Wings Over the Pyre

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I’ve written of Dragonstaff before.

The original idea was a totally over-the-top fantasy setting, roughly inspired by the kind of insanity one finds in DragonLance, but expressed through Capes mechanics. The possibilities for comedy and pathos were always massive in such a thing and the original plan was just to go the whole 9-yards and let the madness flow.

But we can do better.

At Dragon*Con, I plan to go somewhere out even beyond that far outpost of limitation. Just as Marvel has created the Ultimate line of comics to bring their characters into the 21st century, and largely managed to screw up everything that made the originals cool, so I plan to bring Dragonstaff into the modern era and screw up everything — OK, no one but point5b and I really saw it, so no one can really be horribly disappointed, but that’s not the point! The point is that I’m fully intending to bring the most bizarre mix of crazed over-the-top-ness ever to a gaming convention.

I want people playing in the RPGA Living City games to look over and wonder what in th’Hell we could possibly be playing … and how they can get in on it! I want it to get rowdy and disturbing and bizarre by turns. Sometimes all at once.

We can do this.

Ultimate Dragonstaff takes what few limits there were on the Dragonstaff setting and throws it out the window. Ultimate Dragonstaff will make Exalted look like pikers playing in a sandbox. Ultimate Dragonstaff takes a look at Nobilis and scoffs at such a low-level campeign!

OK, maybe not that last one. But close!

Ever wanted to play Fistandantilous / Raistlin? How about The Scarlet Empress? Drizzt Do’Urden? Elric of Melnibone? Conan? John Carter of Mars? John Galt? Elminster the Wizard? The Black Adder? Arthur? Lancelot? The Lady of the Lake? That Guy on the Dead Wagon?

You can do it all in Ultimate Dragonstaff, and probably should!

But you can’t have a Capes game without a Comics Code, the list of things that cannot come to pass … and, which, incidentally, the villains and sometimes heroes of the piece try to do constantly, since almost achieving them gives Story Tokens as a pay-out.

So, let’s rough a little something out. This can be refined as we go, but as a first pass:

• Characters with Powers cannot be permenantly killed.

  The distinction here is any character with Powers. That’s heroes and villains alike. Falling off a cliff to your “certain doom” pointedly does not count as being permenently dead, nor is being left in a deathtrap. If neither of those happened, there’d be no fantasy novels!

• Exemplars cannot be permenantly killed.

  Well, if we’re giving Powered folk the out, might as well give it to Exemplars. This pretty much just means your Exemplars will be constantly in some kind of danger, as folks go for the Gloating pay-off.

• The root conflict between characters and their Exemplars can never be resolved.

  • Corollary: Unspoken love can neither be revealed nor abandoned.
  • Corollary Exemption: A character in love with a villain must make it repeatedly, brutally obvious to everyone but the target of their love.

  Those pesky root conflicts. It’s just no fun if Aunt Mae tells Peter she’s OK with his web-slinging and hires a goon army to protect her from his rampaging rogues’ gallery, and neither is it fun when the cute red-headed wench the burly Adventurer is smitten with but too shy to tell has it all ruined if he confesses his undying devotion like a sane, smart person. Just doesn’t happen. Ergo, can’t.

  Why the thing with the villainous love interest, you ask? Because it’s necessary.

• The world cannot be destroyed.

  Pretty obvious stuff, that. Can’t blow up the setting. Note what’s not covered, though: political revolutions, murdering heads of state, ruining economies … and that you’re intended to be playing characters that can do such things reasonably on a whim. Feeling a bit unconstrained yet?