What's cooking in the kitchen.

Exceptionals has done well enough I think it's worth spending a little time on a small setting book. This setting book is taking place in the outer banks of NC and  looks to contain (at least by my outline) location set pieces, npcs, plot hooks, and 4 new protocols to make make new kinds of characters with (and ease the burden on existent ones). Might do a map for funsies.

It will be a less produced and smaller product on the whole, but  I mostly mean it as a thank you for all the support I've received already.  I'm about 10 pages deep into an intro already and I can't wait to show you what  I'm doing.

I'll save my plans for my next game for a future post, but for now  have a preview of the "Welcome to Reedsville" intro. Keep in mind his this is pre-editing and content and spelling might change.

Intro

This is a setting book supplement for Exceptionals: A Game About Community, Activism, and Kinetic Eyebeams and that means two very important things. The first is that to make use of this book you must have a copy of the Exceptionals Core Book (something easily remedied with a quick visit to https://bramblewolfgames.itch.io/ if you don’t already got one). This little volume won’t have all the important things you need to run like character creation and dice rules.

What it will have is a small little town more or less ready for you to use in a game of Exceptionals as a developed setting. Complete with locations, people that occupy them, and ideas for stories you can tell.  All of which couldn’t exist without the second important thing, the support of all the folk that got me here.

While I’d likely keep making games for the sake of it, the fact is, that it’d be hard to justify spending the amount of work it takes to make a book on something that didn’t receive the love and support Exceptionals did. Every retweet, comment, purchase and thought to share with friends feels like more than I deserve and I don’t think I’ll every stop thanking folk. But I might as well start with the 4 new protocols also included in this book.

The stories this book seeks to tell is something personally familiar. Something about the melancholy of small vacation towns and broad class divides that split them along old lines and circumstance. Tiny tyrants built off the backs of others and small town ignorance. But also stories of resilience and community. Building connections and oasis of kindness and mutual aid that can withstand the biggest hurricanes. Celebration and small moments grown from what started as an offered hand in spite of it all.

Most of the hooks in here are likely to fall somewhere in between what the Exceptionals Core Book would call “Strange Times in Small Times” or “Neighborhood Protectors” and wants to push the town as a character in and of itself full of big television set pieces you want to visit and larger than life characters. All of which have lives, stories, and motivations of their own and may not line up with yours.

It’s a living space, and it’s one with history.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Editor’s Note: The Reality of Reedsboro

Reedsboro is not a real place.

I’m sure if you dug up a map there is one somewhere, but it was never intended to be somewhere real as much of an amalgamation of several towns and cities all along the Outer Banks. Comic books make up cities and whole countries to talk about things sometimes. It takes from places from Sneed’s Ferry to Jacksonville, Swansboro to Wilmington. Many of the direct mentions of the people, places, and events draw from the same well and are not direct truths.

In writing about Reedsboro, in a game like Exceptionals, allows me an opportunity and platform to talk about the real history the real people that shaped it. The struggles they faced or caused, and how it effects us today. History is a record of communities interacting and the ripples outward and through time, and Exceptionals is nothing if not a game about communities, namely marginalized communities.

In this first chapter, the fictional aspects are highlighted with text like this, as to distinguish it from real events and history.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Come to Historic Reedsboro

Welcome to Reedsboro, a North Carolina coastal town situated in the Outer Banks (somewhere in Onslow County if you want to get real specific). During the spring and summer it's a vacation hotspot for people with money, and half the town is built to cater to them and the houses they leave empty for 9 to 11 months out of the year. The other half is for those who have to work in those places. More or less.

It's a town that can't decide if it wants to market itself as a historic district full of colonial and pirate history, or a place for upper middle class families and surfers.

But before all of that, it was Lumbee land. Still is, by all rights, but some folk get real nasty when you remind them of that. The Lumbee are not a singular people, but a collection of diverse nations spread over three language groups and united under the same name and existed in the swamps, forest, and coast of the so-called Carolinas dating back to at least 12,000 years BC and, in fact, still do today.

Everything colonist built was off the blood and back of these folk and through Indigenous and Black slavery. Oddly enough, some folk get even nastier when you remind them of that too despite the adoration of old colonial mansions and plantations.

Reedsboro itself started as a fishing village specializing in mullets, shrimp, and crab but built up a reputation as a minor port of trade. Not the most profitable of catches, but enough to start building what would become old money with enough time. The ever shifting sandbars made it difficult to navigate, which while it kept it from growing as big as some of the now major cities, but it made it an ideal stop for pirates (including most infamously, Blackbeard) looking to offload their goods and spend some time away from sea. Something that folk who made a habit of looting from the wrecks that scattered the shore had no problem enabling.

And so the traders got richer offloading the exploited wealth of the so called new world and the suffering of others. Sugar, tobacco, and cotton all had a real human cost.