Greg Stolze: Forums

My copy of Reign just arrived in the mail on Saturday, so you can expect some dumb n00b questions from me as I work my way through it. Reign looks like exactly what I've been looking for - a plot and character driven fantasy game that isn't Exalted - and I'm really excited to start playing with it.

Question #1: how full are Heluso & Milonda?

That is, by comparison, Exalted has tons of empty space. There are areas of the map the size of Texas that have no canon content, meaning it's easy to drop whole kingdoms into the setting. To what degree - if any - is this true of Heluso & Milonda?

In particular, I have a player who is enraptured by Jacqueline Carey's Kushiel's Legacy series and she's interested in making a character who comes from a similarly romantic and beauty-obsessed people, with a claim to "special" blood that makes them all pretty. To what degree can we invent a new kingdom and drop it onto a likely chunk of real estate, or is it better to push and bend a character a little so she can fit into, say, the Empire or Uld?

The world is pretty full but it has lots of hidden places like Mud Duchies. I suggest you download the Years of Our Reign and read up on Fjarn and Bodymasters.

C.

There are all kinds of little wartlike states on the borders of the big ones, surviving by being useful valves between nominally hostile nations (or by being geographically isolated, or by being really hard to invade, or by not being worth the trouble). Salck and Fjarn are both examples. You could stick such a state on just about any border.

I picture the continents as being densely populated in cities, but inbetween there being stretches of wild lands -- even deep in the interiors of large settled countries. Think of medieval Europe or the American West around the beginning of the gold rush. There's a map and there are towns and villages, but some people never go more than ten miles from the steaming hut they were born in. So there are probably places in Deerwood, the Dindavaran mountains, even Center, where no human has ever set foot.

Okay, maybe not Center.

-G.