(Again, plugging the first Eight Lamentations novel again, in which one human protagonist gets roped into all the excitement by a Duardin God.) But you can also (due to mettle and the hopefully soon expanding list of powers, as well as the cool spell-creation system) do truly insane, high-powered games in which your players can be in contact and conflict with God Beasts, Exalted Champions of Gods and eventually the Gods themselves. Soulbound can be played down-to-earth, yes. The GM presents a few rumours, and the party decides which ones to follow up on, hopefully discussing their choice and giving the GM more and more ideas of what to include to hook their players even more. The Doom Mechanic then allows for a kind of "hexcrawl" way for GMs and Players to negotiate what kind of stories and adventures all involved are interested in. Soulbound sneakily introduces a semi-blue-book style of between-session engagement with the world around the PCs, giving the players many reasons and opportunities to build connecttions to the region and people they spend their time around, giving them a personal stake in the prosperity and peace of a given city/region. Then you look at the genius that are the Downtime parts: Endevours and Doom. They will be able to influence and change political and cultural structures.
They will be able to re-form broken alliances.
They will work together to achieve great things in the name of safeguarding the Free Cities and its inhabitants. They will be able to fight against and perhaps even hunt alongside Orruk tribes in Ghuran. They will be the ones on the front, battling Khorne's Champions in Aqshy, but also have the freedom to negotiate with a Vampire Knight of Neferata in Nagash to achieve a common goal. A group of Soulbound will have the freedom and resources to not only travel between realms, they will also meet and interact with powerful people and being. They can be both a Sword And Shield of the Free People, as well as a Dagger In The Night for Sigmar. Then you get to the sort of things Soulbound get up to: They explore. So, you instantly have the sort of wide-ranging freedoms to form your own realms, cultures, histories and societies you have in Exalted. It's just one continent of one of the possible Flameworlds. It is located in one of the Flameworlds called the Ashlands." "The Great Parch, referred to as the Scarred Isle during the Realmgate Wars, is a sprawling continent of the Realm of Aqshy containing multiple landmasses and oceans. The Great Parch presented in Soulbound i only a tiny part of Aqshy, for example! See this description on the AoS Wiki: It's still the best and most evocative and most world-building set of novel and stories for Age of Sigmar out there!Ĭlick to expand.You have a truly VAST array of realm that are only barely detailed.
: If you could convince your bosses to hire Josh Reynolds and Finish the Eight Lamentations trilogy as a Cubicle 7 fiction venture. (As soon as the " "Champions of Death" book drops, one of my players will most likely change her character to be a Vampiric Knight, because of the novels Eight Lamentations - Spear of Shadows as well as Neferata.) If they continue the pace, I can see it doing so much more pretty damn soon. It really is my most favourite 2020 RPG release, and the support looks damn solid. Strangely enough though, you could fit in Dark Sun into a part of Aqshy wihout too many problems.
Not yet "cerebral" enough in background material do "proper" Planescape, but it IS very much able to give you realm-hopping, swashbuckling adventures between various semi-allied/variedly-hostile factions. In my eyes, Soulbound is a perfect replacement for Exalted.