Griffin Grove Gaming

Griffin Grove Gaming

On the Products page you'll find material on the gaming products we have created or are working on for our Lyon gaming environment.

History

Back in May of 1999 Phil Jones? and Ian Plumb? got together and decided to create and publish a scenario for their favourite RPG, Chivalry and Sorcery. In sorting out what it was that we wanted to produce we hit a design brickwall. The scenarios we like to play involve NPCs with richly detailed backgrounds and involve a number of major and minor plot arcs unfolding simultaneously. Producing such material in the absence of a detailed gaming environment doesn't work — all the characters need to be tightly interwoven with the game world. So we decided to produce a gaming environment in which we would set our scenarios.

There are a plethora of generic fantasy gaming environments on the market. Most rely heavily on medieval Western Europe for their setting. For us these pseudo-historical gaming environments are unsatisfactory - scratch the surface and they all fail to appear real to the discerning player. So we decided to create a gaming environment that was based as closely as possible on a real-world, historical location. Having taken that decision we needed to settle on a location. It wasn't long until we settled on the French city of Lyon.

Research commenced and soon ground to a halt. Locating English-sources on French locations was problematic. We needed a local to help us with the research. In September of 1999 Bernard Kaufmann? joined the team. The research became possible and so our work continues to this day.

Design Criteria

At Griffin Grove Gaming we design products according to a simple set of criteria:

• Speed to Table. When we started gaming in our late teens we had plenty of time on our hands and no money. Role-playing is a cheap form of entertainment and we had the time to devote hours upon hours to the game. These days we have families and work committments and so count ourselves fortunate if we can fit in a four hour gaming session once every two or three weeks. Under these circumstances we only buy gaming products that can be easily assimilated into our campaign. We don't have the time to spend hours porting a product designed for another gaming environment into ours, no matter how good it might be. We define Speed to Table as the time that elapses between the referee removing the shrink-wrap from the product to the time the players encounter elements from the product in-game. Our goal is to produce products that have a low Speed to Table factor.

• The product must be as historically accurate as our research allows, with the caveat that magic and miracles work under exceptional circumstances. An historical campaign retains the context for the detail contained in the product. This in turn helps to ensure internal consistency in the gaming environment. If you want a realistic gaming environment there is no alternative to the real world.

• The product must contain interesting, detailed, life-like Non-Player Characters. We produce scenarios that are character driven rather than event driven. The interaction between characters is crucial to the development of the plot. For this to work the Non-Player Characters must be as detailed in their backgrounds as the Player Characters. The relationships between characters carry forward over time. They are the clearest example of the Player Characters' actions having long term consequences.

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