It is my belief that tabletop RPGs are excellent tools for adding depth to the story of a computer game. By running a Pen and Pencil game in the same world as the game you are making, you can eliminate inconsistent design, add depth to your world, and create large amounts of content and history that can be mined to make the game world seem more alive and vibrant.

When working on Mythica, it was my plan to run such a game, so that, not only could we fill up our world bible with depth, but also explore the feeling of playing gods in a mortal world. To this end, I began creating Mythica, the RPG.

When considering what type of game I would run, I looked carefully at what I wanted to accomplish.

• I wanted the player characters in the game to be the actual patron gods (Thor, Tyr, Frey, Loki, Freya, Frigga, Skadi and Smert) themselves. This was for a couple of reasons: I wanted my players to come to the game with a feeling like they already knew the character of the god they were playing, and I wanted the players to establish a deeper character depth for those gods.

• I wanted to create a reference for the GMs that would be working on the Live Team of the Mythica MMOG to give them a good idea of how to consistently roleplay the patrons during GM-driven events.

• I wanted to explore what it meant to be a god in the mortal world of Scandinavian myth.

• I wanted to concentrate on the players interacting with the populace of the world and with each other, rather than pummeling monsters in a frenzy of hack and slash.

• I wanted to explore the growth of the Mythica skill system, but in a way where the players could think up interesting uses for those skills, so that we could find easily created features that added depth to their use, and to possibly find how these skills might be abused by future players.

As a tabletop RPG geek, I've played with many systems in the past, from Rolemaster to Shadowrun to Skyrealms of Jorune to Teenagers From Outer Space. In my search for a good system to modify, I wanted a game that was easy to manipulate, encouraged social activity, but had more structure than the several free roleplaying systems out there. In the end, I decided to use the Everway game system by Jonathan Tweet.

The Everway system was published during a time when the RPG market was failing, and efforts were being made to draw in "casual gamers" to the pen and paper market. Everway is rules-light. You have four stats based off the elements: Earth (stamina and resistance), Air (intelligence and memory), Fire (energy and combat) and Water (wisdom and perception). The random chance system is highly subjective, being based on pseudo-tarot cards, which the GM and players draw in order to determine the outcome of any action whose result is in doubt. This open-ended system was highly modifiable, and the stat system already escalated the player's power to a godlike level at the upper end.

The problem I saw with the Everway system was that it didn't have a lot of mechanics to determine growth. Growth of character ability should keep in pace with a player's growth in play experience within the world, or else the game wouldn't be very good for more than short adventures, much less a full-on campaign. Also, this lack of growth made it difficult to give the players items that augmented their abilities, which was one of the core mechanics of the Mythica MMOG.

In the Everway system, statistics ranged from 1 (very weak) to 10 (godlike). Each raise of one in a stat meant a doubling of power. A stat of 3 was twice as powerful as a stat of 2, for instance. Because these stats were, basically, the only way the characters interacted with the world, I decided that the simplest way to manipulate this for my needs was to expand the stat system from a 1-10 system to a 1-100 system. With this modification, I could factor in growth to where the players could receive items and stat bonuses that would raise their abilities gradually, rather than in huge jumps. I could give items that modified a stat from +1 to +10 without significantly raising the power level of the character. I could also award points to each character for gradual growth due to experience, much like many point-based RPGs, like Champions or Rolemaster.

To this end, I created a statistics table detailing what each statistic could accomplish given a certain point allotment. Click Here to see the modified stat abilities chart.

I planned to give the characters 150 points to initially buy stats with. This was to reflect the fact that, in my plot, the patrons and their Asgardian brethren had been cast out of Asgard by some unknown force, and stripped of their power. This would be the arch theme of the campaign…the quest for vengeance and a winning back of the powers and abilities they had lost. While this did not necessarily jibe with the "official" history that was being made, I felt that it would encourage good character building and help reveal the world from a lower perspective.

I had also planned on awarding 10-15 extra points for contributions. This is a concept I got from Amber, the Diceless Roleplaying Game. The players, in exchange for extra points to buff out their character, promise to create journal entries, sketches, cartoons, or whatever other creative thing that seemed appropriate. I felt that this would greatly contribute to the world bible I had hoped to assemble for use after the game shipped.

One of my goals for this game was to explore the existing skill system. While the Everway system doesn't support skills in any but the most off-handed way, I planned to hand out new abilities incrementally throughout the campaign, paralleling the advancement system in the Mythica MMOG. These abilities would start out as the most basic, such as stealth or minor magics, and then climb up the skill trees Isaiah Cartwright was churning out for the game. These skills would have a value that was either additive to a stat (bowmanship would add to Fire, for instance, in determining how effective it was) or would be treated as a power or magic spell, which the Everway system does deal with.

The next thing I created was a character sheet. Click Here for my initial attempt. Later, I decided to eliminate the Virtue, Fault and Fate fields. These fields were put there for Everway players to add depth to their characters. Using a large set of "vision cards", players were to determine what their strength was (virtue) their weakness (fault) and a possible future (fate). As my players were coming in to the game with a good knowledge of what their characters would be like, I felt that these aspects didn't add anything to the game.

Finally, I took a look at the determination system. As I said, Everway doesn't use dice, but, rather, a set of tarot-like cards. These are used as guides to determine the outcomes of actions when these outcomes aren't clear. For instance, a character with a high score in Fire usually wins in a combat with a character with a low Fire, but, if both characters have the same amount of ability, or a character attempts to do something beyond his normal ability (leaping between rooftops, for instance) then the cards come in to play. I decided that, though the cards were nice, it might be interesting if I used the Futhark rune set, instead. This would not only serve the purpose of making the game seem more Nordic, but it would also teach the players and myself the runic system that was becoming more and more prevalent throughout our game.

Thus, I created a chart detailing each rune; it's meaning, and the element associated with it. Because I am a novice at this stuff, please forgive me if I don't have the exact meaning correct, or have associated a rune with the wrong element, as I couldn't find a handy reference that explained it further. Click Here for the rune chart.

In the end, the Mythica RPG was never used. The week that I planned to start the campaign was the week that they cancelled the project. It was too bad, because I was looking forward to having Thor wake up finding Mjollnir broken, with only one shattered piece in his hand. This would lead him and the others on a massive quest to rebuild his hammer (thus leading to the longer handle, as illustrated in the Mythica marketing posters), and to explore how the corruption got started on Midgard, leading to the first scourge.