Time to Reread Reign

[drcpunk.livejournal.com]

As I was going through and commenting this month's issue of Alarums and Excursions, I saw in Michael Cule's zine that there was an introductory Reign adventure, "Imperial Harlots". I did a web search and discovered that this was in the tenth supplement for the game.

For anyone reading this who doesn't already know, Reign is an rpg written by Greg Stolze. The game is for sale. The supplements are released ransom style, which means that the first twelve are now available for free download on Greg Stolze's website. I've downloaded them all, but haven't read them all yet.

So, Friday, I read the tenth supplement, discovering that Greg practically dedicated it to me. I'd asked him the same question I'd heard many times, to wit: What sort of sessions does one run with Reign? It is, after all, a game that operates on both the level of individual player characters and the level of Companies, which can be anything from one's personal band of (NPC) retainers to a fleet of pirates to an entire country.

Between this supplement and Michael Cule's thread on his Reign campaign, I think I'm beginning to get the idea. I'll need to do a little rereading, of course, but it no longer looks like a trackless wilderness out there.

I'm wondering if I could apply the Company rules to a couple of things I'm trying to run. There's an adventure I want to run for mnemex and ebartley set in the Lovecraftian Dreamlands and surrounding areas, only I've been having trouble figuring out what the adventure should be about. mnemex suggested I step back and look at the big picture, which, in Reign terms, would be a war between Companies.

Then, there's the Strange School play by email. In the weird world of 2036, the Microsoft Corporation just got caught doing bad. There's going to be fallout. While the focus of the game is not about how fictional Microsoft gets smacked down, it might an interesting thought experiment to stat the company out as a Company, and do the same for its more important enemies. I'm not sure how easy it is to apply Company rules to a modern or vaguely futuristic setting, but it should be doable.

Comments

[viktor-haag.livejournal.com]

Two separate thoughts:

• It may be useful to point out that a collection of the first six supplements has been gathered into a bound volume called "First Year Of Our Reign" (available from IPR as is the original game). I don't know whether Greg plans on a "Second Year" annual as well.

• Our group tried Reign, and while we felt generally positive about the person-level mechanics, we were never really able to get the group-level mechanics going at our table. We also dispensed with Greg's gameworld, and subbed in the gameworld from Artesia instead. The adventure was fun, lasted our groups typical "roughly a term", but in post-mortem I think we pretty much all felt that we weren't really able to make the group mechanics work to our satisfaction, and that while we might sort of have liked the game, we didn't like enough to rabidly adopt it and play more of it. A fine effort, but not one to capture our hearts.

In theory, I like the group-level mechanics, or at least the notion of them, but in practice we couldn't figure out how to make them take off. By contrast, the sort of "community assistance" rules in HeroQuest, I found much easier to pin into the ongoing flow of play during that set of adventures.

[drcpunk.livejournal.com]

I think I downloaded "First Year Of Our Reign". Greg was talking about a Second Year on his website.

The Company rules are sort of war gamish, and Michael Cule's thread is an interesting example of how they can work side by side with the rules for individual PCs. The reason I'm looking at them is that there are two things that I'm not actually trying to play out per se, but which might benefit from the Company rules, so using them would be a low pressure thought experiment.