House of Cards GM Log

IMC: That’s Just … Wrong!

posted by Ginger at 01:57 PM, November 05, 2003 | Filed under : IMC , Traveller's Guide to Shadow | Comments and Followups

Arref has an IMC on the weird things you find in Shadow.

We haven’t seen a lot of weird stuff in Shadow in House of Cards. I suspect, as I mentioned in the comments, that there are two drivers behind this.

First, it should be clear that shadow travel is dangerous. We don’t guarantee that people will get where they’re going when they mean to be there. PCs have gotten lost in Shadow, most notably the 500-year odyssey that kept Reid out of Amber from the time of Eric’s childhood and Jerod and Solange’s shadowpath collapse that led to the Land of Peace. I think the players are aware that they have to be careful, and that limits both the number of trips and the types of places the PCs visit.

Second, most PC travel in House of Cards has been purposeful: primarily trade voyages, but also some specific cases like Folly’s return to Texorami, Jovian’s planned trips into Arcadia chasing firelillies and to Calusa, and the Bleys-led expedition to the Land of Peace. If a character is purposefully travelling, there’s much less likelihood that he or she will find random weird stuff en route than there would be if the character were just wandering around exploring.

While House of Cards has some exploratory elements in it, I don’t think as a game it’s working out to be much about exploring Shadow. (Exploring metaphysics may be a different question.) I suspect that will limit the amount of strangeness the PCs encounter in Shadow in general, for they generally will be too busy to do the sorts of exploring that will take them into the realms where the strangest Shadow-things will be found.

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