What is this?
It could have been so different. Who knows, if Niccolo Machiavelli, military commissioner of the Republic of Florence, had not truly understood the scale of Leonardo da Vinci’s genius, he might simply have wasted his time painting portraits of women and doodling. Instead, Florence’s screwcopters, gun-turtles and organ-guns make it secure against the armies of the Pope, Milan and the French, and a haven for radical thinkers, artists and other inventors inspired by his example. Of course, though, success breeds jealousy amongst the city states of Renaissance Italy and beyond. The city’s winding alleys and cobbled squares swarm with sinister Venetian spies, sour-faced priests bearing secret Papal instructions, Milanese mercenaries hoping to earn the king’s ransom the Sforzas have promised for da Vinci’s secrets and even emissaries from France, England and the Ottoman Empire… Exciting times, but dangerous ones, too.
What if all da Vinci’s inventions worked as he had hoped? What if they had been enthusiastically adopted and that their successes had sparked a different kind of industrial revolution? Think of Gibson and Sterling’s ‘The Difference Engine,’ but amidst the sunlit artistic ferment of the Italian Renaissance instead of the smogs and fogs of Victorian England; think of primitive computers running on water clocks and embellished with cupids; think of swashbuckling swordplay as an army of robot knights marches past on their way to the Vatican; think of crossing wits with Machiavelli, avoiding the dangerous charms of Lucretia Borgia, hearing Christopher Columbus tell you about the new world he has discovered…
I am toying with a setting for the Wordplay roleplaying game system, one set in a version of the Italian Renaissance being transformed by weird and wonderful clockpunk technologies sparked by Leonardo da Vinci's genius. This blog is essentially a design journal, in which I'll note down random thoughts, plothooks, links to interesting images and websites, notes on play sessions and anything else which comes to mind...
Who am I?
Mark Galeotti, who'd love to be a Renaissance man. You can also find my Mythic Russia game blog @ http://mythicrussia.wordpress.com/What is Wordplay?
An excellent, simple and intuitive d6-based roleplaying game system - you can find out more about the system and other settings @ http://www.wordplaygames.co.uk/wordplay.html and http://d101games.co.uk/books/wordplay/Blogroll
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Category Archives: Glassblower
Glassblower: Character 6: Dottor’ Dietrich, the masked medic from Munich with a steel scalpel in a brass hand
There is something especially creepy and atmospheric about the plague doctor’s mask, that long-nosed, face-covering and wholly useless accessory meant to protect the medic from the vile humors bearing the Black Death that has since become a classic carnival mask. … Continue reading
Glassblower: Character 5: Padre Taddeo, the Florentine father with alchemical aspirations
Faith and ecclesiastical politics were central themes of the Renaissance. Was the growing interest of science a way of learning the wonders of God’s universe – or a challenge to its ineffable creation? In the main, I posit that the … Continue reading
Glassblower: Character 4: Mordechai the Jewish clocker and kabbalistic cryptographer
I especially enjoyed creating Mordechai, both as a rather different kind of character and also to explore a few aspects of the time and the setting. He’s a Jew who has to a considerable extent turned his back on his … Continue reading
Glassblower: Character 3: Carlo the flying fratboy
Enough with angsty veterans and assassins; I also wanted the characters also to include someone more light-hearted and free-spirited, not least as a fail to the rest. In keeping with the traditions of the heist movie, there also needed to … Continue reading
Glassblower: character 2: Enrico the humanist assassin
The second character, Enrico deGasperi, ‘the humanist assassin with a bad reputation’, was an attempt to on the one hand include one of the obvious tropes for an Italian Renaissance game but to give it a bit of an alternative … Continue reading
Glassblower: character 1: Paolo the Florentine mercenary
As promised, I’ll bit by bit be posting characters and background information from my one-off game The Glassblower Who Came In From The Cold and contemplating what I learned about them. The character sheet, illustrated with pictures taken from the … Continue reading
‘The Glassblower Who Came In From the Cold’
At NerdNYC’s most recent (and splendid) Recess gaming event, I ran this one-shot Wordplay game and I’ll be posting the characters and some of the support materials on this blog bit by bit and commenting on how they worked and … Continue reading
