t have to stop to check the book. It looks like once we’re more comfortable with all the ways that aspects are applyed and tagged things will run much smoother.

Plot-wise last session was intriguing. The main plot was pretty basic – my character’s nemesis kidnapped another character’s daughter to lure the characters (specifically mine) to her. However we found the monks that the daughter had been living with killed (apparently not by the nemesis) a person we suspected had more information was killed by one of the two guest-star PCs that joined us for this game. It will be interesting to see what happens at the beginning of the next session.