Dungeons & Dragons Ruins of Empire Regent Guide v.3.5 Draft 2.20 2010-03-20 1 Original design: Bjørn Eian Sørgjerd Additional design: Even Eian Sørgjerd Editing and development: Bjørn Eian Sørgjerd Additional development: Even Eian Sørgjerd, Brandon “Team Graaavy” Editorial support: Brandon “Team Graaavy”, the RoE PbeM player group Playtesting: The RoE PbeM player group Members of the RoE PbeM player group (past and present): Even Eian Sørgjerd, Rune Bang Leistad, Torleif A. Bruun Vaage, Torbjørn Mæhle, Andreas Brömster, Michael Romes, Joshua Cain Nycon, Harvey Alan Slaughter, Gray Drakeson, Chris Fedor, Matt Heath, Carl Thomas Stene, Malcolm Henderson, Brandon “Team Graaavy”, Sheldon Cooper, Jon B. Kvændrup, Robert Kurelic, Tomas Mørkrid, Thorsten Weitling, Bobby “The Rock”, ShadowMoon, Jared, Wiktor, Kalle, Dimitris, Greg D., Milos Rasic, Alexander, Kasper, Geir…and probably a lot more…feel free to e-mail me if you want your name included in the list. Special thanks to: Even E. Sørgjerd for helping make the game, Harvey Alan Slaughter and Jon B. Kvændrup for helping DM, and Brandon “Team Graaavy” for his devotion to details and tireless additions to the P&H. Based on the BIRTHRIGHT Campaign setting published by TSR and the DUNGEONS&DRAGONS® game designed by Jonathan Tweet, Monte Cook, Skip Williams, Richard Baker, and Peter Adkison. Foreword Hi, 2 Welcome to the Ruins of Empire play-by-e-mail game, set in my most beloved campaign setting – that of BIRTHRIGHT. Nowadays BIRTHRIGHT is pretty much the only game I find time to play, but once upon a time it was not so…and here follows the story of how BIRTHRIGHT became my favorite game, and how RoE came to be… When TSR first released the BIRTHRIGHT Campaign Setting back in the mid-90s, I was not exactly thrilled. Actually, I had more or less given up on AD&D 2ed and moved on to play other games. So when some players at my local gaming club, Hexagon, arranged a BIRTHRIGHT campaign, I didn’t even look at it before dismissing it as yet another low-quality steal- your-money TSR product. I’m glad I gave the setting a second chance, because as it turned out, BIRTHRIGHT was nothing like what I had expected from a TSR product at that time. Here was a setting, equally unique in both quality and innovativeness. At long last a setting that really allowed me as a DM to place adventures in a greater context and to add new elements of politics and intrigue into the usual mix of adventure and more adventure. One of my first campaigns centered on the domain aspect of play, with my play group primarily running the kingdoms of the South Coast. It was all very predictable, with a big war between Diemed on one side and Ilien/Medoere/Roesone on the other. It was a grand experience in all ways; yet it showed me that the domain system had several shortcomings and that I still disliked the AD&D 2nd edition rules when it came to running adventures. Overall, BIRTHRIGHT got added to my top-ten games list, but it was a long shot from being my all-time favorite. The defining “moment” of my BIRTHRIGHT experience started in 1997, when I got drafted into the military and got sent away to the bleak northern reaches of Norway. By chance, I got assigned to a camp not far (relatively speaking) from the city of Tromsø, the very place where one of my oldest gaming-buddies had moved some years before. With nothing to do on the weekends and no way of getting home, we decided to start gaming together again. Now, we could have ended up playing a host of games, and were actually pretty close to starting another major MechWarrior story-line or running a Shadowrun mini- campaign (another fantasy campaign was rather low on my priority list at that time). The reason I pulled out BIRTHRIGHT instead had to do with some books I had just read; A Game of Thrones by George R. R. Martin was just out in paperback and I had also plowed through a lesser-known trilogy by Elizabeth Moon, the Deed of Paksenarrion. Martin had excellent politics and intrigue on the “domain level” as well as extremely strong character descriptions and dialogue. Moon offered single-character focused novels (where the main character starts out as a lowly infantry-woman in a mercenary outfit) set in a believable low-magic world. Drawing inspiration from both books and combining them with the BIRTHRIGHT setting, I ended up putting together a character-focused camping in which the protagonists (who were horribly/wonderfully flawed) got forcibly drafted into the army of a Boeruine barony. Over the following years the campaign developed; the two main characters, Moergan Shaeme (a young runaway Dieman noble) and his faithful companion Wilfred Isilviere (a half-Khinasi bastard from Roesone) would adventure across much of Cerilia and beyond. Eventually both forged their own domains, and we got to integrate the domain rules into our campaign. The game ran for a long time, both in real life and in the game world, eventually reaching near-epic character levels and plot- lines (I believe 2ed 19th level by the end). By that time, however, I had moved on with my life and we only managed to get together to play for a few weekends each year. Indeed, my gaming time around 1999-2000 was at an all-time low. I missed it a lot, but could never seem to find time or players; at least not enough to run the kind of games I found fulfilling. And so I filled what little time I had with computer games and novels; a poor substitute at best. Back in the fall of 2000 I got introduced to the world of PbeM games by my brother Even. I joined a sci-fi game set in the 2300AD setting (a long-dead game, originally published by GDW back in the 80s). Curiously enough it was sort of similar to BIRTHRIGHT; each player controlled one faction (very domain-like) with a vested interest in the colonization of a new world on the fringes of civilized space. When that game started to falter, I decided to go ahead and set up my own BIRTHRIGHT PbeM instead. I knew there were other such PbeMs out there, Even had joined some, but I didn’t much care for them, since I was intending to try and recapture some of the flavor and greatness of the Moergan/Wilfred camping. And so I decided to do everything my own way, starting from scratch (oh, the hubris). When Ruins of Empire first started in October 2000 it was a very small game, with only the South Coast open to players and not even all of the domains there were filled. All the original players were Norwegian, primarily made up my old gaming companions. The game was entirely in Norwegian; the rules set (v1 of the RoE rules), the domain descriptions and all communication. Everything was fairly standard BR at that point (with some house rules in place and altogether new domain descriptions), with AD&D 2ed rules used for building characters and such. It became clear, however, that if the game was to continue to have a future, we would eventually need a broader player base. So by Turn 9 I have converted everything to English and greatly upgraded both the rules (v2 of the RoE rules) and the domain descriptions based on play experience. We immediately gained several new players and the game area was expanded to include parts of the Eastern Marches. By now the domain rules had evolved quite a bit, but were not really coherently presented. DnD 3E started creeping into the setting as well. 2001-2002 were good years for the RoE game; we were still small, but we had a stable and dedicated player base. In 2003 (if I remember correctly) I decided the RoE game deserved a thorough overhaul. And having too much time on my hands I undertook a back-breaking effort to upgrade the domain rules and present them as a cohesive whole (v3 of the RoE 3 rules). I also added and upgraded a lot of domain descriptions, and tried to modify the DnD 3E rules to suit my vision of BIRTHRIGHT (with limited success; it became too much work, and was eventually abandoned). In 2004 my time grew more limited again and development took a back seat to just keeping the game running. I also grew fairly weary of the whole game. Not because it was not fun, but because it took so much effort just to keep it running. I even considered closing the game down, but eventually settled for reducing turn frequency and limiting the number of players to a more manageable level. The end finally came in 2007. Turns had slowed even more as I had too little time, but more importantly my energy was gone. The major plotlines had been wrapped up and I was satisfied. Alan, one of the senior players, took it upon himself to run the game for the final 10 turns. Alas, that was not to be, as he got seriously ill in the spring of 2008 (but he’s doing better now). But I couldn’t let a dead dog lie it seems…so I decided to start a NEW game. RoE II will open in late 2008, and hopefully it will be as long-lasting and satisfying as the first. Only time will tell… Bjørn E.