Intro
In this episode I'm joined by Iron Monocle. He's a serial creator of worlds and keeps a blog about his most recent one. We talk about how game rules influence assumptions in the world, about world building as a hobby, and how players can be a fantastic source and contributors of lore and ideas in your world.
I'm Jon de Nor and this is Goblin Points.
Interview
Jon: Welcome to Goblin points, Iron Monocle.
Seth: Hey. Glad to be here.
Jon: Tell us a bit about yourself and also how you ended up in the Matt Colville / MCDM community.
Seth: Yeah, well, I'm Iron Monocle. Real name Seth. And I am a game master, world builder, general dice roller; it's what I like to call myself. I'm horrible with time so I don't remember exactly the timeline of things. I was trying to think of it, because I know you ask everybody this. I did know Matt's videos on YouTube for a while, but I was never really big in... Again, time. Who knows. But it's only recently that I've actually been on YouTube. Past four or five years I've actually been on YouTube and subscribed. So, it's more of a like, 'Oh, I go on YouTube and I just search for something and I find it'. So, I tangentially knew about Colville's stuff and he's really good stuff. And I remember being around at least for Kingdoms and Warfare.
Jon: Right.
Seth: I remember that popping up and stuff. I didn't back it or anything. But I really honed in with Flee Mortals and I kickstarted that, Flee Mortals, and that's when I really honed in on Matt Colville's stuff and MCDM in general. It came around the time when I was actually building my world for D&D, Skies of Mor-lardon, and I was trying to just make my players feel really powerful and so, at that point and time, there were no minion rules out, right. And so I was like, 'Okay well, I'm gonna have my players start at level five so they feel powerful. And then I guess I'm just always gonna use a bunch of CR1 or CR2 people that use cleave rules so they can do damage to multiple things.' And it, sort of, worked, but it wasn't great.
Jon: Yeah.
Seth: And then Flee Mortals came out and like, 'Oh yeah, We're gonna have these minion rules. You could just be able to cleave through...' This is perfect. This is what I've been waiting for.
Jon: Nice.
Seth: Yeah. So, that's when I jumped in and became a full bona fan of MCDM and stuff. And then I've been following them through with Draw Steel.
Jon: Are you excited for Draw Steel?
Seth: Oh yes, immensely, yeah. I have a playtest group going on right now. Not super far, right. I think they just got to level three and we've been playing since October, so.
Jon: Okay.
Seth: It's taken a while to level up. It's just time, sort of, thing. So, yeah, we've been playing. It's taken little bit to grasp some of the rules for some of my players, but-
Jon: Is it the first RPG after D&D, I assume, or?
Seth: Yeah. Well, for most of them, yeah. I hadn't realised this until we had a conversation with my players, is half the group had not actually gotten into D&D until after D&D Beyond was a thing.
Jon: Oh. Interesting.
Seth: And so, they joined D&D when there was already all this automation that you could get in D&D Beyond. And so, not only are they learning a new game, but this is the first time they've actually had to flip through a book to create their character-
Jon: Yeah.
Seth: ... and do their own math dice rolling and stuff. They were very happy when I introduced them to Forge Steel.
Jon: Yeah, Forge Steel is great, yeah.
Seth: Yes.
Jon: You mentioned Mor-lodron. No, yes? Was that the way that you pronounced your world?
Seth: Mor-ladron.
Jon: Mor-ladron.
Seth: Yup, all good.
Jon: But I also noticed that you have a interest in building worlds it seems.
Seth: Yes, yeah. Yeah, that's probably my favourite part of role playing games.
Jon: Interesting.
Seth: Yeah.
Jon: I think that's my least favourite so I'm intrigued by someone who just really likes building out the world. What makes you want to create a new one instead of just keep building on the one you've already created?
Seth: That's a good question. My players would like to know that too, I'm sure. They're like, 'What? That last one was great. Why is this a new one?' Or, Skies of Mor-ladron has gone through three or four different complete revamps.
Jon: Oh, wow.
Seth: So, yeah. Again, that's just me. I don't know. I just like the creation process. I like coming up with cool new things. I have no real good answer for that, I don't think. I don't know. So, this is probably it: I like reading and watching movies to learn about what's coming. I like to be surprised. I like to find out about new worlds. It's, like, John Wick: There's this whole world of assassins and stuff and, yeah cool, the action's awesome and that, but just learning those little titbits about how this world works and they have these coins at the hotel and everything that they do for the assassins and-
Jon: Yeah.
Seth: It's just, learning those things is what makes me enjoy those movies and books and such. And so, I kinda just like to take that energy and just create my own stuff. There's premade settings and stuff, but I'm always like, 'But what if it was like this?' Usually the last book I read, let's be honest. It's like, 'Oh, I just read a book about powder mages who can control gun powder'. And I'm like, 'Wow!'
Jon: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I've read those books.
Seth: Yes, yeah.
Jon: By Brian McClellan, is it?
Seth: Yes, yeah. I just read those a month ago and I was like, 'You know, if I did some... Maybe in Draw Steel I could have a psionic gun slinger. Kind of does the same thing, but psionics.' So, I was, like.
Jon: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Seth: Yeah, I'm just constantly reading stuff and getting cool ideas. I'm like, 'Oh. Well, this wouldn't fit into this world I made, but if I made a whole new one just with this concept...'
Jon: Okay, I see now.
Seth: Yes.
Jon: But this most recent one, I think, the Marlo... No, sorry.
Seth: Mor-
Jon: Mor-ladron?
Seth: Yeah, close enough. There you go.
Jon: Yeah.
Seth: Half the time we just call is Skies.
Jon: Okay, that's easy.
Seth: You can just call it Skies. That's good enough.
Jon: So, Skies is your most recent world and it-
Seth: Yes.
Jon: From what I could gather from your blog, it also seems like the one that the players have fallen the most in love with.
Seth: Yeah, I think we've been doing it since 2018 or 2019.
Jon: Okay.
Seth: Now there's been a break, probably in the last year, that we haven't played. I'm sure if my players listen to this they'll be shouting like, 'Hey! You haven't allowed us to play this for so long,' because I've been revamping it for Draw Steel. Yeah, they've loved it. I can come up with a bunch of great ideas and I think my ideas are brilliant, I came up with them, but the coolest ideas are the collaboration with my players. So, I have a ancestry called the Fungorians, which are psionic mushroom people.
Jon: Nice.
Seth: And, yeah, they start off basically as myconids from D&D, but then they've slowly shifted into a myconid, mind flayer combination. Good, I mean, they're not evil, but, sort of, just weird, yeah. They're alien race, alienesque race. But, yeah, some of my players have just been really invested. They have actually probably done as much creation on their culture and how they act and stuff as me, if not more so.
Jon: Oh, cool.
Seth: Yeah, so they're really invested in the stuff, because they've helped create it.
Jon: I've built one homebrew world for one of my games and I try to involve my players a bit in the creation in that, when they made their characters I allow them a bit of... Like, you're from this part of this kingdom so how the culture is in that part of the kingdom is up to you. And especially one of the players really embraced that and really came up with a whole thing for how his society worked. He basically ended up in the winter biome. It wasn't supposed to be that in the beginning, but it ended up that way because he just embraced it and then just went with it full tilt, which was great. But the other players, not so much necessarily. But I wanted to involve them, because I-
Seth: Oh, yeah.
Jon: I like it when it's a bit more collaborative and I like it also when I don't have to make everything up myself.
Seth: Yeah, it does help. It can help inspire you too, because you come up with something but then they're like, 'Oh!' And you're like, 'I would never have thought of that. That's brilliant.'
Jon: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Seth: And then you can riff off of what they do. I mean, that's my favourite part of when I'm actually, you know. I love building the worlds, but when you're actually playing the game, right, I love it when my players just do something I didn't think about. A couple of weeks ago my players were finding a ghost. There was an alter that was emitting a necrotic pulse. I think it was basically using the obelisk stats from the dynamic terrain objects from Draw Steel.
Jon: Ah, okay, yeah.
Seth: And there is a dead corpse on it and I forgot one of them had used downtime to craft catapult dust. And so they're like, 'Well, we need to get the body off of this alter'. So, they run up to it, and there's a powerful ghost right next to it so they didn't want to stay nearby, but so they threw the dust on there and ran away. And then the next round the body just goes flying. I'm like, 'Oh. That worked. Would not have thought about that. That's great.' Those are the best times, right, when my players surprise me and they just come with the cool ideas. Because then I feel like I'm playing then too, right. I am playing, but.
Jon: Yeah.
Seth: There's something cool about not knowing what's going to happen next that brings me some joy.
Jon: Yeah. Totally. And speaking of adapting for Draw Steel, because you have some custom ancestries in your world that doesn't necessarily map directly onto the ones in the core rules of Draw Steel I assume, so how have you found both homebrewing your own ancestries and making them work in the Draw Steel mechanic, rule set? There has been some discussion in the MCDM Discord whether or not the core rules are closely tied to the setting or not and it seems that some people feel it's very closely connected, because there are a lot of specific names and terms that come from-
Seth: Yeah.
Jon: ... Matt's setting, but Matt's argument is basically, 'Well, that's easy. You just erase them and put in your own words-
Seth: Right.
Jon: '... and terms and then they're yours.' Where do you fall on that spectrum of? How tied to the setting do they feel, or are they at all, and how has it been for you to adapt existing ancestries to your world?
Seth: Yeah, so I think the coolest move that they've done is they've gone to the ancestry traits, you know-
Jon: Yeah.
Seth: ... , the pick and choose, because that makes it so easy to customise.
Jon: Okay, yeah.
Seth: I mean, the dwarf. All right, let's look at the dwarf. Their signature trait could be a problem if you don't want them carving runes into their stone skin. I love that, think it's a great idea, so keeping it. But then if you look at their other traits, they're mostly dwarf traits and if one of them... I got rid of Stone Singer. I forget what it was called. There's one where for 10 hour they could sing to the stone and they would shape it. Basically a Mold Earth type of thing.
Jon: Okay.
Seth: I think. Maybe that got rid of in the newest version, I don't know. But I was like, 'That's cool'. I think that's a call to Rings of Power where the dwarves were singing to the mountain, which I thought was really cool. But I was like, 'That's not really a thing for my dwarves'.
Jon: Okay, yeah.
Seth: So, I think just by making those different traits, I can be, like, okay, there's one... With the dwarves there's one I don't really care for so really easy to just take that one out and replace it with something else. That's what I've done for most of them. Their ancestries are so cool. There's no way I couldn't just take their ancestries. I was like, 'Oh these D&D ancestries that I had before,' which are roughly the same, a few changes. But I was like, 'They're cool. They're so evocative.' And I'm like, 'Okay, well I'm gonna use them. I'm gonna transition to basically using these. Doing a few small, few small tweaks for my world.' And so, that's basically what I did. I think the Fungorians, the mushroom people, are the most original though I did steal two racial traits from two other ancestries that I don't use. The Time Raiders, they've got Psionic Gifts, and then they have... I forget what their name is. The elves have ability to, we call lore, because they live so long.
Jon: Yeah.
Seth: They get an edge on lore rolls.
Jon: Right, yeah.
Seth: So, my elves-
Jon: Yeah.
Seth: ... don't live that long. So, I took that from them and the Fungorians have a cool thing. This was inspired by Groot from Guardians of the Galaxy.
Jon: Okay.
Seth: When a Fungorian dies, because they're fungus their children actually grow from the corpse of their parent. Which is a little weird. But they also then retain memories from their parents and maybe even their grandparent.
Jon: Oh, interesting.
Seth: Because they are coming from the same body.
Jon: Yeah, yeah.
Seth: So, basically they have the ancestral recall of being able to remember past lore, because they can share the memories of their forebears.
Jon: Interesting. I actually kinda like that. Maybe I should steal them.
Seth: Go for it.
Jon: This is a bit more general question: Do you think that having the proper nouns in the ancestries and having a bit less generic names of some of the ancestries, is that a good or a bad thing, do you think? Should that be done more in RPGs? Let's take one thing specifically, for example the Time Raider seems very specific to Orden and I think some people find it weird to have space fantasy in their fantasy game, but do you think that having the Time Raiders in there makes it easier or more difficult to adapt the core rules of Draw Steel to a different setting? I mean, in one case you could just break the Time Raiders out and say they don't exist in this setting, but do you think it is easier or more difficult to keep them in and try to adapt them as a new concept in the world? If you understand what I'm asking.
Seth: Yeah, I think so. Yeah, I think it's better for them to be there and have to take them out or make changes to them than having to put something like that in. It's inspirational, right. Having that stuff there, you can look at it and be like, 'Oh. Okay. You know what, I might not like my oatmeal with cranberries in it, but I like my oatmeal with raspberries in it.' Right?
Jon: Sure.
Seth: And so, you can just go in and be like, 'Okay, maybe I don't like sci-fi, but maybe these are psionic spider people'.
Jon: Sure, yeah.
Seth: You can re-flavour it. You can use it as inspiration for other things as well if you want. Like, again, I stole their psionic abilities and put them in my mushroom people.
Jon: Yeah, that's true.
Seth: Yeah, I just think all their stuff that they've done with saying specific things and being very tying to a world is very important. We have enough generic stuff out there. And I would argue that their stuff is still somewhat generic. I'm probably just got a lot of people mad when I said that, but there's that tightrope, there's that line they have to balance, right. They wanna get stuff that's cool and new and inspiring, but they also have to be like, 'Okay, well, I mean, not everybody's going to be playing this in Vasloria. Some people just want some more generic stuff.'
Jon: Yeah.
Seth: So, there is that line they have to balance, right. I don't even have a good example. Because they did a good job, I think. They did a good job at balancing that.
Jon: You mentioned having thoughts about how game mechanics influence the world and the narrative, which-
Seth: Yeah.
Jon: ... I found interesting, because, as I mentioned, I've only created my one homebrew world and I don't think it was that intentional, but it's system agnostic. Or at least, I didn't think of any specific system when I made it. I just put stuff in it that I thought was cool with no... I used it for a D&D 5E game, but there was stuff in my world that, I don't think there's a spell that can do those things, but they're just a fact in my world. I don't know if that's a 'me' thing or if that's a general thing, but I just found it interesting how you think of game mechanics influencing the world and to me it seems so limiting to, 'Okay, which spell do I use to make this door do the thing I want to do?'
Seth: Right, right. So, it's not that specific.
Jon: Okay.
Seth: Because, yeah, you can make up anything you want. One of the reasons I was looking for a new system is because I wanted to make something called a Storms Guard, Storm Sorcerer. Basically, I wanted to make a Storm Sorcerer with narrative ties to the world, right. That's why they have the weird name. But, I wanted them to be able to basically slowly summon a storm, or quickly hopefully if they're powerful enough, but then get more powerful, but in D&D, one, you use spells and you get weaker and weaker throughout the day. So, no matter how you narratively say magic works, it's still something you have to say you get weaker and weaker without a rest, right.
Jon: Fair.
Seth: So, that's one of the impacts it has on the world. Now, you can always flavour and try to separate those things, but people are just playing, people are playing the game as mechanics and so that's gonna be... Again, it could just be my group, right, but that's where the lens of the world is, through the mechanics as well. For the Storm Sorcerer I'm like, they're just casting. They're pulling lightning and wind from the sky and just casting it. But again, in D&D you have to have a very specific spell that does those things.
Jon: Yeah, yeah.
Seth: If it's an NPC or whatever you can just say they do stuff and they do stuff.
Jon: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Seth: But, if this is a player character you have to have these spells and so it's like, okay, so what's the difference between this lightning bolt and that lightning bolt and-
Jon: Yeah.
Seth: ... a bunch of lightning bolts? And so you have to think of just like, 'Okay, we have these spell slots that I have to cast. I only know so many and how does that play into how things act in the world?' Whereas with, like, Draw Steel, how do spells work? I mean, I'm shrugging for the people who cares. No one can see me. It can work however you want. Everyone just has abilities.
Jon: Yeah, yeah.
Seth: Right? So, it's a much more freer system to describe. Now, so I think the Elementalist will probably be a great basis for my Storm Sorcerer idea. I'll probably just take that template and then just give it a bunch of storm abilities.
Jon: Yeah.
Seth: Maybe even make it a subclass of the Elemental. So, the Elementalist right now is just they cast. They're very elementalisty. They're druids, they're shamans, they're pyromancers. I mean you get the void mage, but they're all pulling from the earth and the different elements that they have.
Jon: Yeah.
Seth: And then more if you're looking akin to Fifth Edition, they're more like sorcerers than wizards, right. Just in the loose sense.
Jon: Right, yeah.
Seth: And so right now in Draw Steel you don't really have the arcaney, nerdy wizard class.
Jon: Right, yeah.
Seth: I mean, again, you can flavour it to do so, which probably wouldn't be that hard to do, but it's just one of those things. I have wizard arcane towers in one of my cities, Empyrean. They're ruled by mages, but there's nothing in the game right now that fits my idea for it, for that arcane wiz... I don't know how to describe this. No arcane spells, right?
Jon: Okay.
Seth: There's no divination, there's no trans...
Jon: Yeah.
Seth: If you want to be like Merlin, if you want to be the wise wizard in a tower, sort of, feel, right. There's blasty stuff. Mostly blasty stuff or druid-based healing-
Jon: Yeah.
Seth: ... and that stuff. And teleportation galore. Going back to your original question here, the magic system in particular I can feel can shape how your world works just because of the mechanics.
Jon: That makes sense.
Seth: I don't know if I explained that well at all.
Jon: Yeah, that makes sense when you put it that way. We played a few different games, but it's like we always go back to 5E. That's our main thing and we sometimes, like once a year, we dabble in something else-
Seth: Right.
Jon: ... and then we go back to 5E again. Which I hope the Draw Steel launch is the end of and then we go back to Draw Steel instead. But we'll see.
Seth: That's the pros of being the game master, at least in my case, is I say, 'Hey-
Jon: Yeah.
Seth: '... if you want to play games at all, this is what we're playing'.
Jon: True, true. I just find it so interesting that you find world building such a captivating hobby, because I think I'm the opposite. I tried making my own homebrew world and I think at the point where we started playing and my players started asking more detailed questions about how would this work I realised, 'Oh, I don't think I enjoy this'. I just find it so interesting and fascinating that you wanna spend time just doing that then. It almost seems like that's, like, a separate hobby-
Seth: Yeah.
Jon: ... onto itself for you.
Seth: Yeah.
Jon: You just build worlds, because that's what you do.
Seth: And I'll be honest, that's one of the reasons I started the blog. I mean, one, so I could build this world, but also so I keep building this world and I keep on track of this world so that my players could actually play in it. I mean, it's not like the few people who read my blog would burn my place down or anything if I missed a week, but I'm, like, 'Okay if I'm every week, or now every other week, doing a blog post then I'm making progress-
Jon: Right.
Seth: ... and the players are actually able to play in this'. Whereas yeah, as I said before, there's a bit of a problem where I'm like, 'Oh! Oohh.' I have ideas about two or three other worlds, but I'm like, 'No, no, you've got this one. Let's focus on this one right now.' I think if I knew how to write I'd be an author, but I don't-
Jon: Oh, yeah.
Seth: ... know how to write. So, I think this is probably my outlet for that, right. I don't have to worry about dialogue, but I can just create a world and create some characters and then.
Jon: Okay, yeah. I was reading on your blog and I noticed that one of the comments was from Novina-
Seth: Yeah.
Jon: ... who also goes by The Nature GM, which was my first guest-
Seth: Yes!
Jon: ... on Goblin Points.
Seth: Your podcast was how I found out about her and then we've been commenting on each other's posts and stuff, so that's pretty cool.
Jon: Oh, yeah, interesting. It, kinda, came full circle then for me. Also, I saw that you also banned a lot of classes from your setting, which I thought was interesting.
Seth: Yes.
Jon: Not the concept itself, I've heard of that before, but you seemed so aggressive, because I think you were talking about banning four or five of the classes from 5E, which seems like a lot.
Seth: Yeah. There aren't gods in my world.
Jon: Okay.
Seth: The gods left. So, they might come back some day, who knows-
Jon: Interesting.
Seth: But they left. So, any of the holy-based classes were out. I didn't like bards. I have a thing with bards. I love the musical chanting thing. I like it in books.
Jon: Okay.
Seth: I'm reading a book now... Oh, shoot. Shadow of the Gods might be the series. I don't know. It's a fantasy Viking thing and they have... I forget what... The Seithr? I don't know. They're witches basically and they sing magical song while they're on the ship to keep sea monsters away. That's cool. But then there's just something when you have a bard in the middle of combat who's like, 'Oh, wait. Let me just sing a little ditty.' Or bring out my lute in the middle of combat. So, for the D&D version I outlawed the bard, but I was like, 'Hey, if you want something similar we'll just do an arcane trickster with charisma as their modifier'.
Jon: Okay, yeah.
Seth: And I was, like, that's close enough. It's not music-based, but you still get all the illusions and that swashbuckling feel. But, I will say, for Draw Steel the troubadour is dope. Really, really like it. So, the troubadour is allowed in. Singing as a magical tool just always seemed out there. I'm like, you have all these different magical traditions and then just oh, let's sing. Which again, can work.
Jon: Yeah.
Seth: For Skies I'm just like, 'You're super special, you're the one who can do that magic. I don't want to have to come up why magic singing works.' So, I was just like, 'If anyone plays the troubadour, you're one of very few people who can do that'.
Jon: Okay.
Seth: Plus half their abilities are just changing things.
Jon: Yeah.
Seth: I don't know if I read the latest version but, the first version of it at least, I was just, like, this is basically like a demigod. They're just saying, 'Oh, wait, no, this didn't happen, this did happen. Oh, you thought that thing was dead? Oh, no, they're not dead anymore.' And I was just, like, that's some god tier stuff right there. I just feel like that's what a god in mortal form would do or something. That's what it struck me as. And so I'm like, 'Okay, that's cool, we can keep that in'.
Jon: I always found, both the bard and now to an extent troubadour, I don't understand them. To me they have no appeal just because I can't imagine what I'm doing with a bard or a troubadour. People always talk about them being swashbuckling and I would have thought that was a swordsman thing, not a... I don't know.
Seth: Yeah.
Jon: Yeah, I don't understand the fantasy thing.
Seth: Yeah, I would probably prefer just a swashbuckling class. I don't know how-
Jon: Yeah.
Seth: ... you would get different subclasses on that, but it would be a cool thing to see.
Jon: I also have to ask, because you did the cleric and the bard, but also I think sorcerers and druids.
Seth: Yes.
Jon: But you allowed the druids back in, but with some righters basically, if I remember correctly.
Seth: Yeah. This was for the D&D version.
Jon: Sure.
Seth: I'm looking at my blog right now, because I don't distinctly remember. Druid, sorcerers... Oh, right. So, this was the thing. So, in the original concept of Skies there was basically two magical sides and no one else is magical, to a degree. The original Skies was also basically Eberron in Sky Pirates.
Jon: Okay.
Seth: So, there is a low level of magic that everyone had, let's put it that way. Like, second or third level. But the wizards were super powerful and I just wanted to showcase how powerful wizards were, and so I got rid of the others. I don't know if that was the best idea, looking back on it. Yeah, and I think the main reason I got rid of druids is because the world was shattered and there's all these tiny floating islands that everyone's living on. So, what connection to the earth is there, right?
Jon: Right. Okay.
Seth: It's broken. The earth is broken. There's a whole island that's big enough that there's still that connection. And, I know, super traditional, it's the elf island. So, there's druids there and the mushroom people live there and that kind of stuff.
Jon: Okay, okay.
Seth: I don't know if it's theory, but one of the things I like to do is you restrict as much as you need to in the character creation, and then you don't have to restrict anything after that because everything is world-specific, right. So, I'm like, 'Here's all the restrictions. If you can get past those restrictions...' Then, again, my players are on board, right. If they were like, 'Ah, no!' then we wouldn't be playing in this world, right. So, I don't want anyone to think I'm just shoving these restrictions down my players' throats. They're okay with it. Typically.
Jon: I'll make them come around.
Seth: My way or the highway. No. But yeah, once you get through that funnel of character creation and all those restrictions, then you have the world. It's an open sandbox world where you can go and do whatever, and once you understand where your characters come from you can do whatever. So, Mr Colville had the lifepath system that he made.
Jon: Right, yeah.
Seth: The super complicated one that didn't go anywhere. I don't have anything quite that complicated, but I have, depending on your race in D&D, you could roll or choose where you came from and then you'd roll to see if your parents are alive, how many siblings you had, rivals and friends, to just tie you into the world some more.
Jon: Have you been homebrewing specific stuff for Draw Steel? You've done some ancestries for your world, but have you done some other homebrewing for Draw Steel?
Seth: A little bit. I don't know if homebrew's the right term for it. Basically there's a perk for sailing-
Jon: Okay.
Seth: ... that gives you edges and stuff on that, kind of, thing. I've mostly done a bunch of tweaking just to re-flavour different, like the careers and the different perks. Oh, I've made some kits. So, there are firearms in my world. Currently they're called rune-powered guns; trying to go off gun powdered. I don't know.
Jon: Okay.
Seth: I usually just end up calling them guns anyways.
Jon: Okay, sure.
Seth: But, yeah.
Jon: That's just colloquialisms.
Seth: But yeah, I have four kits of that. I have a gunslinger one where it's two firearms, but that's just under the rapid fire kit under a different name.
Jon: Okay.
Seth: It's just you can shoot two people at once. But then I have, I call it a pirate one where you have a light weapon and a pistol. And it's mostly a melee build, but you can use your ranged weapon on some of the signature kit abilities, like you can fire your pistol and it can be someone who's right next to you and you don't get the bane on it. You're on a ship and you're surrounded by people and you're fighting with your sword and then unload the gun. Right now, I'm working on complications. That'll be the next blog post. I went through the whole list of 100 and 70 of them were perfect. I'm just gonna keep them as is.
Jon: Okay.
Seth: Why do the work when there's great... I think there's 10 to 15 that I needed to just re-flavour. I don't think there are hags and fairies in my world so there's a couple of those that, like, you get cursed by those so I just re-flavoured those. I mean, there's 10 that I need to just come up with new ones.
Jon: Okay, yeah.
Seth: So, I'll be coming up with some complications tomorrow. That'll be my day tomorrow, because Tuesday, you know... Three days to get that all in and done. Well, I mean, by the time this podcast comes out it'll be done. Hopefully.
Jon: Yeah. Hopefully.
Seth: So, right now it's just a bunch of small stuff. So, I just had my players and the playtest group just basically arrived in Skies. There's a portal that just opened up and they were thrown through it and now they're there. They knew that it was gonna happen. I was like, 'Hey, you guys wanna help me test out my world here?' And so they got there. I had my original Skies group who should be... We need to still find a time to make that work so hopefully in the next month or two. But once I get people actually playing that that's gonna probably help me focus on some of the bigger homebrew stuff. So, I have a lot of plans. I want a storm sorcerer class or subclass, I wanna do that psionic gun firearm person-
Jon: Yeah.
Seth: ... , a powdered mage class and then subsystems. Skies isn't super heroic.
Jon: Okay.
Seth: I mean, it's heroic in the sense of everyone, they're powerful, but they're not necessarily... The original group were pirates.
Jon: Right, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Seth: The original group of people who played in Skies were pirates, hence the name Skies of Mor-ladron, which stands for pirate in some language. So, they're not bad people, but there's a lot of... I think I take a lot of inspiration from, like, Cyberpunk. So, the powers that be, while not necessarily evil are definitely corrupt and selfish.
Jon: Okay, yeah.
Seth: There's a whole thing in my world that, sure you can find magic items and stuff on the abandoned islands, typically in what I call the world storm which is the storm of islands and portals opening up and all that stuff, and you can find that, but technically if you keep that that's illegal. Each of the different powers in the surrounding areas are like, 'No, we know how to best use those so you need to hand them over'. And there are people, they're part of a relics hunters guild, and so they go down, they find it and they return it to the powers that be. But of course I don't think players will ever do that. They want to keep those magic items. They're heroic, but they're on more of the chaotic side of being heroic. They're not gonna always obey the laws, they're not always, you know. Someone out there's not going to be happy with what they're doing, let's put it. The reason I went on that tangent: The wealth system-
Jon: Right.
Seth: ... is cool, but it's not as in-depth as I need it to be.
Jon: Right, yeah.
Seth: I need to come up with and homebrew a more in-depth system there. At least a plunder system, for if people actually go pirate a ship. Plunder can get transformed into wealth of some sort and deal some stuff with that. I'm also looking to ship combat. It's a pretty big thing. I should probably get on that. That's probably one of the first things that I should make for my players. The crafting rules in Draw Steel are pretty great and so I'll need to figure out how to add ship upgrades into that system.
Jon: Oh, nice.
Seth: Ship combat's great for some of them, but half-
Jon: Yeah.
Seth: ... the people are into that, 'How do we maximise? Okay, we can add more gun ports here. How do we speed up the ship? Okay we can buy this type of sail.'
Jon: Yeah.
Seth: Some of them get really into that upgrade thing. So, some ship upgrade system I'll have to make as well. But again, that's once we actually get into playing the world-
Jon: Yeah.
Seth: ... , which hopefully will be this month or next month and I can help, yeah. Again, inspiration from the players helps motivate-
Jon: Yeah.
Seth: ... those sorts of things.
Jon: It sounds like you have multiple groups playing in the same world at the same time. Is that it? Is that correct?
Seth: I will.
Jon: Yeah.
Seth: I have not in the past.
Jon: Okay.
Seth: This will be the first time that multiple groups will be playing in it and I'm not sure yet if it's gonna be a shared world or not.
Jon: Yeah, okay.
Seth: I think it'll be cool to do a pseudo shared world. If they're both in the same place at the same time-
Jon: Yeah.
Seth: ... I'm not gonna deal with that. That's just.
Jon: Yeah.
Seth: But if someone went to a certain place and then they decided to, instead of fighting the zombies in the forest they decide to just burn the forest down, that's what players do sometimes, and then the next group comes then maybe the forest will be burnt down.
Jon: Yeah.
Seth: That, sort of, thing. Probably? They'll probably like that idea, so I'll probably try and keep it pseudo the same world, but, you know, make it easy on me.
Jon: Okay. So, you would share with your players whether or not their worlds are interweaving and so? Okay, yeah. I'm just asking, because I had a... It was a rival / the BBG was a noble person in the city they ended up using as their hub city and I was scared that my own creativity wouldn't properly make this person feel like a real person. It would feel too much like it was just me. I had a player who weren't able to join us regularly any more so he stopped playing with us, but I messaged him and I'm like, 'Are you up for just playing one of the NPCs in my current campaign?'
Seth: Nice.
Jon: So, I just sent him weekly reports of what the player characters were doing and he was plotting against them and doing tons of stuff that I never would have thought of.
Seth: Ah, that's awesome.
Jon: 'I'm gonna send some spies. I have spies right?' I'm, 'Well, you do now. Of course you have spies.'
Seth: That's cool.
Jon: And I didn't reveal that fact to them until after we were done playing in that campaign. I'm like, 'Oh, you know the shit stain you all hated? Yeah, that was played by...'
Seth: Oh man, my players would probably catch on so fast if I did something like that. They'll be like, 'This bad guy is a lot more unpredictable than usual. Coming up with some creative ideas, Seth. What's different? These aren't your usual ideas.'
Jon: Do you play mostly online or do you play in person when you play?
Seth: These days it's mostly online.
Jon: Yeah.
Seth: Again, the original Skies group when we started in, like, 1819 was in person, but since then, well, we've moved and yeah-
Jon: Yeah, okay.
Seth: Multiple people have moved, so that's the thing. We might have most of the people in an area, but there's always at least one person who's a couple hours away.
Jon: Right, yeah.
Seth: So, yeah, it's online these days. Every once in a while, like once a year, we'll try and get together. I had a campaign called Prophecy of Dragons that I ran, just a made up thing. It was inspired by Fizban's Treasury of Dragons, or something. There's a dragon book-
Jon: Yeah.
Seth: ... for fifth edition and they-
Jon: Sounds about right.
Seth: ... had the cataclysm dragons or something and they talked about how these dragons get so powerful because they hop through the multiverse and... Okay I can't remember which, if this is what I ended up doing with it or if this was the original idea, but if they consume themselves in each of these multiverses they just get more and more powerful.
Jon: Oh, interesting.
Seth: Yeah, and so I actually had two different groups in this Prophecy of Dragons game. They're in different worlds, but they basically had to go fight the same dragon in their world to prevent this plane hopping dragon from getting stronger. For both of those games we played online until the final encounter and then the final encounter we were able to all get together and play for an afternoon and stuff, which was really great.
Jon: That's fun.
Seth: I had a player try and hop on the dragon. They were in a volcano and so the dragon took a dive into the lava. So, that was great.
Jon: Wow.
Seth: They got off in time sadly, but you know.
Jon: They're fine.
Seth: They're fine.
Jon: That sounds really fun, yeah. At the end of my interviews I usually ask my guests for a recommendation of some sort. Might be anything that you wanna put a highlight on basically. Something that people should either check out or be aware of.
Seth: Yeah.
Jon: So, what have you got in store for us?
Seth: All right, yeah. So, hopefully I can just share two things.
Jon: Go ahead. Even better.
Seth: All right, so, there is an RPG called Ironsworn by Shawn Tomkins. Ironsworn, he has a sci-fi version called Ironsworn: Starforged and then he has one called Sundered Isles, which is like a piratey ship, based on islands. So, very useful for me. But one of the cool things he does... I would call it Powered by the Apocalypse on steroids.
Jon: Oh, okay.
Seth: The only other one I've really ever played was Dungeon World. And so you have these few abilities to do stuff. And this one though there's abilities for everything and there's a bunch of different tables and everything. But the cool thing he has for all of his stuff is part of the world building process. And I believe they just called the truths, and there's usually about eleven of them. I've done this for, well the Prophecy of Dragons game I did this for, and they're basically I think something, if you wanna collaboratively make a world with your players, is come up with these truths. And they're things like magic. How popular is magic in this world? Or is it real? Is magic just a thing people talk about? Is it just stories? Is it just some rituals? Is it something that only a few people can do or is it everywhere? Or monsters: Are monsters just stories in the dark or are they out in the wilderness or are they everywhere invading villages or something? So, there's just all these different levers you can set to create the world, which I think is really cool. I think everyone should look into it if you're interested in building worlds. Not to use their exact stuff, but it's just a really cool way to make a world. And in my experience the more involved your players are in helping you create the world, as much or as little as they want, the more... What's the word? Wow. Doesn't matter. The more involved they'll be.
Jon: Yeah.
Seth: The more they'll care. They'll care more. So, yeah, Ironsworn. I think, at least at one point in time, the pdfs were, were free so.
Jon: Okay.
Seth: It's pretty cool. The second thing is something that I really like. It's a podcast (and this might be super popular, I'm not sure) called Midst. M-I-D-S-T. I think it's owned by Critical Role now. So, it's an audio drama. It's a science fantasy space western? It's weird in a really cool way. And I think there's some illustrated YouTube videos on it and stuff. I really recommend people listen to it and just listen to it on Spotify or whatever podcast place people listen to, because it's just so evocative. It has three narrators, they all voice different people at different times and there's sound effects and their narration and everything's just so evocative. And it's been one thing that's really, like, I don't... It's very sci-fi so I haven't really like... I don't know, sci-fantasy, whatever. But it's just really evocative and just helps you think of cool creative ideas. So, I think there's three seasons and the episodes are from 10 minutes to 40 minutes, depending on the episode. And it's completed so you don't have to worry about getting into something that's not done. But it's just really, really cool. It starts with the moon falling on to this town, so, you know. You can't start off in any cooler way than that.
Jon: Fantastic. Thank you so much for coming on, well Iron Monocle. That's how I know you.
Seth: Hey, it's all good, yeah.
Jon: Thank you so much for coming on. It was great having you.
Seth: Thank you. It was great being here.
Outro
Thanks again for coming on Seth. As I mentioned, I'm not that into creating worlds, but I can see why it's captivating to some to delve into these worlds where the concepts you really like and think are cool, is canon.
You can find links to Seth's blog about Skies, to him on Bluesky, the Ironsworn RPG and Midst in the show notes.
If you want to be featured on Goblin Points, or know of someone else who should be, leave a comment on YouTube or Spotify, or send me an e-mail on [email protected].
Links to the MCDM Discord server, the subreddits for MCDM and Draw Steel, the YouTube channels of Matt and MCDM, the complete link section, and this script is in the show notes. It's also on goblinpoints.com.
Next episode is on the 5th. That will be the roundup episode for February. See you next time. Snakkes.