Empire of Bone at GenCon!

Long time no update! Here’s a brief one: lots of work done on Empire of Bone, including a demo game for Gen Con and Pacificon.

Here’s a pic of the demo kit – fun stuff!

Empire of Bone: The Empire Expands

Just an FYI, I’ve been busy with two things:
1) Work – My full-time job has been extremely busy, but things should (hopefully) even out pretty quickly.
2) Writing Empire of Bone – I got a big chunk of work done over the holidays, and am hoping to keep the momentum going once I put my regular work on a more even keel.
So, as I don’t have a lot of time to write about writing EoB, I thought the time would be better spent actually just writing EoB. So… don’t expect to see me writing much more here until I get more EoB stuff written.
Progress forward!

Empire of Bone: The Dismal Saints

The Dismal Saints venerated by the Black Church are Netherworld beings of considerable power, some say rivaling the Bone King who brought about the Empire as we know it. How these creatures came about is unknown to all except perhaps the Hierophant of the Black Church himself, and he does not share the secret.

The Black Church and its faithful speak of the Dismal Saints with fear and reverence. Clergy of the Black Church invoke the Dismal Saints with some degree of trepidation, for these beings severely punish those who earn their enmity. Many a powerful clergy has been laid low by Grims sent by an angered Saint, and a few unfortunate clergy have had the terrible privilege of being visited by one of the Dismal Saints.

Still, the Black Church holds sway in the Empire because of the power of the Dismal Saints, and few are willing to challenge their claim and risk the wrath of these Netherworld beings.

Empire of Bone: Cult of Dismal Saints

The Black Church is a powerful and omnipresent authority in the Empire, overseen by the enigmatic Hierophant. Their dogma runs as follows: undeath is a gift granted by the unknowable beings from the Netherworld. By paying proper homage to these beings, undead can continue their existence untainted by malevolent spirits, increase the likelihood of being resurrected again in case of an untimely destruction, or failing that ensure a peaceful place in the Netherworld.
Whether or not the beliefs of the Black Church are real, the power of their clergy cannot be denied. Calling upon the power of the Cult of Dismal Saints through haunting dirges, chaplains of the Black Church can enact seemingly miraculous powers unseen among other undead.  These invocations of the Dismal Saints allow them to bring deaders back from the brink of destruction or banish evil spirits back to the darkest parts of the Netherworld.
Some say the Black Church and their Cult of Dismal Saints is not too be trusted, that they have an agenda greater than the sanctity of the souls of the Empire. But few are willing to speak openly against them for fear of excommunication.

Empire of Bone: Ectoplasmic Machinations

I’ve always been a sucker for “weird science”. Conceptually, the idea of a crazy guy spending untold hours locked in the lab, challenging accepted notions, and emerging with a wondrous creation (optionally while screaming, “SCIENCE!”) struck a chord with me.  People who push the boundaries of conventional wisdom and create something new and exciting are just plain cool in my books.



That’s why I wanted to include the concept of ectoplasmists in Empire of Bone. Crazy guys refining soul energy to make all kinds of weird – and highly unstable – devices. In a soul-based economy, making efficient use of soul energies is fairly important to the goals of the Empire, and ectoplasmic research provides exactly that.

Of course, what can possibly go wrong with high concentrations of soul energy and highly unstable technology?  Absolutely nothing…

Empire of Bone: Planning Plot Points

One of the great things about the Savage Worlds game settings is the concept of the plot point campaign. It provides gamemasters a framework for running a complete campaign that allows players to chart their own path in the game world without feeling they are being railroaded from one adventure to the next.

The basic framework is fairly simple: there are a number of plot points “wrapped around” the rest of the world and usually tied to some sort of trigger: visiting a location, discovering a vital clue, encountering someone, etc. They are roughly sequential, and playing through them will take you from the beginning to the end of the story.

However, rarely do you play plot points one after another. Instead there are a large pool of related but non-plot adventures that fit between the plot points. These adventures are typically stand-alone and provide the players with new social ties, gear, reputation, etc. and lead you closer to the next plot point.

Additionally there’s the option of an “adventure generator” that takes common plot points, factions, characters, etc. and provides an adventure skeleton for gamemasters to flesh out into adventures. Great for when you want to make your own adventure and need a bit of inspiration!

For example, let’s take the Savage Worlds campaign 50 Fathoms. I had the pleasure of editing the initial release of 50 Fathoms, a great “fantasy pirates” setting written by my friend Shane Hensley. With it the main plot points were based around the rising waters of an island-based world before everyone drowned. The Savage Tales were typically location-based around the myriad islands and seas that made up the world. The initial plot point adventure gave the players a ship and a story hook into the plot point campaign, then let loose to explore the world – a great adventuring experience!

With Empire of Bone, it’s not your typical dungeon-crawl, exploration-based setting. Most of the adventure takes place within the confines of the Grand Necropolis, a Victorian-style city of the dead. While there are plenty of interesting places around the Necropolis, players typically don’t typically wander around in search of adventure. Rather, they are part of a noble house with certain responsibilities to the Empire – if anything, adventure comes to them! So how do you preserve the open-ended nature of plot points within this type of setting?

A few ideas spring to mind for open-ended story hooks:

• News Sheets – News “one-sheets” can be a great way to deliver any number of story hooks for players to investigate. Depending on the creativity of the gamesmaster, it can be an excellent in-game prop as well!
• Connections – The noble houses themselves have ties to the Crown, the Church, various industries, etc. If players have a background with loyalties to any one of these institutions, it can be a constant source of story hooks as they request assistance for services rendered.
• Rumors – Any player characters with street or society ties can get the word on what’s happening in these circles.
• Special Events - As players are members of a noble house, there have immediate ties to high society and any number of soirees can be made into story hooks for new adventures.

By starting off a new game session with a number of rumors, news articles, and requests, players can get the same feeling of choice as exploration-based plot point campaigns. At least that’s the plan!

Empire of Bone: The Clocktower

As part of my upcoming Empire of Bone demo at DunDraCon, I’m building a few set pieces for the different settings. The Necroblock: Chronometer from WorldWorks Games makes a great landmark piece for the mean streets of “Bleak End”:

Still lots of prep work to do, but it should be a fun little scenario!

Empire of Bone: Tabula Rasa

One of the tricky parts about building a society of undead is their relation to the living. Are their living beings amongst them? How are they treated? Are they the enemy? The bigger question is about the sentient undead. Do they remember their life before they became undead? If so, how does that shape the rest of society?

In Empire of Bone I decided a couple of key things: the living are very much “off-screen” – they exist, but are incidental in a society of the dead. The second is related to the first: new citizens of the Empire have no memory of their former life. Personalities and skills are intact, but former memories of life would be “burdening” to a sentient undead. So says the Ministry of Existential Verifications, who also assign the newly dead their role within the Empire. How convenient!

This may sound like a bit of an easy way out, but this leads to a lot of interesting story questions. Is the tabula rasa effect a natural part of the resurrection process, or something engineered to prevent “potential problems” with the trauma of becoming undead? if so, what happens when the problem goes wrong? What happens with deaders awakened “outside the system”? Lots of story potential there!

Empire of Bone: The Power of Death

In the Empire of Bone, death (and undeath) is a tangible force that imposes itself on the world in various ways:

• The Restless Dead – Once a living thing dies, they don’t always stay dead. There is a chance they will come back to life in an undead state: as a revenant, a zombie, a skeleton, a ghost, or as an animated “thing”. While many are quite civil about it, many also go about bothering the living with their undead state.
• Death Rot – The world is awash with entropic energies, causing everything to warp and rapidly. Everything appears to be in a twisted and dilapidated state and drained of color.
• Dead Sky – The sky has entered into a perpetual twilight, casting a pall on everything. The sun and moon both cast a dull light through the dead sky, with grey days giving way to a thick darkness on moonless nights.

This force of death can be controlled in various ways with those with the right knowledge:

• Grave Gifts – Every restless dead possesses a special power when they come back from the grave. Usually it is related to the method by which they died.
• Necromancy – Necromancy means “divination through communication with the dead”. Necromancers can do that and much more with the spirits of the dead.
• Reanimation – Through creative surgery and applied necro-science, talented surgeons can create mindless undead servants.
• Funerary Rites – The Black Church possesses certain powers over the dead, and indeed watches over the resurrection process.

This covers a fairly wide range of “dead powers” to work into story and player abilities!

Empire of Bone : The Big Bad

Back on the Empire of Bone project…

We have a defined setting premise: during the early Victorian era, there was an occurrence that changed the nature of the world so the dead came back from the grave. While some undead went about the nasty business of slaying the living, many were rather civil about it and took up their old lives again. Fast forward a few decades and you have a slightly altered mid-Victorian society where the living and the dead co-habit London.
This brings to mind a number of story possibilities, but the biggest is probably the hardest to answer: who is the “Big Bad” of the story, and why do the players care about it? Some ideas:

• The Undead Problem – Aside from being a bit icky to the living, perhaps the whole world-transforming rise of the dead has a farther-reaching and more sinister element to it. Maybe it’s a pre-cursor to some manner of world-destroying nastiness associated with it – possibly something that was engineered and has yet to reach it’s conclusion. The real trick is making it so that even the undead players have a reason for wanting to stop it – since it could mean the end of their existence if they succeed.
• Class Struggle – Things have really become upset since the dead rose, and are only really starting to settle down. Now that the living and the dead have gotten used to their new roles, how is it going to play out? There is an underlying class struggle in Victorian society – add the additional complication of the undead and it becomes an interesting tangle of politics to unravel.
• Outside Threat – Perhaps there is a threat originating from outside the Empire itself - perhaps a foreign power bent on conquering and/or destroying the Empire. Maybe the Prussians have come up with a new manner of applied necro-science that has given them a combat edge and are pressing the advantage.

Of course, the answer could be “all of the above”, but I’m trying to narrow down the options a bit in order to nail down the plot points. Ideas abound!

Foundations of the Empire (of Bone)

I’ve been doing a lot of research into Victorian culture as of late (partially out of personal interest), and actually have a very large map of London 1889 on my wall (Booth’s Poverty Map). Obviously for Empire of Bone I’m not planning to do a highly historical version of London - a wide-spread event which causes a large chunk of your population to become walking dead sort of precludes that. However, I do think it’s fun to include parallels and equivalencies to historical developments at that time. it allows for some tongue-in-cheek humor and subtle wit that some people enjoy when they delve into the background. Plus the history nerds love it!

Originally I was thinking of including of some sort of cataclysmic event that changed the course of human history and throw in “walking dead” as a side-effect. There’s plenty to choose from: The Black Plague on 1348-50 killed off 30-60% of European population, the Great Plague of London killed of 20% of London’s population. The cholera pandemics of the early early-to-mid 1800s killed tens of thousands of people.

Part of the trick is also finding a story catalyst that doesn’t significantly change the style of the world you’re trying to build. Would Victorian society have existed if whatever “undead plague” event happened back in the 14th century? If being undead effectively means immortality I think there’d be a lot of 14th century notions sticking around for a long time afterward.

So what if the event happened within more recent history and with a bit more subtlety? If you establish the event happening in the early Victorian era it would make a lot more sense for the Victorian societal trappings to still exist. And instead of having ravenous dead erupting from their tombs it’s more like dead uncle Edward popping by for tea. It isn’t like ravenous dead won’t erupt from their tombs during the course of the story campaign, it just doesn’t happen right away.

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“Empire of Bone” Project

“Empire of Bone” is the working name for my bit of personal game writing. It’s a project I starting half a decade ago for Savage Worlds and have recently been prompted to finish to get published. The gist of it goes something like this:

“Welcome to the Empire of Bone, a land of Victorian necropoleis where death walks hand-in-hand with the living. Skeleton chimney-sweeps clean the sooty furnace stacks of the factories where zombies toil many a mindless hour. Reanimators work in fetid labs manufacturing bizarre creations brought to life by the strength of their necro-science. Nobles both living and dead ride in silver-filigreed carriages drawn by bony horses, while necromancers in their long black frockcoats scurry to their lodges to practice their mastery of death magicks. The dark-robed priests of the Black Church keep watch over all, protecting the welfare of the many souls within the Empire. This is a place where death is only the beginning of your existence... welcome home!”

That’s the introductory paragraph for the game - now to get the rest of it done. I’m got multiple sections done in varying stages of completeness – now I just need to flesh it out some more and pull it all together into a cohesive whole. Once I get a bit more meat on the bones of this (so to speak) I’ll be looking for proofreaders and playtesters. Let me know if you’re interested!

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