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May. 10th, 2022
Guilty Gear ValorX - Interest Check
May. 10th, 2022 12:47 pmThe cruelest predator!
Three...
Two...
One...
Let's rock!
Graven Gear ValorX
Welcome to Graven Gear, the first entry in the highly-regarded Graven Gear series, brought to the Playstation One at the turn of the century 1999 and acclaimed for its pulse-pounding tag team battles using "Valor: The Heroic Roleplaying System" as its engine. If you want to know the story before tearing out the guts of your friends in this fighting game, here's a letter from the tournament's sponsor explaining what, exactly, the hell is up:
To many around the Earth, it still hasn't sunk in that humanity has finally vanquished the Gears. It is 2183, one year after the defeat of Apocrypha, and still the shadow of total human extinction looms so large over us that we still expect a Third Awakening to emerge and crush us once and for all. So we cower in pessimism, refusing to reach out to one another, hiding in our villages even as the corpses of the once-mighty Gears rot and rust on the horizon.
No more, I say! This is the dawn of humanity's new age, an age where we can valorously step into our future as one, an age where our best and brightest have triumphed over the worst of our sins! Even if a new threat should emerge, humanity will meet its potential to rise to the challenge as it always has before. And to show the world what we can be, what we are in this very moment... I present the First Apex Flame Trial Tournament! Come, one and all! Come, knights and dragons!
Come, singularities and chainers! Come, and unite as two to show the world what humanity can achieve with hands clasped together! Come! Ride, heroes, ride!
Come! And if you should triumph over all... grasp the chance to erase all of your regrets!
-K.C. Champion
Goofs aside, Graven Gear ValorX is a Valor campaign to be run by yours truly, Doom, and as evidenced by the title is heavily inspired by Arc System Works' Guilty Gear series. Familiarity with the source material is a bonus, but is hardly required, since at this very moment your lovely GM is still catching up with the games herself. Here's a summary of the campaign's premise:
In the twenty-first century on planet Earth, magic was discovered. While the circumstances of its emergence are largely unknown in the modern day, what is common knowledge is that shortly thereafter, a tectonic shift in the geopolitical landscape at the time followed as different countries all scrambled to take advantage of it. During this time, the United States of America, desperate to regain ground lost to other nations during this turbulent period, sponsored That Man to create the Gear Project: unthinking biomechanical monstrosities capable of unleashing magical devastation at the command of their master. Before a decade had passed this staggering display of hubris, an intelligent gear that made herself known as Apocrypha turned on her creators and declared war on the whole of humanity with the intent of wiping it out. After several years of losses to the Gears individually, what remained of the nations of the previous age voluntarily dissolved themselves to work as a single entity, and this new alliance issued a proclamation: the Sentencing of all Gears to death.
More than a century later, Apocrypha was finally struck down by the legendary K.C. Champion in circumstances that remain shrouded in mystery a year later, and this shocking turn of events only grew more suspect when they declared their intention to hold the First Apex Flame Trial Tournament, supposedly to demonstrate humanity's potential to a globe still reeling from a victory once thought impossible to achieve. The prize was even more shocking: the opportunity to regain anything that the winner had once lost. While on its face this seemed ridiculous, especially considering all that had been destroyed during the Sentencing, a desperate (and perhaps a little bit crazy) few took up this challenge, journeying to the Valley of the Damned that K.C. Champion had cut into the earth as the final blow against Apocrypha to vie for the chance to wipe away their regrets...
More than a century later, Apocrypha was finally struck down by the legendary K.C. Champion in circumstances that remain shrouded in mystery a year later, and this shocking turn of events only grew more suspect when they declared their intention to hold the First Apex Flame Trial Tournament, supposedly to demonstrate humanity's potential to a globe still reeling from a victory once thought impossible to achieve. The prize was even more shocking: the opportunity to regain anything that the winner had once lost. While on its face this seemed ridiculous, especially considering all that had been destroyed during the Sentencing, a desperate (and perhaps a little bit crazy) few took up this challenge, journeying to the Valley of the Damned that K.C. Champion had cut into the earth as the final blow against Apocrypha to vie for the chance to wipe away their regrets...
GGVX will start after the conclusion of Quinn's Meteor campaign and the end of Witch Busters' Season One. It will begin with a short-run "Season 0," taking place during the First Apex Flame Trial Tournament, where all characters will be level 6 until the conclusion of the tournament. The purpose of Season 0 is partially to establish that good ol' fighting game feel without taking too much time out of the campaign's main story, but mostly to test whether I can handle running two whole campaigns during a schoolyear with a heavier courseload than I'm used to on top of all my other TTRPG commitments. If the answer is "no," the game will take a long hiatus until I'm able to fully commit.
If you're curious about how magic works in the world of GGVX or the current state of the planet, check out this setting primer. Warning, it's wordy. Whether or not you want to bother with all those proper nouns, fill out this form and drop a comment below! Keep in mind that when making your character, a totally gonzo worldbuilding element that seems orthogonal to everything else in the setting heavily strengthens it. Think Slayer being a vampire out of nowhere and similar ideas that make you double take the first time you hear them passingly mentioned in conversation about the series. Each player will also create the "rival" to (note, not necessarily a rival but someone deeply connected to the backstory that has some kind of fraught relationship with) the PC of another player; while these rivals will mostly be run as NPCs, you may be expected to play them at times when an important scene is happening and none of the PCs can be present and similar circumstances.