Welcome to my first “pause and reflect” post! I’ve finished one “Issue” of my Age of Wonders story, which is a good opportunity to reflect on the system, characters, story, and approach. In case you missed the previous installments:

• Issue 1a: A Simple Job (with game notes)
• Issue 1b: Jail Rats (with game notes)
• Issue 1c: Inspector Calenta (with game notes)

These reflection posts will follow every completed Issue, and I suspect that their length will vary widely based on how happy or not I am with my process. Today, I’m going to discuss what I think is going well in my fledgling story, what tweaks I’m making from here (primarily on my unstructured plot approach), and a look at revamping the Crusaders Victory Points system for my blog purposes.

What’s Going Well

So much about this Age of Wonders story is an experiment. Fresh off six months of my first-ever solo-play experience with Dungeon Crawl Classics, I wanted to continue what was so fun about those games, while a) pivoting to a superhero game system, since superhero TTRPGs are my lifelong happy place and my group games are almost entirely Pathfinder-based, b) spending more time on a homebrewed world, since this was one of the areas I very much underdeveloped in my DCC game, and c) focusing more on characters and character development, since for whatever reason I found the characters sort of flat last time around. The trick is that I love Dungeon Crawl Classics, but didn’t see it as working for a superhero story (though I am eagerly anticipating my copy of Evolved arriving any day now). One of my worries heading into this project was that I wasn’t ready for such an ambitious undertaking. The more obvious next step would have been restarting a DCC campaign, focusing on worldbuilding and characters.

Thankfully, I took my time sifting through a bunch of possible superhero games, and I’m pleased with Crusaders, my current system of choice. Yes, I still wish the game had a bigger and more vibrant community. Yes, there is a chance that it’s too lightweight for a meaningful multi-year campaign. And yes, some might argue that I’ve hacked the rules so much that it’s not really even Crusaders anymore. A niggling part of my brain still wonders if I should have waited for Evolved, or if some game like BASH! would have been better – both games were on my list to explore, but I was too excited by Crusaders to wait. But honestly… I’ve enjoyed the system. The rules-hacking has been fun, and my storytelling has felt enhanced by the game’s mechanics. One Issue into my project, the system is a big green light.

I’m also happy with the structure of my game, using three blog posts to form a single Issue. Whether or not I’m correct that three of these posts roughly equate to one four-hour game session (which is what Crusaders calls an Issue), is an unanswerable question. But I do play multiple weekly games, and the ratio feels right. Moreover, the “three posts and reflections” structure has two implications that make me happy. First, it allows me to make each blog post from the point of view of one of our three protagonists each issue. I have a suspicion that the “objective third person” storytelling in my DCC game was a major factor why characters felt flat to me, especially given how many characters I was juggling. This way I can get into the perspective of each PC, which is interesting narratively and ensures each character receives a deeper exploration. Secondly, assuming that I can keep up my regular writing pace, this process means that you’ll be getting one Issue of Age of Wonders every month… just like a comic book! That’s just fun, and gives my writing an overall structure that makes me happy.

Speaking of characters, I’m excited to be playing with Emah, Kami, and Maly. It always feels risky to leave backgrounds, personalities, and powers to random rolls, but the combination of ICONS Origins and Crusaders pseudo-random generation has provided me with three (four if you count the panther Destiny, who will likely be debuting next Issue) interesting and different PCs. I’m excited to fully explore each one, and I’m going to try and embrace each one changing and developing as the story progresses through PC level-ups. There may be some people put off by a man writing a story about three women of varying cultural backgrounds, but I hope not. Doing so is a writing challenge, and an energizing one.

Worldbuilding-wise, I’m happy so far. If it isn’t obvious, my intention for this story is to keep the action focused on the town of Oakton—like Spider-man stories taking place mostly in Manhattan, Batman stories in Gotham City, or Daredevil stories in Hell’s Kitchen. This intention is why I spent so much time focused on fleshing out the history and character of the place. Oakton is a love letter to my current home of Oakland, California, and I want to make it just as diverse and complicated a setting as I experience living here. I still think there’s a lot of work to do for me to make Oakton feel fully alive, but I’m finding my way and off to an acceptable start.  

Which is all to say: So far so good!

Open Story Structure Versus Published Material

As I mentioned above, one of my goals with Age of Wonders was to focus more on worldbuilding than I had done in my previous solo-play writing. I knew that I wanted to tell a superhero story in a more traditional fantasy setting, which blends all my passions and is something I’ve envisioned for a long time. It was relatively easy to chart a course on homebrewing a setting, and I have a bunch of ideas on how the various forces in this setting operate and may interact in the future. It’s been everything I had hoped so far, and I expect that you’ll start to see the superhero action and themes become more apparent as we get deeper into the story.

I assumed that a homebrewed world must also necessitate an entire homebrewed plot as well. Tale of the Manticore, as I’ve said before, inspired me to begin solo roleplaying. I admire the heck out of Jon and his process of discovery. He approaches each story as a blank page, its secrets ready to be revealed. In the past, however, for both my TTRPG-playing in general and my DCC solo-play games specifically, I’ve relied almost exclusively on published adventures. Heck, even my Paizo novellas are based on a published adventure path. There is something about the structure of existing modules—knowing where they begin and end, plus the main story beats in between—that fuels my creative energy. When I’ve tried writing my own adventures without any published material to inspire me, I find not having this structure to be a burden and stressful. I need more than a blank page.

So, the biggest change after Issue 1 is that I’m going to be steering away from the “open story” approach and instead reach back into the endless shelves of published adventures I own. Or, more accurately, because Age of Wonders is neither fully a fantasy tale nor a superhero one, I will use published adventures as inspiration—a jumping off point to provide more structure than I had in my first few steps of this project. Process wise, this change means that I’ll have a bit more of a handle on the primary story beats and meta-plots as I go. Maybe it means using the Mythic GM Emulator slightly less often, though I’m not sure that’s true. Indeed, this change should be mostly invisible to the overall reading experience. Instead, I’m giving myself some mental structure as I approach each Issue.

What adventure am I going to lean on for this first part of the story? I’ll keep that bit of knowledge for myself right now, particularly because I will surely be bastardizing and changing the source material heavily to fit my world. Suffice it to say, I’m going to keep a toe dipped into the Dungeon Crawl Classics waters for now. If you catch on and identify what adventure I’m using for inspiration, feel free to pipe up in the comments.

Victory Points and Character Progression

Overall, I like the Crusaders Rank and Victory Point system. I’ve already discussed my tweaks to Rank in my variant rules post. Now let’s discuss the specifics of Victory Points. As per the rulebook, PCs earn Victory Points “for vanquishing villains, thwarting menaces, saving cities, and accomplishing other heroic deeds.” At the end of each Issue, the GM is meant to give out a number of Victory Points to each hero commensurate with the victories in that Issue. The guideline is to provide 20 Victory Points for “major victories,” for example. When a PC gets to 100 Victory Points, they advance to the next Rank. Everything in Crusaders is percentile based, so this system ensures that at any point in time you know what percentage of the way your hero is to the next jump. Pretty elegant.

Now that I am at the end of my first Issue and looking at awarding points, I’m realizing something fundamental: I do not like fiddly experience points systems. I’ve been spoiled in recent years by milestone leveling in Pathfinder and the vastly simplified experience system of DCC. Sitting down to examine each story beat from my previous three posts and assign them a point value is, I find, an energy draining exercise, especially without knowing where the plot is heading and how big each accomplishment is relative to potential future ones. Since this project is a game by myself that I’m doing for the pure enjoyment of it, I see no reason to spend time on energy drainers.

I’ve recently run a small handful of Sentinel Comics RPG sessions for one of my weekly groups, which has reminded me how much fun that system is. Sentinel Comics, like Crusaders, envisions each gaming session as an Issue. Yet Sentinel Comics builds on this idea and provides milestone awards when you reach six Issues, what comic collectors know as a trade paperback Collection. It’s a neat idea and helps me figure out the tweak I’d like to make for Age of Wonders.

Here’s what I’m going to try: Instead of 100 Victory Points to achieve the next Rank in my game, I’m going to say that you need six Issues to advance. My three PCs are now 1/6 of the way to advancing to Rank 2. If, by some act of Herculean luck and effort, they all persevere through sixty Issues (i.e. roughly five years of writing… heh), they will hit the ceiling of Rank 10 and be godlike entities in the world. At that point I suspect that I’ll feel more than happy to say I’ve done everything I can and retire them from play. And to be clear: I don’t suspect I’ll make it anywhere near sixty issues, but a guy can dream.

What I like about this plan is that it forces me to pay attention to the trade paperback (TPB) collections I’m creating. Recall that I want each level-up to be an event, a time when the characters take a noticeable jump in power. I’ll either need to ensure a major story climax at the end of each TPB to allow for a time jump or provide a catalyst for them changing. Since Crusaders also judges a character reputation by their Rank, I’ll be keeping an eye on the public nature of their identities through this progression as well. Now there’s a writing challenge that jolts my energy! Perfect.

How About Some Issue Covers?

Finally, this is my first opportunity to introduce the awesome Issue cover sketches done by Roland Brown. As I was writing the first Issue and the idea of one-issue-per-month started crystalizing in my mind, I started yearning for actual comic book covers for this story. I reached out to Roland, who had done such a masterful job bring Emah, Kami, and Maly to life with his character work. He was happy to help.

I couldn’t justify the cost of fully painted covers for a free blog, but Roland has been awesome to work with and we jointly came up with a black-and-white-sketch-solution that allows for a visualization of the story. He’s responsible for the cool Age of Wonders logo and he pulled me away from my first cover concept to a more classic “debut” cover that you see below for Issue 1. Expect a new cover for each Issue, and I’ll go back and retroactively add it to earlier posts if we don’t have it ready by the first installment. Thank you, Roland!

That’s it for now! If you’re enjoying the story or have suggestions, drop me a comment below or feel free to email me at jaycms@yahoo.com.

Next: Issue 2 begins! [with game notes]