Event Information
The Bladelands Chronicles hold weekend-long events several times a year. If you wish to attend an event, please look through the information in this chapter to see when the upcoming events are and to book your place. If you wish to see what has happened at previous events, please look in the Chronicles chapter.
When you book a place in an upcoming chapter of The Bladelands Chronicles, you get a 3-phase "event turn". The three phases are as follows:
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Pre-event
Once you have booked and paid for your place you MUST send us up to date character information for the character you wish to play at that event. Please complete this spreadsheet with the stats of your character or characters, then re-name the sheet as PlayerName.xls and email to to jonathan@bladelands.co.uk - notes on how to use this spreadsheet can be found within it. Make sure you include how much money your character currently has, and also any important or unusual items they own. Money and items not reported may be lost between events.... Certain types of characters may need to send additional information - for example an apothecary will need to send us a list of the potions they wish to bring to the event, mages may need to send us lists of the spells they have, and so on. If you are in doubt as to what information to send please ask, but in general the more information we have about your character the better.
You may also wish to take this opportunity to inform us of any specific things your character wishes to get done at the event. Eg if they have a specific mission or ritual they wish to perform, or if they wish to speak to a particular NPC, or if they wish to learn a certain skill, let us know and we can try and make this possible. We don't promise to be able to accommodate everyone's wishes at every event, but if you don't tell us about it there's no way we can help you!
The deadline for this information is 2 weeks prior to the event, but we appreciate receiving it as early as possible. This allows us to prepare an event which will be appropriate for, and of interest to, all characters which are attending. If this information does not reach us by the deadline you must come and talk to a Ref on the first day of the event to clear your character. In the event that we feel that changes to your character of which we were not informed of would affect the balance of the event you may not be allowed to make those changes. Eg you may not be able to spend recently acquired DP as you wish, or to use recently acquired items, which should have been declared during the pre-event turn.
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Event
Next comes the actual event, during which characters are faced with, and hopefully overcome, a variety of challenges set in their path by the Refs.
You may only play one character at any one event unless something exceptional happens - for example your character is killed, or disabled, or has to leave the area in which the event is taking place for some reason. In these sorts of circumstances you can ask permission from the Refs to create a new character to play for the rest of the event. You will not be able to switch characters again, unless, again, something exceptional happens to the character you are now playing. Again, you must speak to a Ref before changing characters. This is so that we can keep track of which characters are present and prepare suitable encounters.
In return for attending an event you gain experience points ("XP") which you can convert to development points ("DP") to spend on advancing your character (see character creation and advancement for more details). XP is awarded to the character you played at the event, and is not transferable between characters. In the event that you played multiple characters, all of whom survived the event, please speak to a Ref about splitting your XP between the characters played. The amount of XP awarded for an event will depend on its difficulty and on the success (or failure) of the character group to meet the challenges they faced at the event.
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Post-event
After each event you may, if you wish, send us a post-event turn. This consists of 2 parts:
Report - a report of important things your character did during the weekend. This could include, but is not limited to, deals that were struck, information that was gained or imparted to others, any items that were found, and so on. We don't expect (or want!) pages and pages of flowing prose - a bullet point list will suffice. This allows us to ensure that the Refs are fully informed about what happened at the event from the point of view of the players, and to make sure that your character's actions are remembered and incorporated into future plot lines. The Refs cannot be everywhere, and see and remember everything that happens at an event - in some cases they may not even remember everything they were specifically involved in; some of our Refs have bad memories, and we all have a lot to concentrate on during an event - so this is your opportunity to make sure we know what you got up to.
Downtime - a list of "downtime" actions that your character wishes to perform before the next event. Please note that we are running a live system, not a play by mail game, and so where it is possible to do something during time in at an event we will ask you to do so. Consequently downtime actions such as speaking to NPCs are likely to be refused, and it not possible to perform any major, game-influencing events such as engaging in combat, stealing items, etc, between events. However, we realise that some things (eg research into items/ideas/events, sending communications back to the mainland, etc) are simply not practical during game time, so are happy to consider these and respond to them between events. How much you can achieve between events will depend on a combination of how much we think it is reasonable for your character to achieve in that time and how much time we have to deal with your request - please remember that the Refs all have real lives to worry about and are often very busy between events.
The deadline for this information is 2 weeks prior to your next event. After this we will be too busy preparing for the next event to consider information from previous ones. However, we advise you to get post-event turn information to us as soon as possible as this will give us plenty of time to respond and will allow us to consider your character's actions when planning future events. In particular, complicated downtime actions should reach us well in advance of your next event if you want to get a response.
All information which needs to be sent to us for phases 1 and 3 should be sent to us by e-mail.
