[Thy Vernal Chieftains] frequently asked questions

One effect of personally emailing a pdf to purchasers is also personally receiving questions about it by email. So I thought I'd do some of the frequent ones as a public thread.

Here's the first:

Why are the Saxons not one of the player cultures?

When Thor Hansen asked me to be the system designer for the Indie Game Company Game Design Challenge in December, it was to design a system where the Saxons were the bad guys. So that carried through to Thy Vernal Chieftains. Thor wanted a game with characters from the Celtic, Roman, and British populations, individually with inherently different cultural strengths, that was about whether they could transcend cultural differences and join together to overcome the common Saxon and Pictish threats. A system like TSOY, with different cultural secrets and keys may have been more to Thor's liking, and could have been designed, but not well, not under the time constraint of the Challenge, at least not by me. So I came up with the spheres concept, with the idea that the different cultures would each excel in a different sphere.

If I'd been the one Jared stung with the requirement of producing a supplement, probably I'd have tried to add the Saxon and Pict cultures to the game. But it would have been rough. I'd have needed to cut way deep into the system and add new spheres, I think. And I can't imagine I'd have gotten it to work.

Paul