I'm not exactly sure when the Gnomeworld game started and finished, and what else I did during this period of my gaming life. I am sure, however, that the Gnomeworld project was absolutely enormous compared to other games I had done when I started working on it.
Gnomeworld began quite simply; we were looking to run a new game, with new fresh characters. So we did; me and Lex created two new characters called Gelbon and Shamila, and ran this more or less exactly in the same style as the previous games. In the third session, though, something interesting happened – the adventure called for going back to a place we had already visited. I hadn't planned for this – it just happened – so we took a break in the game to make a little map of the area north of the city based on what we could remember of the first session. Since the first adventure in the area mentioned it being close to the country's borders, I ad-hoc made up “Glorywell”, a name taken straight out of Heroes of Might and Magic, and marked it as being the neighboring country. This left us with the left and right side of the map looking very empty, so just for the sake of good measure we drew all of the kingdoms' borders, and were left with a circular kingdom with one city in it, occupying exactly one A4-sized sheet of paper.
We went on with the adventure and left it at that; to the north of the mountains is another kingdom. Pretty soon, though, we got curious about Glorywell – what was it like, actually? So, on a whim I decided that the bad guys had fled the country, and turned the adventure into an exciting mission of exploring foreign lands. Taking a new sheet of paper, we drew out the kingdom of Glorywell as we went along; when the characters passed a river, we drew a river. When they saw a mountain, we drew a mountain. Pretty soon, we were both so curious about this strange new kingdom that we stopped playing altogether and just drew more of it, and by the time the evening came, we had mapped out our home country – Gnomon, the kingdom of the gnomes – and Glorywell, which we decided to be the kingdom of the humans.
I say that we were both curious, because the entire thing just sort of grew organically. I didn't plan for Glorywell to turn out at it did – we just played the game as we had always done, with obstacles and monsters, but we did do one thing different: We carefully documented everything. When we stopped playing to draw, it wasn't organic any longer, but I was still curious – for having a map added a whole new sort of excitement, a strange sort of anticipation: It was quite far to the capitol of Glorywell (creatively named Glorywell) and surely, it must contain a lot of cool stuff, right? I mean, it wouldn't be such a big, important city if it didn't, would it?
Sometime at this point I had to go home, and – filled with anticipation at what would happen in Glorywell – I began plotting and scheming for serious.Previously, I had done one adventure at a time and been happy with that – when the Gnoll King dies, the adventure is over and I'll make up a new one. Now, however, I was planning ahead, and really far ahead at that. “The king is sick; he needs medicine from the land of the elves. The elves are plagued by evil ogres and will need someone to kill them. When the king is about to get cured, his evil brother will try to kill him. When the evil brother is captured, his necromancer allies will try to get revenge.”
Strangely, as an outcome of this long-term planning, a spectacular villain emerged. I don't remember where he came from at all, actually – in all likelihood he was initially just some run-of-the-mill villain that was bossing around goblins – but what made this villain unique was that, after he was defeated by the PCs (or PC, as it was with Lex), he somehow managed to survive and get away. I don't remember how, or why, because I don't think it was really intentional – but he got away, and I remembered him when I was writing my plans. Then, I brought him back.
So it was that Shamila the Barbarianess got a nemesis – the menacing Baron, who was quite an extraordinary villain, probably one of my best. Throughout the chronicle he returned I think five or six times, each time with even more powerful minions and even more villainous plans. He grew alongside Shamila, both in power and in influence – initially a mere nameless, evil fighter with some goblin minions, but at the end of the campaign a megalomaniac demon-tyrant with hordes of monsters at his beck and call. The most spectacular thing about the Baron, though, was that despite being repeatedly defeated, and despite being killed twice (yes, he came back from the dead too) – he was never unmasked. He wore a black and red helmet with a visor, and it was never, as far as I can recall, removed – throughout the entire game. Nor was his backstory ever revealed. The Baron remained a mystery, and because of his megalomania and cruelty coupled with his inhuman nature – faceless, nameless, friendless – he became a very compelling bad guy.
I am, however, getting ahead of myself. When we first encountered the then-unimportant Baron, the entire world still consisted of only two nations – one big, one small. When me and Lex met again to play more, the first thing we did was to make the world bigger still. We elaborated the kingdom of the elves, the kingdom of the dwarves, the wild lands of the orcs, and so forth. Far to the west, we placed an impenetrable barrier of mountains, to put some sort of limit on our crazed world-building; the rest of the world was surrounded by endless ocean. Later, we added more nations with a bit more flavor than just “elves” or “orcs”, and in an unusual moment of creativity we even made two distinctly different dwarven nations.
By the time we began playing again, we had a world map spanning 36 sheets of paper, held together with sticky-tape and folded together with the utmost care to show only the relevant location. I would later use this world for a lot of stories, but for now, all we had was a map; a huge drawing, a geographical skeleton of a more or less empty world. Me and Lex had finished drawing the big picture – now, we would focus on drawing the small picture.
There was a craze of creating, inventing and detailing during this period of my roleplaying life – we would sometimes stop mid-adventure to ask ourselves “What food do our characters like?” or “I think my character was taught magic by his grandfather” - and we'd also take long pauses between games to draw a lot. We had drawings of our characters, of our characters in alternate outfits, of their family, of their extended family, of every single piece of equipment they carried with them, of their shared house (that they bought for honestly-earned adventuring money), of their respective bedrooms, et cetera. Of course, since neither of us was very good at drawing, they were simple pictures and they took virtually no time to produce, but it was the documentation that was important. Every detail, no matter how small, added to our world and to our characters. We had no way of knowing what would be important, so we took note of everything, from food to relatives to pointless customs of distant lands. We also started fiddling around with the rules, changing stuff we didn't like. We were terrible at it.
Shamila started out as a barbarian, but since that made the group consist of a barbarian and a wizard it meant we had no source of healing power, I put together a home-made “barbaladin” class for Shamila, which was basically a barbarian and a paladin, simultaneously. It was horrendously broken and meant that Shamila was much, much more powerful than my character – but on the other hand, Lex was strictly speaking the only player, so it was never much of a problem.
As I mentioned in the previous post, Shamila and Gelbon both made it to level 20, and that was with by-the-book experience points awards. They even made it beyond level 20 – although the actual story ended before that (the Baron was finally, definitely defeated for the last time around level 18, and with that the real story of the campaign ended. After that, we ran a bunch of unrelated adventures). The campaign ended with the two lifelong friends parting ways; Shamila married the God she had been devoted to ever since she became a barbaladin, and Gelbon waved goodbye to her and disappeared off into the Infinite Worlds, and with that we formally leveled them up to 21, just to have it done.
Aside from being a good-bye to a much beloved story, this was also a sad moment because it was the last serious, big game me and Lex had together; although we continued to play for a long time after that, my focus had shifted to players back home... players who initially were of a much more sinister bent than Lex or, indeed, the Baron.
Notable Characters:
Both Shamila and Gelbon. They were zealously detailed... and that's about all the cool that was to them, really. They weren't very interesting people; they were, however, not very interesting people that we knew almost everything about.
Crowning Moments of Awesome:
“The Tyrannosaurus Dragon uses its +26 Intimidate skill and roars. All your soldiers and followers pee their pants and collapse into whimpering balls of fear. What do you do?” - “I intimidate it back. Natural 20, and I have +28.”
Aside from that little gem, the Barons two deaths were really cool, cinematic moments. The first time, he was thrown into a deep pit full of fire, and messily burned to death. The second time, he had been reborn as a powerful demon prince, and was thrown into a planar vortex and destroyed. While such battles are simple and the staple of B-movies everywhere, they are also awesome. Such power is not to be disregarded.
Next Up:
Dark Hearted Heroes, in which a vile force of darkness arrives in the Gnomeworld, bringing with them murder, betrayal, evil pacts and utter despair. Kings and heroes fall by their hands, wicked beings kneel before them, ruin and death follows in their wake. They are the new player characters, and the world trembles where they walk.
