Tag Archive for: Blue Rose

Playing With Stunts

Stunts are one of the pillars of the Adventure Game Engine, the system we use in Fantasy AGE, Modern AGE, Blue Rose, The Expanse, and the upcoming Cthulhu Awakens and Fifth Season roleplaying games, all descended from design work on the grandfather of them all, Dragon Age.

Heading into the new edition of Fantasy AGE and Cthulhu Awakens, as well as some proposed and to-be announced projects, I played with how stunt point generation and stunts functioned. Part of game development is exploring ideas that won’t necessarily make it into the final game—and sometimes even ideas that would never have done so, but act as conceptual landmarks.

Relationship Bonds and the newer Stunt Attack option aside, the basic way to generate stunt points is to match any 2 dice on a 3d6 test. This prompts a look at the Stunt Die (Drama Die in some games, or Dragon Die in Dragon Age), which tells you how many stunt points (SP) you get. But what if we did it differently?

Let’s take a look at some of these options.

Creating your own house-rules like stunts is part of what makes AGE so fun!Highest Die is Stunt Die: Instead of having a fixed Stunt Die, it’s always the highest die. Since you get SP on the set of successful tests your SP will always tend toward the higher range in the first place, but this exaggerates the effect even further. I don’t recommend this as a standard practice, but it might work as a special ability provided by a talent or extraordinary effect.

Lowest Die is Stunt Die: Woah, this one is interesting on a few levels, and in fact, is the most mathematically “logical,” but it isn’t fun enough to replace the ordinary Stunt Die. For one thing, that means you need a natural 18 to get 6 SP—and there’s a 0.46% chance of getting that. That’s why it isn’t fun enough, as part of the purpose of the Stunt Die is to add more variable results— “swinginess,” we call it, sometimes—to the regularity provided by the 3d6 curve.

SP and Degrees of Success Are Separate Dice: As we also use the Stunt Die to measure your degree of success, making the highest or lowest rolled die the Stunt Die becomes a problem for things like automatic weapons in Modern AGE, as well as advanced tests and other things that rely on degree of success. So, you might retain a visually distinctive die called the “Success Die” or “Power Die.” Even if you keep the usual Stunt Die you might split it from the Power Die. I looked at this pretty seriously as it opens up a lot of design-level opportunities, but in the end, I didn’t think it was worth it.

Anti-Stunts: Cthulhu Awakens actually has a limited version of this, but the version here is simpler. If you blow a roll but get doubles, you generate SP—for bad things. The simplest application is to hand them over to an opponent who spends them on stunts that are bad for you on their turn, in addition to the SP they might gain. Enemies who do the same naturally give you SP in return, so if you use this option SP ebb and flow from one side to the other. Besides the convolutions necessary outside of straightforward situations like combat, the problems with this one are the sheer number of SP that can concentrate in one place, which can get out of hand.

Degree of Success to SP: One recent idea I had was to award degree of success -5 SP regardless of whether a roll scores doubles or not. This means 1 SP on a 6. It gets really interesting when characters gain the ability to add focus bonuses to degrees of success. In newer AGE games this bonus maxes out at +4, so a roll of 6 with that bonus on the Stunt Die would provide a degree of success of 10, which converts to 5 bonus SP. The tricky bit comes when we score doubles. We could drop that completely, which would be miserable because low level characters could only ever get 1 SP from a roll, but if we keep SP from doubles the range of SP would be (degree of success -5) + Stunt Die, which might award up to 11 SP, which is too much.

Everything is Stunts: The answer to too-many-SP variants of course is, “What if it’s all stunts?” In this scheme we would add a Base Effect stunt table and the General Stunts from the Modern AGE Companion, and instead of stunts being an extraordinary result, we use SP as the building blocks to do anything—but no SP, no result. This would produce a really formal set of AGE mechanics which don’t fit the GM-guided goals of the system but might be fun to experiment with, nonetheless.

What do you think of these ideas? Would you try any of them? AGE is house rule and variant-friendly by design, as shown in the optional systems in Fantasy AGE. Modern AGE has two books that are filled with optional and variant game systems: the Modern AGE Companion and perhaps more relevant to this article, the Modern AGE Mastery Guide. Regardless of what we cook up in the lab, so to speak, we like it when you make the games your own.

A Gathering of the AGEs: Consolidated Rules in Fantasy AGE 2e

Fantasy AGE Core RulebookHey folks, Malcolm here. I’m not the developer of the new edition of Fantasy AGE but I am one of the developers of the core rulebook. While I can’t give you a first-person perspective on the whole game, I can tell you a bit about the parts I helped work on. So, I thought I’d write a couple of pieces about that!

One of the goals of Fantasy AGE’s second edition was to consolidate various rules developments from multiple AGE games and supplements. If you’re an Adventure Game Engine completist you might recognize the following new and updated rules as familiar—with a few exceptions, because they’re from AGE works that haven’t come out yet but influenced development nonetheless! In any event, this is one of the factors that led us to eventually decide the new core rulebook was a true “Second Edition” of Fantasy AGE even though much of 1e remains compatible.

Challenge Tests: Challenge tests are advanced tests with certain special conditions, meant to emulate heists and other forms of dramatic extended tasks where characters need to apply multiple focuses, and fallout from failures can occur mid-test. Originally created by Crystal Frasier (and called “breaching tests”) for Modern AGE’s World of Lazarus supplement, it proved to be such a good idea we moved it to the core rulebook. The Expanse merged challenge tests and Modern AGE’s chase tests, and that final evolution is part of Fantasy AGE now.

Daring: Daring, an optional rule that promotes dramatic reversals in encounters, is an evolution of the rules for Serendipity, originally from the Modern AGE Companion.

Daring is one of the cool new optional rules in Fantasy AGE 2nd edition

Peril and Daring!

Defeat Conditions: Despite making their first appearance in Fantasy AGE 2E, Defeat Conditions were originally invented for Cthulhu Awakens, to provide alternatives to death as the result of dramatic combat.

Fortune: Fortune is an invention of Steve Kenson, originally devised for The Expanse roleplaying game, where escalating Health wasn’t appropriate but “script immunity” was a better fit. It was a great idea in that game, and it’s a cool option in Fantasy AGE, too.

Minor Arcana: These petty spells originally hail from the Threefold setting for Modern AGE.

Peril: Peril, where success lands you in deeper trouble, began as the Churn spiral in The Expanse. Interestingly, in the Modern AGE Companion it’s present and called Complications.

Relationships: Relationships, an optional rule to strengthen character connections in Fantasy AGE, was first introduced in Blue Rose.

Revised Spellcasting: In the new edition of Fantasy AGE spells only fail to be cast when a mage decides to abandon them or doesn’t have the magic points for them, because we determined spending MP on nothing happening wasn’t fun. Instead, if you fail a casting roll, the MP cost goes up. This is another option that was originally piloted in Modern AGE’s Threefold setting.

Simple Tests: A “test that doesn’t use stunts/SP” has existed in an ad hoc fashion since the beginning of the AGE system but the Simple Test concept, introduced in the Modern AGE Mastery Guide, gathers them all together as versions of simple tests and lets the GM use them at their discretion as well.

These nine examples aren’t the only ones, and notably, much of the Fantasy AGE Companion from the game’s first edition has been updated and added to the core of Fantasy AGE 2E.

Works Cited!

Want to know about the games that provided input for the new Fantasy AGE? Check them out:

Blue Rose: The AGE Roleplaying Game of Romantic Fantasy

Cthulhu Awakens

The Expanse Roleplaying Game

Modern AGE

Modern AGE Companion

Threefold (Modern AGE)

World of Lazarus (Modern AGE)

The AGE System is a Map

Nothing quite starts off a new year like a cryptic blog post title, so here we go! Seriously though, I’d like to chat about how I feel about what the Adventure Game Engine is as it now powers a wider array of games than ever: Fantasy AGE, Modern AGE, Blue Rose, The Expanse, Cthulhu Awakens, and as per our recent announcement, The Fifth Season. And of course, it all goes back to its roots in the Dragon Age roleplaying game and Chris Pramas’s design.

Unfamiliar with the Adventure Game Engine? We’ve got you covered with our handy “What Is AGE?” primer!

The AGE System provides nearly infinite story opportunities and options!

I’m the Modern AGE developer, and that means taking an expansive view of the system that has come to be my default. This makes AGE something of a map: The system has “bare metal” mechanical features I can play with in a number of different ways. Very few things about the system are fundamental, but what is there—the fixed points on the map—help me answer questions about how a given instance of the game is supposed to work, and what the play experience should be like.

Are classes essential? Modern AGE proved they weren’t, but that protecting unique niches still mattered. Spending points on spells and other powers? Not essential, but a sign saying power should have some kind of cost.

The core of the AGE experience is something I like to call a “punctuated curve.” The core mechanics are 3d6 + modifiers versus a target number. 3d6 outputs a curve of results, where some numbers on the dice, in the middle of the range, are more likely than others. So, a character’s abilities are fairly reliable. But this sort of thing wouldn’t be especially cool without an additional element. In AGE, this is scoring doubles and generating stunt points. Thus, in the set of successful rolls there’s just under a 50% chance of a more interesting success.

This principle doesn’t tell us what a “more interesting success” is, and of course, that’s up to what stunts the player will pick—and stunts turn out to be something we can greatly customize by a game’s genre and setting. In Fantasy AGE Trojan War, divine stunts can be acquired with the help of the gods. In Cthulhu Awakens, certain stunts represent mind-melting insights won through exposure to the Mythos. The Expanse has stunts related to spacecraft.

But that point on the map can be zoomed in on, divided by area, and customized even further. Stunts represent exceptional results, but we can split them off from doubles. This is how we get the stunt attack mechanic in newer AGE rules sets, and how we use Bonds, where we add an opportunity to do amazing things because of a relationship or belief.

This is the kind of flexibility that lets AGE work for multiple games—we strip it down, see what remains, and it shows us what we can play with to address themes and play experience. While we sometimes do aim for cross-compatibility between games, we usually don’t fret that option A in one game contradicts B in another. You can pick and choose when crossing over. The point is to generate familiarity that lets you make your own crossovers and house rules, while presenting lots of readymade options to choose from.

What do you think is essential to the AGE system? What’s flexible? What should be one, not the other? Feel free to let us know!

A Few Words on Languages

Tabletop roleplaying games can give us some funny ideas about languages and linguistics. At least, I know they did for me in some regards. Starting with a certain Popular Fantasy Roleplaying Game comes the notion that player characters are all multi-lingual, speaking three, four—as many as seven or eight languages fluently! This is often compounded with the notion that entire species share the same language, or that there are special languages for fantastic creatures from dragons to elementals to the denizens of different planes of existence.

Later RPGs have taken a more nuanced, and certainly more detailed approach to languages, including various levels of fluency, and things like complex charts showing the relationships between “language families” of earthly or imaginary languages, which may grant some greater understanding or closely-related tongues.

understanding the Language can be very important

“I’m not sure what you just said, but I don’t care for your tone!” Art by James Ryman

The Modern AGE rules have a somewhat laissez-faire attitude about languages. The sidebar on page 16 of the Basic Rulebook says characters should “be able to speak, read, and write whatever languages” they “would pick up due to their cultural and social class” suggesting a limit of three. The Linguistic talent in the game handles learning additional languages and requires a fairly significant investment, since talent degrees aren’t easy to come by, and each degree in the talent grants only one additional language. It would take a new specialization to create the true polyglot character who speaks a dozen or more languages.

Fantasy AGE likewise offers a Linguistics talent, for characters truly dedicated to speaking other languages. The game’s ancestries follow the fantasy standard of an ancestral language (all elves speak Elvish, for example) along with a “Common tongue” used and understood by everyone, for the most part.

Mutants & Masterminds treats language fluency as an advantage, one rank grants an additional language the character can speak, but each additional rank doubles the number of languages, so it’s fairly cost effective to create someone who speaks a dozen or more of them. Of course, in M&M, the ability to speak and understand all languages is on the table for just 2 ranks of the Comprehend power, so there isn’t a lot of point in having more than a few ranks in the Languages advantage, other than to represent the character’s own skill and knowledge.

Individual Game Masters have to decide the role languages—particularly unknown languages—will play in their campaigns. In some cases, the language barrier can be an important element of adventures or the setting. Others prefer to generally ignore the problem in order to get on with things; the Threefold setting for Modern AGE, for example, includes magical “universal translators” for characters working for the world-spanning Sodality, so GMs don’t need to worry about whether or not the characters speak any of the local languages—at least not until their translators are lost or stolen! Likewise, the Cosmic Handbook for M&M recommends Comprehend as a “default” power for star-spanning campaigns, unless you want to institute some form of “Galactic Common” that all alien species speak and understand.

When building worlds of your own for RPGs, you might want to give some thought as to how people say things, and what languages they are saying them in.

Last Chance Warehouse Sale

Last Chance Warehouse Sale: 75% off select print books, while supplies last!

 

After 22 years in business, the Green Ronin warehouse is looking a little crowded. With reprints and new products incoming, it’s time to make more space! These deals are for print products only. With limited stock and priced to clear some pallets, this is a screaming deal (75% off!) you don’t want to miss. With that, we offer you the LAST CHANCE WAREHOUSE SALE!

Please note the sale does not extend to shipping, and shipping fees are determined by the carrier.

75% off on select titles

 

Gen Con Indy 2022

The Green Ronin Convention Crew reports from Indianapolis that Gen Con is going well! Alex and Jonesy are running sold-out games, and some products are already sold out as well. Here is a view, care of Disembodied Troy, of what’s for sale at Booth 101.

Here’s a view from inside the dealer hall at Gen Con 2022 in Indianapolis, Indiana, showing off all of the goodness available for sale this weekend at booth 101, right inside the hall entrance next to Paizo. If you’re at the show, stop by and see us!

New at Gen Con are Cyberpunk Slice and Five and Infinity for Modern AGE RPG, Danger Zones and Starhaven for Mutants & Masterminds, Six of Cups for the Blue Rose RPG, the 5e adventure A Shadow in the Downs for The Lost Citadel, and a novel for The Lost Citadel, A Song of Eagles! And, as you can see in the video, we have tons of other great game products, like Sentinels of Earth-Prime, The Expanse RPG, Freeport, and more. Plus, we are running awesome bundle deals at the show. Booth 101!

We’ve since sold out of some things, necessitating some revised bundle deals, which look like this:

Six of Cups for Blue Rose AGE: The Storm of the Century and Other Stories

Six of Cups for Blue Rose!Six of Cups is Blue Rose’s second anthology of adventures (the first was, of course, Six of Swords). Of course, at center, this book is about providing a set of interesting, self-contained adventures for Blue Rose campaigns. Perhaps your group will play Sovereign’s Finest, traveling the lands, playing through all of these. Or, one or two might form the basis for a new campaign, or at least an arc within one. But that’s not all Six of Cups has to offer. This anthology does a couple of things – and some of them were even intentional.

Themes: The Suit of Cups

From the get-go, I wanted the stories in Six of Cups to be about emotions and relationships. In the minor arcana of the Tarot, the suit of Cups focuses on the connections between people and the emotions that both inspire and come about as a result of those. It’s the “emotions that run deep” suit (in comparison to the “emotions that burn bright” of Wands).

Above everything else, Blue Rose and the genre of romantic fantasy are about those ties, and I wanted a set of adventures that expressed that. From the connections between orphans in Witching Weather to the desire for redemption in Out from Exile to the questions about compassion and mercy at the heart of Hemlock’s Bane, the tales in Six of Cups all center on the themes central to this suit.

Gazetteers: Around the Kingdom

The Blue Rose AGE core rulebook is a whole lot of book. Even so, we had to paint with some fairly broad strokes while describing the Kingdom of Aldis in that book. Now, we had the chance to get a slightly more zoomed-in look in Aldis: Kingdom of the Blue Rose, and we decided we weren’t quite finished doing so.

One of the guidelines given to the authors of Six of Cups was to include a gazetteer section that described the place in the kingdom where that story takes place. The intention, of course, is to help make the book useful even beyond the adventures it includes. Find in these pages the major cities of Elsport, Garnet, and Lysana’s Crossing, as well as Khaldessa in the central Aldin valleys, Hemlock in the northern Pavin Weald, and the Scatterstar Archipelago!

Happy Accidents: The Storm of the Century

One of the things I asked of our authors was to send me proposals for their adventures and gazetteers. In short order, it became apparent that (perhaps inspired by the elemental association of Cups with water) no less than three of the stories feature a massive coastal storm. Rather than require some of the authors to change their ideas, I thought I could include them all to highlight one of the interesting ways to use generally unrelated adventures.

Finding a common thread to run between adventures is an awesome way of building a sort of “accidental” campaign. The tumultuous weather plays a role in all three of the stories, and they are not written as being interrelated. An enterprising Narrator might, however, come up with some connecting concepts to help tie them together. Perhaps these are all part of a single, major storm system of some kind, a sort of terrifying storm of the century to strike the southern coast of Aldis? Or, perhaps there is something (or someone…) nefarious at work, hurling storm after storm into the world.

Conclusion

There is a lot that might be done with the contents of Six of Cups. And that’s not even including the new Specializations (Storm Rider and Marsh Shaper), or even the devastating Arcane Lightning arcana knack for those who wield the Weather Shaping arcana! Join us, with an open heart and a sense of courage – we’ve got a lot more stories to tell.

 

Six of Cups is available now for pre-order here, and don’t miss out on that $5 PDF add-on! As well as on DrivethruRPG!

Bonds: An AGE Mechanic Evolved

Bonds form the basis of many relationships and effects of Alienation

Art by Tentacles and Teeth

If you’re familiar with Blue Rose or Modern AGE, you’ve come across Relationships: a system that provides mechanical benefits based on your character’s powerful feelings for another person, whether it’s love, friendship, professional admiration—or deadly enmity. Relationships form the seeds of Bonds, a generalized mechanic used in Cthulhu Awakens that among other things, is used for the Alienation systems we’ve discussed elsewhere. I’ve been experimenting with expanding the basic concept of Relationships ever since developing Modern AGE and notably, used it as the basic for a divine influence system in the Fantasy AGE Trojan War supplement for sibling game Fantasy AGE.

In Cthulhu Awakens, Bonds are covered in the character creation chapter, as they are essential to the game. A Bond can represent things other than a relationship with a person, and can represent the following:

Enlightenment: This is a Bond of strange, mind-warping insights gained from contact with the Mythos.

Ideology: A belief system to which you’re strongly committed. This could be a religion, a political theory, or some code of honor.

Material: Your Bond connects you to an object, structure, or location. This is the kind of Bond possessed by a character who treats their car like a pet or child, or who would rather die than give up their home.

Melancholy: This Bond attaches itself to characters who abruptly leave the Dreamlands and are deprived of its wonders by our gray, heavy world.

Organization: This Bond either represents an organization’s hold on you or your feelings for it.

Relationship: This is the most common Bond. It represents your feelings about another person or the hold they have over you. A Personal Relationship Bond need not represent affection; you can have a Bond with an enemy.

Terror: This is a Bond given to thoughts cracked by the unnatural, and like Enlightenment, is produced through Alienation.

Each Bond has a rating and descriptor, such as the ideology Bond I will stand up for workers against the bosses because an injury to one is an injury to all (3). This tells you its strength and purview.

Unlike previous AGE system Relationships, Bonds are also split into Personal and External types. Personal Bonds are a source of strength when it comes to addressing the subject of the bond, and you choose when to draw on them. In practical terms, you can spend it on bonus stunt points to make an action more effective, even if you didn’t roll doubles on the dice, the usual way to gain SP. External Bonds represent an involuntary attachment, either because it represents how someone or something else treats you, or it’s a mental and emotional association you can’t consciously control. These are used aversively, such as to add stunt points to tests used against you. Once a loyal member of a group, you’re vulnerable when your former comrades act against you, for instance.

Bonds permeate the Alienation mechanic and several other places in the game, and I look forward to seeing the full rules out in the wild.

Blue Rose Meets Cthulhu Awakens!


What does Cthulhu Awakens have to offer players and Narrators of Blue Rose? A great deal, as it turns out, even if you don’t want Outer Gods and Great Old Ones threatening the world of Aldea. Let’s look at some of the possibilities:

Bonds

While Blue Rose has Relationships, Cthulhu Awakens has Bonds, a development and expansion of the basic concept of Relationships to “represent your character’s special ties to other characters, ideals, obsessions, and more.” In particular, there are Personal Bonds, which are much like Relationships, but can also include your ties to ideals and beliefs. There are also External Bonds, which are largely involuntary and can be detrimental to your character.

If you want to expand upon the basic system of Relationships in Blue Rose, then Cthulhu Awakens has done some of the work for you.

Cthulhu Awakens on Kickstarter now!

Live on Kickstarter now!

Talents

Cthulhu Awakens has talents spanning the Weird Century (from 1920 to the 2020s) and some of them would be right at home in a Blue Rose game, such as Dreamer, Esthete, Improvisation, Strange Inheritance, or even Inhuman Legacy (for those affected by the work of the Sorcerer Kings).

Conditions

Cthulhu Awakens includes various character conditions, shorthand for packages of game mechanics to describe things from being blinded, defenseless, or at a disadvantage, to name a few. These would be easy to import into a Blue Rose game to use for similar quick-use and -reference in play.

Alienation

Whereas Blue Rose has Corruption, Cthulhu Awakens has Alienation, the bending of the human mind towards the inhuman and the alien. It offers inspiration for modifying the Corruption system, or introducing a whole new risk associated with the eldritch arts of sorcery (or other forbidden practices). Both Enlightenment and Terror Stunts offer inspiration for similar sorts of stunts for Blue Rose characters wrestling with the temptations of Corruption and Shadow.

Fortune

Cthulhu Awakens offers an optional version of the Fortune system (which originally appeared in The Expanse RPG) as a replacement for Health, representing more the characters’ ability to evade damage than withstand it. Fortune may suit the often swashbuckling and daring style of Blue Rose and offer a more cinematic and fictionalized approach, wherein it is a character’s importance to the story that determines their survival.

Eldritch Workings

This whole chapter of Cthulhu Awakens offers riches for a Blue Rose game: strange rites that some call “magic” (or “arcana” or “sorcery,” perhaps) with far-reaching effects. Eldritch Workings can greatly expand the strange sciences of sorcery in the game and well suit the practices of the Sorcerer Kings. Some Eldritch Workings might see use even among heroes, although they must beware when learning and using them, just as with sorcery.

The Dreamlands

Material on the Dreamlands literally opens up a whole new world for Blue Rose characters to explore, well suited to the kind of psychic talents much of them possess. Even if you don’t want to use the Mythos Dreamlands wholesale, the rules and guidelines for them can easily be adapted for an Aldean version or similar “psychic plane” where characters can travel and adventure.

Artifacts

“The Mythos is rife with strange artifacts, arcane symbolism, dead languages, incomprehensible geometries, and objects beyond human reckoning.” So Cthulhu Awakens offers numerous strange treasures you can use in your Blue Rose game, many of them suited as artifacts of the Old Kingdom or the Empire of Thorns. Envoys may be dispatched to deal with one or more of these artifacts resurfacing, in the possession of a cult leader, or for-sale in one of the Night Markets of the Silence. The material on dangerous texts well suits treatises on sorcery left behind by corrupt adepts to tempt the unwary.

Entities

Cthulhu Awakens offers a chapter of strange, otherworldy, and hybrid entities easily adapted for use in a Blue Rose game as darkfiends, shadowspawn, or even stranger creatures arrived through a shadowgate from … elsewhere. It also includes numerous people as allies or adversaries, including cultists and eldritch scholars.

The Mythos

Last, but certainly not least, Cthulhu Awakens contains a wealth of information about the Mythos adapted for the Adventure Game Engine, allowing you to include pulp-era, eldritch fantasy elements in your Blue Rose game. Perhaps the Mythos has always been a part of the world of Aldea, or perhaps the shadowgates of the Old Kingdom opened onto … something, something that seeped into the awareness and understanding of those ancient adepts, brought about the rise of the Sorcerer Kings and the Empire of Thorns. Something (or somethings) that slumber still, just waiting for the stars to be right and shadowgates to re-open.

Added Ancestries for the Blue Rose Adventurer’s Guide

BRAG and 5E AncestryOther Fantasy Folk for Aldea

The Blue Rose Adventurer’s Guide describes the romantic fantasy world of Aldea for Fifth Edition fantasy roleplaying. Aldea is a bit different from some fantasy settings, including the ancestry of its people: the Adventurer’s Guide describes the humans, night people, sea-folk, vata, and the rhydan (psychic awakened animals) of the setting.

Other fantasy folk common to Fifth Edition settings are not found on Aldea, at least by default. A sidebar in the Adventurer’s Guide talks about adding other ancestries to the setting, if you want them, and this Ronin Round Table takes a closer look at how those folk might fit into the world of Blue Rose.

Dwarf

Dwarves are people of the deep earth, their holds often found in the high mountains or deep underground. In Aldea this means ranges like the Ice-Binder Mountains separating Aldis from Kern or perhaps the Golgan Badlands of the mountains near Jarzon. Their elemental associations and the presence of giants might connect with hidden dwarf-holds there as well. Perhaps dwarves once trafficked with the peoples of the surface world, but the rise of the Shadow Lords and their long reign drove the dwarf clans to close and seal the gates of their holds. Only now, centuries later, do they consider returning to the surface, and some dwarves may have changed during their long exile.

Elf

Elves have some similarities to the arcane Vata: both inherently magical and long-lived folk. Perhaps the elves of Aldea are closely related to the Fey described in the Blue Rose Adventurer’s Guide. Since Aldean fey are elemental spirits (not possessed of souls from the Eternal Dance), elves might be something different: fey who are possessed of souls! If souls of the Dance have incarnated as folk with fey heritage, perhaps this indicates some change within the Fey, or a “bridge” of sorts between their Courts and the peoples of Aldea. It would certainly be a momentous development of interest (and concern) to many.

Halfling

Homey and pastoral halflings would find themselves well-suited for life in Aldis. Perhaps there are halfling communities scattered through the fertile hills and valleys of the Sovereignty of the Blue Rose, with other halflings mixed-in with the people dwelling in the great cities and larger towns. Halflings may have always dwelled alongside the different folk of Aldea, or they may have been created by the experiments of the Shadow Lords, similar to night people or vata’sha. In the latter case, halflings may have originally founded their settlements as refugees, giving them a tendency to keep to themselves and an understandable wariness concerning “big-uns” and larger folk. Regardless of their origins, halflings might also dwell in the other lands of Aldea: They make hardy and devout farm-folk for Jarzon, particularly with their own focus on family, and interesting dwellers on the Rezean plains, either as members of the clans or part of their own wandering bands.

Dragonborn

Although Aldea has no (known) true dragons, it does have draconic and reptilian creatures. Aldean dragonborn might be flesh-crafted creations of the Shadow Lords, intended as arcane warriors, now liberated from their rule. They could be descended from otherworldly visitors who arrived through a shadow gate, who have long since lost the world of their birth, or they might be folk of Aldea, arising from the elemental forces of the Golgan Badlands, the Shadow Barrens, or some land far beyond the shores of Aldis and its neighbors. Whatever the case, dragonborn are likely fairly rare and an unusual sight on Aldea. While they might experience some polite curiosity in Aldis, dragonborn are likely to have a more difficult time in Jarzon, where they’re likely to be mistaken for shadowspawn, or in Kern, where they’re likely to be forced into the service of the Regents or simply killed out of hand as a potential threat.

Gnome

Like dwarves, gnomes might have hidden themselves underground for some time following the rise of the Shadow Lords, such that they have become only legends by the modern age of Aldea. With their talents for artifice and illusion, gnomes could easily remain hidden, only now returning to deal with the other folk of the world. Gnomes fit right in to both the pastoral and urban aspects of Aldis and of Jarzon. Their ability to communicate with certain animals may make them friends and allies of the rhydan, at least of the small and burrowing sort, and they might dwell alongside them in their communities.

Half-Orc

Half-orcs imply the existence of orcs, which also don’t exist on Aldea. Their role in the world is largely assumed by the night people, the occult creations of the Shadow Lords. True half-orcs on Aldea might be visitors from other planes (via shadow gate) or descendants of other experiments or cross-breeding programs initiated by the Shadow Lords, with similar reactions from the nations and peoples of Aldea as to the night people.

Alternately, half-orcs on Aldea might not be “half” anything, but a unique people unto themselves. They might easily have come into being in the rugged mountains, the haunted lands of Drunac, the Shadow Barrens, or the Plains of Rezea, to name a few, and be as populous as you wish in your own setting.

Half-Elf

If there are elves on Aldea, then there may also be half-elves, or at least folk of mixed human and Fey ancestry. In some regards, half-elves would be much like the vata, descendants of human and vatasin ancestors. If there are no Fey with souls (as described under Elves, previously) then it is possible all elves have a mix of human and fey ancestry, with half-elves more equally in-between the two and elves favoring their fey heritage, along with a few of mixed ancestry who have the abilities of humans (perhaps variant humans with a particular feat or other unusual “talent”).

Tiefling

Tieflings are certain to be an oddity on Aldea. The only fiends known there are the darkfiends of Shadow, and any ensouled folk who can claim ancestry to them will be a test of Aldin inclusiveness indeed! Given the long reign of the Shadow Lords, it may well be that tieflings are descendants of ancestors who practiced the occult or otherwise trafficked with darkfiends and the powers of Shadow, now manifest in their heritage. Of course, tieflings are ensouled beings with free will, so they can choose their alignment and their behavior. That won’t stop some from considering them inherently corrupted by Shadow, however, just like night people, vata’sha, and others, perhaps even more so. Tieflings are likely to be persecuted and openly killed in Jarzon, feared and sought in Kern, but treated fairly for the most part in Aldis and Rezea, in spite of the ignorant few who mistrust them because of their heritage.

…and Beyond!

Who knows what other folk might dwell on Aldea, housing the souls of the Eternal Dance in endless varieties of form? You can bring almost any ancestry you wish to your Blue Rose setting, keeping in mind the following avenues:

  • An ancestry might have arrived on Aldea via shadow-gate from a far-off land or other plane. Depending on how long ago that was, they might be populous and well-integrated into the present day lands or relative newcomers.
  • Many ancestries might have arisen as experiments of the Shadow Lords during their rule, now free of their occult overlords to determine their own destinies. Such folk may find others prejudiced against their origins, but enlightened and fair-minded people in the world know better.
  • Finally, you can simply decide any added ancestries have always existed on Aldea, created by the gods alongside all of the other peoples to preserve the souls of the Eternal Dance. In this case, you may want to consider the roles the ancestry has played in this history of Aldea, where they are most commonly found, and what other folk tend to think about them.

And while we’re at it, hey did you know that Blue Rose Adventurer’s Guide already has two adventures you can run for the game?
Be sure to check out Flight of the Snow Pearl and The Night Market in our online store, or on DrivethruRPG!