Developer Spotlight Series: Temeraire The Roleplaying Game | The Gamerheads Podcast
- Roger Reichardt
- 3 minutes ago
- 7 min read
We had the opportunity to interview Mark Diaz Truman, the co-owner, CEO, and Senior Designer at Magpie Games, to talk about their upcoming TTRPG Temeraire: The Roleplaying Game, based on the novels by the same name. If you are a fan of TTRPGs or the novels (or both!) this is an interview you won't want to miss!
For those who might not be familiar, can you introduce us to the world of Temeraire and how it draws from the original book series? What makes this setting unique compared to other fantasy or historical TTRPGs?
Mark (Magpie Games): The Temeraire series of novels and other stories is set during the era of the Napoleonic Wars. Everything is similar to the real world history of that era, but with one big exception: there are dragons! Dragons have been a part of that world for millennia, and in the Napoleonic Wars they are used as part of the organized military. They have whole crews of soldiers riding them into battle, and they reshape the nature of Napoleonic warfare. So the Temeraire setting gets the benefits of a rich, well-established historical setting alongside this fantastical twist that adds whole new stories and diverts the established timeline onto new trajectories. Players get to play through historical fiction in the period of both Jane Austen’s stories and the Patrick O’Brian Master and Commander series, while also not knowing how things are going to play out due to the presence of dragons!
When adapting a book series into a TTRPG, how do you balance staying true to the source material while still giving players the freedom to create their own stories?
Mark (Magpie Games): For one, it helps to have an author like Naomi Novik on your side! Naomi is a huge advocate for fan-created content and has been for a long time, as a founder of AO3 and a director of the OTW, and she has always been very clear that she wants fans to inject their own creativity into the world of Temeraire. The balancing act, then, isn’t about demanding that players adhere to a strict canonical timeline and set of truths about the world; it’s actually about creating a rich framework to support players in adding their own elements. It’s much more important to make sure that players and GMs feel comfortable and confident with their understanding of the setting’s truths and tones than that they slavishly adhere to the exact sequence of events either in history or in the novels!
I’d love to jump into the game, but I haven’t read the books. How approachable is Temeraire for players who haven’t read the books? What have you done to ensure new players can jump in without feeling lost?
Mark (Magpie Games): Our goal is to support as wide of the range of players as possible, from readers to Napoleonic history buffs to newcomers. The principles of the setting will be well-explained in the corebook, and by and large you can get by with one major principle: everything is the same as it was in our real-world history, except for the things that were altered directly by the existence of dragons. For example, British culture in general isn’t very different from the real world, but the existence of the Aerial Corps – the British dragon fighting force – has necessitated some changes. Some dragons will only accept women as their captains, so the Aerial Corps has had to allow women into the military, even if it is a largely unspoken and unacknowledged fact in the wider society. We’re going to call out everything that you need to understand the basics and make decisions during play, with an acknowledgment that in the end, it’s most important you keep true to your own set of characters and their stories than anything else!
Were there any moments where you needed to sacrifice lore for gameplay? If so, how did you approach those decisions?
Mark (Magpie Games): So far most of our “lore sacrifices” have been to practicality – we have to make this a physical book, and it becomes more and more difficult to make a book and ship it when it gets bigger and bigger! We don’t have infinite space in the core book, so we know we can’t explain the full depth of lore in the overall setting, which is why we’ve already had to make some tough choices around which nations to focus on, for example. We’re really appreciative that we have a supplement planned and that backers have already unlocked enough stretch goals to let us hit several more areas we’re interested in! But the more direct answer to your question likely has to do with the specificity of Temeraire’s own story in the novels compared to what players might do. Temeraire and Laurence go on quite the journey across the world over the course of those novels, and the effects of their trip had consequences at the global level! If you started your campaign towards the end of the novels, you’d likely feel obligated to live in the world their actions created…but if you started your campaign before the first novel took place, then they haven’t even met each other yet! We’re going to provide guidance on how to set your campaign at a time of your choice in the Napoleonic Wars, with the acknowledgment that once you start playing, no matter what your starting point was, it is now your campaign; the events of the novels can have as much or as little impact as you find appropriate. Once you know where to start, you play to discover where you’ll end up!
One of the most interesting aspects is that players can take on the roles of both humans and dragons. How did you approach designing those two perspectives so they feel distinct, but still work together at the table? Were there any challenges in making that dynamic work?
Mark (Magpie Games): The crux of the decision to make both humans and dragons playable lies in a simple assessment of the novels: Laurence is the viewpoint protagonist in the first few novels, but both he and Temeraire are surely the main protagonists. Temeraire then also becomes a viewpoint protagonist in later novels, so the series continues to reinforce that he and Laurence are both equally important as the leads of their tale. Seeing how Temeraire was a character just like Laurence, it became clear that the most important facets of playing a character – your personality, your beliefs, your desires and duties! – existed for both. After we had made that decision, we just had to figure out ways to serve both kinds of characters. Different identity choices – which is to say, different character generation options – would do a lot of the work to distinguish dragons and humans, while shared elements like the duties & desires system would unite them as characters with similar-enough goals. The single biggest challenge lives in balancing out the dragon-to-captain deep relationship with other PCs, but that became its own interesting source of story. What is the tale of someone on the crew, but not the dragon’s captain? What is the tale of the feral dragon who hasn’t yet accepted a captain? The overall structure of play lives with the formation, the group of characters both draconic and human who work together as a unit, and being able to think of the formation as providing useful structures for why these characters work together helped answer many of the questions we had.
Temeraire uses the Ædana system. What made that system the right fit for this world and how does it support players in creating the stories they want to tell?
Mark (Magpie Games): At its most basic, Ædana is modular. That means that it comes with a fairly flexible and easy-to-use system for resolving most moments of uncertainty with a challenge roll. But then there is a great deal of space for additional systems and refinements to suit a particular tone. For example, we can make Scandal one of the Dangers of Temeraire, to make sure that it echoes some of the social politics of the era; we might not do that in a completely different era. We can also give characters highly specialized mechanics that reflect the major themes of the story, like the duties & desires of the PCs. So Ædana’s modularity gave us a lot of tools to really meet the setting where it lies.At the same time, Ædana is overarchingly about a slower burn than some of the frameworks we’ve worked with before such as PbtA. We might have been able to do some unique mechanics in PbtA too, but the PbtA structure creates a sense of endless chaos and spontaneity that actually doesn’t fit a more highly structured setting. In Temeraire, it just isn’t the case that a cannonball could blast in through the window at any moment, anywhere you are! The war doesn’t work like that. Similarly, the tension of an advancing front is very valuable to a Temeraire story, where the characters all know the enemy is approaching and it’s only a matter of time before they get here…but that time could be a month, giving plenty of space for machinations, clever plots, and betrayals in advance of the enemy’s arrival!
When players finally sit down and start their first campaign, what moments or experiences are you most excited for them to have?
Mark (Magpie Games): One of the best moments in any RPG for me is the moment of dawning potential and realization, when a player is creating their character and the system pushes them to realize how interesting and dramatically directed their character’s path will be. I’m really excited to see lots of players engage with the formation-creation and character-creation systems, to put together their own distinctive formations with their own complex characters, to have that dawning moment of excitement when they realize just how varied and enthralling their stories might be! Figuring out that I’m the dragon and you’re the captain, and we have a complex relationship, and then that other PC is the sharpshooter who comes with us, but that sharpshooter and the captain are in a secret romance, and then we have this other younger dragon and captain along with us and neither of them have much in the way of good sense or survival instinct…just writing it up triggers a sense of anticipation, wondering what will happen to these characters!
Past that, if I’m being really honest to my own interests, I’m excited to have players engage with some of the non-combat conflict systems and elements. The ball conflict in the Temeraire quickstart makes my little heart sing because I love the idea of a ballroom dance treated with the same depth and solemnity as a sword duel or a battlefield.
We want to thank Mark for taking time to answer our questions. We're excited about the game and look forward to giving it a try! You can learn more and get the quick start at Magpie games!