artesia well

[reverancepavane]

It's been interesting reading Artesia the role-playing game which a friend lent me recently. Based on the comic of the same name, it has one of the things I am a sucker for – a comprehensive history which blends the cosmology with history. Not only does this give incredible depth to a campaign. One of the things I liked about my old fantasy campaign was that it was spread over a considerable time (well over 10,000 years), so that major events of one mini-campaign became the history and then legend of the next few mini-campaigns. These critical events actually shaped the campaign, so it was very much the players actions (or inaction) that shaped the world (literally, when they enabled the casting of the Shattersea [which was both a spell and the name for a quarter of the Known World after it was cast]. And the theory and practice of magic became more refined as the campaign progressed, as well as the available technology. Players represented a karmic line; usually they were the reincarnated souls (or children or grandchildren) of the previous campaign. Three actually managed to achieve immortality (one by becoming a lich, one by going to the Underworld and being excused his subsequent appearance by the Judges of the Dead (the only way to become a True Immortal), and one by simply not dying), although they did find immortality less attractive in the long term and eventually played allied karmic lines. Unfortunately it doesn't really seem fun to ressurect the campaign, especially given that the last acts of one of the major players sealed the Doom of the World (well, "unsealed" would be more technically correct). I always wanted to go back and have him play in the Last Days, using the forbidden magic of Chronomancy to try and stop what he did, only to discover that he was in fact responsible for the problem in the first case (and not just releasing it). He would have enjoyed that. Anyway the advantage of such a nice history is the possibility of playing mini-campaigns in each of the major eras in history simultaneously with the main campaign in the present. A sort of past-lives pastiche. I think it would be interesting, and something I've wanted to do since reading Nephilim. Anyway the rules are a pretty comprehensive version of the Fuzion system, with life-paths and everything. The magic looks interesting too, with a nice mixture of folk lore (peasant charms), hermetic lore (sorcery), and occult lore (sorcery using the darker aspects of existence), in addition to alchemy and potion-making, although I've yet to really look at the actual system, it looks quite workable. And the artwork is quite good, as you would expect from something sourced from a comic, although most seem set-pieces rather than extracts from the comic. (although the female armour seems to have a particular problem around the hips; I mean, while the gap between the scale mini-skirt and thigh-high steel leggings is distracting, it is probably less so to someone with whom you are fighting). All in all, a very high quality production. Which means I've probably got another contender for something to think about doing.