How You can get the Dark Albion Hardcovers Even Cheaper! And, What You can do With a Dark Albion Campaign!

So, it turns out that we've had a very cool and enthusiastic initial reception to the Dark Albion hardcovers, which are already on sale at Lulu: you can get the regular book here, and the "Choosing the Roses" Variant Cover here.

Now, as it happens, our other resident Uruguayan RPG-writing guy JongWK bought his copy already (variant cover, as I expected) and he had a tip to share with all of you:

"Lulu has an ongoing promo code for orders: GETIT15

It shaved off 15% from the price (in addition to the 20%). The book price is then roughly comparable to the upcoming softcover release on Amazon ($25 vs $22, per Dom's comments). You might want to let people know!"

So there you are! You can now get the hardcovers even cheaper, for a while anyways.  If you want it softcover or PDF you'll need to wait until its available on RPGnow, which will be in under two weeks.  But if the only reason you were holding out for the softcover is price, you are at the point where you really need to ask yourself if the difference of a couple of dollars will really be worth the wait, especially when both hardcovers are so gorgeous!


Now, in some of the threads where people have been talking about Dark Albion, like the one on theRPGsite, or other one on the somewhat more hostile territory of RPGnet (where most people have been fairly well-behaved, if a bit clueless, except for a couple of intensely bad actors trying to engage in open character assassination), people have been trying to assess just what kind of gaming you can manage in an Albion campaign: is it just D&D with a historical veneer? Are the dungeons going to be like going to dungeons in greyhawk? If not, what's the difference?

In other words, what can you do in an Albion Campaign?

My own 4-year long Albion campaign has tended to have an even division of three basic forms of adventures:

1) Intrigue-based politicking between the White and Red Rose factions (i.e., PCs acting as agents of one noble trying to inflict harm on the property, reputation, or influence of a noble of the other side; or trying to convert a noble, town, or institution to their cause, or trying to recruit support in different areas, or in Parliament, or in the city Guilds, etc.).

2) Warfare-based adventures around the major military campaigns of the war: the PCs being out in the field, sometimes as soldiers or other times as agents, engaging in scouting, sabotage, rescue missions, raiding or protecting local towns, checking out weird-goings on, etc etc.

3) More conventional 'wilderland exploration' adventures: In Albion, all the fantasy stuff tends to be out on the periphery. So these adventures involved the PCs going to some lonely places in the countryside (The forest of Dean, the Welsh Hills, the Reiver Lands in the north, Sherwood, Scots Land, Transylvania, etc. etc.), and either resolving supernatural dangers for locals (usually based on actual folk tales of the area) or investigating ruins - these are never generic D&D-style dungeons, they always make sense in the Albion context: so you have abandoned manors and castles, or Barrow-Mounds, or Cairns, Mine complexes, Arcadian ruins, temples or catacombs, or ancient Elven sites.


There are a few other styles you could run for the game that were not prominent in my own campaign: for example, in my game the PCs went all over the place, but you could run a "local area" campaign, like in the North (maybe the PCs are all stationed at one of the forts on The Wall?), or Middlesex (London and environs), or the area in the middle around Leicester/Derby (where troop movements and countless battles occurred in the war). Or you can have a city-based campaign, most likely London; or have the PCs be Crowners (investigating deaths on behalf of the King) or Inquisitors for the Clerical Order.  Or a band of minstrels, or hangers-on at the court, or privateers fighting Iberian pirates or the Hanseatic League at sea.

So there's a great deal of potential supported by the setting, in terms of what your PCs can do.

And now, with the low low prices, there's no good reason not to check it out!

RPGPundit

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