Being a game designer means being a tinkerer, and even as you develop a new game, a part of you thinks “this would be perfect for this other game I want to run…” And so I think every AGE book, regardless of the line, is a stealth toolkit for Gamemasters. At least that’s how I went into designing World of Lazarus. While most of the new player backgrounds, for example, have in-world flavor, they are easily adapted to almost any Modern AGE campaign. Minor Family can be translated to “Scion of the 1%” while Herd Worker makes a dang good “Rust Belt Burnout.” Most of the talents are ready to pop over to any Modern AGE game as well (with GM permission, naturally). Except…

What to do with Minor Augmentation and the various Lazarus talents?

The four flavors of Minor Augmentation are built to balance with other talents, and you can always pop them into your otherwise mundane Modern AGE game as “Savant” or something similar: extraordinary but entirely natural abilities a character might be born with that set them apart. In this case, you might want to limit a character to only one Minor Augmentation talent and eliminate the story idea that minor augmentations need regular maintenance to keep functioning (or cause other occasional drawbacks).

The Lazarus augmentations don’t work quite as well as natural abilities. But man… do they work great for a variety of unnatural abilities! As we talked about a few weeks ago, the Lazarus talents represent a wide variety of improvements, from gene-splicing to drugs to cybernetics, and you can use them to reflect any of these options in your own home-spun campaigns! Want to do a gene-punk game where splicing is the new tattooing? Want an urban fantasy game where every PC starts with the blood of something unearthly in their veins? Lazarus talents can even represent temporary abilities PCs get from alien symbiotes, powered armor, or esoteric talismans.

Whatever use you find for Lazarus talents, remember that they offer players a power boost over mundane talents, and so they should come with an appropriate in-world drawback. In World of Lazarus, the setback is story-based: to possess a Lazarus talent, a PC must (theoretically) be a Lazarus. They are at the beck and call of their Family, and rely on their Family to maintain their extraordinary bodies. Loyalty is programmed into their DNA, and disobedience means death. Your own campaigns may impose similar constraints on PCs with Lazarus talents: they might need to remain loyal to a powerful figure to maintain their talents, or need expensive drugs or equipment that constantly push them to take dangerous jobs. They might instead have a more mechanical drawback, such as imposing a level of fatigue whenever the PC uses them in a scene, or requiring a PC to spend Power Points to activate it. It could open up weird new gameplay options: Lazarus talents might represent high-end cybernetics that need maintenance and can be hacked, introducing a minor story cost and a weird mechanical vulnerability.

There’s no perfect way to adapt new rules into your campaign, so play around and see what feels a little too good in play and what seems just right. Make sure your players know the rules might be in flux, and be willing to listen to their feedback as well. If they like the rules even if they seem a little much to you, always remember your NPCs can use them too!

OH! And my personal campaign idea? Roll Lazarus talents in with psychic powers and let my players go mind-diving into weird psy-scapes, Psychonauts-style!

A World of Lazarus campaign doesn’t need to include a Lazarus as a player character, and in fact much of the book assumes the players are ordinary people trying to survive in this extraordinary world. The gamemaster’s chapter includes four general campaign models: Family, Serf, Waste, and Resistance, with the first three focusing on the various tiers of society that define the Lazarus setting and the fourth focusing on organizations like The Free who work to upend that stratification and restore basic human dignity to everyone. Each campaign model has its own player-character suggestions, objectives, adversaries, and nuances that can make for very different campaigns, and none require a Lazarus among the PCs’ numbers. For three of these campaign models—Serf, Waste, and Resistance—Lazari serve more as adversaries and boogeymen than heroes.

But we all like a power fantasy now and then, and World of Lazarus delivers with all the information you need to make player-character Lazari. But if every Family is only supposed to have one of these champions, how do you handle that at the table? Most roleplaying games are built around symmetric gameplay—the idea that player characters should be roughly the same power level. Fighters and wizards play differently, but if they start to feel too different, it feels unfair. Making asymmetric gameplay—where one player is more powerful than the others—work can be challenging, because you run the risk of one player being able to solve every problem, leaving the other players feeling useless and bored.

World of Lazarus describes several options for incorporating a Lazarus into your game, but the key is to design your adventures and opponents mindfully, making sure the Lazarus can’t do everything themselves and that there are challenges that showcase other players’ abilities. You wouldn’t design a fantasy adventure where every puzzle and every opponent could only be overcome by divine magic, and likewise you need to make sure you don’t build your Lazarus adventures in a way that every challenge is overcome by a Lazarus’s superior combat abilities. You may build combat encounters with one or two high-level threats the Lazarus must focus on, with other opponents that the non-Lazari party members can take out, or build your entire campaign with the intention of the Lazarus handling combat scenarios, but the focus including many scientific, investigation, or social challenges that the human party members can solve.

World of Lazarus details four ways of including a Lazarus as a prominent, permanent element in your own campaigns, which boil down to:

• Lazarus Oversight, in which the Lazarus is an NPC the PCs report to directly every session, and who may occasionally join them on adventures as a plot device.
• Rotating Lazarus, in which every player makes their own human-scale PC and collaborate to make a Lazarus as well, then take turns every session playing the Lazarus as an active party member.
• Tip of the Spear, in which one player is the Family Lazarus, with the rest of the players playing various support elements. This suggestion is especially fitting for Family campaigns, considering that all Lazari receive special condition to enforce their loyalty, and so despite their power, the Lazarus PC is subservient to the other PCs.
• The Phalanx, in which every PC creates either a Lazarus or a lesser version of a Lazarus, representing a coalition between families or an illegal attempt to circumvent the “one Lazarus per family” rule enforced by the Maccau Accords.

There are plenty of other ways to include a Lazarus in your game, from an occasional guest role to a cooperatively-played pseudo-PC to an NPCplot device the PCs can unleash as their secret weapon. The possibilities are limited by the deviousness of your own imagination. And you can always use the Lazarus talents to allow players to create half-measure Lazuri agents without applying the full Lazarus creation rules.

Players coming to World of Lazarus from other Green Ronin titles are probably vaguely familiar with the organization rules used in the Dragon Age Roleplaying Game, Fantasy AGE, and A Song of Ice and Fire Roleplaying. This simple, flexible system lets players take control of a noble family, thieves’ guild, mercenary company, or nation of their very own as a core part of the campaign. With the setting’s intense focus on the responsibilities and effects of character’s actions on the world around them, this system is a natural fit for World of Lazarus as well!

The setting book includes a few sample organizations already, including the Novaya Bratva crime empire and a sample Waste town, but you can make your own as a core part of your own campaign, using adventures to help shape the PC’s organization and their impact on rival organizations. For PCs playing Waste, they might build up their own tiny community and target organizations representing warlord armies, aggressive towns, and the local tax man. Resistance-focused campaigns might instead use the rules to represent the PCs’ resistance cell and network of supporters while their opponents include Family intelligence organizations, law enforcement, and criminal groups looking to pressure freedom fighters into supporting their own illegal empire. For a Serf campaign, organizations can represent anything from rival research groups in a scientific and corporate-espionage-focused campaign to enemy forces in a military campaign.

But we already started thinking about a Family campaign last week when I created my own character for a campaign, Carrie Morrow, a loyal but ruthless intelligence agent for the Quinn family, who are desperately trying to hold the Borderland South Sub-Domain together in the face of war and Family power struggles. The PCs can operate their own organization representing to Quinn family and their power base, and for this kind of campaign we’ll want some enemies… Say the local Hock forces eating into the eastern border? And a rival Family hoping to oust the Quinn’s and take their place? And just to keep the players on their toes, we’ll toss in something stealthy… say an up-and-coming dark web media group associated with the Free and prying in to family business. Each of these organizations will need their own statblock, a few named NPCs so the PCs have something human to recognize with their forces, and a modus operandi. But that’s all behind-the-scenes work for the GM. For now, let’s focus on what the players can build: Their own Family!

The GM decides that a Junior Family like the Quinns has Medium Scale, and lets us build the Quinn Family by selecting organization Ability scores from an array: one 3, two 2s, two 1s, and a 0, plus 2 Focuses representing important assets or focuses. The Quinn Family is stretched pretty thing right now, dealing with a war and political backstabbers, so we’ll want a good Force for military confrontations and a decent Tradecraft to help handle spies and political intrigue. We need to decide who the Quinns are, what makes up their power base, and what unusual assets they might be able to call one. After fifteen minutes of passionate debate and some light name-calling, we arrive at:

• Force 2
• Finance 0
• Influence 3
• Culture 1
• Tradecraft 2
• Technology 1

The Quinns are popular and know where all the bodies are buried—controlling the local media outlets and entertainment venues—probably with strong ties to CARSEC, but their lavish lifestyle has left them cash-strapped and perhaps lagging technologically behind what would be expected of a Carlyle house. Organization Focuses can be more abstract than character Focuses, and for the Quinns, we go with Influence (propaganda) and Finance (blackmail); the Quinns can put some serious pressure on people when they need to, making up for their empty bank accounts, but it won’t win them many new friends.

Being built with an array, the Quinns begin with a Cohesion of 3 and 28+2d6… 36 Capital. That’s all an organization needs to get started. Now the GM just needs to figure out how frequently the PCs will make Organization checks, which in turn determines the timeline of the campaign. Organization checks once a month means things are hitting fast and hard, with constant struggle and changes in power, while every three months or every six months would be more appropriate for drawn-out political maneuvering in a campaign intended to covered years. The GM wants the campaign to be high-energy and high-stakes, so we’ll go with once a month, usually with a PC-scale adventure somewhere in between Organization checks.

A PC organization gives the GM additional hooks for adventures; a bad Organization check may result in a drop in Influence, and the adventure may involve tracking down whoever is trashing the Quinns’ reputation, for example. A PC organization also provides additional options for rewards. The PCs capturing a renown Hock scientist as part of the adventure may provide a free Technology Focus while a remarkable public victory over an opponent in an adventure could restore organization Capital. Especially with an intrigue-oriented campaign, it’s important for the PCs’ personal action to feel like they have larger consequences, and affecting their organization or others is an easy way to represent that!