The Vesalipolis Lullaby: a brief introduction · 4:12am Aug 21st, 2021
I know it looks like I haven't been creative much - at least, if my writing output's any indication. To some extent, that's true: chalk it up to work, my parents being an incessant thorn in my side and good old-fashioned depression. But truth be told, there's been at least some work there, and I've gotten enough requests from folks I know to share it that I figure I should share what i have, complete or not.
W o r d s
That said, what i've made is enough content that I'm not going to dump it all into one blog post. Instead, I'm going to be chunking things out over the course of several days. Hopefully, keeping myself to that sort of loose schedule should encourage me to finish up parts of it that I've started and haven't wrapped up. Granted, the entire things can't be wrapped up, since it isn't technically a story: it's a Tabletop Role Playing Game setting.
This setting, tentatively titled The Vesalipolis Lullaby, is effectively a mashup between a couple of games that have me hooked, specifically a pair of Hearts of Iron 4 mods: Equestria at War and The New Order: Last Days of Europe. The former is a transposition of Equestria and its themes into WWII's conflicts; the latter is an alternate history "axis victory" setting and a massive deconstruction of concepts and attitudes associated with axis victory AUs in general. Both are known for having very well detailed settings and, more than anything else, having truly excellent writing; for a while, I wasn't able to work on what I've got because I was struck by just how much I wasn't going to be able to match up to what the dev teams from both mods have put into their actual content, and it took a fair amount of coaxing to convince me to at least talk about something I knew couldn't compare to the official product if other folks still found it enjoyable to some degree.
Over the next few days, I'm going to be sticking my A Brief History Of... notes that I was planning on sharing with my prospective players for a prospective tabletop RPG I was planning on running in this setting. The first four blog posts are going to cover the four main factions in Equus as they stand in the year 1033 - 33 years after the canonical beginning of the show proper - and a fifth blog post will cover the entity I had originally planned on having said player characters belonging to. There's a fair amount of writing in the factions documents, with the shortest one clocking in at 8k words; as for the organization hiring the PCs...I've got to finish up what i have before I can give an exact estimate. 
I know I keep referring to the setting in terms of a nebulous "Tabletop RPG" terminology without giving a precise rules set, because honestly I haven't narrowed things down to just one. There's stuff from similar or overlapping time periods (e.g. The Fall of Delta Green, Godlike), stuff designed to be simple and easy to pick up (e.g. savage worlds,) stuff designed to handle narratively-driven gameplay well (e.g. The God-Machine Chronicles,) even tweaks on systems that the people I know are familiar with (e.g. modified Pathfinder 1e/2e rules.) It's hard to stick to one when there are so many different suggestions and so many different opinions, and maybe once I've got all my thoughts together and an adventure or two planned out, I'll settle on a system for sure.
Because, honestly, this wasn't going to originally be something I would have talked about at all. I worked on the first Brief History... largely for my own amusement and out of self-indulgence, and showed it to someone else for a lark when talking about what i'd been working on recently. Turns out that more people were into the concept I was describing than I had thought, and the more I write, the bigger the audience has gotten. At this point, I've had enough requests to make my notes public that I feel like I might as well go ahead and announce "this is what I've been working on" anyway; even if nothing comes out of it, at least it's proof that the past eight months haven't entirely gone to waste. And if it eventually gets me to actually put my GM boots on again, well...that's a good thing, probably.
Anyways! This has been a wordy enough intro. I'll post part 1 of 5 tomorrow, see what reactions are like, and try to make this be a one-a-day thing for a while. Feedback will be appreciated, and if you want to borrow what i've got for your own potential TTRPG campaign musings, that's fine (as long as you don't try to claim ownership of it, obviously.)
As for the setting's title, it's a reference to one of the songs on TNO's soundtrack, arguably its best known one: Burgundian Lullaby.
Hopefully this will do a good enough job of setting the tone.
See you tomorrow!
-Petri
Looking forward to the follow-up posts! What I'd read before was great.