Hey, all!
Happy to see there's still a bit of life in the building.
Personally, I'm always a bit puzzled that the Ursai, of all things, get so much attention: They were our campaign mascots, for sure, and I love their stories - Rizo's stories, mainly!! - quite dearly.
From a purely Blackmoorian perspective, though, I think the group's adventures in "The Road to the Promised Land" (which also contains a lot of Ursai-related material) are much more interesting. If you can still find them, as, how I remember them, they read pretty much like a textbook approach to how a post-Afridhi Blackmoor could look like.
(I can be blunt and broad in my praise because this part of the game was a creative writing effort of the gaming group with which I was only marginally involved. I think I didn't contribute much other than some global-level outlines. I think this was in the year when I got my degree, and I was understandably busy otherwise.)
I don't necessarily think the Ursai, as we played them, are terribly compatible with canon Blackmoor: In our game, their dramatic function was precisely that - to signal to the group, after the first very Ravenloft-y adventure, that we were entering another story that wasn't necessarily "how canon would do it". It was not entirely a mistake that we first met the Ursai when the group got to the Western borders of the BMd20 map.
It's only quite recently that I put together a few longer posts that detailed some Ursai lore for a thread at the Piazza, as I remember it:
https://www.thepiazza.org.uk/bb/viewtopic.php?t=30120
Feel free to build on that for some CBI/Threshold-related fun.
Like, the evil Ursai cult plotting to overthrow the Lords of the Elphand Lands, that would have been a story I'd have liked to detail some more, back in the day. Anyone wants to do that, and I'll dig out the old WL Box and chime in some extra ideas.
Not that I would have planned it like this, but I think the general concept of visual storytelling is one of the reasons why the Ursai remain so popular with our community: You see them, you know what you're gonna get with the story:
The Guild Wars artwork we always used.
Is the same technique that you see here:
A poster for "Return of the Jedi".
It was my luck that I accidentally stumbled over this concept because it gave me a guideline for how to present my later stuff, as well. Like, after Hrrd and Bobby from the LFC came "Zatara, the Lion Man" in the "Mordred" game. After that, there was this thing that the PCs in the "Meleon" games would all have to wear a certain color to be able to enter a magic realm. And in our current game, there's, of course, the stag, and a certain type of very specific enemies that make the party's life very difficult. - Like, if I had to draw a poster for the game, I'd know what to put on it.
This is probably an idea for another thread, some time - in the age of AI art, what would we all put on the posters for our respective campaigns?
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BTW, I'm being completely genuine (like, how could I not) when I say that I like Havard's take on the Ursai very, very much:
The Bleakwood Ursai are more playable and adaptable than the Wilds of Ten Ursai are. Rizo's character was a freaking masterpiece, but there's a reason I've never used any similar character models again in my other games, online or offline - they were in dire need of in-setting contextualization and balancing. I think the Ursai in my campaign (except for Rizo's character) had Wookie syndrome: One of them would work, ten of them would break the game.
I think Havard is giving the outline here - and in the Bleakwood booklet, already - of how to integrate the Ursai in a way that has much more use for the "D&D Vernacular". That might not seem "big", but is very important. The fact that the Ursai are slowly becoming a pretty established element of Blackmoor "fanon", that's possible because he's been laying the groundwork here long after I pretty much stopped speaking on any things Blackmoor anywhere.
Not sure how to put this properly, but I couldn't be more flattered by this, and I hope *that thing that Havard is currently working on* becomes something people really come to notice.
...AND PLAY, more than anything else.
