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!

Medieval Gatehouse–Part II

Having the basic gatehouse worked pretty well for the encounter around which it was based, but the “advanced” version looked too cool to ignore. Considering the amount of work that was involved, I probably should have ignored it…
First off was build a top extension to place on top of the basic gatehouse.

After the basic building extension was done, it was time to add the “optional” crenellations. Once build, two tabs at the bottom of the crenellations slides into two slots at the top of the building.

The end result actually looked really cool, and made it feel even more like a classic castle.

Once mounted to the top of the basic gatehouse, it doubled the height and made it look like an even more imposing structure.

The next part is where it started to get tricky. Printing chain and portcullis designs on transparency paper yielded see-through and fairly sturdy chains and portcullis. Slotting the portcullis bars in a gate from and running the chains through the gate slots resulted in the following.

Of course, we needed something to hook the chains to, and so the next step was building a working winch. This actually involved building a rotating center core suspended in a frame and held in place with straightened paperclip!

Fastening the winches in place beside the gates and at the top meant and attaching the “chains” to them meant you can actually winch up the gate and portcullis! The process is a bit slow and finicky, but being able to do that in a paper model is impressive nonetheless.

The end result is a rather stylin’ gatehouse that is a great centerpiece for any 25mm-28mm miniatures battle!

Now to build some walls to go along with it…

Medieval Gatehouse - Part I

The next part I wanted to do as part of my fantasy terrain is a medieval gatehouse. I decided on using the gatehouse from WorldWorks Games CastleWorks Ultimate.
The building base used the older “Paperlinx” system, so I decided to modify the base a bit to make it compatible with the newer “Terrainlinx” system, essentially cutting two slots based on either side using the TerrainLinx template:

Like a lot of the earlier WorldWorks Games kits, there are a lot of fiddly bits associated with the model. Worst than that, there are some pieces that do not use tabs on all connection points, sometimes resulting in places where there are small gaps left between what’s supposed to be “joined”:


Still, with a bit of work the end result starts to look pretty good:

This is the “basic” version of the gatehouse, which is respectable in its own right, but I’d likely expand this out into the full version as time permits.