Garden/HMBackground

Ripples

Background

When Exalted was first released I rushed out and bought myself a copy, devoured it, and drew up a character ready for the campaign that my friend had said he was going to run. Several months later, we were still waiting, and my character was gathering dust on the shelf. However, during this time my brain had been ticking over and I'd come up with a few random ideas for a game of my own, which I happened to mention to my boyfriend. One drunken Saturday, we were all sat around my friend's house, wondering what to do, when my boyfriend mentioned that I'd got ideas for an Exalted game. So everyone started excitedly drawing up characters and trying to persuade me to run something there and then. So, with absolutely no preparation other than the glass of vodka in my hand, I suddenly found myself running Exalted. Surprisingly it actually went quite well... or that could just be because we were all drunk.

The game's still going though, they're big hardass bastards now, and making dents all over Creation. And seeing as that the first real campaign I've ever run, I don't think that's bad going, still holding the player interest after... how many years has Exalted been out now? But ever since then I've wondered what I could actually do if I sat down and planned it out properly. It occurred to me a while ago that I could run a smaller scale side campaign, where I could drop in interesting tid-bits of info (more to annoy the players than anything, as the info is going to be stuff that their main character's need - it's the evil ST in me...). I was going to have them playing Exalts originally, but then it hit me that a Heroic Mortal game could actually be really interesting, and could easily be set on a very small scale, in this case a small kingdom in the South East. I mentioned it to my players to see if they'd be interested, along with the potential idea of Heroic Mortals using knacks from Adventure!, and they were all up for it, so I set to work on building the world...

One of the first things that I realised was that anyone who's an Heroic Mortal is, by definition, a couple of steps above the average spod human, and therefore likely to be a reasonably big player in their chosen field. So I needed to bring the players in on the creation of the kingdom. So far I've given them a basic outline of the kingdom, with only a few immutable points, its likely trades, that kind of thing, and asked them to draw up there character's so I can flesh out the world more.

That's where we're up to now... it's looking quite interesting from the feedback I'm getting from the players.