When the Developer Plays: Let Me Tell You About My Character!
(No wait! Come back!)
As many people know, telling random folks about your character is simultaneously the greatest temptation in RPG talk, yet the lowest form of discourse. However, since I develop Modern AGE I guess I can get away with it! Beyond that, there is honestly some broad relevance, since I ended up accidentally playing an iconic Threefold character based on…me. This was not entirely voluntary.
Andrzej Paterseki (Sword Dad)
The Story of Sword Dad
People who know me know I’m a parent, and a practitioner/sometimes-coach of historical fencing (late medieval Italian longsword, a bit of rapier, a smattering of other stuff), which is why that kind of stuff ended up in the adventure I wrote, Warflower, whose name alludes to a real-life fencing treatise. At some point, this produced the internal nickname “Sword Dad,” about which I have…mixed feelings.
Then in 2018, we were working on Threefold, and wanted some new iconic characters: folks who appear in examples of play and illustrations. H.D. Ingham created several of them, including, as a bit of fun, one Andrzej Paterski, a swordsman working for the Sodality faction, based on the Sword Dad joke. Andrzej is younger and handsomer than I am, of course, but this was less wish fulfillment than wanting a marketable iconic character. Thus, a guy with a sword and glasses became one of the faces of Threefold.
Accidentally Andrzej
Then in 2020, our group’s regular GM decided he wanted to run a Modern AGE game with Threefold, which I’ve talked about in a few past posts. I went for random character generation and ended up with a character with the Warsmith sword-maker profession in Threefold, along high Fighting and Strength. Dammit, I ended up with Sword Dad. I just admitted this was him, wrote down Andrzej’s name, and got playing. So, this is how I was used as the basis for an iconic character as a joke, and then ended up playing him.
In fact, I’ve been playing Andrzej for a year now, in our Pulpy-Mode game, and he recently hit Level 8. (Playing without GMing has taught me a lot.) The focus of the campaign so far has been tracking down demonic para-technology connected to intervention from an alternate Earth. This became entangled in an organized crime family that traded in souls, but ultimately circled back into a plot to destroy the primeline—the “true Earth” by some measures—and replace it with an alternate world. In the process we discovered that the original primeline itself replaced a previous “true Earth,” Eld. We explored its ruins in sealed powered armor, as one does, and briefly examined the wreckage of a giant robot built by some classical Greece-derived civilization before learning the reality-modeling algorithm required to shift primelines via a trapped transcendental quasi-AI. Then we leveled up.
(Yeah, this is the kind of stuff you can play in Threefold, and there’s even a series of five adventures to get you started.)
Now that I’ve set the context, here’s Andrzej at Level 8. I thought that, even leaving the above backstory aside, folks might be interested in seeing an organically developed Modern AGE character of this level.
