The Veiled Kingdoms

Milieu, Take Two

December 27, 2007 at 7:07 am (anitaverse, Meta, roleplaying) (anita blake, Historical milieu, role-playing, rpgs, setting, vampires)

If you’ve read the initial posts here, you’d certainly have the impression we’d settled on a setting for the game. After talking a bit more about it though, we’ve decided to revisit that decision.

One of the things we talked about was, naturally, how to create conflict since it’s what drives RP. Now, setting the game in the past does a couple of things which make creating conflict a little easier.

• Since preters are relatively unknown, no one is watching for evidence of preter-on-preter violence

• Even if they were known, they still don’t have any rights and most people will be all too happy to have them killing one another

• The Vampire Council ban against turf wars doesn’t exist

Now, couple these with the fact that vampires tend to be very good at manipulation and are very territorial, and you have a lovely avenue for conflict: vampire courts not only in conflict with one another, but manipulating humans into attacking other territories as a prelude to an attempt to take over.

To make these sorts of conflicts more likely and realistic, we’d need territories which are fairly easily demarcated but near by and politically (at the human level) independent. The classic city-state is the obvious example.

And of course ancient Greece is the time and place which likely leaps to mind when city-states are mentioned.

I don’t want to RP in ancient Greece. After asking a few other people where they’d choose to set an historical Anita Blake RPG, none of them mentioned it either. People did mention Viking Age Scandinavia and Victorian Age London. We’ve also tossed around the idea of ancient India or Egypt as well.

The problem is, with the possible exception of the Viking Age, none of those really featured city-states. So we hit upon the idea of simply extending our creation of a fictitious island in 18th century Caribbean: why not drawn inspiration from a particular historical milieu to create our own setting from. (Readers familiar with Guy Gavriel Kay’s novels will recognize this approach no doubt.)

So! With this in mind, it becomes a question of selecting a milieu which provides good inspiration and color, and then we drop in our conflict-tailored political system.

Of course not everyone wants to RP a war, and naturally we would never require anyone to participate in it directly who did not. Just as naturally, it will be hard to avoid dealing with it indirectly, but as it is also intended to give a backdrop for RP that’s just fine.

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