So, we’ve gone over the themes a bit, and our intents going in, and we’ve told some abstract tales about a world you don’t know yet. More of all of that, but let’s get some basic reality stuff down, so you know what to expect.

Characters

Alba is a class based game, with your mechanical abilities restricted to your class. As currently designed, class and where you come from are your only character choices. There’s no XP, and no planned mechanical advancement – nor “prestige” classes – and you may at any time between events swap which class your character is.

More information on the classes and their skillsets in a later blog post.

Groups

We recommend being a member of a group. Groups in Alba will almost always be people arriving from the same village. Alba is a land without cartography or written language, and the stars are not consistent enough to navigate by, and so these gatherings are the only real chance for people of different villages to communicate with each other. Each prides itself on its independence. Each village is somewhere unspecified within an area of a country, and each area will have its own traditions and lore, but there are no mechanical changes depending on where your village sits.

More on this – again – soon.

Eventualities

We mentioned five regional events. Part froth-generator, part play-test, part prologue, these are smaller events (Capped below 100) that are going to focus on an aspect of the game. Combat, Religion and the Supernatural, Games, Legends, all this kind of mechanic stuff. Exactly how we split them up is still in the air, but we’re aiming for:

• Scotland / North of England
• East of England
• London area
• Midlands
• Wales or Southwest

Not in that order, and all still to be confirmed (depending on sites actually responding, which is harder than you might think). Character Generation isn’t going to be final for a while, so any characters or groups built for these games will be considered non-canon, though the events themselves are real. There will probably be a limit on how many regional events you can go to, but we’ll announce anything like that ahead of time.

After that, the national events, as well as more smaller regional events as we go on.

But you want to know when, which is not unreasonable. So do we, really. Once we have a solid venue and date, an idea of ticket-prices and how big we want to run the first couple, we’ll tell you. This post is mostly to set some expectations and avoid unpleasant surprises. Our aim is to run at least some regional events in 2019, and launch the full festival next year, but that’s not a plan that’s run into the spinning blades of logistics yet.

More on this soon also.

More on a lot of things, it seems, later on.