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Sunday 14 June 2015

Dark Albion Won't Just Have Albion

Yesterday, in the original Albion campaign, the player characters finally made it to the lands of the Turk, during their ongoing quest to recover the various pieces of the Lance of Mithras.   They got to see the magnificent City of Byzantium, spending time in the great market, and visiting both the old Temple of Holy Wisdom and the new Blue Temple, while awaiting a hard-won audience with the Sultan Bayezid.  There were some culture clashes which led to a couple of them being arrested, but they got off with fines.

Anyways, the upcoming Dark Albion book goes into tremendous detail about Albion, but that's not all you get in the book.  There's a reason it will be including a full hex-map of the whole continent.  It is assumed that characters in an Albion campaign will potentially travel to these distant lands.

In the course of our very long campaign, the PCs have been to: Scots' Land, the distant Azure Isles, Brittanie, Burgundy, Frogland, Lorraine, Iberia, various Arcadian city-states and the great city of Arcadia itself, Sicilia, Venetia, several of the Principalities including the Hapsburg Principalities, the mighty and powerful Commonwealth, and obviously Wallachia - and now the lands of the Turk.   They did not happen to go to Hunland, the Teutonic holdings, any of the cities of the Hanseatic League, the Canton Confederacy, the Northman Lands, the lands of the Rus, the rest of the Border Principalities, or (curiously) Eire Land.

All these, and probably a couple of others I've left out, will get mentioned in the Albion book.  And of course the setting takes place in a time of tremendous interest; over the course of the campaigns you can have Hussites, Turk invasions, the rise and fall of Burgundy, the printing press, gunpowder coming into universal use, Borgias, the establishment of the Inquisition, Renaissance masters (Da Vinci, etc.), and of course Dracula.  Some areas are ruled by the same great monarch from start to finish (like the Commonwealth King Casimir Jagiello) while other places switch rulers, or even fall in and out of existence, on a constant basis.

You will get information about all of this in the book, and more: like the list of the Pontifexes of the church (and their various history-based scandals and crimes), the commanders of the Clerical Order, biographies of kings like Casimir "the great", Mattias "the Crow" of Hunland, the doomed hero Skanderbeg of Albania, the Turk Sultan Mehmet the Great, and many others of the great movers and shakers.

(with a kingly nickname like "the Crow" you just know this guy's going to be up to trouble)

There's entirely enough material in Albion that you could run a whole campaign just in the area of Middlesex if you really wanted to.  But if you want your PCs to be sophisticated continent-hopping tourists, Dark Albion will have your back too.


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9 comments:

  1. Sounds cool. Is it compatible with Arrows of Indra? Can Albion colonize Bharata and establish an empire in the not too distant future?

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    1. There's no reason it couldn't be compatible per se, though of course the classes and magic in AoI are specifically oriented to an indian-style campaign.

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    2. Well of course I would expect nothing else!

      I'd assume the reverse is true vis-a-vis Dark Albion's classes/magic/etc.

      That's what makes it more fun for me.

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  2. I'm more and more intrigued, think I'll have to get the book.

    I may not have kept up to date on everything about it, is it going to be an 'OSR' product I assume? Compatible with D&D of most editions that is.

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    1. Glad to hear it. I'll probably go with some bastardization of 3rd ed. for my system then.

      I wonder what the Turk is like in this setting, no Islam without Christianity - interesting historical butterflies.

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    2. The people of the Sultanate worship the God of the Crescent Moon. Most people in Albion and the Continent believe the Turk to be pagans, but Clerics and some sages know that in fact the Unconquered Sun and the Crescent Moon are both facets of the same (one and only) God of Law.

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  3. Just started reading Dark Albion: War of the Roses. I'm afraid I bought it second hand (as with Cults of Chaos), but a few pages in and I was compelled to go pick up Old School Companion and a couple of later issues, so I'm not entirely a bastard.

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