Forum: Savage Suzerain

Reposted from the Suzerain Journal, 18 June 2009

The bad guys...

     I'm working on fleshing out the list of adversaries and critters for the Savage Worlds Suzerain rule book today, and thought I'd share a couple of the neat ideas that'll be making it into the book. It's quite a mix!

     For standard play (up to Heroic rank):

     A robed madman and his horde of henchmen, including officers and a rock hard second-in-command. She'll definitely give the characters a challenge! Yes, Suzerain will have the regular mix of villains available, giving all the comforting combat styles we're used to.

     Spirits of the Veil, who strike nefarious deals to open portals through time and space. Woe betide anyone who fails to deliver on their end of the bargain - these are seriously tough guys who love to suck the very life energy from your body. It's the first time most groups will have met critters that are dangerous for the non-physical damage they deal. And yes, that's a bit of a sneaky reveal right there. Suzerain will add mental and spiritual fatigue tracks to characters, extending the fight into new areas of pain.

     For Heroic characters (up to Demigod rank... the all new rank you get from Suzerain, over and above Legendary):

     Two shades of dragon kin. Starting at human size, these man dragons are the first stage of dragon development. They wield weapons, have thick dragon hides for armor, and work in well organised teams. Then there are the wyrmlings, taking up a 2x2 space on your battle mat and giving the player characters hell with their hybrid variety of human and draconic attacks.

     For Demigod characters (as they work up to becoming gods):

     Dragon spirits who take the fight into the spirit world. If the characters can't get into the spirit world to defeat them, the dragon spirits will act as scouts and raise the alarm. if the characters can get into the spirit world, expect a fierce barrage of soul shredding death from above - they fly, they mash you with their claws and teeth, and they feast on your soul.

     A god. No seriously. Get a bigger battle mat. Get a bigger table. Get a bigger house. What did you expect, us to raise the play level of the game and not to raise the stakes?

     You can see why we love working on this stuff. Play testing is a dirty job, but someone has to do it ;-)


     Happy Suzeraining!

     Miles M Kantir
     Suzerain Lead Developer
     Savage Mojo

From Alpha To Beta

     It's been a long month since I last posted on the old Suzerain journal (which I'm continuing here). A great month, but a long one. You can see some of the fruits of those labors in these new forums and the great wiki we've got. The T-S Wiki? is going to be a fantastic repository for all manner of groovy gaming-related stuff. Very exciting times.

     That's not the biggest thing we've been working on, though. And I wouldn't be talking about it on the Savage Worlds Suzerain forum if that was it.

     The last month has been a long set of days and nights working on the Savage Worlds rule book for the Suzerain universe, polishing our notes and watching as they went from a rough jumble of scribbles and idea, through to an Alpha booklet which we play tested to destruction and then rebuilt into a finer, shinier, Beta rule book.

     We're almost there, too. The text is final and the manuscript is being laid out as I write this. When I saw the first draft of that PDF at the start of the week, it was an indescribable moment. So much hard work by so many people to get it to that stage. And the second draft of the layout, which I saw last night... wow. We're really looking good. There are only a few more fixes and tidy-ups to do, and then...

     ...and then it's your turn. Because no matter how hard we play test the rules, no matter how much we like the way it reads and plays, it doesn't mean a thing if you guys in the bigger SW community don't like it. So we'll be releasing the PDF as an open Beta, looking for as much good feedback as we can get, and using that to hone the book even further, until it's everything we'd hope for. Everything you'd hope for too.

     This is the first time we've released a book in the Beta stage and asked for your opinions, but I have absolutely no doubt that it's the right move... and one we should repeat for more books as we move forward with Savage Worlds Suzerain.

     We're coming into the last weekend of SW Suzerain being under wraps, hidden in that secret chamber. You know the one, at the end of the echoy corridor with the security cameras and THE DOOR to protect it from the outside world. Retinal scans and fingerprinting are about to get swept aside, though, and it's about to get unleashed, the thing we've been feverishly working on like so many mad tinkerers. If we're lucky, if we've done our sums right, nothing will ever be the same again.


Happy Suzeraining!

Miles M Kantir
Suzerain Lead Developer
Savage Mojo

It's ALIVE!!!!!

That's right. You were warned. The Savage Worlds Suzerain beta is now live and prowling the roleplay universe. It's available for free download from the shop. The beta book is the whole of the Player's Section, edited, tidied, and made super pretty thanks to the tireless work of a certain Ace on our team (we finally got there, eh Aaron? Without resorting to the hand grenades, either!).

The book went live on our site and a couple of other shop sites a little while ago and we'd had a dozen downloads in the first few minutes, which is great to see. Now all I'll ask is that everyone have a good read through , play a little, and drop us some feedback on these forums. I really can't say how much we're looking forward to that, to knowing what you think and how you reckon we can make it even better.

Meanwhile, life at Suzerain Central doesn't let up at all. No sooner do we open the cage and release the Beta Beast but I've got a new draft of the whole book in my inbox, still smelling of fresh ink and raw inspiration from Zach 'wordsmith' Welhouse (and if you haven't seen the other books Zach wrote for us, then check them out. Really, he's a fantastic writer. Fun and informative in one happy bundle. The Mojo Rules! Suzerain rulebook is free, again from the shop, but it's also well worth checking out The Great Below and The Best Little Hellhouse In Texas for their cool adventures and genius ideas for character development).

As if that wasn't going to keep me busy, in two days' time my play test group flies in for a week of thrashing the demigod rules in dawn till dusk endurance roleplay style. And given the campaign will be Shanghai Vampocalypse, perhaps we should be playing From Dusk Till Dawn? Sorry, couldn't resist a little punning.

Time for me to go prep a few bad guys for the coming apocalypse... and they won't all be vampires. Only most of them.

Happy Suzeraining!

Miles M Kantir
Suzerain Lead Developer
Savage Mojo

250 downloads in 12 hours

We had a dozen before we'd even finished setting up the download text

Consider me a happy man. The more the merrier. C'mon world - join the Savage Suzerain party!


Happy Suzeraining!

Miles M Kantir
Suzerain Lead Developer
Savage Mojo

500 downloads

500 downloads in a little more than a day. Double what we'd hoped for in the first WEEK. This is great.

Meanwhile, we've already started getting feedback and updating the file with changes. Thank you to all you savages. This means a huge amount to us.


Happy Suzeraining!

Miles M Kantir
Suzerain Lead Developer
Savage Mojo

750

Make that 750, as of a few hours ago.


Happy Suzeraining!

Miles M Kantir
Suzerain Lead Developer
Savage Mojo

Ding - 1000

And that's us with 1000 downloads in four days for the SW Suzerain beta when we were expecting about 250 in a week. It's fantastic news to hear while we're in the middle of a week of intense play test (seven days, two four-hour sessions per day, plus several hours of write-ups, note taking, discussion, etc). Exactly what I needed to give me an energy boost for the coming session. Thanks to everyone who picked up a copy... now please also have a read of it and post some feedback on this forum.


Happy Suzeraining!

Miles M Kantir
Suzerain Lead Developer
Savage Mojo

Vampires and demigods (part one)

We're into the first full day of roleplay sessions testing the life out of the Shanghai Vampocalypse setting (Savage Worlds Suzerain's first full Demigod campaign setting). Here's what we've been up to so far:

Saturday was a logistical day, setting up the week's play test and introducing new play testers to the concepts. We ahve purposefully got a mix of experience around the gaming table, with all the players being veteran roleplayers but one having never played Savage Worlds before, and two having some experience but being totally new to our Vampocalypse setting. This lets us judge how well certain aspects translate to different knowledge levels.

Sunday was the day of character creation and the main campaign introduction session. The characters were briefed and thrust into a desperate countdown to the extinction of mankind with no time to rest and heal from the end of their previous adventure. Everything went smoothly, everyone looked suitably worried about the enormity of the task ahead of them, and we chose that cliffhanger moment to stop for the day and spent some time taking notes and discussing where we'd got to.

Monday, and we've seen the characters come up against the AI of a cybertech skyscraper on full alert, raid a corporation for vital materials, and help save the home of one of the Shanghai city gods from a veritable army of vampires. Sheer mountainsides were traversed, explosives, laid, and vampire pigs dispatched. This evening we'll work through a feedback session about the play experience so far and take notes on that (I'm already running to about four pages of tight packed notes I've scribbled in session for additions, tweaks and other changes to the setting, its rules, and the campaign). Tomorrow... the second full day of playing the campaign should see some pretty frantic action. It'll be interesting to see what choices the characters make!


Happy Suzeraining!

Miles M Kantir
Suzerain Lead Developer
Savage Mojo

Vampires and demigods (part two)

Things are really starting to click in the Shanghai Vampocalypse play test of Demigod ranked characters under extreme pressure. Yesterday (Tuesday), the team found themselves in their familiar skyscraper and were much surprised to find the world was literally changing around them... and not for the better. Having to work fast and think quickly, they faced off against a nemesis who's set to haunt them throughout the rest of their time in Shanghai - and this is with them all banged up from a previous mission and no time to recover.

They survived by dint of some smart planning and quick reactions, and were promptly dispatched to find a live specimen of the vampire disease. They'd largely avoided the front lines of the conflict up till then, but that was all about to change. And the bad guy wasn't done with messing with their understanding of the universe. Thankfully, there were local gods to help, and they've been calling on all the help they can muster. Crane on Mountaintop, Dragon of the Bund... all useful friends.

Today (Wednesday) has seen the group visit two more divine allies, help them out and be helped in return, enter a supernatural war zone complete with tanks and assault troops in power armor... as well as a sea of vampires of course.

What's neat is seeing how different sets of skills can help out once you hit that exalted Demigod rank. Our cyber-implanted hacker has been just as important as the little shaman girl with the machinegun drum or either of the front line martial artists. And it's great to see how fists can be as powerful as any other weapon in the game, with stacks of cool flavor for the setting.

I'm hoping that we can post the character sheets for these guys really soon, so you can see what makes a demigod tick. Hopefully you'll get a kick out of it. In the non-martial arts sense.


Happy Suzeraining!

Miles M Kantir
Suzerain Lead Developer
Savage Mojo

Vampires and demigods (part three)

Today, I'm figuring that it's time our demigod characters dealt with... the nuclear vampire question.

What's the nuclear vampire question?

How do you hold back 8 million vampires who've just taken over the country's nuclear missiles?

Wish them luck. They're going to need it.


Happy Suzeraining!

Miles M Kantir
Suzerain Lead Developer
Savage Mojo

Vampires and demigods (part four)

We reached the end of play testing our Demigod rank setting, Shanghai Vampocalypse, a little while ago - wonderful wonderful stuff. I have a stack of notes in my notebook, we have four exceptional characters to offer as pre-generated character sheets, and a storyline full of twists, turns, personal intrigue, mysterious goings-on and two massively kick-ass endings to give the group a choice of how to run their climactic session.

Now, time to debrief, rest and start catching up on everything else that's on the list of things that need doing urgently. It was worth it though. Definitely. We learnt a lot about the setting and about demigod gaming, as well as having a lot of fun along the way.

Happy Suzeraining!

Miles M Kantir
Suzerain Lead Developer
Savage Mojo

No epic without heroes

In Suzerain terms, we've always talked about characters telling an epic tale over the span of their adventuring lives. The word 'epic' has come to mean 'the sum of the character's campaigns and scenarios' to use old D&D-speak. Savage Worlds has come to embody that thought more than ever before in our minds. We now have a more formal structure than we've previously had for expressing it, too.

When a character is created, he (and obviously I'm only using 'he' for ease of writing here, since a character has an even chance of being female) is a fresh start, a blank page, a concept with a handful of stats associated with him. We play new characters with a vague idea of who they are, but we don't really know the little details of how they'll react to situations and how they'll grow. Over the course of many sessions we learn who they are and get comfortable being that person whenever a session starts. We know their capabilities and use them well. The group gels as a team.

That's the first stage. The first campaign normally. Most games have a climactic scene of some sort by about session 25. A tale has been told, but mostly it was a voyage of exploration internally - learning how the characters think and what they can do. Which is also what lets us decide how they should grow, what to do with the advances they earn.

Then there's the second stage, the point where we know our characters and they're working like a team. A bigger threat inevitably rises from the ashes of the first campaign, and off we go, feeling the satisfaction of watching our accomplished heroes taking on such a threat in an accomplished manner. It's like having your kids grow up and feeling the parental glow as they go out and scale Mount Everest for the first time.

Heroic rank is the time where we should feel the adrenalin rush of having a truly integrated team at our disposal, firing on all cylinders. Yet many of us stop those characters when we finish the first campaign, satisfied that we've learned who they are and dealt with the camapign goals. We do the hard work of getting to know them, then put them aside to start the process again. And why? Because there are so many cool worlds out there to explore, and we want to give that cyberpunk setting a go where we'd done the whole 'fantasy thing' to death.

I know I tend to talk a lot about Demigod. It's a whole new rank and level of play, adn it's all very exciting. But the truth is, none of that means anything without the powerhouse of an epic, the Heroic stage from 60xp to 120xp. That's the campaign which drives it all, once the learning is out of the way and the really satisfying adventures begin.

We've been doing a bunch of work on each level of the Suzerain rulebook, and the unsung heroes are often... well, the heroes. Yet almost all the feedback we get tells us that it's a massively satisfying stage of the characters' epic, for both the players and the GM. I figured that after my talk about demigods recently, I should tip my hat to the stage before, to the Heroic (and Legendary) ones. More than anywhere else, those are the ranks where people simply relax and enjoy the story and the characters in perfect harmony.

This being my development blog, I feel fully justified in ending with a promo to one of our own forthcoming books, and reminding everyone that we're developing a Heroic campaign called American Grit. It's set in the Great Depression of the 1930s, but with supernatural elements. And since Suzerain is Suzerain, you can take any set of characters who got to the end of their initial 60xp campaign, and have them land a job at the SPA, that super-secret government department tasked with keeping supermantural law and order - no matter which reality they originally came from.


Happy Suzeraining!


Miles M Kantir
Suzerain Lead Developer
Savage Mojo

Thank you

While I'm here and writing, I thought I'd extend a thank you to everyone who has downloaded a copy of the Suzerain beta. There are more than 1,500 of you now, and that's a wonderful acheivement, well beyond our wildest imagination (and we have a pretty wild imagination, as our in-house play testers can attest).

More than that, I'd like to say a super huge thank you to those of you who've posted to the forums with suggestions, thoughts and comments on the beta. You guys are stars. Keep it coming.


Happy Suzeraining!


Miles M Kantir
Suzerain Lead Developer
Savage Mojo

Why visit the spirit world?

It's a fair question, and one reason why it gets its own heading in the GM section of the SW Suzerain rulebook. I'm working on the spirit world material this week, and it seems like an opportunity to talk a little about the place, and what it can do for your game. Let's start with some text from the GM section.



As you might imagine, the world of spirits can be a strange place, as strange as your group wants to make it. It has the chance of being a little bit of a surreal environment alongside the 'solid world' we live in. And yet, it's easy to get to since it sits on top of our world like a glove. Just shift your senses, and there you are. It can be a silvery, ghostly analog to allow a shaman to sneak past a set of guards, or it can be truly freaky experience to match the limit of your imagination. Take your pick.

But if you want to keep your game relatively close to reality, how does that whole sneaking thing work? The trick is to picture the spirit world in the way Frodo sees things when he puts on the One Ring. It works similarly, though the character who 'shifts' to the spirit world (technical expression there) isn't invisible to those in the physical world - instead he becomes a ghostly version of himself. Which is pretty good for sneaking just the same.

All the same obstacles will be there, waiting for a character who shifts. People, animals, plants and inanimate objects are in the same place as they were. Living things are the other way around, though - physical people suddenly appear to be ghosts and spirits take on real substance. You can get hurt by a spirit in the spirit world, so best be careful. And you can walk clean through physical people, making sentries and guards mostly impotent against you.

One wrinkle in reality is the way inanimate objects behave. Mostly, they don't move around. They feel solid in the spirit world just as they do in the physical world. Only when they're moved does their insubstantial spirit world signature become obvious. When a door is opened in the physical world, it goes wispy and ghostly in the spirit world and takes 2-3 days for its spirit signature to go fully opaque and 'harden' once more. A clever sneak might consider that an opportunity.

Example? Well, in the intensive Shanghai play test we ran a couple of weeks ago, the characters needed to get into a skyscraper that was guarded and locked up. A classic dilemma for an infiltration mission. In Suzerain, though, all it takes is one shaman with The Sight? and things become easy. The loading bay doors were almost certainly opened at some point in the past day, so the shaman could switch into the spirit world, walk clean through the doors, and wander around the building until she was out of sight of the security guards before switching off The Sight and returning to the physical world. Which is exactly what she did. Well done, Su-Ming!

The key for us has always been to make the spirit world an interesting, functional, and useful part of the gaming landscape. Do you need to have it as part of your game? Not at all. Don't introduce any spirits and don't have any shamans in the team! For new options though, or indeed a fully-blown scene of weirdness, it's a genuinely refreshing addition to your storytelling arsenal and a great chance for the players to think up great tactical plans using this new location.

More on the spirit world when I next write. Meanwhile,


Happy Suzeraining!


Miles M Kantir
Suzerain Lead Developer
Savage Mojo

Perils of the spirit world

Having talked about the perks of going into the spirit world yesterday, now seems like a good chance to mention the flip side... the perils. Heading across, leaving the solid world behind, well that has its risks. For starters, not everyone can do it, which means it's a risk for a character to go off, leaving his buddies on the other side . They might be in the same room, but your meatshield's not much good when you're not in meatspace, to borrow cyberpunk terminology.

Sure, there are ways around it, to send the whole party into the spirit world. But they're not common. There are a few more options for making everyone dual-aligned... but that poses risks because then you're all vulnerable to physical and spirit world threats. Let's assume your character is a shaman who uses The Sight to go into the spirit world - what dangers can he face?

Well, the first one is unlikely to affect him too much. I mentioned yesterday that inanimate objects become insubstantial when they've been recently moved in the physical world. Then they become increasingly more difficult to traverse over the course of a couple of days. That does mean that a spirit could force its way into a mansion when the front door was being shut and locked, then fall asleep in a nice corner and wake to find it couldn't get back out again because the door was solid now. If that mansion was being locked because its owner had just moved away and it was left derelict for decades, that would be a terrible fate for any spirit.

Mostly, spirits are smart enough to avoid that, as are shamans. But it would make for an interesting plot moment in an adventure, wouldn't it?

The most likely threat to someone in the spirit world is an aggressive spirit. Now, don't get the idea that all spirits are evil and want to suck your soul. There's the usual mix of personalities among spirits just as there is among people. Some though... like spirits driven mad by the isolation of being trapped in a derelict mansion perhaps... aren't friendly.

That's where combat might begin, and there's no difference between the physical and spirit world in this respect - you can still die from being hit by something. The damage is to your soul, your spiritual presence, but it manifests to your physical body too. The only difference mechanically is that Spirit and Vigor are reversed, which changes your toughness.

Spirits in the spirt world are one thing, but some spirits can make it across in to the physical world just as shamans can realign themselves with the spirit world (a process called 'manifesting' in the physical world for spirits). That means they can be a real threat to the whole party, under the wrong circumstances.

Okay, so I've mentioned spirits tearing into people and being a threat, but what sort of spirits are there? Well, you get spirits of emotions, of animals, of places and occasionally people (ghosts/ancestors). I'll leave you with one example:




Happy Suzeraining!


Miles M Kantir
Suzerain Lead Developer
Savage Mojo

Why visit the Maelstrom?

A couple of days ago I wrote a piece called 'Why visit the spirit world?' where I talked about the advantages of using the spirit world as a location in Suzerain games. In one corner of the spirit world, well away from where it overlaps the physical world, is the Veil, and the Veil separates everything mortal from everything immortal. On the other side... the Maelstrom.

So the same question applies - why go there?

Fact is, the Maelstrom can be just about anything and everything you want it to be. It's an endless plane of pure energy, shaped by beings into realms of their making. One of the definitions of a god in Suzerain is having the ability to create a permanent realm in the Maelstrom. Let's take a few examples of how you might use the setting if you're coming from various other gaming experiences:

You're a D&D player, coming to Suzerain for the first time. This is the place you'll send your high level characters to track down evil gods, great elemental spirits, and other assorted bad guys in their own homes. In D&D you had planes of existence. In Suzerain you have immortal realms. Mount Olympus, the realm of fire, and so on. Make the immortal realms into vivid places of high adventure and you're reliving those D&D days.

You're a World of Darkness player. This is the place characters see the universe as it really is. It's the home of the fey realm of dreams, the Umbra for your werewolves to quest across, the new Underworld for your Wraith game. Make the immortal realms drip with atmosphere and linger as long as it takes to really feel your White Wolf experience.

You're a Savage Worlds player... ah well, that's the key isn't it? -grins- It's the Maelstrom that strings together your character's adventures, allowing a GM to take characters between settings. With the Maelstrom in place, after all, why not have your characters doing a plot point in their native setting, perhaps 50 Fathoms, then enter the world of Shaintar for some Heroic adventuring against the forces of Flame? Stringing plot points together with the same characters is neat, but you could choose to go further. Why not run the plot point from one setting, but dip your toes into others along the way? The characters have been given the right to travel through time and space, so why not have them experience a couple of Savage Tales from Shaintar in between episodes of the main 50 Fathoms plot point?

And then, if you're quantum leap fans, you can truly indulge yourselves and take on a new mission in a new setting every week, as soon as you have Heroic rank characters (or if you create characters at that rank). Fancy some alternate reality fun, a little Sliders-style action? Then take Demigod rank characters and see what nefarious alternate realities your villains can create by flexing a nexus. If that's getting your juices flowing, wait till you get a look at Shanghai Vampocalypse to see the true power of how that can work to give you the ultimate gaming experience!

I'll sign off with one last answer to my original question - you'd have a character visit the Maelstrom when his player can't make your session and everyone's in the middle of things. This is a 'non' use of the Maelstrom, but a really important one for most of us, where real life just gets in the way. Now, any character can be recalled to the Maelstrom for some reason (the gods who hired you have more information, or that character is needed for a quick mission elsewhere that'll never get played, but it's a reason for him to be whisked away). The other characters will just have to bluff their way through explaining why their buddy's not there for a while, but they can carry on gaming without missing a beat. On its own, the Maelstrom has kept a bunch of sessions moving forward on an important plotline when I've been a player down temporarily. Bless the Maelstrom for being our flexible friend.


Happy Suzeraining!


Miles M Kantir
Suzerain Lead Developer
Savage Mojo

Perils of the Maelstrom

     I've been talking about the spirit world, the benefits and perils of visiting it, and I've talked a bit about the benefits of the Maelstrom as a setting. What about the perils of the Maelstrom, though? There have to be some, right?

     Oh yeah.

     This is my chance to drop some quotes from the GMs section of the SW Suzerain rulebook :-)

     First, let's consider travel around the Maelstrom:

The SW Suzerain rulebook wrote:

Without a god's protection the mere sight of the Maelstrom would be enough to turn most mortals into sticky statistics, as their senses collapse under the inherent disarray of their surroundings. Luckily for our heroes, your standard-issue Telesma will filter out the most immediate threats. There are still conceptual predators, nomadic gods' spawn, and mimetic parasites, but at least bare existence becomes a philosophical concern rather than an immediate one.

Even after ruling out the Maelstrom's sensory overload and its inhabitants, it's not the greatest place for a mortal to vacation. The air feels thick, like a storm layered over a leaden apron. That feeling is all around because there's no hard distinction between ground, sky, or water. Instead it's all closer to a gelatinous, cosmic gumbo. This isn't to say that slogging through the Maelstrom is anything like drifting through lukewarm chowder. It's more akin to a dream of flying....

     Yes, it feels really strange in the Maelstrom, which isn't much of a surprise. But those billowing clouds of Pulse can hold all manner of dangers. After all, the spiritual predators that live beyond the Veil are generally a pretty tough bunch. And oftentimes hungry. Just getting to the realm of your choice isn't guaranteed if your GM is feeling like stirring up trouble.

     Other times, perhaps bribed with tasty pizza, the journey might be completely effortless and uneventful - it's funny how the Maelstrom works.

     Next, let's look at one of the more nightmarish of the immortal realms:

The SW Suzerain rulebook wrote:

The Red Realm is a sore upon the Maelstrom, a merciless tangle of iron fortresses and crumbling stone towers. It is a dark and twisted land, clouded by the stench of ubiquitous swamps and the deafening buzz of predatory insects that swarm the bloody River Crimson. Giant rats, spiders, scorpions and more terrifying beasts provide additional hazards, most of them carrying diseased and poisonous bites.

Over time, this harsh realm has served two purposes. The first was as a hunting preserve and testing ground for the Great Spirit of Hate's malevolent creations. One of the beasts turned out to be more hateful than anticipated, and promptly devoured the Great Spirit. Since its death, the realm has been locked in a power struggle between the lesser spirits of the realm. This spiritual battle royale centers around the Desolation Engine, the Great Spirit's nightmare factory where negatively charged Pulse is transformed directly into bitter monstrosities.

The Realm of Red's second notable purpose is a prison, used by gods and other power beings. Mortals that cannot be killed due to prophecies, curses, or political backlash are deposited here to suffer for their ability to evade death. The prisoner population has shown minimal positive growth over the generations, and eke out whatever livings they can manage among the festering ruins where they have been abandoned.

     So apart from your regular god realms, the Mount Olympuses and Celestial Courts of the universe, there are realms created by Great Spirits... and some of those are spirits of nasty emotions like hate and greed, whose realms are only really suitable for the most powerful of adventurers. Then there are realms like the Red Realm, where even its creator was destroyed by its creations. Nobody rules here, and anything goes. There are all manner of 'unruly' realms to discover, abandoned or forgotten by former inhabitants, occupied by who knows what manner of spirit these days.

     The Maelstrom can be a place your characters go to relax, talk to the nice gods and learn about vital threats to the universe they can deal with as their next adventure. Alternatively, the perils of the Maelstrom can be very real indeed, and that's when the place comes alive as a setting in its own right. I think you'll like the scenarios we're putting into the rulebook that take place among the immortal realms.


Happy Suzeraining!


Miles M Kantir
Suzerain Lead Developer
Savage Mojo

Apologies for taking a few days to get back to my blog, but I had the death of a close family friend to deal with this week and... well, it took my focus away from Suzerain for a while.

I'm back now, though, and ready to talk about....

The state of the universe

The president of the United States gets to make a 'state of the Union' address each year, and I don't see why I wouldn't get to do something similar with Savage Worlds Suzerain. Here's where we stand:

The core rulebook is just going through the process of adding stats to the last of the NPCs and critters. When that happens, it'll go to its main edit for a couple of weeks and then come back for a final read-through before being ready for layout.

Meanwhile, Aaron is busy working on the art for the book behind the scenes, and he'll be spending the rest of September just making sure he has all the pieces together. What sort of art can you expect in the book? Here's a little taster. This piece is by James Byrd, who's doing great work on bringing together various bad guys for us, giving them an amazing treatment. These guys are the demi-ogres, and the little one is head and shoulders taller than a normal man.





Next, we're ploughing ahead with Dogs of Hades, the sci-fi book for starter characters. I know that's in play test now and the text is being honed and tweaked all the while. Robert Friis is illustrating the whole book there, and we should be on for another visual feast there.

Following on, Stuart Gorman is busy pulling together all the threads from his Noir Knights work to deliver a full 144 page script there. Meanwhile, Chaz Kemp is doing the illustration - check out the Noir Knights page to see the sorts of things he's coming up with for us.

Next up we have Shanghai Vampocalypse, our first setting for Demigod rank characters. We've played through a plot line there and tested the main rules we want to use. The feats and some of the NPC/critter stats are in. The scenario structure is decided. The next stage is to pull all that together in to a full book, and I hope we'll be doing that over the next three months or so, getting the text illustrated as we work.

Finally, we've just put together the team for a fourth SW Suzerain book - again 144pp of full-color goodness - which is too secret to talk about right now. We're hoping for that to come out of development in early 2010.

And there you have it. Lots happening. Lots moving forward very fast. And new material about the Suzerain universe appearing on the wiki at www.suzerain.info all the time.

Happy Suzeraining!


Miles M Kantir
Suzerain Lead Developer
Savage Mojo

The Universal Reset Button

I've been thinking about the end of the universe in recent days. Not a very uplifting subject, I know, but vital to Suzerain high-end play. After all, when your novice characters go out and stop evil thugs who intend to take over a kingdom, your heroic characters go out and foil a vile wizard intent on setting an entire realm on fire, then what do your demigod characters go out and do? The answer... save the universe and earn their right to be gods themselves.

Here's the scoop, straight from the rule book. And it's the central theme behind the Shanghai Vampocalypse book we're developing for demigod characters. And the scoop is all about a thing they call the 'End Times' myth:




Happy Suzeraining!


Miles M Kantir
Suzerain Lead Developer
Savage Mojo