Jane Lamprecht

Age: 32

Skills: First year M.D. with extensive field experience.

Background: Jane was once a promising young doctor in her first year of residency, covering the ER in a city hospital. As society collapsed, Jane watched in personal horror as her family and life vanished almost instantly. She was cut off from her family and friends as government forces entered the hospital and began evacuating hospital personnel. Patients were left in their rooms, as the government could only take people with skills vital to the war effort. The vast majority of doctors and nurse complied, desperate to survive. Shocked by the callousness of the government and cowardice of the hospital staff, Jane refused to go and remained with the patients along with a few other staff members.

Eventually, Jane had to abandon the hospital when it ran out of supplies and the patients either recovered or died. Since then, she’s become a wandering healer, trading her skills for supplies and food. She remains idealistic and frequently helps those who can’t pay for her services. In fact, her idealism is her way of dealing with her stress and emotional pain. However, she will work for mercenary and military groups provided they do not mistreat refugees or commits atrocities. She is a capable surgeon when it comes to treating gun shots and shrapnel wounds and can either go into the field as a medic or teach medical skills to characters. She carries a pistol for self defense but will only use it as a last resort. She will never work for any group or character she considers evil and is willing to die for her beliefs.

Lately, she’s started having nightmares of her family dying horrifically in her arms. She may stop her aimless wandering and begin the search for her family in the next few months.

Appearance: A weathered woman of German descent, black hair with a few grey strands showing. She wears sensible clothing, with a webbed tactical vest stuffed with medical supplies and held together by judicious amounts of duct tape. She speaks bluntly to men with guns, never backing down with them but kindly to those in need.

Zack

Age: 18

Skills: Scavenging, streetwise, wilderness and urban survival, unarmed combat, knife fighting

Background: A street kid grown up, Zack’s learned how to take care of himself. He spends his time on the fringes of settlements, looking for a scam or opportunity to improve his lot in life.

Zack will make himself available to any tough or well equipped group he can find and offers his services as a soldier, scout, or laborer. He is quick to please new employers but will gradually slack off and become unreliable when not monitored by a more seasoned character. He is also prone to petty theft, although he will not risk stealing valuable equipment as he fears being caught.

His attitude is full of bravado and fearless. He isn’t easily intimidated and is quick to start a fist fight with anyone who doesn’t show him respect. On the other hand, Zack is still green when it comes to fire fights and may freeze in combat. An experienced military instructor will see potential in Zack given proper training. In fact, Zack would make an excellent soldier if a veteran takes him under his wing and shows him the ropes of soldering. Such a bond does not come lightly as Zack will not trust a character easily. He is unsure of himself, let alone anyone else. But if a character earns his trust and trains him, he will have a valuable ally for life.

Appearance: Zack changes his look every few months, as one settlement learns of his thieving ways and drives him off. By changing his appearance, gossip about him doesn’t spread far. Currently, he sports a ratty brown mo-hawk (self cut), wearing a death metal t-shirt with a torn blue jeans. He carries a scavenged hiker’s backpack and several concealed knives. He has a functional zip gun but only uses it in emergencies, as he only has a few bullets.

Cal Chilton

Age: 47

Skills: Diplomacy, Investigation, Politics and Fast Talking

Background: Cal was a cop before the war with a head for politics. He was average in police work but his silver tongue got him a steady stream of promotions and accolades. He became arrogant and boastful and took shortcuts with procedure. Eventually, a minor accounting scandal damaged his career. He was relocated to a calm district with little crime and a smaller chance of promotion. Still, he made the best of it that he could and soon became a major player in the region.

After the war, Cal saw his opportunity and made the police into his private army. He purged the ranks of the police of any potential troublemakers, exiling from the district and then recruited thugs and punks as a special ‘peacekeeping’ force. They commandeered as many food caches and gun stores as they could, which turned Cal into the de facto warlord of the region. Unfortunately for Cal, his powerplay made him unpopular and a militia formed to take him down. Brutal fighting between the militia and Cal’s thugs lasted for months. Both sides grew tired of the bloodshed and pressure from outsiders forced them to seek a compromise. Cal managed to negotiate a settlement that kept him in power, but only in a reduced capacity. Cal kept his most loyal men by his side and he favored certain associates when he redistributed the looted supplies, thus keeping him connected. However, he is extremely vulnerable as many in the area want him dead. He is eager to help anyone who can help him and can provide black market contacts or information to those he deems worthy. However, he is not above selling out someone if it means a profit.

Appearance: A tall but portly man with slicked back silvered hair and a broad smile. Cal wears a stylized police commissioner’s uniform, part of his self designated job as ‘keeper of the peace’. A convincing politico, Cal is quick with a joke or speech, whatever is needed at the moment.

• a post apocalytpic utopian community powered by zombies on treadmills
• shrunken alligator’s head grants wishes but only Florida related wishes
• alternate reality game that thousands of nerds play in world wide is in fact, not related to the latest NIN album, but is run by a few bored vampires. They embrace the first five people to solve the last puzzle.
• The resurrection spell is a massive social controversy similar to abortion in America. Anti-life activists assassinate priests who raise adventurers from the dead.
• Cthulhu mythos cultist embeds occult knowledge in fonts. The space between letters forms Aklo runes and when certain sentences are typed out in these fonts, they form spells that summon hungry monsters.
• African militias weaponize dragons with great effect. A rebel group in Nigeria led by someone like Henry Okah takes over oil production and demand more favorable terms from the West.
• New meaning to the word twink: in a D&D-style fantasy world, adventuring/dungeoneering is a sexual fetish for ultra rich old perverts. They outfit pretty young mercenaries and wizards to fetch rare artifacts from remote corners of the world – but all the magical items have scrying devices so the pervs can watch the adventurers hack oozes and squirm through tight corridors.
• a few teenagers find a buried alien artifact – ipod sized supercomputer with self-replicating nano fabricators. The geek figures it out first and builds high tech battle armor for himself and his friends to fight crime and protect the world from evil aliens. Twist comes when the geek realizes there’s too much work for him and his friends. Recruits several hundred 4channers/Anon members and gives them an identical suit of battle armor. They set up a system of watches so that there’s always one on duty at all times. The world is now protected by anarchist geeks with alien hypertech but everyone thinks there is only one. Alternatively they fight scientologists who use Xenu derived alien tech to try and dominate the world – Anonymous geeks die in battle but there’s always more teens ready to fight and die for the lulz.
• Meat packing companies frequently hire immigrants to work in the slaughterhouses as they can’t get citizens to work in the plants. One slaughterhouse hires a southeast Asian immigrant, from the tcho-tcho tribe. He does well at his new job and sends a letter to his tribe explaining he can get all of them jobs at the slaughterhouse. That’s when the tribal shaman and priest of Shub-Nigguruth decides to immigrate to America. Within months, the slaughterhouse becomes a hidden bastion of the cult, as they breed living cattle with horrific monsters and raise horrid undead guardians from grafted flesh sculptures of various creatures.

On May 22

Other tabletop game designers have used the model to finance their work, but they were typically well known in the community and the products they put out through a ransom had a good reputation. For example, Dennis Detwiller co-created Delta Green, an award winning Call of Cthulhu campaign setting. So when he set up ransoms to pay for several Delta Green scenarios, fans had a good idea of what they would get. However, the New World has no publication history. It only began as an informal set of notes for my weekly D&D game. The only reason anyone was willing to pay into the New World ransom or even knew about the campaign was through my podcast.

I am the co-host of Role Playing Public Radio, a tabletop RPG podcast. Aside from a biweekly talk show discussing these games in general, we also record actual play episodes. The actual play shows are normal tabletop RPG games recorded with a digital audio recorder. I use a Zoom H2 recorder, which can record 360 degrees, catching everyone’s voice at the table equally, more or less. These games run from 2 to 5 hours on average. I do not edit them for content, only for quality before I encode them to MP3 and post them on the podcast. They have proven to be popular and I make it a point to record every game I play or run in.

The idea for the New World came to me when I saw a documentary about Columbus’ later voyages and governorship. The 4th edition of Dungeons and Dragons came out last year and several listeners had asked me to record a 4E game as an actual play. A D&D game based on the challenges presented with colonization and exploration seemed much more interesting than the average ‘save the world from evil’ narrative. Moral dilemmas over limited resources and the exploitation of the natives also had its own appeal. I wanted the players to initiate the action instead of passively waiting for a NPC to hand out quests to them. So I wrote some notes down and began the campaign.

When I posted the first game, it was a hit, judging from the reactions of the listeners. I continued to run the game and develop the setting. By the seventh game, I had decided to write up the campaign and use the ransom model as a way to pay for RPPR’s hosting fees and some recording gear. I wrote an outline of the New World Primer and set up a ransom on fundable.com. In order to promote the ransom, I reached out to the network of RPPR fans.

RPPR has a presence on several social networks, primarily Facebook and Myspace. Fundable limits all donation drives to 26 days, so I sent out reminders about the ransom several times so that fans wouldn’t forget about it. Every episode released during the ransom drive also had a promo about the ransom. Fortunately, the fans responded and the ransom was met so I began work on it.

A great deal of the work was already done, as I had written quite a bit for the campaign. To flesh it out better, I asked several of my friends who I knew were talented writers if they wanted to contribute any writing to it. While I was prepared to write the entire primer myself, I figured it wouldn’t hurt to have even more content. The RPPR co-host, Tom Church wrote adventure hooks to give GMs running the game ideas for their own campaigns.  Cody Walker, one of the players in the game, contributed background material while Patrick Seth Williams, a friend of mine from grad school wrote a great essay about historical colonial law. With this in mind, I also sent out a request for art on the main RPPR site and received free work from four talented artists.

Once I released the primer, I created a static page to showcase the art and make the primer more visible on the main site. Since I plan to create more material for the New World in the future, I’ll update the page with any future PDFs.

Given the amount of time spent creating and laying the primer out, I probably could have made more working for someone else as a freelancer. The added value from this project comes from the fact that I retain control over the New World setting. Usually in the tabletop RPG industry, writers sign over copyright and/or control of their work to the publisher. Every contributor to the primer kept copyright on their art or text. But since I wrote the main text, I can develop the setting in the future in any number of ways.

A growing number of artists are earning good revenue through the Internet but many critics point out that most of them had a reputation before they began to earn any money over the web. Through this project, I’ve learned it’s possible to develop a marketable brand solely on the Internet, even in a niche industry like tabletop RPGs.