Worlds Without Numbers (Istanbul) - Dramatis Personae
A Brief Preamble
In the winter of 2025, I was invited over to a family retreat in Istanbul for some pork - a rare delicacy in this part of the world, and one I am eternally starved for. During my stay, I ran a "one-shot" that became a two-day affair, involving the children of my host family, as well as a friend of the family who had also been invited there. This was my first live table since I went full text-gm and to my great chagrin, I botched it. The players were apparently sufficiently entertained enough, however, to ask for more - and so began my renewed acquaintance with live table TTRPG.
The Worlds Without Numbers campaign is a product of some evolutions and iterative changes. The New Years' two-shot was more or less shelved and has no bearing in this campaign; it used Old School Essentials as a rough framework, and was never intended to be more than a taster of TTRPGs for wholly newbie players, of varying ages and backgrounds. It featured extremely overpowered characters (background wise; in terms of mechanics, they were OSE lvl 1s) which left little room for further narrative-character development.
So began the "proper" campaign... in 5e. At this point, I was most familiar with 5e, though I detested it as a system - it was because of 5e that I had left the live (or, voice-chat and roll20) gming scene back in 2017 in the first place, retiring to the relative reclusive relaxation of the textual play-by-post GM/QM. For almost a decade, I wandered the well-trod halls of /tg/, spacebattles, sufficientvelocity, and Discord PbP servers under the monikers of FortunaQM and Trauermarsch, offering my text-games to those who would be sufficiently fluent in written English and willing to actually post regularly.
Suffice it to say that I switched to WWN when I was told of its existence, being eager to jump ship from 5e. And the transition was not unbearable; WWN seems to be what is called an "NSR", though I am not at all confident in the nomenclatures at play among OSR circles.
The Worlds Without Numbers campaign takes liberal "inspirations" (read: theft) from the Soulsborne games, Dune, the Iliad, Romances of the Three Kingdoms... and probably some other sources I have forgotten or am too lazy to mention. Just consider my opening narration, for instance:
Rage - Goddess, sing the rage of Atreides’ son Kyros
Murderous… doomed.
Hurling down to the House of Death, so many sturdy souls,
Great warriors’ souls
And made their bodies carrion
Feasts for the dogs and birds.
Yet the will of Astarte was moving toward its End.
In venturing east, to the Moon-blessed lands,
Where the Padishah-Empress reigns in royal lineage unbroken,
The westron upstart broke his armies,
Machines of war-craft against the Iron Wall
Lending truth to the old words: the fire fades, and its lord goes without a throne.
Emptied of its emperor, the empire crumbles.
Two hundred years of war and fire and ash.
The Imperial Palace, the throne-city, has shut its gates to one and all.
Lesser sons of greater sires
Squabble, among the ruins of their ancestors
Living in thatched huts amidst ruins of marble.
What are the Children of the West
But the ashen leaves that drop at the wind’s breath?
Looking at it again, I can see just how much of a patchwork job it is. It certainly was not one of my better writings (one of my worst, actually). But it did the job for the players. I think.
As a GM, I never shy away from being open about how derivative I am. A good GM steals, and steals often; one cannot be a Tolkien, creating languages wholesale - and he cribbed some things from the old literature he studied, at any rate. It seems insouciant to assert that the One Ring received not one whit of imaginative debt from that of the Nibelungenlied.
Anyway, that's enough babble. Below are the player characters of the Istanbul campaign.
Habosh Babosh
Psychotic gnome wizard. It seems in my campaign setting, gnomes are psychopaths, or at least sociopaths. They also control... a lot of things, behind the scenes, being the longest-lived race. I think I subconsciously took from Arcanum for this.
Zalara(?)
Dragonkin. Very full of herself. Thinks she's some kind of a hero (she took that one 5e background... folk hero?) and likes to be at the center of attention. Her true nature is more mercenary, however - she is more motivated by the appearance of being a hero.
Elf Silverleaf Ranger Girl
My memory is clearly deteriorating. In my defence, it has been months since I last ran this game. I only remembered the name of that gnome because of its comedic nature! The Elven player is perhaps the most enthusiastic of all the players, being fond of dressing up as a ranger with some anime-con purchased hooded jacket thing (apparently it's from a show called Attack of Titans).
The Priest
I would like to extend my apologies to most of the players of this campaign. I simply cannot remember their names - it's been too long! That was always the issue with the Istanbul campaign; it's not like I live there, and it's hard enough to coordinate people scattered across three different places (two different countries!) for a game. The priest player was generally the most sensible of the four, being the one to most often propose rational plans of action - though that is not to say that all of them were smart.
It is to be hoped that we will be able to play over the summer.
Hope is the first step on the road to disappointment.