Reign: Nagalisitu – Episode 1

Mysterious slavers attack the camp of the Hunting Pack, a small mercenary company. The leaders of the mercenaries chase after the slavers, trying to rescue their followers. The slavers ride unnatural monsters and wield strange weapons, which none of the mercenaries recognize. When the mercenaries tracks down the slavers, they find a strange portal in a cave in the middle of a swamp. A hidden world awaits the Hunting Pack and the chance to change history forever.

Check out the preview art for this campaign, which includes sketches of the player characters.

Art by Patsy McDowell.

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26 Comments

  1. Five minutes in and I regret not backing the KS.

  2. Of course, Aaron chooses fire for a complication.

    Also been looking forward to this since I saw the comment about a Reign campaign in the last release.

  3. I’m really curious how Caleb came up with the name Nagalisitu? It’s a cool name. Also a really cool setting. It’s got a little bit of a Dark Souls vibe to me.

  4. Finished listening to the episode, I really like the framing for this. It is sort of like playing out the enclave generation in red markets, or the city construction in dresden files rpg, or similar “collaborative setting creation” setups. But with evil gm monkey paw action between each step.

    I’ve got a feeling that the rest of the group sort of saw that the ‘ascend someone’ wasn’t going to be a good option, and let Aaron beeline for it.

  5. This is a really cool concept, and it’s a heck of a lot to get your head around. I love it.

    Some things might be easier to grasp with the Reign mechanics in front of me, but I definitely had some questions remaining at the end of the session:

    1. Was there something keeping some of the PCs from staying inside Nagalisitu for a few (inside) years just to get things kicked off? They’d lose almost nothing in outside-time terms. Or just appointing one PC to go through it every half hour or so for a while just to check up on how things were progressing? I wonder if some mechanical cost for each time they go through the portal would disincentivize that sort of gaming it.

    2. It seems to me that there could be a quick way around the mark that keeps the natives from leaving, by importing a second core reproducing population of outsiders and making sure that they never interbreed with the marked natives. Then you could farm a population of soldiers to bring out of the portal every few generations to be a nice big new army for the mercenary company. Tell the folks inside that the outside world is Valhalla or something. I guess that’s just a faster way of getting to a stage that will come around later on, though.

    3. I know it’s contrary to the premise of the game, but how about the option of deliberately ensuring that everybody inside dies, looting the super magic tech, and prepping for the eventual land rush when the land rematerializes in the outside world?

    4. We’ll see what the RPPR crew does, but my first thought was about deliberately cultivating a religion with the PCs as gods, with a very Judeo-Christian-style end times myth about the world eventually ending and the worthy being delivered into the next one. It would be a good way to ensure that when the bubble pops, the “alien invaders” are loyal.

    Another thought! It would be really fun to run one-shot interstitial mini-adventures inside the portal, representing significant events that happen between the PCs’ visits. Each mini-adventure would have completely different characters, of course (who would only have stories of the last time the “legendary saviors” came to visit, several hundred or thousand years earlier). And since the setting would be vastly changed each time, there would be a lot of exposition required. But it could be an entertaining way to play out the effects of the main PCs’ interventions

  6. digging this so far! Did Ross contribute the army mechanics from Spoils of War?

  7. @Ethan: I think the PCs might have been a little backwards on how the time dilation was working, and as Caleb pointed out at one point the entire idea of time dilation is fucking out there for their characters.

    @Matt: If I remember correctly, for the Spoils of War campaign it was the other way around – Ross looted the company mechanics from Reign for the army mechanics.

    ORE recap: Stat+Skill pool, roll and look for matches, more matches and higher numbers are better in various ways.

    For the company, they have a variety of stats (like might, or treasure) and when they want to do a company action the GM will have them use one or two of the stats to build the pool.

    Then there are rules for getting bonuses to zoomed-in-character level actions from the company (like when they were pushing their guys early on), and also rules for the players to add temporary dice to company rolls.

    Not going into specifics since I have no idea what is getting changed for 2nd edition stuff.

  8. Is this going to the Patreon RSS feed?

  9. Author

    Yes, future episodes will go to the Patreon feed as early access.

  10. So this is what nihilist horror sounds like when it’s written by a public school teacher.

  11. Caleb is a god of storytelling.

    Brilliant setting.

  12. You could never possibly understand how much I’m looking forward to the rest of this campaign… don’t get me wrong I love all of your guys’s games that are uploaded but I haven’t been so interested in one of them since you the first episode of God’s teeth

  13. Yay, it’s Caleb!

    I enjoy all the regulars, and Bridget, but I really enjoy Caleb’s creativity, and had been missing his presence on this last few months of podcasts. I’d feared maybe he’d moved, or something.

    And it’s a great pick me up after being in the hospital for the past 6 weeks.

  14. That was very enjoyable! And some great art too.

    I love Caleb’s patently unhelpful NPCs.

  15. I shoulda backed the kickstarter now….well at least I have something on the list.

  16. WAIT HOW DID I MISS THAT THIS HAD STARTED
    CHAPO YOU’RE ON PAUSE RPPR IS MY FRIEND NOW

  17. oh my god I had no idea Nagalisitu itself would be so dark, I love thiiis

  18. Can’t wait to see how you guys screw up the other world. 😉 Great stuff so far!

  19. I finally have had the time too sit down and watch these so that’s what i’m doing got 13 episodes too catch up on and then talk with people about.

  20. I’d like to congratulate Ross for the nerdy biology joke in naming his raised-by-beavers character Castor, the genus name for beavers.

  21. Hello, new to this site and this will be my first campaign listen!

  22. This is still an amazingly good campaign and I really did love and enjoyed it.
    Shows how amazingly fun you can make reign and i’m super excited to get access to it with Reign Second Edition

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