This series of articles will document my online rpg campaign Kingdoms in Flames, a rpg set in the Hyborian Age as depicted by Robert E. Howard in his Conan short stories. It is a campaign, meaning that it is a series of stories, each spanning one or more play sessions. It's online, meaning that we will be playing over the 'net with tools such as Skype , TeamSpeak , OpenRpg and Vassal Engine . It uses the rules of Dust Devils rpg. The setting is the Hyborian Age from Conan stories, in particular the Kingdom(s) of Koth and nearby areas.

The article series will consist of two kinds of articles: Session reports and in-depth coverage of specific areas of the game. Session reports will be more narrative whereas the coverage articles will thrive to cover specific areas (such as the tools used in the game) from many viewpoints.

In this article I will kick off the series by providing a short introduction to the campaign. 

I have been planning to run a Hyborian Age campaign for a long time. I have a soft spot for sword & sorcery / gritty fantasy. Our LARP group created a wonderful setting, the island of Kothar, which was a beautiful combination of ancient Finnish and Celtic and fantasy elements (if I may say so myself). The Hyborian Kingdoms, constantly in turmoil and changing rulers, is just perfect for role-playing: You don't need to create overly complex plotlines or power-struggle / intrigue situations, simple greed and power-motivated crazy kings / queens / wizards NPCs can act as the trigger for dramatic turns of events.

This basic idea has had many forms in my drawing board: WoD-like system combined with Warhammery, Mordheimy or some other strategiygame-like battles between different warbands, my own fantasy rpg system (general conflict system with an emphasis on character development) and now Dust Devils. Dust Devils seems like a good choice because in my own designs I've also been interested in character development and Dust Devils is just the kind of game where the characters can let hell loose like Conan does in Howard's short stories. (Even though I see Howard's Conan as a reluctant hero and he seems to randomly opt for the righteous choices at odd moments).

My regular RPG group has long ago split up to different corners of the earth (ok, Finland) and with Vellu's ST: The Next Generation campaign we have been able to form something of a online RPG routine together. OpenRpg and Skype have been our weapons of choice. In addition to that, we use Vassal Engine for the conflict resolution as OpenRpg's playing card plug-ins are less than favourable right now. 

In addition to determining the gaming tools to use, I made a simple setting description for the players to create theirr characters onto: I told the players that they are the captains of a mercenary group operating in the Shemic plains and just now returning to southern Koth. I also described the mercenary leader in short as well as giving some pointers on what plot hooks the players could hold on to in their character creation if that was their fancy. I did that to promote mutual creation as well as as a way for players to say if they are interested in strong plot elements besides their characters and their inner demons.

The easy character generation of Dust Devils was a delight and it produced five very promising mercenaries. We went on to play our first session, where the setting was laid out. I'll probably write more about the first session shortly, but let me say that I had two stages of feelings after running it. At first I was dissappointed in myself on not using the conflict mechanic as much as I could have and also not pushing the story in the way of conflicts more. Later I realized (after talking with the players) that they were happy that we had kind of layed out the normal routines of the characters so that the players would later see the change to more troubled times for the characters. I also had some technical difficulties with OpenRPG, but I'll write about them later, too.

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Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved.