PROFOUND MASTERS OF OGRE GATE PHASE ONE

With Wandering Heroes of Ogre Gate in layout, we've turned our attention to Profound Masters of Ogre Gate. This is essentially the high level campaign book, where you begin the path to longevity. We've been running profound campaigns and it has led to some interesting observations. 

Right now, there is definitely a big difference between Qi levels 1-6 (which are the standard wuxia levels) and 7-24 (which are the profound to immortal levels). Qi levels above 6 are optional (it takes a long time to get to 6). We are noticing the normal issues you'd find in any high level campaign, but there are also other challenges unique to the setting and system. 

One problem I am trying to solve is making characters who are already higher level. The game assumes you start at Qi rank 1 and advance, but not everyone will play that way. Something that emerges when you make higher level characters is they don't feel rooted the way regular characters do; they don't develop the ties and connections over time. So we've been experimenting with some tables to help generate history for characters that start out high level. This is nothing new or revolutionary, but they are very effective. 

From a design standpoint the big challenge is to devise a large number of interesting and unique Profound Techniques. This is something that actually gets easier with time. The same thing happened with Sertorius. The initial spell list was harder to cobble together, but subsequent ones like Book of the Archon were a lot easier to make. With Profound Masters of Ogre Gate, there is a host of new territory to explore in terms of Kung Fu Techniques, Rituals and Immortal Powers. 

The Profound material is more in the realm of Zu Warriors from the Magic Mountain, Journey to the West, Journey of Flower, Chinese Paladin etc. It involves gods, celestial realms and a horde of supernatural entries. This changes things considerably. Once players start adventuring in the Lunar Realm of Supreme Judge Yu or the Hanging Valley of the Dead, then that makes vastly different prep. One aim of the book is to reduce prep for the GM, so we will be including information on the different realms. Part of the purpose of my current campaigns is so I can explore them as a GM and map out most of these places. 

I'll keep everyone updated on this as we go forward. As I said before we want to give ourselves at least a year from the release of Wandering Heroes of Ogre Gate before this one comes out. Between then and now, we will release Ogre Gate Inn and other Strange Places of Li Fan (title is tentative and evolving). Also, we started work on a supers game called The Forever-verse.