Sanctuary - Prelude

First off, Sanctuary is the name of the town where the game is centered. It is from the Thieves' World books, edited originally by Robert Asprin. Here are some links:
Wikipedia's entry
Lynn Abbey's site

I used to run a game in an old home-brew RPG system, which I will NOT get into here. When Green Ronin announced the Thieves' World books for d20 (which Joe told me about initially) I went NUTS! I already liked d20, and we'd been playing a few d20 variants already:
Babylon 5 - from mongoose publishing
Conan - also from Mongoose publishing
d20 Modern - from Wizards of the Coast (WOTC)

As a group, we had issues with 'second hand' publishers (IE Mongoose) because of the massive number of typo's, errata, missing information and generally a sub-standard product line. So, I was wary of the d20 Thieves' World offering. But, my hopes outweighed my wariness, and I plunged in and got the 4 books available at the time, both in hard copy AND PDF. No toe test for me, I dove in.. Spent a pretty penny on my TW addiction. After looking through the books, I was very glad I did. The folks at Green Ronin do a top notch job at publishing stuff. I was impressed and giddy as a school girl. I took the books, consumed them over and over again, took them with me when I traveled and generally lived, breathed and ate Sanctuary.

Green Ronin's series of books for d20:
Thieves' World Player's Manual
Thieves' World: Shadowspawn's Guide to Sanctuary
Thieves' World Gazetteer
I ran the module
Thieves' World: Murder at the Vulgar Unicorn

One note on the module; it's set in the 'Irunne Era', and since I've really only read the first 5 or 6 books (there are now 14) and my key time period is the 'Ranken Era', I didn't want to start my game 50 years from what I was familiar from. So, I modified the module to fit in the time period I had chosen, which is actually BEFORE the books start. The books start with Prince Kadikithis taking rule of the city with his Ranken Elite (Hell Hounds) soldiers. I set my game to about a month before this event. Then, when the adventure was over, it would tie into the Prince coming into the city, and the introduction of the iron fist that would be the Ranken Elite (Zalbar, Tempus, etc). Plus, it gave me opportunity to introduce the gang to Jubal, and the city in general. I thought it worked out well.

With that game introduction done, next I would like to introduce the players and characters, and end this posting. The next Sanctuary post will be the edited log that I kept for the game, and I will post in parts.. mostly significant story arcs. To date, I have "Murder at the Vulgar Unicorn", "The False Prince", and "Elinbar Steel". The game group is on a Sanctuary hiatus currently, but I am trying to re-engage the group.