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Package from France |
| 2021-11-30 |
Package from France
There was a package waiting for me from Olivier Sanfilippo. He had asked me if I had the Yami Monogatari screen. I said no, I have the Yami Monogatari book (and all the other Empire des Cerisiers books), but nothing more.
Bam, I open the package and there's a beautiful, dark, screen, A4 landscape three panels, this is interesting, it seems you can easily sit behind the screen and still connect with the players. My belief in A4 portrait screens (and standing and moving) is shaken.
There are also 12 beautiful A4 pictures of NPCs (with description and stats on the back). See two of them here, left and right. My favourite is probably Yamashiro, the tanuki warrior on the right.
Having such gorgeous pictures to show to players is great, but sometimes you feel constrained. The quality is so high and the Empire des Cerisiers "tone" is so strong, that you, the gamemaster, might hesitate to glean further images from Google because so many of them might not fit.
In each of the images there is an atmosphere. Is it snowing on the tanuki warrior? Why is the magical halo so strong around Natsumata-san on the left? Am I good enough of a gamemaster to render those atmospheres? Shouldn't I just stick to my silly dungeons?
I guess, I'll just use the images (and the maps) to "prime" the imagination of the players and then let it do all the hard work ;-)
There is a thirteenth image in the pack, a beautiful depiction of Izanami no Mikoto, after all it's centered on Yami no Kuni. No stats on the back, she is a goddess, she'll probably end up in a frame hung on the wall, or I'll put the frame next to the kamidana.
And then there is extra for Roads of the Empire: the map in A3 of each of the twelve locations. That's again a wonderful asset for a gamemaster. Like with the A4 NPC pictures, I cannot prevent myself from asking: "How can I protect these from the greasy hands of the players?". I guess I'll just put the NPCs in plastic wraps and, for the maps, find a A3 copier and get some copies so that the players and I may write on them.
Olivier, many thanks for all of this!
P.S. for those of you who understand French, there is an excellent video about L'Empire des Cerisiers that came out a few days ago on the Suck My Dice channel.
Update The pre-filled characters mentioned above are available in PDF. Other downloads for L'Empire des Cerisiers are available from Arkhane Asylum.
