The Honorable Club of Role Playing Gentlemen and Ladies of the Center Total war

[Narf]

If we could bump it up to be last exile inspired too, I'd be immensely interested and later invested..

[Dirty Chai]

In what regard?
Airships and airship battles aren't unique to Last Exile (as in, we'd have those already).
Did you mean the Guild particularly or something else?

[Ferreira]

Hey guys, I'm kinda new here and have a question.
I'm starting a roleplaying group with some friends over a portuguese speaking Grand Strategy/Total War forums, and ran into some trouble. We're creating a cyberpunk universe, inspired mostly by Shadowrun.

The problem I ran into was that I really want to play, have my character and all that, but I'm the one organizing it, and the only one with roleplaying experience, I believe. I've seen some GM's playing on their own rps here, but how do you conciliate the both?

Hope I was clear enough!

[Dirty Chai]

You can play your own character if the other players trust you and you just keep the GM-ness and character separate.
Beyond that, it's just a matter of how much math you want to do (if you're doing mechanics) or how much added GM stress you can handle.

[Ferreira]

You can play your own character if the other players trust you and you just keep the GM-ness and character separate.
Beyond that, it's just a matter of how much math you want to do (if you're doing mechanics) or how much added GM stress you can handle.

We are doing full roleplay.
Any general tips for new GMs? Never did anything like this on forums.

[Dirty Chai]

Just remember that you are not narrating a story to them. You're making a story together, with you simply facilitating needed NPCs and plot devices.

[Narf]

I'm NOT thinking the guild. That's the part I liked the least. I just like the aesthetic, for both countries portrayed there. And how the ships functioned with the bridge and all that jazz. Something else I'd think that would be cool, would be if there were some that had created the same conditions in the Ocean, like the big ass ship in Atlantis the Lost Empire. Also cool with the bridge, communication specialists and so on..

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[Agamemnon]

@BF: That sounds really cool, I especially like the idea of basing this society on an ancient Eastern sort of thing. I'm not particularly familiar with Far Eastern culture, but the culture of, for example, the Canaanite tribes has always fascinated me. It really seems like in those days any dude could run off and found his own nation if he could make enough babies, at least from the accounts in the Bible. Thus, if we're basing this around that sort of culture, this really seems like it would be a great place to implement the house system that I generally despise in RPGs.

[Dirty Chai]

I'm NOT thinking the guild. That's the part I liked the least. I just like the aesthetic, for both countries portrayed there. And how the ships functioned with the bridge and all that jazz. Something else I'd think that would be cool, would be if there were some that had created the same conditions in the Ocean, like the big ass ship in Atlantis the Lost Empire. Also cool with the bridge, communication specialists and so on..

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

That's basic steampunk. So no worries.
The actual technology will be more fantastical though, based on around more magical substances, like the cores that keep the islands afloat in the sky.

@BF: That sounds really cool, I especially like the idea of basing this society on an ancient Eastern sort of thing. I'm not particularly familiar with Far Eastern culture, but the culture of, for example, the Canaanite tribes has always fascinated me. It really seems like in those days any dude could run off and found his own nation if he could make enough babies, at least from the accounts in the Bible. Thus, if we're basing this around that sort of culture, this really seems like it would be a great place to implement the house system that I generally despise in RPGs.

I hadn't thought of it that way. I was thinking of it as a One Shot.
But as a game with mechanics? Huh.

I imagined us as people of one of these particular flying city-states, or perhaps characters on both sides of the world, surface and sky.
The general, overarching plot would be a changing world based on something to do with the flying cities;
Maybe even start with the destruction of a surface city ("Fire from heaven"), and then also show why that happened above too.

The things I come up with and envision seem more suited as novels than as RPGs sometimes..

[Xion]

That's basic steampunk. So no worries.
The actual technology will be more fantastical though, based on around more magical substances, like the cores that keep the islands afloat in the sky.

Perhaps something like Skies of Arcadia's moonstones or a form of crystallized substance?

[Narf]

Cool, then I'd like to be a Mercenary of some kind. Own ship, respectable size, without being a part of a fleet. But pro with Uniforms and such. Maybe like the Ulysses. Maybe not. Very rough idea so far.

[Agamemnon]

I dunno, Steampunk really doesn't seem to me like it's the right aesthetic. BF's idea places this in an ancient society where the cities are held up by magic, and while there obviously has to be some technology for the fliers to exist, if we retain the ancient civilization it really doesn't make sense to have modern steampunk mercenaries and such. Has anyone here ever read Edgar Rice Burroughs's Barsoom series? That's the sort of thing I was envisioning, if you look it up. The Martians actually have more advanced technology than we do, but when reading it the world feels like it's more of a pre-Classical Greek or Bronze Age Mesopatamia sort of thing than anything remotely modern (except the last book, which clearly draws its imagery from the Aztecs).

[Dirty Chai]

Hmm.. there could be "uniforms", but nothing modern-like (nothing that resembles 1600's or later).
People might have advanced clothing pieces akin to that time, but there's no concept for organizational uniforms.

[Narf]

No cool clothes or guns? I was looking forward to the whole ancient steampunk thing. Like with a lot of tech forgotten how it works and such.

[Zectorman]

@Ag

Steam punk, is good punk

I want my ancient machine armies. Maybe a far flung era, after a cataclysm of some sort. Old technology is now rediscovered and used. A post Dark Age of tech rp. new nations springing up and taking whatever tech they can find and try to use it....resources are scarce etc.

[Agamemnon]

That's really not at all what I got when I read BF's idea.

[Dirty Chai]

I do have an idea that pertains to "ancient-ness" and M_1512's endless quest to create a game called "Genesis of Empires":

We could perhaps play a (mechanical, not one-shot) RPG similar to TRS (and the other Roman RPGs) in structure.

It's a fictional setting, inspired by the aftermath of the Late Bronze Age collapse, which in my view, set the stage for Classical Antiquity to ferment some several centuries later.
Migrations & technological change, and ecological & economic disaster(s) changed the setup of the eastern Mediterranean and Near-East.
The Assyrian Empire collapsed, and power vacuums severely weakened the Near East.
Cities along the Mediterranean were destroyed and left abandoned, many even razed. (Troy?)
Indo-Europeans and other groups (isolates, such as the Etruscans) migrated in from east, north, and west.

We'd be a city or even a tribe - some form of budding state.
Our ancestors - perhaps our great grandfathers - took this land, invading from distant lands.
This is an age of the fall of strong but expensive bronze weaponry and the rise of plentiful iron weaponry.
It is an age of chariots still, but the maryannu noble caste has fallen in the background and the use of mass infantry has risen.
The creation of two-layered galleys, biremes.
We'd have chosen at some point not to rule by despotic monarchy, but by some form of governance where all the players have more power rather than just one.

There'd be a vote (if people are interested) to determine what kind of cultural umbrella we should most resemble in reference:
West, From the Sea - Inspired by the Sea Peoples and Indo-European peoples spanning from Italy to Greece to the Levant.
North-East, From the Deserts & Steppes - Inspired by the Indo-Iranian peoples who moved south from the steppe into Iran and India.
Reborn - We are natives who have thrown off any foreigners and taken our city and state to independence and potential power. This entails a Semitic or Egyptian aesthetic.

[m_1512]

I like this idea. A mechanical RPG would be quite a change.

[Agamemnon]

I've always wanted to play that sort of game as a tribe of Hebrews right after the exodus. Other ideas are also cool, but I'm partial to Jews.

[Dirty Chai]

Yes, it would be a very interesting analogue to play with for a lot of us I suspect, but I bet you can agree it shouldn't be a direct parallel..
Anyway, this falls under "Reborn" (Semitic), obviously.

Edit: We could also go earlier in this world's history, back to the days of the first empires, based on the Sumerians, Amorites, and Akkadians.
It would look more like this rather than this.