RPG a Day #5 Throne

 

I’m going to try and take part in the #RPGaDay writing prompts for 2021. The idea is there’s a prompt every day that asks you to write about something in RPG’s you really like. There are a couple of alternate prompts offered but I’m going to try and do the main one every day. If you want to try it yourself, you can head here for the calendar for this year.

It took me a while to figure this one out. Throne is such a nebulous term that I wasn’t sure where to go with it. I think I’m going to talk about one of the few times I included royalty in a game I ran.

I was set to run a Vampire the Masquerade campaign back in the early 2000’s. I’d decided to go with Dayton as my city since I lived there and everyone knew where all of the landmarks I wanted to use were. It also helped that I picked up a Haunted Ohio book and was prepared to use all of the Dayton section as story hooks. Since I was setting up a ghost hunter ideal as part of my story it gave me a great starting place for the Prince of Dayton.

It’s been a while since I set up this campaign that sadly never came to fruition so I’m hazy on some of the details, like the Prince’s name. I do have a journal where I set up tons of charts and trees that laid out who all the major power players in Dayton were; I hope to find it one day. Until then, let’s talk about what I do remember.

The Prince in my campaign was never meant to be the villain. His job was to give my players work that would move the campaign along. He survived as Prince by being far cleverer than the rest of them and knowing how to leverage his connections to keep himself safe. At the time almost every Prince I’d heard of was an absolute bastard of a monarch and I wanted to do something different. For me it made more sense that the Prince would be nice to people as it would make keeping him in place easier too.

The one thing I had that might be considered a negative was his obsession with the occult. Part of this was his clan, I think he was a Tremere. I wanted him to be looking for magical items and relics that would help him increase his power base and research. I wasn’t sure what he was researching since we were at the beginning of the campaign, but I knew he was looking into something.

As I said, I never got to run the campaign. I was excited to do so and ad set up the first session and what would happen there. I even had players ready to go. I can’t remember why we never go to play. I’m sure I’ll figure it out at some point or possibly get to run the game at some future point. I know some changes to the setting would certainly make that easier. Coteries have been introduced and that will make my job as the storyteller significantly easier. In the original game I had to come up with a reason for all of them to be working together.

Anyway, that’s my take on Throne.

See you tomorrow for Flavor…