Here’s the deal, from my interpretation of the reports I get from RPGNow, there were something like 7400 purchases of the bundle. That is the kind of penetration into the gamer community that few independently published RPGs ever see. Over 7400 people now own Chronica Feudalis who didn’t before. Over 7400 people own 3:16 and Apocalypse Prevention, Inc. Thousands of new owners of Full Light, Full Steam and Beast Hunters.

You probably personally know several other people in your local gaming community who donated their $20 and picked up this bundle. This has been touted on every major gaming forum and a myriad of blogs, podcasts, Twitter tweets, and Facebook posts. Gamers came together in large numbers and in agreement for a cause like I have never seen before. It has been tremendously inspiring. The effort raised over $180,000. That’s significant.

Just because the bundle deal is over and the iPad was announced and Amazon and Macmillan got in a little tiff, doesn’t mean the problems of Haiti have gone away. So, when I say this, don’t take it like I’m saying the crisis is over. It’s not. We still have lots of work to do.

But here’s my point: take a little time to play. You and 7400 of your closest friends have new game material. There has never been a better time to find players to play these games. Take advantage of that. Games are meant to be played. They long to be played. They desperately want to be played. Call up your friends and say, “Did you download Diana: Warrior Princess? I did and it’s awesome. How about we get together this weekend and roll some dice.” Don’t just get your $20 out of these games, get the full $1000+ bundle value out of them. Crack them open, take them out, use them, abuse them. After all, they’re PDFs. They can take a beating.

Here is what the revisions do:

• Combines the reaction and passive defense into one defense roll
• Streamlines the skill list down to 20 skills (5 in each category)
• Revises mentors in regards to the new skill list
• Enhances the effectiveness of conditions, therefor making maneuvers more advantageous
• Removes the Vigor Rush rule
• Clarifies disarming an opponent through the use of a maneuver
• Better defines the rules for buying and selling using one’s purse
• Includes a conversion guide for updating existing characters to the revised rules

Be sure to check back often as further revisions may be added to this document.

In addition to Chronica Feudalis, you will receive over $1400 of gaming material. You’ll receive 3:16 Carnage Amongst the Stars, Greg Stolze’s eCollapse, Spirit of the Season, Kerberos Club, Serenity Role Playing Game, Trail of Cthulhu Player’s Guide and tons more. Admit it, you’ve had your eye on more than one of these games for a while now.

Donate today, help Haiti, and expand your gaming library like you never have before.

Here is the link again: The Gamers Helping Haiti Bundle.

The rules are light and easy, as is character generation, with a setting that has room enough for both GM and players to make Medieval Europe what they want.

Read the full review here.

Listen here.

But in reading over Diaspora over the last couple of weeks, I find myself reminiscing over one of the key concepts of FATE that didn’t carry over into Chronica’s design: phased character creation. For those of you who are not familiar with this process, introduced in Spirit of the Century*, each player writes a paragraph of background material for each of several periods (phases) in their character’s life. These paragraphs then serve as inspiration for the character’s aspects.

So, I’d like to present an alternative protagonist creation method for use with Chronica Feudalis. This method utilizes three phases. In each phase you will write a paragraph about your character’s background, pick one mentor (and apply those benefits), and write one aspect (and, optionally, one background).

Phase One: Childhood

In one paragraph, describe your character’s early childhood – from birth until the age of ten years old. What class was she born into? Who were her parents and what did they do? Was she provided with any education (perhaps via a hired tutor) or was she brought up to learn the trade of her parents? Some children are betrothed when they are very young. Did this happen to your protagonist?

Pick a Mentor

Choose one mentor from the mentor list to represent your protagonist’s most influential teacher from this period in her life. For the three skills that mentor teaches, increase those on your character sheet by one step. Copy each of the mentor’s gifted tools to your tool list.

Write an Aspect

Using what we’ve discussed about aspects in the core rules, write one aspect that encapsulates your protagonist’s childhood. If your character was born with a particularly unique feature or inherits a particular status or title by blood, this aspect should be used to indicate such things.

Write a Background

You may optionally write one background that describes something about your protagonist’s childhood.

Phase Two: Apprenticeship

In one paragraph, describe your character’s introduction to their life’s trade and their subsequent education. A noble’s son might be made a page in another noble’s household. Many sons and daughters are sent to be novices in monasteries and convents. In a city you might become apprentice to an artisan, and in a village you might remain with your parents taking responsibilities on the farm. What happened to your protagonist? What kind of person is he shaping up to be? What do his parents want him to be? Is he willing to go along with that? Some young people are getting married at this phase in their life. Is that the case for your protagonist?

Pick a Mentor

Choose one mentor that stands out as your protagonist’s most influential teacher from this period in his life. For the three skills that mentor teaches, increase those on your character sheet by one step. Add each of the mentor’s gifted tools to your tool list.

Write an Aspect

Write one aspect that encapsulates your protagonist’s apprenticeship. If your character has professional skills that reach beyond adventuring, it might be a good idea to establish those with this aspect.

Write a Background

You may optionally write one background that describes something about your protagonist’s apprenticeship.

Phase Three: The Path to Adventure

You’re not likely to play a protagonist that stays on the farm or in the shop forever. Write one paragraph that describes how your protagonist transitioned from the mundane life that was planned out for her to the hero of the tales you will tell in your sessions. Did she run away to escape an arranged marriage? Does she display some unique skill that influenced her convent to use her as an emissary? Was there some crisis that interrupted her life and forced her to find her a new path? And in all this, what kind of adult is your protagonist turning out to be?

Pick a Mentor

Choose one mentor that proved to be your protagonist’s most influential teacher from this period in her life. For the three skills that mentor teaches, increase those on your character sheet by one step. Add each of the mentor’s gifted tools to your tool list.

Write an Aspect

Write one aspect that encapsulates your protagonist’s path to adventure. If your character has a major motivation that will drive her throughout the campaign, you may wish to establish it with this aspect.

Write a Background

You may optionally write one background that describes something about your protagonist’s path to adventure.

A Name

Likely you have already named your character in order to write about him. Fill this out on your character sheet and the process is complete.

You will note that is incredibly simple to make child or adolescent characters simply by limiting the number of phases you go through. 6 to 10 year old characters should only complete the first phase. 11 to 15 year olds should complete the first two phases. 16 years old and up protagonists should complete the full three phases of the procedure.

* True, there were phases in FATE 2.0 but they do not appear to be as fleshed out.

To register or to learn more about the convention, please visit http://www.conofthenorth.org.

There are many ways to play the Chronica Feudalis Manor System. Largely this is because there are many elements that can scale in complexity based on how interested you are in the element. If the tenants of the manor are villeins who work on your demesne, then you roll each season to see how they do with their farming / fishing / sheep herding. If they are free peasants, you roll nothing and just collect flat rent payments from them every year. The choice between the two has as much to do with the play style you’re interested in as anything else. If you’re interested in mining and lumbering, you can hire laborers to do these tasks for you or you could just buy the materials outright and avoid the hassle.

And because of the way that the system scales in size and scales in time, you have some choices in this regard. Are you telling the story of a family of peasants working one virgate strip of land – because the system can do that – or are you telling the story of several wealthy barons, each with their own manors, because the system can do that too. Or maybe each player is a peasant with their own virgate or perhaps all the players collaborate on running one baron’s manor. Are you playing with the manor system as a framework for your adventures or are manors something that work in the background of your role-playing focused campaign?

So what’s the problem? Lots of choices and scalability are good things, right? Well the issue that comes up now is how do I write this? At any one decision point, I feel the need to spell out not only all the various options, but also how each previous decision impacts all those option. Choosing between villeins and free peasant tenants is a different choice depending on weather you are playing the tenants or the lord.

My decision – for the moment anyway – on this issue is to create a default play scenario and write the manuscript targeted at that play-style. The scenario will likely be the one that most engages with the rules. It’s not that this play-stye is any better than any of the other options, it’s just that it hits on nearly every eventuality. Likely we’re talking about a knight’s fief (allows you to see every facet of manor life but still gives you room to grow) with the players sharing responsibilities of running the one manor (to illustrate how responsibility sharing can work) that uses the manor system as inspiration for short, episodic adventures (so that we can explore epic time-frames of castle building and generational play). I will of course hint at and imply the various other play options – probably including a section that introduces several of them – but it seems like it would make the writing of and learning of the system too muddled if I map out each path linearly through each chapter.

How do you match the hour-by-hour, minute-by-minute urgency of adventure stories with the long time-frames needed to see results come from your manor? Ploughing and planting fields will take up a full season. Then it takes almost a year (from the autumn planting season) before those crops are ready to be harvested. Building something like a church could take a few years. Building a castle or a cathedral takes decades.

The solution here, if you really want to engage with the manor system, is to let the manor system frame your adventures (and fortunately games like Pendragon have paved the way for this option). You’ll start play using the manor system and end play using the manor system. In the meantime, you will have periodic and distinct adventures. What I mean by distinct is that no urgent plot threads are left dangling. Are you really going to let five more years go by if your spouse is still held hostage by your rival?

So, how can adventures be inspired by the manor system? Well, we talked about hardships the other day: these are temporary aspects that can be compelled whereby you turn whatever obstacle your people are facing into a problem to be solved. Also, the GM can always compel the lord’s aspects. To be a lord, you either have to be a noble (which implies some obligations that might be the impetus of a compel), be a knight loyal to a noble (which has its own compel-worthy obligations), or hold some high office in the clergy (which again is full of obligations).

But another source of inspiration is having a rival manor run by the GM. What happens when the rival needs a resource that the player manor has? Or vice versa? Are deals made? Are raids planned? Do the two factions go to war? Conflict breeds stories, and conflict on the manor level can instigate adventure after adventure.