The Crowned Comiserate

I've run Mythic Bastionland as a general campaign once before, and I had fun rolling up some Knights for NPCs to run the Holdings, but I was also stressed out that one of my players would roll up the same Knight and one of us would have to change. It didn't happen, of course, and led to some interesting stories that were inspired directly from the results of the Knights I rolled. Still, when I rolled up a one shot (more of a four shot, at this rate), I didn't want to roll for Knights from the player list. It didn't seem worth the risk of having duplicates: I wasn't about to ask my players to re-roll Knights they might be excited about just because I had done so first, and I didn't think we would have time for such duplicates to create an interesting narrative. Ultimately, I just thought about some adjectives that would make for an evocative but straightforward Knight, and voila, the Grey Knight and the Fury Knight were born. However, there was a chance other Kni...

Local Heresies  When running Outcast Silver Raiders, I found I wanted to make the world feel more real AND strange at the same time. Simultaneously, I began to do a bit of research into the medieval world (more than my interest in fantasy tabletop RPGs had already led me to do, that is) and in fact our world in general and came across a lot of information about religion at the time. One thing in particular that stuck out with me is the idea that there is no such thing as a "normal" Christian. Yes, even today we might be aware that Christianity is divided into sects and denominations and that in the past, many traditions were born out of local customs during conversion to Christianity itself, but even beyond that, people practice religion as it applies to them and think of it as the way everyone does. If this sounds at all odd or strange, well, good, that is the goal, but let's see if we can ground it in reality too.    A good example, I think, is a widespread belief and p...