Wednesday, August 4, 2010

The Dragon and the Phoenix: The Dark Druid

A Gen Con treat for those of you who can't make it to the "Best Four Days in Gaming".

The Dark Druid: The Director's Cut




A bit of history.  Back in 2002 Eden was getting ready to release their newest game, The Buffy the Vampire Slayer game.  As you know, I had already been playing a Willow/Tara focused WitchCraft game for about a year, so I was pretty excited by this.  Well I got asked by Eden to write the first Buffy adventure that would appear in "Games Unplugged" along with an interview with C.J. Carella talking about the game.
I took an idea I had been working on for my other game (tentatively called "All Soul's Night") and thus the Dark Druid was born.

The original featured, rather prominently, Willow and Tara, as to be expected.  I had to make some changes to make it playable for others and to make it an "intro" or season opener type episode.  The plot dealt with an enemy from the Cast's past as a portent to greater evil in the future.  It was designed to be a opening episode of the season, but one that may or may not be directly related to the seasonal arc.  We were going to use this i n part of the great "Djinn" story, but that never happened.

Fast forward a few years and I was finishing up work on Ghosts of Albion and another adventure that sprang from "All Soul's Night" called "Blight" (which I have played at Gen Con before).  I felt it was time to bring back the Dark Druid and restore it to the mythology that I had created in my games.  Now you can have it too.

I updated it not only to fit better with my world-myths, and with some of the work I did on Ghosts of Albion and the adventure Blight.  In fact you can run Blight and The Dark Druid as co-adventures, separated by time.

The story is rather direct and linear.  This was partly due to the nature of the story and what is was supposed to do (introduce new players to the game) and part of just me writing for the Buffy game for the first time.  I have opted not to change that here, despite nearly 8 years of Cinematic Unisystem adventure writing since then.  It is supposed to be a quick, fun little adventure dealing with past lives.

Enjoy!

6 comments:

Tim Knight said...

Thank you for this. Your Buffy/Ghosts material is always welcome ;-)

Pun Isaac said...

Awesome. You Unisystem stuff is always great and I've tried tracking down that issue of Games Unplugged for a little bit now, to pick up the adventure when I found out about it.

James said...

Cool! My wife and I have the Buffy RPG and will no doubt get around to playing it, one day. :) This'll come in handy!

Charisma Keller said...

I would SO play the Buffy RPG, only if my fellow players would stop laughing at me.

Stupid fellow players.

wastelander said...

Hi I'm eager to download this but the link appears to be dead, have you got an up-to-date link? Thank you!

Timothy S. Brannan said...

Link should be working now.