I'm a recent arrival to Turn Alpha and a man who knows less than nothing about Gundam, but there's already so much here to grab me. The complex geopolitical web underpinned by a tangle of salvage rights, technological advantages, economical power, military presence (literally hundreds of mobile suits, each with their own specialties and abilities), and infrastructure has got its hooks in me good. I'm so grateful to both Princess_Hex for roping me into this and BiopunkOtrera for acting as an incredible GM. There's few GSRPs that I've seen that deserve this win more than this.
But.
THE FALLEN LEAVES TELL A STORY
The Shattering War has consumed me body and soul. I was lucky enough to join during Turn 5, and right now we're finishing up turn 7. In the span of those two months, I've created murder plans for every character within the game, enacted old man yaoi with the ghost of a dead bird, attempted to reforge the Elden Ring using rat corpses, spent far too long figuring out the mechanics of colony dropping onto Leyendell, and set up the opening acts of a narrative about loss, loyalty, and diminishment. Alone, that's not special. Every GSRP has its share of wild things and crazy plans, and everyone's enacting their own insane bullshit. The point of these games, after all, is to tell a story that's greater than the sum of its parts.
And that's where The Shattering War exceeds every reasonable expectation to enter the realms of the absurd. If you'll pardon my dramatism, there's few things that describe this game's narrative better than a tapestry woven in real-time, where story threads and character moments are spun together into battles, betrayals, heartbreaks and losses that scar the Lands Between forever. Theaxofwar gets Elden Ring in a way that I didn't expect outside of Miyazaki, Martin, or a handful of loretubers, and the best decision he made when putting this game together was excising half of it for an entirely new character roster.
The only member of the Golden Lineage left from canon was Godwyn, and he met his canon fate. In their place, we have the likes of Gwydion, fey lord of Stormveil and false son of Godfrey, Drowned Raahlach, newly returned to the Lands Between to claim his birthright, Gwendolyn the Silver, dark shadow of her favored brother, and Roshan, who shoots down the stars. The Demigods, Servants, and Warlords of our new Lands Between are larger-than-life, conanesque in their melancholies and mirths, and their players gleefully weaponize that to create stories as biting as they are compelling. It's rare that any character achieves a lasting victory without taking a stinging loss as well, and every crushing defeat has a thread of hope that a player can clutch onto for the next turn.
This, along with the lack of any hard stats or power levels (Ax's second best decision) creates an atmosphere where the goal is still to win, but the focus is far more on character arcs and narrative throughlines than the cold calculus of military strategy. I can recite the storylines of all 20-30-odd PCs in this game basically by heart, not just because they're incredibly cool (even though they are) but because I need to in order to know how to deal with them. When conflicts are based on narratives rather than numbers and each character has a story, preparation and properly stacking the deck determines victory and defeat. A Demigod dies to mortal men in The Shattering War after they shoot a ballista through his heart, but it's the leadup to the battle as much as the bolt piercing his heart that kills him.
But he doesn't die.
Instead he's trapped inside Caria's manor, a brilliant mind in a feeble body desperately seeking a cure. When the madman who used a blasphemous blade to sever an Empyrean from her body was caught, he was bound in an Evergaol instead of killed. There he waits for a worthy successor to pass his weapon and deicidal mission onto. The peerless swordswoman who was felled by a ruthless sorcerer rises as an undead abomination, the last line of defense before you can bring down her new liege.
Because this is Elden Ring, and it's so much more interesting this way.
There's so much here I'm cutting for the sake of brevity (lmao) - setting changes and lore, Ax's monstrous update speed, special mechanics for armies and Tarnished - but that's the one point I want to hit above all else. The Shattering War's narrative bangs so hard because everyone - GM and player alike - is fully bought into the atmosphere of Elden Ring, a brutal world where life is cheap no matter how divine, heroes rise and fall at the point of their own sword, and hope is always over the next horizon. We all know how this is going to end, and more likely than not it's going to be with our bodies cooling at the feet of the Tarnished of No Renown. But this is Elden Ring, and everyone from the highest Empyrean to the lowest Servant is going to fight for a victory every step of the way, whatever that may be.
It's a fantasy, it's a tragedy, and it's created one of the best stories I've ever been a part of. I'm so excited to see where it'll go from here.
Please vote The Shattering War - An Elden Ring GSRP for the best GSRP of 2024.