The Guild movie is in its final hours of crowdfunding on Kickstarter. More than $5 million dollars has already been raised to turn Felica Day’s seminal series into a ren fair feature film. That money is also going towards development of a Guild D&D book. The official Dragonor campaign setting is the brain-child of Guild star Vince Caso and the D&D wizards at Hit Point Press.
For everyone involved, this feels like a homecoming. “Felica and The Guild were the butterfly that flapped its wings and meant we’re all here today”, Verity Lane, designer at Hit Point Press, says. “Getting to be part of something so foundational is really cool.”
Caso, who was 15 when he first played the model-turned-rogue Bladezz, tells me “it feels like coming back to something that was so foundational in my experience growing up”. “It was the basis of my comedic style.” “It’s where I learned to be an actor and a comic.”
This book is the first full look at the world of The Game, the MMO that The Guild’s main characters are obsessed with. The series only ever gave us glimpses of its expansive setting. Now, players will get a chance to explore it freely.
While the book plays it faithful, it also needed to give players the subclasses, feats, monsters, and magic items to create their own stories. For this reason, Caso says “the adaptation has been mostly in the mechanics”.
“The book presents six new subclasses, and those are based on the archetypes of the characters in The Guild.” “This is a world where the Knights of Good Exist, and it’s been shaped by their participation”, he adds, “but they’ve taken on a legendary, distant status, so this is your story within the world.”
“With adapting IPS in the D&D space, it’s all about finding the balance – making sure those references people are expecting are there, but also that they’re fun and playable”, Lane says. “You want to give people the feeling of being in the media that they love.” “We really focus on what we can do to evoke that feeling in the players.”
Caso has been a professional Dungeon Master for many years, but this is his first official D&D design credit. You can tell, though, how proud he is of what he’s dreamt up. “The subclasses are so much fun”, he says. “I think people will enjoy the frankly absurd new mechanics that I’ve developed for them.”
Absurdity is the name of the game in The Guild. The Kickstarter page promises some pretty wacky things for the TTRPG: Cheesybeard the pirate himself, a carnivorous outhouse, sentient BLTs, and cartoonishly evil ex-boyfriends. All this comes from the mind of Caso.
“The Carnivorous Outhouse was one of my favorite pitches I put forward”, he says, “because it also ties into the movie in a way that doesn’t make sense now, but when you see it, you’ll totally get what inspired it”. “I adored the idea of a literal outhouse Mimic that eats you when you try to use it.”
Caso also tells me more about the origin story of a monster known as Flaming Hot Trevor. “In the show, Codex references this recent ex-boyfriend of hers, and we expand upon that character quite heavily in the comics”, he says. “I said ‘well, let’s take this character, who’s just the pastiche of every horrible boyfriend you’ve ever had, and give people the chance to kill him!”
If you couldn’t tell by now (and seriously, how couldn’t you?), this is a comedy D&D supplement. That makes Dragonor feel authentic and unique, but it comes with its own design challenges.
“The question is where to put the comedy on the page”, Lane explains. “If you put a joke in a highly mechanical section, it can lead to misinterpretations and slow down play.” “Instead, you’re trying to give players the tools to create those comedic scenarios for themselves”, she continues. “You still get those little jokes in the book, but we’re also safeguarding the sections where that doesn’t function well.”
“There were a lot of conversations about how to adapt such an inherently ridiculous comedic style into what’s often a very structured, stylistically specific medium”, Caso says. “We’ve worked with Hit Point, who knows the rules inside-out, to find a proper middle ground, where we’re paying off the ridiculousness in a way that’s sound and playable.”
Caso is hopeful this balance will appeal to all D&D players, not just fans of The Guild. “The book is in large part a mechanical treatise where you’re able to use these items, spells, subclasses, backgrounds, and feats to introduce goofiness and zaniness into your game, irrespective of table or story”. “Nothing is ridiculously broken or hyper-meta to the point that it’s unusable”, he adds. “It’s all fully mechanically sound, and it fits anywhere.”
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Source: Wargamer
