Hello! It's Jorden, again. I'm just gonna dive right into it today.

Those who know me know that I absolutely love tabletop role-playing games such as Dungeons and Dragons, Chronicles of Darkness, Shadowrun, and Stars Without Number to name a few favorites. I played those games all through high school and college, usually in the Dungeon Master or Storyteller role, and when we went into quarantine and could no longer physically visit our friends and family I began running a game for my family as a way for us to keep in touch and make sure everyone was ok. As I have worked on writing scenarios for Rank: Warmaster I found myself drawing upon those collaborative writing skills I had sharpened in my teens and early twenties. Once again I find myself in the Storyteller role, setting the scenes and deciding on the behaviors and personalities of the people that are encountered in those scenes, but just like in those tabletop games the other half of the story is provided by the players. I find myself making decisions about the challenges each scenario should present in exactly the same way that I would plan an adventure for a group of players; asking myself about the skill level of the players in quesiton and the tools and abilities they have available and even about how bad I'm willing to make the consequences for failure. On top of that, Art recently suggested that we probably want to put another AI in the game using the IAUS style that I mentioned a few posts back. This AI would be the Storyteller and it would serve to make decisions about when scenarios should trigger and which ones. I'll likely be doing a lot of the work to determine how this particular AI makes decisions and what it considers to be a fair or unfair challenge, which would of course be based on how I would run things personally. We're basically planning to put a stand-in for me into the game to try and give everyone a better experience.

What this all means is that, in a way, everyone who plays Rank: Warmaster is going to get a decent idea of what it would be like to play a tabletop role-playing game run by me. I hope I can be a good Storyteller for you.