Introduction: First Things First

Back around the beginning of this year, a good friend mentioned the idea of doing an online RPG. Now, we've done this before with some success, but not for a decade or so. In high school, I ran a game of Mage: The Sorcerer's Crusade (with plenty of non-mages) which was fun, but ultimately a little unsatisfying. From what I remember, most characters were in a monastery of some sort, trying to solve some kind of mystery or obtain some power presumably. There were definitely mages, perhaps a mummy, a vampire, a cockatrice (thank you Bygone Bestiary), and probably some kind of werewolf or changing breed, I forget. At any rate, it ended (I think) because I got tired of writing lots of really awesome high-school quality prose each turn for people who weren't always responding at times. I'm pretty sure I ended it just by killing everyone as a diabolic ritual happened which the players were unable to stop (either through their own incompetence or my own fiat, I can't recall per se).


We tried a few other games after that. I ran one based on the (then) new Mummy rules for the Classic World of Darkness. I don't remember much about it besides the title was something like Kingdom of Salt and Ashes, and there were mummies and sorcerers and maybe a wereraven in it. Another friend tried running a game based on an internet set of rules detailing knightly orders. These were fun, but a lot of work to adjudicate actions and then give all the responses in prose. For a smaller game (2-3) characters, I can see that working well but the larger games required a lot of work for the person running the thing.

Ultimately, we remembered some of those lessons and decided to try a game using some sort of influence rules. We've considered this a bit here and there, but this new game would focus almost solely on a type of rules that aren't usually done in most tabletop RPGs. In fact, we've only really identified three solid sets of rules:

• Reign has a company system, in which quantifies the group the PCs work for and allows for company rolls. This is something like the PCs are all part of a pirate crew, and they storm the city to open the gates for their raid. Depending on their success, the Crew's roll may be modified, but it gives the players a simple and abstract set of rules for figuring out how strong their company is and how well their actions influence (and are influenced by) their company.
• AD&D 2nd Edition had a set of domain rules in the Birthright setting (which Dragon Magazine also extended to Al-Qadim). One or more of the PCs was a regent with a divine bloodline, and after the adventure was done you could run your kingdom by agitating against your enemies, forging new trade routes, and even sending troops to war as needed. These rules are quite detailed: you need to set a few abstract stats for each province, have large list of actions, and many different resources to trace.
• The Classic World of Darkness games (Notably Vampire: The Masquerade) have a set of Mind's Eye Theatre rules in which characters' abstract Influence background is divided into many different pools (Bureaucracy, Law, Occult, Transportation, etc.). But the Dark Epics book provided a set of additional actions rather than just letting a clash of influence be purely story-driven. Now a Vampire, Werewolves, and the rest could Attack one another's influence within the Church, Grow their influence, apply Stealth to their actions, etc. Its a crunchy set of rules, but seemed to be an intermediary between the highly abstract Reign rules and the much crunchier Birthright domain system. Add to that the fact that many OWbN Larps have tinkered with the rules and cut-and-pastability, and the lack of an interrupt mechanism that's present in the Birthright system, and these rules seemed the most palatable to me.

So. I spent a bit of time getting the basics of the system written up and quickly modified them to work a bit more with the tabletop Vampire rules rather than the LARP ones, and we had a set of rules to play with. Now, I'm also a tinkerer, so I've kept updating my copy of the rules with notes about what was unclear, what could be added, what didn't seem to function, etc. And now our first game is done, so I've decided to keep some better records of my design process here as I think to take over running this type of game.

Both my good friends from high school mentioned the idea that these rules were nice, but why bother developing them a lot if we're not going to be able to apply them more broadly? Well, besides the part where we like to play games, I decided that I really want to give them a good shot to see if they're actually what I want. This is a type of rules largely absent from traditional RPGs, but seems to lend itself well to an online setting, larger LARP games, and I could even envision it as a second layer of a traditional RPG (each player plays a hero on the one hand and a manipulative villain on the other). This thought-chronicle, however, will help me get my thoughts out and let others give some feedback as I think about running Alexandria by Night.