The Korranberg Chronicle 1020 YK: A New Day in Khorvaire

Creating your character

We will create characters together during our session 0. This is a patron game which means that the characters need to work together as a coherent group. My request for players who like to spend their time getting the details of their character right is to bring ideas to the table but don't bring a character you are married to. Bring flexibility and a willingness to make something that works well with the premise of a squad of beat reporters for a newspaper that operates in a mode that is somewhere between the New York Times and the CIA. We will be using the standard array method of character stat selection. I will guide players in an orderly manner as the table makes decisions about their characters and we discuss those choices to clarify intent and vision. Session 0s are integral to my process as a GM because my games are so reflective of the choices that my players make. This campaign will orient itself around the decisions on your character sheets and the decisions you make during play. A session 0 is a series of negotiations between the GM and player about the expectations of a campaign, and that sort of consent forward process is how I like to approach campaign construction at a foundational level. When we get to the session 0, be prepared to think about how your character knows the other player characters. Pay active attention to the other players' decisions. Think about how you can build on themes other people have introduced or how ideas that interest you complement what others have discussed. Our party may be full of rivals vying for promotions in the ranks of the Chronicle, but the table will be a group of respectful adults willing to work together to craft a dramatically satisfying tale of political intrigue (using a heroic fantasy simulator and high fantasy milieu), and it's only possible for that to happen when everyone as a player is on the same page that we work together instead of against each other.

Preparing for the session

Players will need a (free) D&D beyond account where I will be able to provide access to the required rulebooks for us to play and access to the Eberron setting book for players that are new to the setting. They will also need a (free) Roll20 account for mapping and combat purposes. Discord will also be necessary for inter-session communication and for the voice chat during the session.

What Ophelia brings to the table

As an autistic trans woman who worked in entertainment journalism, I bring an authentic editorial perspective to Eberron's most famous newspaper and story that would be about the political choices inherent in journalistic storytelling. I principally wrote about music and video games and their broader relation to popular and political culture, but I am a student of history and a political scientist by training. It would be dishonest of me to not lead with the fact that I'm an intercommunalist Communist who speaks as easily with Marxist-Leninists and Maoists as she does anarchists and even leftists and liberals who tolerate radicals in their midst. This element of my politic informs my storytelling much like it informs most aspects of my life. I love dense, character-driven storytelling, and any campaign that I create for my players ultimately centers the choices they've made and the directions they've indicated they want the story to progress. A constellation of characters will begin to bloom around your PCs, and your relationship with those characters and the places they call home will change based on how you choose to navigate the community and faction politics that will undergird the game thematically and systemically. My approach emerges from the shadow of critic turned artists like Truffaut and Godard who moved in and out of the realms of criticism and filmmaker throughout their career (and, often, creating film as film critique). I think through the implications of genre, and Eberron prior to the 2024 updates (which I have not seen because I don't own the 2024 game) needed a critical re-engagement. I like the historical density of the setting and the specifics of much of the cultural and religious background of the setting, but there were elements of the approach to the acknowledgement of the colonial associations of much of the imagery and text of the medium of tabletop roleplaying that needed to be engaged with directly. I wanted to do that engagement immanently because I'm a Marxist and immanent critique has become a hyper-focus of mine. And so I will turn a setting on its head just enough so that I can begin to approach political storytelling from the perspectives that challenge and interest me as a writer. I will not approach the setting with kid gloves. It is our playground now, and it won't harm anyone else's game in Eberron if we make changes to the canon in ours that still respect the implications of the canon as written.

How Ophelia creates a safe table

I utilized the Lines and Veils system as well as the X-Card system. Both are established in a Session 0. Lines are hard lines and boundaries that players do not engage with in the game at all. Veils are things that can be alluded to sensitively but we don't want to see depicted in play. The X-card allows a player to pause play and request that a scene which has crossed a heretofore unnegotiated boundary be rewound and replayed with the new boundary established because the player didn't realize it was needed until the moment.