All you need is near-godlike characters and some imagination! I’ve been reading some of the other posts people are making for the RPG blogging carnival as well as the comments being left for them and I’m maybe started to accept that homebrew can apply to more than just systems built from scratch.

Almost 20 years ago I took part in a campaign that was to go on for four years. Now to most that is a good length. Factor in that we were at secondary school at this point and played three nights per week as well as every weekend whilst we were in school and almost every day during school holidays. You can come to understand it when I say there came a point when our characters became a little powerful.

We had been playing Rolemaster for many years in our own little world that barely consisted of a badly drawn map and a couple of scribbled notes on the back of it. At one point the only way to challenge the players was to throw multiple old nether drakes at them but the two main characters finally found a challenge that was worthy of them.

My friends character was a Quishadi Archmage who had hit level 50 after several years of constant playing. He wanted to become a god but whilst our GM was willing to run with almost anything this he would not allow. So he picked the next best thing. He would create his own race of creatures that would call him a god and revere him as such. Can you guess where he started with this dastardly plan? That’s right he picked on my character to be his Adam. I had been running a Great Man Warrior for almost the same length of time and so his level was roughly around the late 30’s to early 40’s. He was already at the peak of his physical development when the tests started. I don’t know how he mastered them, if someone wasn’t there for a session the gaming still went on without them, but he managed to get almost all the healing spell lists learned and through spell lists like Bone Mastery he started to change me. I went from a 7′8″ man to an 8′4″ beast over the space of a year. My skin was turned leathery and the colour of obsidian with an AC of 20. I had razor sharp bone spines grow along my forearms and spikes grew from my knuckles well before I’d even heard of the X-Men. I grew claws and fangs as well as gained acid saliva. What really stood out though was the huge wings that sprouted form my shoulder blades. A few others were experimented on in the same manner and eventually the next generation came along which he named the Akra Neanor. The mutations had stuck and it looked like his new race was about to be born.

Now anyone can make up a new race on a bit of paper and with a little bit of history and a crow bar can usually fit it into a campaign somehow. I’ve never seen a player come up with the idea to actually do it in game and get away with it. Well thats a lie but I’ve never seen anyone in a normal fantasy based roleplay manage to pull it off.

He didn’t stop there however. A great sword was also created called the Wraithblade, the original specs of which have been lost over the years. The founding history was created and carried through like a religion amongst this new race. Several years later we still had it as a playable race but because of the devotion to my friends old character that he eventually retired just shy of level 75 you had to have a damn good reason to be out adventuring.

It’s things like this that have cropped up in the games that I’ve played and ran over the years that are making me rethink just what it means when someone calls something homebrew. I’m beginning to think that I’ve never played a standard game in my life now.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!