Tales from the Table - Lotus

A round of questions with a long-time Anno Amagium beta-tester

1. Say hello! Introduce yourself with whatever name you would like us to use, and briefly describe your player characters in Anno Amagium.

Hi! I'll stick with my usual gamer tag here, so… I'm Lotus, and I've participated in two campaigns so far: Dalhart and Deluge.

My Dalhart character is Cael Agniva, a rookie keeper. Unlike most rookie keepers, he's 37 years old because he spent his entire adult life playing professional baseball, including four years as a pitcher in the asfalis Major Leagues. As a result, he's the most recognizable member of the force outside of Dalhart. Unfortunately, he is best known for the final pitch he ever threw, which resulted in the most famous home run in Erician baseball history. Cael got knocked out of baseball and into another life, but after a few months in small-town Texas, he's slowly but surely found his footing. In battle, he's mostly offense-oriented, pairing fire magic skills with his trusted triggerblade and a pair of telekinetic weapons: a wrist-mounted bladed projectile called a kestrel, and a pair of metallic balls called bashers.

In Deluge, I play as Raleigh Hawthorne, a Gulf Federation and Louisiana native who became a refugee of Hurricane Katrina. He eventually landed with relatives in California and enrolled at the Arroyo Athenaeum, where he's done his best to start fresh and put the trauma of losing his home and community behind him. Raleigh was trained primarily as an artificer, so he relies on technical prowess, including a portable gun turret that he affectionately named Tommy DeVito*. But he's also very gifted with water magic, and that has led him to become the party's utility player, bouncing between support skills that shine in watery environments (turns out there are a few of those in a campaign about intense flooding) and a few strikingly fun attack spells.

* Coming up with this name made me happier than it had any right to, because it managed to be a triple reference to Tommy guns, Danny DeVito (“so anyway, I started blasting”), and of course its clearest namesake: briefly legendary NFL quarterback Tommy DeVito.

2. What are your favorite moments with those characters so far?

For Cael, a few moments rise to the top. One was his first experience being the linchpin of a battle victory (which is also my answer to #6 in more detail). Another was when he was left to figure out if he actually had legal cause to detain a person of interest in a murder case, which I had to roleplay solo while negotiating with said person's lawyer. But I think my favorite is actually from character creation day: I revealed Cael's identity by tying his backstory to a specific historical event from a piece of side content he'd written during the run of his Anno Amagium web serial, and it made me happy to both achieve a creative moment like that and see that it brought Hank a bit of joy in the moment.

Raleigh's development has been a bit slower since (ironically, since it wasn't my first game) I started with a much less solid character foundation. I think my favorite was a warm moment with his closest friend on Team Arroyo, where he encouraged her to exchange her wheelchair–which he had built himself for her as an Athenaeum artificing project–for a magical and much more fun mobility device after she initially said she couldn't part ways with something a very close friend had handmade for her. As for combat, his finest hour has to be the first time he set up Tommy DeVito the turret. After being placed, it sought out any enemies in range, found none, and did the only logical thing: it spun around and fired at Raleigh himself, doing a fair bit of damage. After he dusted himself off, he looked around at his teammates and quipped: “and now it is a fair fight.” It somehow managed to be both corny and badass at the same time, which is everything I could've asked from a line I pulled out of thin air.

3. How experienced are you with fantasy, TTRPGs, and gaming in general? How does Anno Amagium compare to other TTRPGs you've played?

I have no point of comparison here, because the Dalhart campaign was my first TTRPG experience ever. I play a good amount of video games and have read a decent amount of fantasy, which is a good segue into the most useful thing I can say here:

One thing I appreciate about the Anno Amagium universe is the modern urban fantasy theme that tries hard to envision how magic could and would function in a society much like our own. I often struggle to mentally visualize environments that are described (verbally or in text) rather than illustrated, which over time has made it harder for me to immerse myself in fantasy environments in non-visual media. If my first TTRPG had been something like traditional D&D in a high fantasy setting, I think I would have struggled to concoct a character and play them convincingly. The fact that AA has parallels to our modern-day existence made it much easier for me to learn to be a person operating in the in-game universe.

4. Tell us about learning the game. What mechanic took the longest to figure out? Did anything click immediately or take you by surprise?

I don't think it was a single thing for me, but rather just the full slate of skills and actions and techniques and things that are available to any given player as part of a TTRPG. When I was handed Cael's initial kit, I was a little bewildered at how much there was to read through: three sets of magic skills, each of which was a Google sheet with hundreds of lines, along with separate and fairly in-depth sheets for actions, techniques, and skills. I knew in broad terms what some of it would be, having read through and selected my curriculum setup in advance, but seeing it all stacked up felt a bit overwhelming.

It's always been especially pronounced in combat. When we're coming up with combat actions, it often feels like my teammates are so attuned to their characters' kits that they instantly come up with really brilliant strategies every single time they're up, and those strategies also happen to be very much in line with their characters' personalities. Meanwhile I feel like I'm always frantically flailing to figure out two or three things that would be even moderately useful in the current situation. I'm well aware that there's imposter syndrome at play here, and my party members are largely TTRPG veterans whom I know to be smart and crafty people. It also doesn't help that I spend a lot of the action taking detailed notes of everything that happens (so I can give pre-session recaps for our group), taking time away that I could otherwise spend considering how to approach a battle or a roleplaying moment. But I often find it hard not to feel like I'm struggling to keep up.

Still, as with anything, that improves with time and experience. As our Deluge campaign has played out, I've had many more moments of coming up with battle tactics that make me feel clever and that I'm taking advantage of my character's skillset properly. Of course, half the time I never get to carry them out because someone else takes actions that turn the situation upside down, but usually that leads us all to a more fun place anyway, and I still get the nice feeling of knowing I came up with a fun strategy.

5. Where the setting and lore is concerned, what do you think is the most intriguing or exciting aspect of the Anno Amagium universe?

I've always wanted to poke more into the universe's reimagining of world history. One of my favorite book series is Naomi Novik's Temeraire series, which reimagines the Napoleonic Wars of the early 19th Century with dragons being used for aerial combat (in that part of the world, at least). There's a similar energy in Anno Amagium's lore, and I appreciate the commitment to establishing specific points of divergence–where magic either affected how a known global event played out, or it was the entire reason why a new historical event happened–while keeping a thread across time to bring us to something that very much resembles our contemporary world but is meaningfully different.

The three initial Anno Amagium campaigns that are in work are all set in modern times in the in-universe equivalents of southern California, northern Texas, and New York City, which I think makes perfect sense for broad appeal. But the approach to history and magic's role in it leave the door open for some fascinating storylines across time and across the world. I'd be very interested to see what could be done with a campaign set in the Industrial Revolution, or maybe around the fall of Athens 2300+ years ago. It'd be equally cool to play out adventures in modern times in nations other than Ericia, although I recognize that showcasing another country in a respectful way would require considerable care. But I think the foundation is in place to explore some really fascinating ideas in this universe.

6. If somebody were to ask you about Anno Amagium, what is the first story from around the table that comes to mind?

The first one that jumps out is from an early Dalhart sequence in which our party was split into two groups, each of which ran into a very different threat. Cael and his boss, Dalhart second-in-command Guy Venday, had to stop a mechanical monster that was marching toward the town. We did just that through the power of hyper-concentrated rage paired with excessive amounts of fire (excessive because it turns out that if you overdo it with magic, you may just hallucinate meeting someone who's strikingly seductive and definitely not demonic in nature). Meanwhile, the rest of our team was dealing with a very hangry chimera, and they resolved it through the power of… tricking him with a fake Doordash order. It was a great dichotomy of the range of possibilities in a game like this.

There was also an intense battle with vampires in Dalhart's lone movie theater, in which we had to find a way to deal with extremely strong enemies while also protecting the dozens of civilians who were caught in the crossfire. Two of the most critical things that helped us cleanly(ish) win the battle were gloriously absurd: our most chaotic member wanted to run outside to tell us “YOOO THERE ARE VAMPIRES!” and opened a door with such force that he accidentally knocked out a person standing behind it–who, though we didn't yet know it, happened to be one of the vampires we were about to battle. Later, we witnessed the first-ever use of the spell Summon Suburban Menace, which incited a minivan driven by a frazzled dad of three to crash into the theater and slam directly into a group of enemies.

Two others are moments I didn't directly participate in but greatly enjoyed. The first was one of our Dalhart characters having his fishing rod stolen right as we dove into a battle, and he was so laser-focused on getting it back that we found ourselves trying to find ways to help him get it back too, with our newest party member succeeding by picking it up and (after I suggested this as a joke) trying to deliver it by stringing it like an arrow on her archery bow… and somehow succeeding. And the other was from Deluge, where a TTRPG rookie in our party seemed to instantly settle into his character's role by delivering one of the most inspiring roleplaying moments I think I'll ever see: attempting to overdose on medicine as a way to bring himself close enough to death to be “saved” by an angel whom we needed a way to keep in our immediate orbit.

7. What improvements would you like to see in the future?

With the caveat that one or both of these might already be in work by the dev team… something that would help me is having additional ways to filter player skills. We already have magic broken out into combat, utility, and miscellaneous, but within combat skills it'd be helpful to have a quick way to narrow the list to, say, healing spells. Or wide-area offensive spells. Or things that inflict a specific status effect on an enemy (a bane, in game parlance).

Another would be a more condensed view of the character's kit, particularly for magic. At this point I've become fairly familiar with Cael's and Raleigh's respective kits, but in the heat of battle I often can't remember everything I have available to me and am prone to scrolling past useful skills while trying to find something that'll help the situation. Having a quicker reference that I can skim through to remember the full set of options I have would help me a ton by reducing the time I spend hunting for ideas. It's something that is possible to make myself using our temporary Google Sheets implementation, but I think this could be good to make available to new players as a standard offering.

8. Anything else you would like to add?

I think I can safely lay claim to having written the first piece of Anno Amagium fanfiction. I had wanted an excuse to try writing some fiction as a way to exercise the creative part of my brain, so after we got the Dalhart campaign rolling, I started spending most Saturday afternoons at a coffee shop trying to put together a story about Cael's final baseball game. After a few months and a few rewrites, it came together as a ~20 page story that I felt happy with. It's not something I'd feel comfortable sharing publicly, but it was very fulfilling to write, especially knowing that the few people I'd shared it with seemed to enjoy it. And as someone in a STEM career who's spent very little time trying to do anything creative, it gave me a deep appreciation for Hank's ability to churn out that amount of creative content on a weekly basis for nearly two years.

Anno Amagium tabletop nights have been a weekly-ish thing for me for nearly three years, and it's been a very happy and fulfilling addition to my life. So I'm very glad to have been a part of this game as it takes its first steps toward (hopefully) becoming something much bigger.