AGOT Delinquency

Well, I brought my AGOT book over to Denmark with me because I was going to make huge strides forward in my planning for the campaign I’m going to run and stuff. Alas, I’ve spent too much of my time working on my thesis work instead. I suppose on the whole that’s a good thing, but it does mean that I feel rather silly for lugging a very heavy book across the Atlantic for no purpose.

And what thinking I have been doing about gaming has been trying to come up with a character concept for JP’s new Amber Game. I’m currently lacking any original ideas and thus trying to decide whether I should try to reuse an old character concept. In doing so I realized that my characters in Jason’s games became dramatically more cautious after MLD. Drake was rather reckless and would leap headlong into things (like oceans of Primal Chaos), and Jaime was only slightly less so. Castor, Aerion, and Connal, on the other hand, have all been of the rather cautious variety, tending to play things extremely safe and doing everything to ensure that they survive every encounter. The thing is, playing someone impetuous is a lot of fun, when you get down to it

Anyway, the brief summary of the AGOT game idea is that it would be a noble house style game (everyone playing characters related to a noble house in the Reach) set around the time of the Blackfyre rebellion). Things are at relative peace in the Realms, so there is time to explore more of the day to day life and interactions between people without the backdrop of a war. The idea would be to have challenges like sorting out wedding alliances, fighting raiders, dealing with bandits, poachers, trade delegations, and a fair bit of internal politics. My problem is that I’m struggling with coming up with decent challenges that won’t be just combat and won’t be too boring. I think the problem will be making sure everyone is entertained, basically. I may try to have some of the PCs play certain NPCs when their characters are offstage, which will undoubtedly happen. I’d like to avoid having it be too Amber-like where I would be running things with each player individually, though. I’d like it to be a game of inter-player interaction and a game about being, rather than just about doing, so to speak.

There are some basic thoughts. Still need to find players, of course, but that’s another matter entirely.