Back From the Dead - Part III

(This blog was written by Shawn O'Leary, co-author of Risen, to provide his take on the project and the paths under his watch. Enjoy!)

Game design offers some unique opportunities and the crux of it all is the ability to create something wonderful like a game world, rules that help define it, or simply a compelling story.

I've been a creative writer for many years, and I’ve played Dungeons and Dragons in its various incarnations for nearly as long. Much time has been spent creating just for my own games. I love to create stories, and I love the fantasy genre best. I've always dreamt that I would get to share my work with others and bring it to a larger audience. Thanks to Emerald Press I've done that, but I'm not finished. This is only the beginning. I have too much to tell and much more to share. Having said that, below are some thoughts on how I arrived where I did writing for EP's latest project Risen.

The Wrath of the Irish - The Cuardach
The cuardach, at its heart, is a heritage idea. I am of Irish descent and felt it would be a novel idea to interject something as deep and cultural as Irish myth into a paragon path without saturating it. I didn't want to add too much. It needed to be generic enough and simple enough that a DM could use it in his own campaign without too much work. So I kept it simple. I always start with a simple idea, and attempt to work around it and flesh it out. To find the name cuardach, I simply researched a few Irish Gaelic words and came up with the title of the paragon path. It’s not an exact translation but fits for what I wanted. Secondly, most games revolve around sword and sorcery, good against evil, and true heroism. Nothing wrong with that, but you rarely hear of the hero's tragic beginnings or how he's vowed to reunite with his kidnapped love. Usually it’s someone else’s daughter, king, son, etc., that needs rescuing, so I tied them together and made it personal for the caurdach , an important aspect of the paragon path. Irish mythology is also steeped with faeries, elves, and their fey realm. Tying the path together with the realm of faerie added enough flavor and color to be as magical as any Irish tale while holding true to simplicity for GMs to use. The GM is free to add as much or as little as he likes if he has his own mythical Emerald Isle in his games. I also wanted to present the potential for truly dramatic and memorable role playing. Love, an emotion not touched upon a great deal during games in my experience as a gamer and DM, does this.

Rising from the Ashes - The Sword of Heaven
The dramatic tension in a story should be present in a game as well. A player should feel like he is a part of the story. I tried to achieve that with all of the paragon paths that I crafted and the easiest, perhaps, was the sword of heaven. He is a hero much like the paladin in many ways with one major flaw: he didn't start out truly righteous and pious and, of course, he has to die first before his career can begin. That origin alone I hoped would spark the kind of characterization you see in epic stories. A paladin-like character was an easy choice for me. I’m all about the good guy. Too much emphasis is placed on the "good monster", and today’s movie and novel market is oversaturated with this trope. Take, for example, all of the vampire novels and movies, and the ubiquitous dark elf hero. Even the 4E Player's Handbook presents a morally questionable race and a class named after witches. Every opportunity exists for those kinds of heroes in roleplaying, but I wanted to go with an "I'm mostly a good guy with a few problems" rather than "I am the only shining beacon of light amongst a black hearted race." Of course the paragon path is open enough so that you could still be a member of such monstrous races, but it was the traditionally white knight in shining armor that sparked the idea. I wanted the sword of heaven to be a force of reckoning in the world, achieved by making hard moral decisions and always working toward a strong goal: redemption. The sword of heaven has a chance to avert the nether realms and earn a place in the heavens. It’s basically the second chance we all wish we had at one time or another. This paragon path is all about morals and ethics, and the poignant differences between not only different cultures and nations but even amongst players. Ask your friends how you should play a paladin and what it means to be lawful good and you’ll get a different answer nearly every time.

Fused with Raw Power - The Primordial Ravager
The third paragon path I envisioned came to me late. I had initially only developed the first two, and even then I wasn't finished with them. But in discussions with Todd, it struck me. We discussed at length what I had created for Risen and also what he had written, and bounced ideas off of one another in what I called our "First Business Meeting" which amounted to an online discussion about in what direction we needed to take Risen. I really liked his idea of the firebird and its connection to the Phoenix. The paragon path resonated with me on a whole new level. I was thinking about how the Phoenix is a powerful symbol and great force of nature, as well as a story that everyone knows the world over. The paragon path also granted some limited elemental power and that got me thinking of primordials. And that’s when it struck me: what if the Phoenix was a primordial, one of a small few that actually sided with the gods during the Dawn War? To top it off, the power that was the phoenix decided to bond with a few mortals after death. Great stuff! I decided to take it a step further. Primordals are great beings and the few examples of their power is only hinted. What if a number of the primordials that spawned the universe had been killed in the war but were not really dead, just splintered into many parts because they couldn't truly die? But they can still dream and still seek revenge. In order to exact their revenge and gain power they must bond with mortals who have recently perished. It was then that the primordial ravager was born. The story I wrote for this path was the easiest to write because the moment inspiration hit me all of the other ideas came running. I wanted it to be different and unusual, and so it is. To explain some of the ideas I had come up with required t a reasonable explanation for the bonding with mortals. The idea came to me when I thought about the chained primordial and Bane's influence and leadership during the Dawn War. Afterall why did they chain the primordail and not kill it? As a final note, I based the fire bull primoridal on Peter S. Beagle's The Last Unicorn. If you’ve read or seen it you'll know what I’m talking about. I saw it as a primordial chained by a mad king. If you haven't experienced it, you should: it’s a great tale.

That’s it. I hope this has been insightful and enjoyable. I thoroughly enjoyed writing my part of Risen, and intend to use the wonderful opportunities it presents in my own Dungeons & Dragons games. I hope you do the same.