Your ship drifts through the sweltering mist, aimless and silent. You can't find the strength to sit up and look around, not that you would see anything if you could. For the past two weeks (Or was it three? Frankly, for all you know you've been out here for years) you've languished in foggy doldrums as your companions perish one by one. The captain's prayers to Poseidon have gone unheeded, and yesterday he died after drinking seawater. All that remain are your three most stalwart comrades, and you. It was you four who originally saw the vision from Zeus commanding, "Set sail, heroes, and the gods of Olympus will guide you to glory," though with each passing day your faith wanes. At this rate you'll die on a rickety boat, forgotten and unmourned.
A cool breeze brushes against your cheek, and the sails flutter. Your companions begin to stir as the wind picks up, and you force yourself upright. A vigorous wind fills your sails and the fog slowly disperses. An island! Just a short distance away is a great green island, and you can see the smoke from chimneys behind a towering mountain.
Your heart swells and strength returns to your limbs as the ship sails faster and faster toward the island. Within minutes you're aground. You and your companions jump onto the shore and kiss the sand, praising all the gods. Just off the beach is a dense forest of unfamiliar trees. You hear the calls of strange beasts within.
Then you notice three statues, not fifteen feet from where your ship landed. They're statues of the gods, Aphrodite, Apollo, and Poseidon.
With the sound of grinding stone, the statues stir...
This is what we call "rebound." Dark Heresy is dead of Hamachi fuckery and I'm moving on quickly to something else. Something that doesn't need a grid, or maptools, or any of that shit, but isn't some fancy shmancy diceless roleplay method acting nonsense.
I settled on Agon.
In Agon, you play as a Greek hero who has found himself far from home, in a strange place where the gods and myths of his homeland are all too real. Each island has its own terrain, culture (Though all are Greek in basic nature), and set of problems. Your hero is a pawn of the gods, pushed towards greater and greater deeds in their service, while your ultimate fate inexorably creeps closer. And so, you find yourself leaping from island to island, putting right what once went wrong, and hoping each time that your next leap will be the leap home.
In all seriousness, you sail across the bizarro-Aegean, being pushed around by the gods and trying to make a name for yourself. One day you'll meet your fate and you want to be remembered when you do.
That leads into the coolest part of the game, competition. Not everybody gets to be a legend. For every Hercules there are four or five regular guys following him around who died young and were promptly forgotten. You'll be working with your companions, but at the same time you'll be working against them. You can't slay the Brass Scorpion of Phobos by yourself, but you can't all kill it either. There will be a scoreboard where your character's exploits will be recorded, and when the game is finished there will be a winner.
In addition, you'll be competing against me. In Agon I'm not here to lead you guys through an exciting story where you save the day. I'm here to kill you. Technically, I'm only here to make life difficult for you. Your character is a hero of destiny and until that destiny is fulfilled you can't die. Basically you have a stat called fate that starts at 0 and ticks up for various reasons (If you fall in battle you gain 1 fate. If you complete a quest you gain 1 fate. You can also take fate points to improve rolls and stuff like that). As your fate increases so does your renown and skill, but once you hit 16 you're almost done. At 16 fate you go on one final quest, and it's on that quest that you'll die. Once your dead, the only thing you have left is the story of your life, so make it the craziest fucking story you can.
That's basically the premise. I'm not going to go into huge detail about the rules right now, we'll deal with that in the first session. You can always "Obtain" the rulebook if you want to and make a character beforehand, otherwise I'll run everybody through the basics when we make characters. There's stuff for character creation that has to be done together anyway.
So basically what I need now is your character's name and your patron god. Your name should be Greek, and consists of a first name and the name of your father or mother. Something like "Aristarchus, son of Euryphon." If you have future characters you can make them the children of your first character if you want. You can also make your character the son or daughter of a god. If you do that you automatically get a better name die (Which can be added to most rolls and represents your fame and renown) but you also start off halfway along the fate track. Better not disappoint your dad.
You also have to pick your patron god. This can be any of the basic Greek gods, try not to pick anybody obscure. Your patron god will look upon you with more favor than your companions, and might even grant some boons to help you out. Each god has three favored abilities. We'll talk about those during character creation or you can see them by getting a hold of the book and checking them out.
Basically characters have twelve abilities. Each ability has a die (d4, d6, d8, d10) and that's what you roll to see if you succeed at that ability. Nothing is free in Agon. If you want to do something and it's not something trivial, you'll have to roll for it. Each success brings you greater glory. There is no fudging die rolls, and there's no "Well, we'll just say this happened, no need to roll for it." In a competitive game that would be very unfair.
That's basically it, I'll post more if I think of it. I'm looking for four players, and we'll be using IRC. Games will be Sundays at 10PM GMT.
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Topic: Agon - Competitive IRC RPG (Read 1332 times)