Why Do You Love The RPGs You Do? It's Worth Thinking About

If you've spent any time at all in RPG spaces, whether online or in-person, you've heard gamers talk about their favorite games. Whether it's one of the early games from the dawn of the hobby, something that exploded on the scene during the boom of the 90s, or one of the various settings that came out of the OSR revolution a few years back, gamers are not shy at all about bigging up the games we love.

However, a lot of these conversations devolve into arguments over time... particularly when we have a round robin regarding game recommendations. With that said, I feel like a lot of these arguments could be avoided if we took a moment to not only ask which games we like, but to actually take a moment to evaluate why we like them.

Really? That edition? Okay, make your case.

Before we get into the nitty gritty this week, don't forget to sign up for my weekly newsletter to get all my updates right in your inbox. Also, if you've got a bit of spare cash that you'd like to use to help keep the wheels turning, consider becoming a Patreon patron! Also, be sure you're following all of my followables, check out my LinkTree.

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One Man's Meat is Another Man's Poison

All of us have favorite games, but even if two different people adore the same RPG, they may love it for wildly different reasons. For example, Pathfinder Classic is still my go-to game for high fantasy RPGs, as it was for a lot of people. But while I loved it primarily because of the robust mechanics that carried on from DND 3.5, for other folks it was their first RPG, and they have a lot of nostalgia for it. Other people really like certain classes like the magus, or they love the Golarion setting, and enjoy exploring its various nooks and crannies.

While all of these players might share the same table, chances are good they're all getting something different out of this one game system. And while you can have that much variation among people who like the same game, you can also have one person who doesn't care for a game for the exact same reason another person absolutely loves it!

As an example...

While a lot of the interest in the FATE Core System has fallen off over the past few years, I remember when this game was everywhere. If you were looking to adapt a property, or if you needed a fast turnaround, this was the system everyone recommended. Horror, fantasy, sci-fi, FATE could do it all! It was easy to learn, easy to play, and it was a story-forward, mechanics-minimum experience that removed a lot of the reading and number crunching from your game, allowing new and experienced players alike to get to grips with the action quickly.

All the stuff I just described is what a lot of people loved about this game. It's also a description of why I was never more than lukewarm on it at best.

Now, does my opinion that this game is primarily just an exercise in cooperative storytelling but which barely has enough components to it for it to claim to be a game mean it's bad? Absolutely not. I'm one RPG fan in a colossal sea of people, and it was plenty successful without me buying a copy and making it my game of choice. And just because I don't subjectively enjoy an experience, that does not mean it isn't the perfect experience for someone looking for that exact type of game.

It was just bad for me.

And this is what I wanted to get to as part of this week's update. Because a lot of the time we know whether we like a game or not... but we don't always stop and ask why we do or don't like something. Especially when the thing we do or don't like might not actually have been the game's fault; a bad GM, awful table mates, too many homebrewed mechanics that just didn't work... a lot of things can make or break a game that have nothing to do with what's between the covers. That's worth thinking about, not just because it can help give you a better sense of what appeals to you as a player (thus making things easier to recommend to you in the future because you can more precisely describe your enjoyments), but because it can help you figure out what experience someone else might be looking for before you tell them the game they definitely need to play next!

We can like our games for whatever reasons we want. We can dislike games for whatever reason we want. But if you can't articulate what about this experience sparks joy, and what does not, then you're going to get into a heated debate with someone while the two of you talk past one another because the fact that this game is a chopped down, rules-light affair where your characters have the survivability of a wet paper bag may very well be the reason one of you hates it, and the other loves it.

Lastly, even though I didn't find a place to work this link in earlier, take a moment to go and read my article 5 Things You Can Do To Be a Better Ambassador For Your Hobby. I figured that gelled nicely with this week's topic.

A Reminder, For Folks Who Haven't Subscribed Yet!

Regular readers have likely seen me talk about this before, but we're only 106 subscribers away from getting the Azukail Games YouTube channel over 1,000 people! Not only that, but we're slightly less than 1,000 hours of watch time away from getting the channel monetized!

Whether you just want to listen to me talk instead of always reading my blog, you're a fan of audio dramas, or you're looking to break into the TTRPG industry and you want the inside scoop from a professional, that channel has a little bit of everything. And once we get it monetized, we'll be able to expand, and do even more stuff! And if you want to support some of my other work, subscribe to my Rumble channel The Literary Mercenary.

I am not allowed to have my own YouTube channel for complicated reasons, which is why I had to go to one of the site's only viable competitors. For the full run down, please read Trying Out Rumble as a Platform For My Audio Dramas (Join Me, Won't You?).

Like, Follow, and Stay in Touch!

That's all for this week's Moon Pope Monday. To stay on top of all my content and releases, make sure you subscribe to my newsletter at the bottom of the page!

Again, for more of my work, check out my Vocal archive, and stop by the Azukail Games YouTube channel, or my Rumble channel The Literary Mercenary! Or if you'd prefer to read some of my books, like my dystopian sci-fi thriller Old Soldiers, my hardboiled gangland noir series starring a bruiser of a Maine Coon with Marked Territory and Painted Cats, my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife or my latest short story collection The Rejects, then head over to My Amazon Author Page!

To stay on top of all my latest releases, follow me on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, and now Pinterest as well! To support my work, consider Buying Me a Ko-Fi, or heading to The Literary Mercenary's Patreon page to become a regular, monthly patron. That one helps ensure you get more Improved Initiative, and it means you'll get my regular, monthly giveaways as a bonus!

What is "Sundara: Dawn of a New Age" All About?

All the folks who keep a sharp eye on my latest additions and updates probably saw Cities of Sundara: Ironfire last week. This supplement is all about Ironfire: The City of Steel; a full-fledged industrial fantasy city built atop the volcanic forge established by an alchemist who figured out the formula to mass-produce dragon steel. The supplement provides a history of the city itself, insight into the culture that grew up around it over the past century or so, and it also gives you a map, as well as a district-by-district break down of what's in the city. There's a slew of NPCs, unique locations, and rumors you can use as jumping-off points for your game in there, too. Lastly I provided rules for using dragon steel equipment, stats for playing volcanically-adapted Cinderscale lizardfolk, stat blocks for dragonsbreath salamanders (the huge riding lizards native to the region), as well as unique background features for veterans of the city's mercenary trade.

Seriously, go get a copy!

This particular supplement is available both for Pathfinder Classic (or first edition for those who insist on the name), as well as for Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition.

However, while Ironfire can technically be used all on its own (either as the main location for a campaign or folded into your existing campaign world), it is merely the first installment of a much larger setting that I've been hammering on since the end of 2020. And since there are several new installments coming down the pike, I wanted to take this week to let people know what they can expect from Sundara: Dawn of a New Age.

And if you want to make sure you don't miss any updates on Sundara (or any of my other projects) then sign up for my weekly newsletter today!

What Is "Sundara: Dawn of a New Age"?

Several months ago I had an exchange with my contact at Azukail Games, and he suggested that we break some fresh ground by providing unique locations for GMs to use in their games. It was a deviation from the huge lists of NPCs, gear, random encounters, etc. that we'd done in the past, and I figured it would be a nice change of pace where we could see what the audience thought.

The first part of this project, 10 Fantasy Villages, went Copper in less than a week... so you could say we'd stumbled across something folks were definitely interested in seeing more of.

It really does have a lot of stuff crammed into it. Go on, get one for yourself!

One idea for a follow-up was to expand on the initial concept, and to do a collection of 10 fantasy cities. After all, urban games are tough on a lot of GMs, and you can never have too much content to draw on when setting a scene or making a unique location. For folks who are good at pattern recognition, though, you'll know that cities are my jam, so I didn't just want to do a shallow dive on a bunch of places that had the potential to become so much more.

And that was the inspiration for a whole new fantasy RPG setting which has become Sundara.

There are a lot of factors that make Sundara: Dawn of a New Age so unique, in my opinion. The first is, as the name implies, the setting is striding out toward progress, change, and finding new solutions to the problems people within it face. Unlike so many fantasy settings that can trace their roots back to the works of Tolkien, the world of Sundara is meant to feel rich, varied, and full of strange discoveries waiting to be made. It's got its share of old ruins, abandoned tombs, and lost places, but the idea is that people are looking forward to make new things, rather than trying to reclaim ancient relics of the past simply because they represent some lost time of glory or achievement.

What better way to represent that, we thought, than to start with a series of supplements that showcase some of the cities across the face of this new world? Places that have developed their own unique industry, and which make a statement about the sort of things that are possible during this, the dawn of a new age?

Not High Tech (Technically Speaking)

One misconception a lot of folks have when I have talked about Sundara so far is to just assume that it's a high-tech fantasy world, or that it's a magitech setting. And while there are definitely going to be pockets of such things in the world (freshly-discovered methods, or jealously guarded secrets protected by engineering guilds), that's not the thrust of what is going on.

Rather, what I want to do with Sundara is to introduce (for lack of a better term) "period" technology, combined with all the bizarre elements that are available in RPGs filled with monsters and magic.

Just as an example...

Getting back to Ironfire for a moment, the city was founded on the volcanic forge that produces reliable, high-quality dragon steel. While the location and method of power is very fantastical, the item being produced is pattern-welded crucible steel... what most of us think of as Damascus steel. This steel was regularly used for swords at least as far back as 800 a.d. in our real history, and techniques for producing crucible steel in the Middle East and India go back to the third century or so.

That is, in a nutshell, the sort of thing you're going to see all over Sundara as the setting expands.

Because our real history is full of wide-sweeping industries, feats of amazing engineering, and achievements that astonish us even to this day. From the highway system and shopping malls of ancient Rome that I mentioned in Introduce Some "Period" Technology In Your Game, to the industrial levels of soap production during the Middle Ages (as well as the enduring legacy of communal bath houses held over from the Roman era), history is a strange and undiscovered country. And that's before we add in things like celebrity advertising (how gladiators often shilled for particular products), or the attempts to keep products legitimate through maker's marks and guild seals like I mentioned in Who Are The Famous Brand Names and Merchants in Your Setting?

And those are the things I'm adding in to give Sundara its unique flair as a setting. It's a world that is full of odd quirks and strange resources, bizarre industries and curious crafters who are all trying to explore and expand on the resources of this unusual world they all live in. And that's in addition to the wide array of fantastical beasts, bizarre species, and competing ideologies that will likely span the width and breadth of the setting.

What Else About It Is Different?

In addition to the theme of moving forward into discovery rather than attempting to reach into the past, Sundara is going to have a variety of other elements about it that won't conform to what folks who play Pathfinder or DND 5E are likely to expect. While I'll be going into some of these in greater detail in future releases, I figured I'd provide a short list of some of the bigger ones here.

- Sundara does not use the alignment system. This will require a lot of changes both thematically and structurally for Pathfinder players, which will be addressed in upcoming supplements.

- I'm also nixing the multiplanar setting we've grown used to, with three-dozen or so different planes to explore. Sundara has only two realms; the material plane, and the Prim, the place where magic is born, and where the gods dwell.

- For the foreseeable future, Sundara is probably going to drop in separate splat books and expansions, rather than a single, unified rulebook/setting guide.

There's more, but I think this is enough to chew on for a bit.

For the first point on this list, alignment is one of the most contentious points for many Pathfinder players because it's such a huge part of the game as it's written. And like I said in Alignment's Roots Go Deeper Than We Might Think (How Much Stuff Do You Lose Pulling It Out?), you basically have to tear down the old cosmos, re-write a lot of spells, and either eliminate or greatly alter a lot of classes in order to adjust for a game that doesn't use it. And since I'm creating a whole new cosmos from the ground up, I figured that I would purposefully provide a setting where not using alignment was intended right from the get go.

As far as the cosmos, boiling it all the way down is meant to do a couple of things. One, it deals with eliminating so many planes tied to alignment (no devils, no angels, no demons, and so on, and so forth), and it allows the GM to keep gods and their desires more varied and mysterious. I'll go into greater depth on this in Gods of Sundara, which I hope to start soon, and hopefully you can all see where I'm going with this one.

Lastly, though, Sundara's books will (for the foreseeable future, at least) keep coming out in what amounts to splat books. And I want to talk about my reasons for that.

There is method in my madness, I assure you.

First things first, part of the reason for this decision is because this is a one-man show at time of writing. I can only produce content so fast, and while I can put out one Sundara supplement a month without straining too hard, a big RPG book could take a year or more to complete. A year or more of not getting paid at all, and the book could flop utterly after all that time and effort, leaving me nothing to show for it.

This setting is still in its infancy, and I'm trying to build up a fan base for it that wants to see new, fresh content. It's a lot easier to convince a publisher to put out a city guide, or a supplement for discussing gods and the nature of the divine, than it is to get someone to commit to a hefty tome that lays the groundwork for a whole new setting. And it's not just getting the project greenlit, either; it's also a lot easier to convince players (many of whom may have setting fatigue) to just try a bite of something new than it is to get them to fork over a big chunk of change for a massive book with an equally massive price tag.

Lastly, I want these early supplements to be flexible enough that players and GMs can have fun at their tables without needing to use the whole of Sundara to do it if they don't want to. If someone thinks Ironfire is neat, or they want to use Moüd: The City of Bones (this month's supplement, so keep your eyes peeled for this necromantic nonsense) as a central hub of a dungeon crawl game, they should be able to do that. The mechanical goodies that I'm loading into every supplement are meant to be used, as well. Even if someone opts not to play with them with the location I'm tying them to, I want people to use these tools to enhance their games.

What's Coming Up Next?

Well, in addition to Moüd (an ancient city that's been brought back from the graveyard of history by a guild of necromancers), and a supplement discussing Sundara's gods and magic, there's been a lot of talk about where this setting could expand if folks decide they want more. At present, the goal is to put out several more city supplements, and some more general supplements expanding the map and mechanics, and then to delve into providing more hands-on adventures. Species of Sundara is on the list, as well, for providing a varied, alternate take on the creatures players can take control of, ranging from the usual elves, dwarves, and orcs, to goblins, gnomes, and others.

Other potential projects include adventure modules, and if players respond well to these shorter stories it's definitely possible that bigger campaign books (with additional details, NPCs, and extra gaming goodies) will be produced as well. So if this is something you want to see more of, please boost the signal by sharing the links around, leaving positive reviews, and of course getting a copy of Cities of Sundara: Ironfire for yourself if you haven't done so yet!

Oh, There's Also Easter Eggs!

For folks who've enjoyed all the other supplements I've released over the past few years, there's going to be several Easter eggs for you to spot in the upcoming books.

As an example, all of the mercenary companies in Ironfire, from the Scarlet Company to the Bloody Fools, are taken right out of my supplement 100 Random Mercenary Companies. Additionally, the dragonsbreath salamander was a creature that I invented because of the salamander steaks entry that I talked about in 100 Fantasy Foods where I mentioned the meat had to be eaten raw, or acid seared, because of the creatures' resistance to fire. And for the upcoming City of Bones, the Silver Wraiths were one of the early entries in my 100 Fantasy Guilds supplement, and they are the backbone (pun very much intended) of the necropolis turned metropolis.

If you've been following all my past work, there's going to be a lot of call backs as I expand on Sundara... so keep your eyes peeled!

Like, Follow, and Stay in Touch!

That's all for this week's Moon Pope Monday. To stay on top of all my content and releases, make sure you subscribe to my newsletter at the bottom of the page!

Again, for more of my work, check out my Vocal archive, and stop by the YouTube channel Dungeon Keeper Radio. Or if you'd prefer to read some of my books, like my cat noir thriller Marked Territory, my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife or my latest short story collection The Rejects, then head over to My Amazon Author Page!

To stay on top of all my latest releases, follow me on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, and now Pinterest as well! To support my work, consider Buying Me a Ko-Fi, or heading to The Literary Mercenary's Patreon page to become a regular, monthly patron. That one helps ensure you get more Improved Initiative, and it means you'll get my regular, monthly giveaways as a bonus!