Renegade Horizon

A couple of weeks ago we wrapped up what was the current story arc in our Renegade Horizon game. It was a fun little campaign that ended with what our gamemaster described as a rock opera. It’s really hard to explain how this running joke ran throughout the session without disrupting things but everything just added up to a very enjoyable game.

As far as the session itself, we wound up tracking down the baron that had placed a price on our heads and kidnapped him from the compound of the cult he was heading up. After some discussion as to how to force him to remove the bounty he had placed, the idea of a psychic re-education was brought up. So that’s where we ended the campaign – as our characters were hiding out for a couple months re-writing the Baron’s psyche in preparation for when we return to the campaign later.

For now the mantle of the gamemaster is being passed off to another player who’s been prepping a SciFi game set in our solar system with an inhabitable Earth, no aliens, no “magic”, and no interstellar travel. We’ve settled on a basic concept for now – residents of a space station that has recently been invaded and occupied by an unwelcome power who have to form an underground resistance to drive them off. A couple of the players have come up with basic character concepts but we’ll be nailing down all the specifics at our next session. Should be fun!

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.

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