Tabletop Timetraveller's Portal

Part 1

I’ve been working in the tabletop RPG field for twenty years, and I’ve contributed to such settings as The Forgotten Realms, Oathbound, and Golarion. Cobalt Kingdoms has existed for approximately six years in a state of on-again, off-again development.

This map shows the northwest corner of the Cobalt Kingdoms, a setting that encompasses the entire globe. The map is obviously in somewhat of a proto-state, with mountain ranges, forests, rivers, and regional borders still undefined. I’m making the map in Inkarnate, because to date, it produces the most professional looking results of any fantasy map making software I’ve seen. I’ve also been paying the fee to get all the features and the license to publish the maps I make professionally.

So what are the Cobalt Kingdoms? Put simply, it’s a 5th edition campaign setting in the purest sense of the word. Back when settings were all the rage at TSR, only small sections of the products for sale would be for rules. The rest would be rich and detailed information about the people, politics, and places contained therein. They were chock full of adventure hooks and suggestions to put you in the driver’s seat for your game. You were free to use whatever rules you and your group agree upon, whether they be from official or third party supplements. This swung a great deal toward rules content during 3rd edition, and it setting products have largely remained unchanged since then. Cobalt Kingdoms will take you back to a format much more reminiscent of those earlier products.

In addition to that, the Cobalt Kingdoms will be an open setting. When I say open, I mean that anyone who wants to will be able to set their adventures, stories, and novels there, and release them commercially, royalty free, under the community logo. You can even release rules modules if you so desire.For right now, Cobalt Kingdoms is an idea. Some portions exist within the text of adventures that are already available for sale, but the vast majority of it exists within my mind. My initial effort is obviously to get those ideas onto paper in a professional, edited, and attractive format. Eventually it will be something that you can purchase and adopt for your own gaming group. But that’s a discussion for later.

So, with the recent release of the first teaser trailer for Star Wars Episode IX, we learn that the movie’s official title is Rise of Skywalker, and that Ian Mcdiarmid will be back as Palpatine. Meanwhile people are scratching their heads, wondering how it’s possible that he could somehow be alive after we see him disintegrated in the bowels of the second Death Star. The fan theory I’m going to float is that while Palpatine may be in the movie, he isn’t back from the dead, cloned, or somehow otherwise present in the current story. It’s a flashback. And while this is just a fan theory, I am one of the people who figured out the big twist ending in The Sixth Sense within the first ten minutes of the movie, and I often irritate my wife by figuring out plot twists well before they happen. In other words, I’m pretty good with narrative structure. In fact, I’ve worked as a narrative designer for what was a major video game studio, but I digress.

In The Force Awakens, we see Rey suddenly come into force powers she never knew she had. She said that it felt like it had just woken up inside her, and then with literally no training she was doing things that it took other jedi years to learn. This was a clue that there is something interesting and unique about her origin.

The next clue comes from earlier in the same movie, when Rey touches Luke’s lightsaber. As we all remember, that lightsaber had originally belonged to Anakin Skywalker, and then was given to Luke by Obi One in A New Hope. Luke loses this lightsaber on Bespin while fighting Darth Vader. The presence of the lightsaber and her obvious and unexplained connection to it provide us with another clue.

Moving on to The Last Jedi, Rey goes to the dark side cave because she feels that she’ll be able to learn something about her parents. What she sees there however are just endless copies of herself. Now, it could be argued that this might just be mirroring a scene in Empire Strikes Back where Luke sees his own face in Vader’s helmet, I mean this is a dark side cave after all, but it’s also possible that what the force was showing her was the she’s her own parent.

Wait… what?

It’s the original trilogy and Empire Strikes Back has just ended with Luke deciding it would be better to let himself fall to his death than join Darth Vader. Palpatine still wants to take another Skywalker as his new apprentice. He knows Vader is going to reach a point soon where he’s going to turn on him and he’ll be forced to destroy him. Vader says as much when he confronts Luke on Bespin. It’s inevitable, and Palpatine has had to arrange the death of at least one former apprentice, Count Dooku. He’s also not so convinced that Luke can be turned. Despite this, somehow, Luke’s lightsaber is recovered, and if his lightsaber is recovered, odds are pretty good they found his hand too. That means they had his DNA, and in Star Wars if you have someone’s DNA, you can clone them.

We also know that clones can be altered. In Attack of the Clones, we find out that the clone army are clones of Jango Fett who have been altered to mature faster and be better soldiers. We also find out that everybody’s favorite anti-hero, Boba Fett, was unusual in that he was an unaltered clone of Jango that he took as a son. In other words, just because Rey isn’t male doesn’t mean that she can’e be an altered clone of Luke. It also means that Disney didn’t have to go out and cast the new lead as someone who looks remarkably similar to a younger Mark Hamill.

So, Palpatine being back in Episode IX will be a flashback that will show the truth of her origin, which is that the Empire clones her. When the Empire fell, she was likely too young to remember anything, and she was adopted, either by someone who was with the Empire, or by some junk dealers who found her later on. Kylo Ren wasn’t lying when he said that her parents were nobody, but they weren’t her real parents. Either he is unaware of this, or he was intentionally trying to deceive her.

Also, if Rey is a clone of Luke then it makes sense that she would feel a connection to the lightsaber and that it would awaken latent force powers within her. Maybe a clone wouldn’t have the same memories as the being it was made from, but the force is a kind of magic, and maybe that magic was already developed within her because Luke had already developed his own force skills before he lost the hand. Or maybe it’s just that potent Skywalker blood.

To support all this, I’m going to say that Disney isn’t stupid. There has been this narrative about the production of these movies that Rian Johnson just jumped in and did his own thing with the characters without any oversight. JJ Abrams has said as much.

We’re supposed to believe this? Really?

Disney paid $4 billion to buy up the Star Wars franchise, and we’re supposed to believe that the producers of these movies didn’t get together and figure out everyone’s backstory and major plot twists ahead of time? This is an utterly ridiculous narrative. It’s a total red herring. And they’re trying to sell it to us to mislead us and keep us from jumping to this conclusion. It’s so easy to just shrug and tell us that Rian Johnson screwed it all up. That might be how they did things with the original trilogy (they decided that Leia’s Luke’s sister while they were making Return of the Jedi), and I think they’re trying to convince us that they’re flying by the seat of their pants now. But I don’t buy it. This is too important for Disney to get right, and they’re deceiving the fans when they tell us that they didn’t coordinate the major plot points of the movies well ahead of time.
They want the movie to come out and then they’ll smile and say they planned it this way all along, and oh boy did we have you going!

Or at least that’s my take. I could always be wrong, but at least my personal fan theory is supported and is internally consistent from a narrative perspective.

I’ve been saying quietly on forums and posts for years, and I usually get the half-hearted head nod followed by, “But really it is.” No it’s not! Too many times I see people evaluating RPG campaign setting products and saying things like, “The city population sizes are too large for medieval cities,” or “People there sure seem to speak with a modern American dialect,” or “That weapon isn’t historically authentic, so this is wrong,” or… I could go on and on. Look, if you’re searching for modern make believe that is intended to bring historical authenticity, check out the Society for Creative Anachronism. But if we’re talking about gaming, there are so many inherent differences between “standard fantasy worlds” and medieval Europe that you can just stop with that argument.

Let’s start with the obvious, and most important differences between fantasy and medieval Europe: magic and monsters. There were literally no monsters, nor was there any magic in medieval Europe. This is important, because both of these things are drastic game changers. Magic allows you to do things like cure injuries and disease instantly. It allows you to travel to far-away places in the blink of an eye. It allows you to lay an enemy low from a distance without having to do so much as fire an arrow. Think about the implications of this realistically.

Magic that allows you to heal people better than modern medicine does means that people will live longer and there will be a much reduced rate of infant mortality and child deaths. This means population sizes will be larger. You could always make the argument that the peasants wouldn’t be able to afford treatment, which is a modern conservative way of viewing health care, but the fact is that most of these “medical treatments” come from clerics in service to gods of good or neutral alignment, which means they aren’t going to turn people away because they simply don’t have the money. Magic aside, even if you do compare it to medieval Europe, Rome had a population of 1 million in 100 BC, Alexandria Egypt had a population of 1 million in 100 BC, Constantinople had a population of 600,000 in 600 AD. In other words, even in a world without modern healthcare or magic, we still had massive cities with a million people or more in this world.

Next, let’s look at magical travel. We’re talking about a world where a wizard can cast a spell and be halfway across the world, where there are magical gates that allow people to instantly travel from one continent to another, or even from one plane to another. There are those who believe that including people of color in fantasy is just some “SJW crap.” Actually no. In a world where people are just as mobile as they are today, if not more so, the only way you would have a culturally and racially homogeneous society is if the people of that society rejected racial integration. You might even be inclined to imagine that this would be the case, but getting back to actual history, the exact opposite was true. With things like the Roman Empire and the Silk Road, the major ancient and medieval cultural centers had a variety of peoples present. When Rome conquered parts of Africa, the people there were not subjugated, they were brought into the Roman Empire. When the Roman Empire came to England, people of African descent were already a part of it, and there were black people in England. Trade, likewise, brought people together from far away lands. The merchant was far more interested in accumulating wealth than worrying that someone from Asia doesn’t belong in their lands. In other words, if history was multi-cultural, so too should fantasy be, and to a greater extent because individual mobility is greater.

And this brings me back to people who like to argue that what we think of as a broadsword isn’t really a broadsword, a mace isn’t really what we think of as a mace, and so on. The fact is that regardless of historical fact, there is a cultural understanding of what these things are, even if they aren’t historically accurate. People know what you’re talking about when you say they’ve come across a certain object even if it had a different name somewhere back in time in our own world. Trying to argue historical accuracy is like swimming against the current of a river–you’re going to put a lot of effort into it and not change anybody’s mind. And furthermore, nobody really cares, because fantasy gaming is not meant to be a reflection of actual history. The same goes for using modern-speak in your games. There’s really no reason that your character is going to speak like a character out of Shakespeare unless there’s some weird cultural reason the place he or she came from does that. It’s a game. You don’t need to do embarrassingly poor English accents. You don’t need to do funny voices. Just do the character.

Finally, let’s examine how out of place some historically accurate things that do carry over into fantasy gaming can be; for instance, the walled city. Erecting thick, durable walls around cities made a lot of sense in the middle ages, because invading armies had to come by ground. They had to march or they had to sail. There was no air force. In a fantasy world this is not true. Enemies can ride dragons, griffons, or they can simply teleport past the walls. In fact, a smart warlord would take full advantage of every monster they can tame and spell they can get their warlords to learn, because it only makes sense to conquer your enemy by the most efficient means possible (incidentally, that’s why the good old US of A maintains the largest, most technologically advanced military in the world).

So the bottom line is this: fantasy is not, and is not supposed to be a historical simulation. Inaccuracies are a part of the world that has been imagined for us, starting with the likes of Tolkien, and perpetuated by Gary Gygax, Weis and Hickman, Salvatore, and even George R. R. Martin. You’re welcome to do it how you want at your table, but while you’re at it you had better get rid of dwarves, elves, dragonborn, tieflings, dragons, magic, etc., etc., and you had better add things like the bubonic plague, the Catholic church (yes, that means you can forget about polytheism too) , and the idea that anyone who isn’t born into nobility can go off and have adventures.

One of the things I will be doing with Cobalt Kingdoms is to create the world where society is structured in a way that is realistic given the realities of that world. All but the most xenophobic cities will be a melting pot of people who look different from one another. In some ways, magic will be harnessed for the public good, but the most powerful concentrations of magic will still be reserved for the most powerful individuals who are lucky enough to have come into possession (or inherited) the locations where the ley lines intersect. Population sizes will vary wildly based on location, just as they do in the modern day. It will also have a rich history of toppled empires dating back thousands of years, and each will have its own style of artwork and architecture that will carry forward, both in terms modern styles in different locations of the world, as well as treasures to be found. Some might accuse me of perpetuating some agenda, but the fact is that I’m simply going to try and put out something that makes logical sense given the tropes that are built into the game.

The Town of Woodwail Has a Dragon Problem

It’s not an obvious problem; dragons don’t swoop out of the sky and prey upon caravans and livestock. This problem is far more insidious. Decades ago, the dragon, Chardinarth took up residence in a forgotten temple outside the frontier town of Woodwail. Not content to simply sit and bide its time, it began extorting money from the local Duke. Now, its demands have increased.

Duke Arret Warda oversees the town of Woodwail for the Regent. A fair but grim man who carries this burden heavily, he knows he, and his father before him, have been party to activity many might consider treasonous; raiding the coffers to enrich a dragon’s hoard.

The dragon has grown greedier. Warda knows he must do something to rid the area of this monster.

He needs dragon slayers!

Master of the Forgotten Temple is an adventure for the 5th edition of the world’s most popular roleplaying game, and is intended for characters levels 11 to 13.

Darrin Drader is a veteran game designer, who has worked on such titles as the D&D 3.5 Book of Exalted Deeds, Forgotten Realms: Serpent Kingdoms, Forgotten Realms: Mysteries of the Moonsea, D20 Apocalypse, and a host of others. He started DDD (Darrin Drader Designs) as a creative outlet for his numerous RPG ideas, which include the Cobalt Kingdoms (a new campaign setting that will be entirely open for 3rd party use), a line of adventures, and a second edition of the space opera setting, Reign of Discordia.

Creative works change over time.

This is a fact most of us acknowledge, and it even has a name: retconning. The problem with this practice is that it then draws into question whether something that came before is cannon or not. For example, in Star Trek V, we see the Enterprise-A travel to the center of the galaxy. Forget all the God stuff in this movie, this is a major cannonical problem. Prior to this movie, we had seen the ship travel to the Great Barrier at the edge of the galaxy, and this didn’t present a problem due to the fact that the Earth is actually located near the outer edge of the Milky Way. The edge of the galaxy would be within reach to a ship with the warp capabilities of the original Enterprise. However, the same cannot be said of the center of the galaxy, and this raises a few questions. The first question is why there would be a great barrier at the center of the galaxy. The second question is how the Enterprise could possibly reach it in a day or two when it should have taken Voyager sixty years to get home. The third question is what’s with great barriers and godhood in Star Trek anyway (as you’ll recall, Gary Mitchell started becoming godlike after they crossed the Great Barrier at the edge of the galaxy in the original series episode Where No Man Has Gone Before)?  The answer, of course, is that despite a few scenes that were kind of fun, Star Trek V is kind of a piece of crap, and non-cannon. Unless you count the inclusion of Nimbus III in the Star Trek Vanguard series of novels, that movie is never mentioned again throughout all of Star Trek. As a side note, Vanguard was written by authors David Mack, and the writing duo of Dayton Ward and Kevin Dillmore, and the three of them have made a bit of a habit of taking some of Star Trek’s less than wonderful episodes and spinning novels off from them (one could call them mini-retconns) and using them as premises for amazing books (see David Mack’s use of Flint from the less than stellar episode, Requiem for Methuselah, in his amazing Cold Equations trilogy of novels). But, I digress from this little tangent into a different science fiction property. What does this have to do with the price of tea in China?

With nearly ten years of Reign of Discordia under my belt, I’ve realized that some of the creative decisions I originally made just don’t hold up to scrutiny; either that or my sensibilities have changed over time. Whatever the case, I’ve decided to implement some changes to the setting, and the purpose of this post is to go over them, and briefly explain why those changes have been made.

It’s Lamagos, not Lamogos. This is a spelling change rather than a pronunciation change. The reason is that with the original spelling, it would be a little too easy for the reader to misinterpret the pronunciation of it as Lə-mō-gōs when the intended pronunciation is Lə-mɑ-gōs. Since the letter A represents this sound better than O, I changed the official spelling. Because of the fact that the Lamagos have their own alphabet, this is simply a translation change rather than a full retconn. In addition to these considerations, the spelling was changed prior to the writing of the first Reign of Discordia novel, and the source material is being changed to match. There are still instances of the old spelling on the site, and they will be changed over time as I find the rest of them.

Population sizes of most worlds has increased… a lot. This is a full retconn, and there’s a reason for the massive population increase of the Known Galaxy. Initially, my thoughts were that few worlds would have populations in the millions or greater due some having harsh environments, and the difficulty of moving massive quantities of people from their homeworlds to settle other planets. Some of the planets listed in the core book as major worlds have populations not much larger than my home town of Pullman Washington. It eventually occurred to me that my assumptions were deeply flawed. First, the population of Earth exploded in the 19th and 20th centuries, going from approximately one billion people to seven point five billion. In other worlds, introduce something to eliminate the early onset of death (antibiotics), and a lot more people survive and reproduce. A mere fifty years is all it should take for a small seed population to explode on a new planet. As for the harsh environments of some worlds, human beings, and therefore any intelligent beings, should be resilient enough to adapt to harsh environments by building shelters, growing food, purifying water, and generally being self-determined to not die. Somehow, New England has a high population despite the fact that it doesn’t have one pleasant season in the entire year. Another reason this is a consideration is that if these are major worlds, it’s assumed that they can generate enough revenue for the local government to construct starships to defend their planet with. I happen to know how much it costs to build one fast-attack submarine, and I’m pretty sure that my hometown doesn’t generate enough money to buy even one of those over the course of a decade. I feel that even in the space age, starships built for war would be priced similarly, and that means a planet needs more people to be considered major. To have a thriving space-born community, planets need a thriving population, which means every worlds needs to have inhabitants numbering at least in the hundreds of thousands or more. Besides, the thought of desolate worlds with one small population center and then entire continents devoid of people kind of bores me. If you happen to be one of the people who liked those small population sizes, fear not! There are still planets with only one or two small settlements-they’ve just been downgraded to colony worlds, and are too small to mention in the core book (in other words, game masters are welcome to make them up as they see fit).

Starship appearances. Yes, there’s a production story behind this one. After Reign of Discordia was originally written, it went off to the company now known as Gunmetal Games for editing and art. There were some creative differences between me and the artist we hired, and unfortunately for the artist, I win those arguments. The setting is, after all, my vision, and if their interpretation doesn’t match what’s in the art order I wrote, it’s going back along with a request for changes. I actually liked the artist’s style quite a bit, but I would turn things over to him, such as a space station that already had an established appearance in orbit around a gas giant. It turned out, he didn’t seem to understand the difference in scale and appearance between terrestrial planets (rocky planets, like Earth) and gas giants (planets that are mostly made of gasses, usually with banded clouds in the upper atmosphere, such as Jupiter and Saturn). Eventually, despite my efforts at being diplomatic in my requests for changes, the artist quit the project before completion. One of the things he did complete were starships, but frankly, I was never completely happy with them. I described them in the art order as classic in appearance, taking cues from space opera of the 1970s. In other words, I was looking for ships that looked like they could have come from the sets of the original Battlestar Galactica, or Star Wars. What I got were ships that were color-coded and lacking the kind of detail on the hulls I was looking for. Despite my reservations, I accepted the designs that were turned over due to the fact that I had bigger battles to fight on the art front. To this day, I regret not pursuing my vision for these ships rather than settling for what was turned over. I intend to hire a new artist at some point and re-imagine the starships. The basic designs may be similar, but I’ll be looking for greater detail, and a more classic look for these ships.

These are the major changes for now, but I suspect that as work continues, there will be additional modifications to the setting. As always, feel free to offer your own opinions on these topics in the various RPG forums, or my Facebook page.