GROWING UP WITH BEYONDER: Jacob McEntire

Jacob McEntire grew up playing Beyonder. He was five years old when he made his first character, an intrepid thief named Bilbo. Bilbo excelled at sneaking about and gaining access to secret places, but he wasn’t always prudent – he loved a good fight with bad odds.

Jacob and his friends played whenever they could. His birthday sleepovers featured epic adventures into the night, complete with pizza and birthday cake. He played for years – from the time he was four until he graduated from high school. He went on to game in college.

These days, Jacob is finishing up an engineering degree and helping to create the new Beyonder adventure module, “Legends of Tamarra.”

Learn more about Beyonder at fnbgames.com

CREATING A CHARACTER IN BEYONDER: Basic Character Types

The first of an occasional series on character creation

This post describes some of the basic character types you can choose in Beyonder. In future posts we’ll go deeper, describing ways to make more complex and nuanced characters.

If you want a fast and easy way to generate a character, go to “Make Your Character with an Adventure” MYCA ©. Follow our “choose your own adventure” story; your choices will determine everything including your Race, Guild, basic stats, and abilities (your Talents and Powers).  You’ll end up with a character that really reflects your preferences. (Don’t believe us?  Try it!  It takes about five minutes.)

If you would like to tailor-make your character, use our QuickGen ©. QuickGen lets you pick and choose parts of your character, and then fills in the details.  For example, when you choose your Guild and interests, the system will determine the Powers that you need.  In only a few minutes you will have a fully fleshed out character with all of the details worked out for you.

Here are some basic character types, as well as the Races that work best for each (when applicable) and the Guilds that will help them to develop their Skills.

• Social:  Social characters are leaders. Humans excel at social interactions, although you can be a social character of any Race.  Skills to concentrate on are Communication, Deception, Insight, and Leadership. You can be a member of any Guild.

• Fighting:  Fighters do damage; “tanks” soak up damage as well as doing some damage themselves. Combat casters use Powers, not just weapons.  You will do best with a large Race:  crawn, ishiri, ushen.  Recommended skills:  Melee Combat and Ranged Combat. Choose whatever Guild you prefer.

• Stealth: Good for spying, scouting, and generally lurking about. Choose a small Race like a dwaheely or wellyn, join the Umbrist Guild, and concentrate on the Stealth Talent.

• Crowd Control: The Guilds that have specialties in crowd control are Charismatics and Mentarchs. For this character type, you can be any Race. If you want to control groups of people and help your party, get Charismatic Powers such as Group Tactics or Emotional Net, or any of the Boost Powers for Mentarchs.

• Healers:  Several Guilds teach healing, but if you want to specialize in healing others as well as yourself, be a Mystic. Charismatics can do temporary Faith Healing; Evokers can heal objects.   Members of any Race can be a Mystic, but ushen and heola excel at it.

We hope this helps you to get started!  You can always find more info at our website at FNB Games.

Our books will be ready a little later than we had hoped: early next year, not late this year.  We have chosen to go for greater printing quality, which will take a little longer but which we believe is worth the wait.

We are hoping that the Beyonder: Science of the Six, and Imbelnhi’s Bestiary: Being a Traveler’s Account of our Continent and her Creatures will be in our hands in January. (If we sound calm now, that’s because you didn’t hear us wailing, tearing our hair, and gnashing our teeth … but I digress …)

The good news: the reason for the long prep time is that our books have layers and subtleties of design and color that can’t be achieved in just one or two steps. Or is that the bad news? We’re losing track. We are very grateful to 21XDesign for guiding us through this and helping us to keep excellence at the forefront.

We really appreciate your patience!  As always, we’ll keep you posted.

The FNBGames team — Robin McEntire, Jordan Campbell, Simon McEntire, and Caleb McEntire

Judy Schatz, Director of Communications

 

Nineteen years ago, Simon McEntire played Beyonder for the first time. He was in sixth grade, and his dad moderated.

This weekend, Simon will be moderating a game of Beyonder for a group of sixth graders. He is now a partner in Flying NightBear Games (FNB Games), the company formed in 2008 to write and publish Beyonder.

The game this weekend is the result of a visit that Judy Schatz (Simon’s mom and Director of Communications, FNB Games) paid to a doctor. He asked her where she worked; she told him about FNB Games.

“My sixth grade son loves role-playing games!” he said. “He plays after school with a group of friends, and a teacher moderating.”

“My sons went to a school that does that! What school does he go to?”

As in the best stories, coincidences occur. Judy’s doctor’s son attends Abington Friends School, from which three of the four FNB Games partners graduated. He was unable to attend the test play at AFS in two weeks, but FNB Games liked the idea of playing with a younger group. They arranged to have a test play for him and some of his gamer friends.

The test play takes place this weekend; meanwhile, the sixth grade participants are busy creating characters and making plans. Says Simon, “It will be interesting to see what it’s like from the other side of the table!”

Simon’s dad, Robin McEntire, originated Beyonder in the 1970s. More than 25 years later his two older sons, Simon and Caleb, and best friend Jordan Campbell discovered the game and created and developed the mechanics, creatures, Powers, and game play that have made it a hit with advance players today.

Considering the many times, over the years, that Simon and his friends begged his father to moderate games for him and his friends, he says, “It feels appropriate, somehow, that the suffering we inflicted on my father should now be inflicted on me!”

Open to members of the AFS community only

On Wednesday, November 26, Beyonder returns to its roots for Homecoming weekend! Flying Nightbear Games (AKA Simon, Jordan, Caleb, Jacob, and Robin) will be hosting a Beyonder game after Homecoming Meeting for Worship.  Whether you’re a player from back in the day, or a newbie who wants to know what all the excitement is about, join us then!

For more information, or to reserve a seat at the table, contact us at info@fnbgames.com. We hope to see you there!

Flying NightBear Games has been added to a vastly growing list of developers who are  choosing to take a critical stand against GamerGate.  Last week,  Flying NightBear Games board  members Robin McEntire, Caleb McEntire and Judy Schatz weighed in on this volatile subject.  Check out the entire list of game developers and see where everyone has chosen to stand on this hot button topic.