Darklands LP Part I

I'm gonna try to make an LP of the interesting parts of Darklands, an amazingly wild and interesting game that has been largely forgotten. It came out in 1992 and that's around when I first played it. I can't even guess how many thousands of hours I've put into it. I know this game way better than the people who made it, so I have a lot of habits of how to play the game optimally. But I'll make some effort this time to play like a normal person approaching the game for the first time.

The manual describes the game better than I could:

Darklands is based on a real time and place: Greater Germany in the 15th Century. The strange, miraculous and magical elements simply reflect popular beliefs, superstitions and myths. This is an era before logic or science, a time when anything is possible. In short, if medieval Germans believed something might be true, in Darklands it may actually be true.

We need to put ourselves into this mindset. Remember that we are good Christians, but we are not any kind of Christian you would recognize today. Disclaimer for anyone who might be offended: There will be parts of the game that show Christianity of the time in a bad light. There's bound to be since it permeates everything going on in the game. If you think you see something anti-Catholic or pro-Catholic, remember that the Reformation hasn't happened. There is no "Catholic" or "Protestant" yet. We're all on the same team.

I'll talk more later in later episodes about what the game is all about, including some special insights the guy who made it gave to me personally, but we gotta keep the pace up so let's start now.

Character Generation

Darklands is famous for having a character generation system that is a better game in itself than 90% of the games you've ever played. It's based on the old Traveler pen & paper system, where you live out the whole life of the person through their education and careers until the moment they joined your party. You want to put them on a career path where they will pick up the skills you need, but let their physical abilities waste away. Every 5 years you choose what their occupation is, and you can't just jump from any job to any job. You need the right skills and work experience. (Darklands is sometimes a little too real.) If you want to become a master alchemist, or bishop, or robber knight someday you've got to build your way up to that.

Also keep in mind that once we get into the game, Darklands is not some fantasy game where you get XPs and you can assign them to your elf wherever you want. Skills increase through experience. As in actually using them. (Or through being trained by experts, but this costs lots of time and money.) So during character creation we're actually going to neglect our weapon skills, the skills we use the most, because we'll get so much practice in the game those will improve quickly.

(If you see other seemingly weird choices on the character sheets, like making a streetwise nun, I am doing some metagaming where I already know every time there will be a skill check in the game, who it's rolled against, and which skills are difficult to increase.)

The Party

I'm so good at this game that I've been generating intentionally handicapped parties for the last 20+ years, but that would be bad for an LP. So I'll try to make an actually decent party this time. Our theme is going to be great figure skaters. Here's my concept:

Sasha Cohen - The queen of my heart, the reason I got into figure skating. She's going to be the face of the party, the one who speaks for with others. Extremely charismatic. Crafty. She's an investment banker or something now, which is pretty close to being a thief. She's gonna be agile too (again, obviously they all are but for gameplay reasons we gotta build up the stat in one of them). Good with a blade.

I have her be a local trader, later becoming a traveling merchant. That builds up her people skills but keeps her physical abilities in shape.

Redactor Zero - How do I image myself as a hero in 1400s Germany? I'm an idiot savant so I'll be the alchemist. Having the maximum possible intelligence is important. I'll need to be literate, so I pump up my Read & Write and Speak Latin skills. I don't want to be like one of those people who plays D&D and gives themself a magic wheelchair, so I'll give myself relatively low agility. Impact weapons.

Before you ask, this is from several years ago when I guess somebody wanted to see my foot.

I first study as an oblate, a lay student who is taught at a monastery. That will cut into my charisma even more, but let's get real. I never was a personality boy. From there I go to the university. Now I have the knowledge to become a professional alchemist. Later on I could promote myself to Master Alchemist, but I don't want to get so specialized into alchemy that I can't fill my other roles on the team. I've made sure to bump up certain skills like stealth, streetwise, woodwise because checks against these are run against the whole party and they don't improve quickly. Everyone needs to invest in those. For my last job, I decide to go out in the forest and be a hermit. You can never be too close God, amirite? At 35 characters begin losing their physical abilities but that hasn't hit me too bad yet and my age allowed to build up a lot of skills that would be hard to get in game.

Kim Yuna - The 국민 여동생, the Nation's Little Sister and a devout Catholic. She'll be the warrior nun in our party. Of course your personal connection with God is vital to every one of us, but she's gonna take that to the next level. She'll also have the academic background to understand theology because we're gonna be running into some pretty wild stuff out there. She'll have high perception and she's also going to be our medical expert. This is a crucial skill and she's got the best background for it. Impact weapons.

Her career path is very simple. She's just a nun the whole way through. That allows her to study so many useful skills that she really doesn't need to do anything else. I might have made her the abbess of her own convent but the option never came up, probably because when choosing her background I didn't put her in a high socioeconomic class.

Nathan Chen - The man who launched the Quad Revolution. Incredibly strong gigachad. He's also the most agile. When we run into a really tough physical challenge, like scaling a wall, he'll be the one we send. Polearms. At the end he's gonna be the ultimate killing machine, using a halberd to chop up our enemies, which if you think about it is the 1400s combat equivalent of landing a quad.

Since Nathan is only 25 this is pretty simple. He begins as a hunter so he can pick up Stealth and Woodwise skills, which our party is lacking in. Then he spends one term as a recruit soldier to boost his combat skills. We'll be relying heavily on him in early fights as the other characters get some on-the-job training.

Let's Go!

We now pick each character's heraldry and appearance. There's not that much to choose try, but I'll try to make it fitting.

• Sasha - Based on her outfit in the legendary 2006 Olympic short program at Torino.

• Redactor - There's two different male body types and one is the fat friar, so I guess I gotta be that.

• Yuna - A nun outfit of course, because she's not allowed to be a sexual being.

• Nathan - I just kinda tried to make it look like him.

Our party. Yuna, me, Sasha, and Nathan. Do you see the resemblance?

And the game begins, with our party coming together in the town of Duisburg near the Rhine. Who knows what adventures await us?