Well, the old group had a good run, a very good run in comparison to most groups, and now it’s sort of atrophied. One person doesn’t care what we do, one person doens’t want to RP at all and another can only RP if we don’t have to “make new characters too often”.

Not much enthusiasm there to say the least.

So, I started asking around and found a pair of couples who want to get in on some weekend RP. That gives us 5 players (in the RPG sense, since one ‘player’ ends up being the GM1 [usually – there are games where that responsibility is spread throughout the participants]) which in my experience is a ideal number. The acceptable range is 3 to 6 in general I find, with 4 or 5 being the best. More than that and things bog down, less and it can be difficult to sustain momentum.

Anyhow, next comes the setting and system. Rachel definitely wants to use a ::high fantasy:: setting, and since she’s GMing first and everyone else seems to at least be willing to do fantasy that’s what we’re going to do.

We wrestled a while with whether to roll our own setting, use one from a novel, or use an existing RPG setting. We sort of split the difference between rolling our own and using one from a novel: we’re using a map from a board game, Elfenland and creating the setting from that. You can see the 1280×1024 version of this map here.

The system decision was actualy easier, and made first. We’d had the creator of The Burning Wheel, Luke Crane, give us a demo at Origins last year and were pretty impressed. Very cool system, in particular the combat and character creation aspects of it stood out.

So, the stage is set. We’re all getting together for the first time on ::February 6:: – and I can’t think of a better way to celebrate the signing of the ::Treaty of Waitangi::.

1 Game Master