There’s lots of things in the works at the moment, but the biggest thing in my life right now is Phoenix: Dawn Command. I’ve been working on this RPG for over a year, and now we’re closing in on our goal on Kickstarter. Needless to say, I’m thrilled about this. Phoenix uses a number of innovative mechanics – including a card-based resolution system and the fact that death is how your character grows stronger – but beyond that, it’s a fully formed RPG and a new setting that I love. I look forward to getting to delve deeper into this world myself… and just like Eberron, I look forward to seeing what other people do with this world once they have their hands on it. To be clear, while Phoenix uses cards, it’s a game where you can create your own adventures and threats.

Anyhow: There’s a few new places to get information on Phoenix. Playtester Rich Malena has just posted a new video that walks you through one of the core mechanics of the game, showing how cards are used to resolve non-combat challenges. Rich is working with early prototype materials, so this is not what the final game will look like! In addition to this, Twogether Studios is putting together a gameplay video so you can actually see what Phoenix looks like in action; that should be out in a few days. It uses Elegy and Wolf, and I’ll be blogging about the remaining two characters over the course of the week.

In addition to this, I’m currently posting on an AMA thread on ENWorld. If you have any questions about Phoenix – or Eberron, or Gloom – this is a great place for questions.

Finally: One of the advanced backer levels for Phoenix is the Shrouded Phoenix level, which gets you access to a series of online seminars with myself and co-creator Dan Garrison. I wanted to provide a little more information about these, so you can decide if it’s interesting. While the pledge level only mentions three sessions, there will actually be four – two general-interest sessions before the game is released, and two Phoenix sessions afterwards. Each one will have a handout summarizing the main points – and people will have an opportunity to send in questions ahead of time. The seminars are:

Seminar #1: Creating Worlds

Creating a setting is an important step whether you’re developing an RPG, a computer game or a work of fiction. But where do you begin? Where do you find inspiration? How much information is too much information, and should you avoid well-established tropes or embrace them? Eberron creator Keith Baker will cover these subjects and more in this two-hour workshop on creating worlds.

Seminar #2: At The Table

Between them, Keith Baker and Dan Garrison have decades of experience as game masters. In this one-hour session they share their tips on adventure design and practical advice for GMs.

Seminar #3: Advice For Marshals

Once Phoenix: Dawn Command is released, creators Keith Baker and Dan Garrison will host a one-hour session offering advice to Phoenix GMs. The session will cover how to get the most out of the system, background on the world, and advice on creating your own adventures and challenges in Phoenix.

Seminar #4: Advice For Players

This one-hour session covers the unique aspects of Phoenix: Dawn Command from the player perspective, looking at character creation, developing ties to the setting, tactics, teamwork, the value of each life and more!

I stared down the character sheet in front of me. There were no numbers, no dice rolls and modifiers. There were a list of traits, a name, a class… and questions. Weighty questions. – Playtester Morgan Hillsman

Phoenix: Dawn Command is a roleplaying game in which you play a champion who’s returned from death to try to save your world from a host of nightmares. When you play long-term, you build a character from the ground up, selecting your School and your Traits and then answering questions about this process. Rich Malena has created an excellent video that walks you through character creation, and you can see how that works here. However, when you’re playing your first session or playing a one-shot you may not have time to go through this process, or you may feel that you don’t know enough about the world to create your own story. To help with this, we provide a set of pregenerated characters so you can jump right into the game. However, one of the most important elements of Phoenix is having a personal stake in the conflict… so even with our pregens, we want you to answer a few questions. Let’s take a look at Elegy, our iconic Shrouded Phoenix.

Lessons and Traits are the things that differentiate Elegy from every other Shrouded Phoenix. Each Trait provides her with a special ability, and the Traits she possesses make her an excellent investigator and assassin. Sneaky enhances her natural stealth, Killer Instincts helps her find weaknesses in an opponent’s defenses, Brilliant Deduction reveals clues, while Seen This Before lets her assist an ally’s action. Psychometry is her unique Shrouded trait, and lets her burn her mystical energy to learn secrets about anything she touches. In addition to these powers, Traits can also enhance any action if you can explain how they are relevant to what you want to do. If the players are trying to understand a mysterious plague that’s overtaken a village, it would help if Elegy had Seen This Before. But assuming that she hasn’t actually seen it during gameplay, it’s up to Elegy’s player to come up with a story about WHERE she’s seen it before. Was it in her first life? Was it during her time in the Crucible, the limbo where she became a Phoenix? You don’t have to tell a story to use a Trait… but if you do, you can get more out of it.

Traits are cards that are in your Action deck, and you can only use them when you draw them. Lessons are ongoing abilities that you can use at any time. Elegy has a base set of Lessons that are common to every Shrouded Phoenix, but not every Shrouded knows Shadow Dancer. This makes Elegy an expert at stealth and lets her play more cards when she attacks from hiding… enhancing her talents as an assassin.

The paragraph that follows is a brief glimpse into the character’s past. When you make a character in Phoenix, the first question is always who you were in your first life – before you died and became a Phoenix. The Empire provides a number of cultures to choose from. Elegy is one of the Shadovar, a traveling people long distrusted because of their tradition of necromancy.

Who were you in your first life? How did you die? Why did you come back? These are the critical questions of Phoenix. You don’t become a Phoenix by chance. If you live a remarkable life and die a meaningful death you have the chance to gain the powers of a Phoenix and return, but it is a long, harsh series of trial. What gives you the strength to make it through those tests? And why is it so important to come back? Returning as a Phoenix means you’ll spend the rest of your lives fighting the Dread; what made this bargain worthwhile for you?

Beyond this, how did you die is important because it is also a question of why are you a Shrouded Phoenix? Your choice of School is based on the reasons for your death and the lessons you take away from it. Shrouded Phoenixes die due to secrets, either in pursuit of secret knowledge of because a secret was revealed. Thus, Elegy’s options all deal with a quest for knowledge. As a Shrouded Phoenix, her investigative powers are dramatically increased.

As a Phoenix you are part of a Wing – a squad of up to six Phoenixes with a supernatural connection. Once you’re in a Wing you will serve together through all your lives. From the start, we want you to think about your connection to the other members of your Wing. Beyond that, we also want you to think about your fears. Your world is being consumed by horrors. No matter how brave you may be, no one is completely immune to fear. We want you to think about why you fight and who you care about… but we also want to know what gets under your skin.

The goal of these and all of the other questions is to help the GM develop details that will make a story feel personal to you. You aren’t just fighting the Dread because, hey, monsters; this is personal. This is a game where you may have to lay down your life to protect the things you care about, and we want to know from the start what some of those things are.

When you are reborn as a Phoenix, your appearance is essentially about your image of yourself. You might appear exactly as you did when you died, but any aspect of your appearance could change. Age, gender, race, build… anything could change. If you were an old man, do you still think of yourself that way or do you imagine yourself in your prime? If you were a child when you died, are you now the world’s scariest ten-year-old or do you re-imagine yourself in the image of one of your favorite legendary heroes? Aside from your overall appearance, there are two specific things you need to define: your Talon and your uniform.

Phoenix isn’t a game about acquiring loot, because sooner or later you will die and you can’t take it with you. But there are two things that do stay with you, things you carry through the Crucible and on into your next life. Your uniform is the basic clothing and tools you always have with you, the things you need to perform your basic skills; as a Shrouded, Elegy’s uniform can be assumed to include lockpicks and the equipment she uses to investigate. The question here calls on the player to think of something that particularly stands out… a defining element of her uniform.

Your Talon is a unique weapon – a tool you acquired in the Crucible and that you will carry throughout your lives. It is a relic that was used by all of the Phoenixes that have been tied to your particular Flame, but over the course of your lives it will evolve along with you. Thus, rather than finding a more powerful weapon, you will instead invest your Talon with greater power over the course of a campaign.

Phoenixes can use any equipment they can get their hands on. Between supernatural strength and speed a Phoenix can turn almost anything into a weapon, and part of combat is finding ways to use your environment to your advantage. But your uniform and Talon are always with you, and defining them is a way to help visualize your character.

At this point, you’ve got an Action Deck full of cards, a blend of your unique Traits and general actions such as “Strength 3.” You know how you died and what you’re fighting for, and you know the tools you use in that struggle. It’s time to get the story started.

Phoenix: Dawn Command is on Kickstarter right now. In future updates I’ll talk more about both the world and the mechanics of the game. If you have any questions, ask below!

I’ve just launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund my new RPG, Phoenix: Dawn Command. I don’t have any news at this point about Eberron for 5E, though I still believe that progress is being made on that front. Which means it’s a good time to answer the following question…

How would you adapt Phoenix to work in the Eberron setting? I want to try Phoenix, but I can’t let go of the setting. Is there space in there for Phoenixes?

In Phoenix: Dawn Command you take on the roles of Phoenixes – champions imbued with supernatural power and the ability to return from death up to seven times. Death is actually how a character becomes more powerful; each time you die you learn lessons from your previous life.

The trick is that there’s more to Phoenix than playing a hero with seven lives. The game is set in a fantasy world facing a existential threat: a plague of supernatural horrors that mortal forces cannot overcome, and that have slowly but surely been consuming the known world. Part of creating a character in Phoenix is determining why you fight – what you’ve lost to the Dread, what you still care about – but Phoenix is a game about facing an enigmatic force that could destroy your world. This is part of what makes the seven lives structure work. In Phoenix, you regularly face unknown threats with terrible odds… and quite often it is more important to find a way to accomplish your mission than it is to survive. It is a setting that calls for heroic sacrifice.

So: it’s a trivial matter to insert Phoenixes into Eberron. The question is how you would provide that same sense of urgency that makes Phoenixes feel necessary – and where choosing to sacrifice your life to accomplish a task feels worthwhile.

One possibility would be to amp up the threat posed by the Mourning – to say that the Mourning is expanding, and that terrors are emerging to threaten people on its borders. Meanwhile, Phoenixes are something that first appear after the Day of Mourning; the first Phoenixes could be Cyrans who died in the Mourning, only to return with the power to face this threat. This would reflect the other aspect of Phoenix, which is that the threat is a mystery. As I mention in this post, it’s not just about whether you can fight the Dread, it’s whether you can unlock its secrets.

I could also see a high-tension game set around the Dragonmarked houses. Perhaps the Phoenixes are a creation of the Twelve – a joint project of Vadalis and Jorasco – who have escaped from their creators with knowledge of some sinister plan. Now they are fighting a shadow war against the houses while being constantly hounded by their other secret forces – sort of Dark Angel meets Shadowrun.

The main point of this: there’s more to Phoenix than the death mechanic. I love the Phoenix setting as well. It’s something I’ll reveal more about in the days ahead, and it’s something that is tied around the idea of Phoenixes. So you certainly COULD run Phoenix in Eberron, but I’d check out the new setting first!

And with that in mind, I’ll leave you with some of the threats you might encounter in Phoenix!

Our world is under siege. You are among the few who can turn the tide. You have passed through death and returned stronger than before. You are a Phoenix, and you are our last and only hope.

The Dread began three years ago with the rise of the bone legions in the south. Since then it has spread across the known world, a waking nightmare that takes hundreds of horrible forms. Ghosts howl in the night. Skinchangers lurk in the wilds. Fallen soldiers rise to slaughter the living. Entire cities fall to a Chant that turns all who hear it into mindless killers. We don’t know why this is happening. We don’t know how to stop it. All that we know with certainty is that we are fighting a war and we are losing. Over a third of the Empire has been lost to the Dread, and each day brings new horrors.

In this dark time we have one hope: Phoenixes are returning. Every citizen knows tales of the Phoenixes, champions who can face death and return stronger than before. In the centuries following our brutal civil war the Phoenixes have become legends… and now you are one of them. Whoever you were in your first life, you have overcome the challenges of the Crucible and returned to the daylit world with the power to face the forces of the Dread. Go forth. Complete your mission, discover what you can of the enemy, and don’t place too high a value on your own life. Die well and you’ll return stronger than before. Just make certain that you make each death – and each life – count.

This is the basic story behind Phoenix: Dawn Command. The original Phoenixes founded the Empire, and put an end to the dangerous magical practices of the First Age. Following the civil war, the Phoenixes relinquished control of the Empire, and over the generations their numbers dwindled and they became legends. For centuries the world was at peace… and then that came to a sudden and terrible end. No one understands the Dread. No one knows if the undead army advancing inexorably from the south has anything to do with the Chant that has destroyed cities or the vicious beasts ravaging the Fens. As a Phoenix you have the power to face threats no mortal could hope to defeat. But a single victory is worth little if you can’t discover why this is happening.

Phoenix: Dawn Command is driven by this core story. Every character has been touched by the Dread. In character creation you will determine how you died and what gave you the strength to return. What have you lost, and what do you have left to fight for? It’s not a story about searching for treasure; it’s about having seven lives to try and stop the horror that is destroying your world.

Phoenix: Dawn Command is on Kickstarter right now! To get the latest news, follow us at @Twogetherstudio on Twitter or go to Twogetherstudios.com to get on our mailing list. In my next post I’ll talk more about the card-driven mechanics of Phoenix; in previous posts I’ve explained What’s a Phoenix? and looked at the central element of Death and Rebirth.

Also: Dan Garrison and I were on the most recent episode of the Going Last Podcast talking about Phoenix. Take a listen!