The Dee Sanction: St Mary's City

The Dee Sanction: St Mary's City is a role-playing game series set in 17th Century Mid-Atlantic America (but with the ability to range to other locales). One way to think of it is as a “counter-colonial investigative gothic”:

• counter-colonial because although the events take place on a frontier, we will be avoiding and/or skewering problematic tropes about savagery, “progress”, civilization etc. rather than playing into them 

• investigative because the core conceit of the story - the A-plot, if you will - focuses on a group of people seeking to investigate, understand, and if necessary neutralize threats to humanity

• gothic because the overall tone and narrative structure of our play will tilt towards on the macabre, the melodramatic, and the baroque, even if there are individual moments of humor, swashbuckling, and triumph

The characters are a diverse group of people brought together by the mysterious Mr. Garland to serve as agents of... well, who can say? When the Dee Sanction was founded in 1564, it served England by royal mandate; but now it is 1645, and England and its king are at war. Nevertheless, supernatural events do not pause for politics, and someone must still rise to investigate these and act to contain or neutralize them.

The characters have been tasked with re-establishing the defunct Sanction cell in St. Mary's City, Maryland. Of the last cell's demise, nothing is currently known.

• The reestablished cell's jurisdiction will run from the northern borders of Maryland, where it meets the Dutch and Swedish territories north of the Chesapeake Bay, to the southernmost borders of Virginia.

• Mr. Garland will provide equipment and passage across the Atlantic, and dispatch human and financial resources when necessary and when possible, but the characters must largely see to their own resourcefulness to fund their operations.

• At the best of times, the Dee Sanction's relationship with the mundane forces of law and order has been spotty and unpredictable. Therefore, the new cell is chartered to cultivate relationships, as its members deem necessary, with useful local figures regardless of origin, ideology or nationality. Beyond these partnerships and any help that can be had from a sister cell in Massachusetts Bay, the cell is on its own in the Americas.

This is the "starting state of play" after our prelude session. Along the way we’ll grow our story considerably; we'll uncover plots, fight terrible beasts and worse people, find and spend riches, and perhaps even make right some wrongs; in sum, we’ll craft a story of our own as an irreproducible act of narrative alchemy that could only have come from this combination of people at this time. As the Host of this game, it’s my job to create a world and fill it with secrets and challenges; as the players, what becomes of that world is up to you and the actions of the characters you create over the next few months.

Here are some resources for you, going forward:

• What is Roleplaying (a work-in-progress essay)
• How to Create Your Character
• A link to Paul Baldowski's The Dee Sanction, the game on which I based this campaign