System: OpenQuest
GM: Newt Newport
All of England is aware of King John the First’s public shortcomings as a king. His disastrous wars to retrieve English lands in France paid for by an ever-increasing tax burden on his people. His irreverence and refusal to play along with the church got the Pope to declare him an Atheist publicly! His falling out with his Barons, who are at war with him after he annulled the Magna Carta, a powerful document of law to curtail his reckless spending, which they forced him to sign at the start of the summer.
As bondsmen of the Bishop of Norwich, a close ally of the King, you’ve also seen his majesty at his worst first hand at court. The drunken, murderous rages and the blasphemous words that constantly froth at his lips. The pale faces of those who cross him when they know they are going to be ‘disappeared’ by his lackeys after spending a rough night as his plaything. Whispers at court say he is in league with the devil, but you know he is willingly possessed by Satan!
Now your Liege Lord has called upon you to serve him. So, with a heavy heart you prepare to take yourselves through dark pagan woods that surround the godforsaken port of Bishop’s Lynn, on the North Norfolk coast, where the King and his army currently camp. You suspect heavily that the mad, bad king intends to take his army across the stinking marsh of The Wash to do battle with the rebel Barons in neighbouring Lincolnshire. It’s September now, and the weather is turning bad. This will be an ill journey, were cunning, treachery and baseness will have to be employed to keep body and soul together.
Additional Information
Bad King John takes place in a fantasy version of historical England, where magic and superstitions of the time are true.
OpenQuest is a D100 OGL rules system similar to Call of Cthulhu, RuneQuest, and Mythras. It is rules light and quickly picked up. Instead of Classes and Levels, characters are defined by percentage skills and every character has a bit of magic, as determined by their previous experience before becoming adventurers and membership of magical secret societies commonly known as cults.
More information can be found on the D101 Games website