I have had enough people ask for this I thought I post the summaries. IF the other Buffy books get published then maybe I'll go back and
finish up the write-ups for full adventures.
Until then this will do.
The Dragon and the Phoenix
The Dragon and the Phoenix
The Dragon and the Phoenix originally began as the means for my Buffy playtest group to tell a Willow & Tara centric story in a new way. Originally titled
"Road Stories", it began with the death of Tara's father and then followed Willow and Tara in their cross-country trip across the Southern US in
Bob Maclay's (Tara's father) old 67' Thunderbird.
There would be some strangeness along the way. That is of course till March 2002 came around and we heard that Tara was going to be murdered. Now I was (an
still am) a huge Willow and Tara fan, but most of my playtesters were even bigger fans than I was. We changed course rather quickly. Road Stories was scrapped,
and we worked to come up with a new idea. In our talks (and we were less concerned now with playtesting and more with providing ourselves something we had
lost) the Dragon and the Phoenix was born. We were going to bring Tara back. We decided rather early that there were not going to be any of the issues that
plagued Buffy herself the season before. As Lisa, one of my playtesters and the brain behind Heaven Bleeds, stated "without Willow even Heaven would have
seemed like Hell to Tara". The ideas flowed in pretty quickly. The name of the series, the "past episodes" of the demonic army and Yoln came
from an AD&D I had played in the 80s just before going off to college. Morganne had been a character back then taht I had set up to die and have regretted
it nearly the instant it happened and ever since. So to bring her into this and make her death parallel to Tara's (and to some extent Buffy's) was
poignant on a personal level but also because I felt I could do a much better job of it. In AD&D Morganne had been Bard (1st Edition) with a particular
hatred for vampires. In The Buffy game I retconned her into a Slayer.
The choice of Leviathan as the big bad was also pretty easy. I loved old Godzilla movies and had this vision in my head of the Cast standing, looking up and
facing a giant monster like that. I was also using the Armageddon Playtest docs in my game, so it seemed an obvious choice. Adding that Willow and Tara are the
only ones to stop it was also my snarky remark that anyone playing in a world without a resurrected Tara was doomed to be consumed by the Mad God.
My playtest group was also watching a lot of Charmed, so quite a bit of those mythos entered into our games as well. The Demonic Wasteland influenced
Leviathan's plane. Warlocks became more Charmed like with their quasi-demon heritage (and thus ok to kill by characters taking a Geas never to take a human
life) and witches were given other choices as a secondary power other than just TK. As development in the Buffy game progressed, so did the Dragon and the
Phoenix. Each adventure was designed to take advantage of the new rules in the books. Want to play the next adventure, well you'll need to pick up the next
book. But we moved from that when development slowed down. Eventually we moved all moved on to Ghosts of Albion where we were joined by the like spirits of
Amber Benson and Chris Golden. There are a number of new rules and things we wrote for Willow and Tara that later were tweaked for William and Tamara. Given
the parallels, we all felt that this was very appropriate. Did we make Willow and Tara Protectors? No, that was never considered, plus given the Anamchara
casting rules there was no need. Once Ghosts got into full swing The Dragon and the Phoenix had to take a back seat but when the core of the rules were laid
out we went back to it. We dropped Willow and Tara into the Ghosts of Albion world and used their current stats with the magic-richer world of Ghosts. To quote
my co-author of Ghosts and Dragon Garner Johnson the amount of power they could summon up was "just sick". We knew we had done good.
We tried out the other adventures with a mix of unpublished Buffy books and Ghosts rules. In "Enemy Within" we compared Thom Marion's revised
Werewolves with the Ferals of Ghosts of Albion. We used Army of Darkness' mass combat rules to detail how an army of demons and angels could fight an army
of tainted demonic dragonmen. Magics were mixed and matched. Silent Lucidity added cinmatic Bast, but while they were nice the rules for them never gelled for
us.
We decided to "release" the adventures for people to play since there was quite a bit of controversy over Tara's death and most of the people we
knew gave up watching the show at this point, so this was their replacement. Outside of Garner and myself none of playtesters had ever gamed before, but all
had written fan-fiction. I grabbed them for a few reasons, first if the Buffy game was going to work it had to appeal to non-gaming fans. The fact that they
learned to play the game and even get to a point to where they were working on adventures is a testament to the game. Secondly I wanted fan-fic authors, and
good ones at that, because they understood dialog and plot. Most RPG adventures make good dungeon crawls but terrible "books". I wanted people to
feel like they were IN the show that the adventure and dram was now indeed their own. How well did this work? I was driving home one day after going to the
store and I had just been given the first draft of "Identity Crisis". The main author, Sass, had pitched to me as an excuse for Tara to do a strip
tease for Willow and the two of them get caught. I had read it and of course I was amused, the dialog was great the B-plot was snappy as hell and I was
building up the A-Plot (the Buffy part) and then it dawned on me. Tara was alive and well and I soon could care less what was going on in the
"canon", the Dragon and the Phoenix was the only thing that was "real", anything else was just a rumor.
We also had some surprising help. Both Chris Golden and Amber Benson know of the Dragon and gave us feedback. Amber remarked that Garner and I now knew Tara
better than anyone (except maybe for Chris). We even had a writer on the show that was sending us scripts long before the shows would film. So we worked
spoilers for the other Season 7 into the narrative and mocked them. The writer has asked to remain anonymous and that is the way it will stay. This person
agreed with us but was powerless to do anything. We were also hearing about how toxic the set had become and how most people were counting down the days till
the show was over.
Similar to the authors I got Willow & Tara fans (collectively known as "Kittens") to do the covers for the adventures, you can see them all here.
There are a lot references to music and songs in the episodes. I do my best work to music. I wrote my dissertation while listening to the Ramones and
"Ghosts of Albion" was written on a steady diet of Black Sabbath and Iron Maiden when I needed horror elements and Sinéad O'Connor, Enya and
Máire Ní Bhraonáin (I guess we are distantly related), and Lorrena McKinnett for when I needed to write about the fae or ancient history. Dragon had a lot of
influences, but mostly I listened to a lot of Linkin Park.
The Dragon and the Phoenix was a great success in my mind. Of the adventures we released, 1 through 5, it has been translated into German, French and Spanish.
There are two "unauthorized" fan-fics by authors not related to the project set in the same universe not to mention the works of the authors involved
from the dramatic ("Unexpected Consequences") to the silly (Willow and Tara's drunken adventures in a adult book store by Sass) to Lovecraftian
inspired horror (Garner's "Those that Feed"). Plus two more series and a mini-series that comprise what we call "Willow & Tara the
Series". "Road Stories" was later revived as "Season of the Witch" and the ghost of Robert Maclay is added to the cast. "Mid
Semester's Night Dream" was a mini-series featuring a semi-retired (from monster hunting) Willow & Tara being asked to investigate a suspected
vampire at a private boarding school. This lead to "Generation Hex" where Tara is still teaching at the school and they have help the next generation
of hunters of the supernatural.
Next up backgrounds and episodes
We also introduced a new race of
the demons, the Lilim. One sub-race, the Mormolycia, are a group of warrior demons, normally they all look like stunningly attractive 6ft tall women in green
armor. Their true form is so horrifying that other demons fear them. The Mormo make a pact with the Slayer. They will leave each other alone in order to fight
the greater threat, the Tainted Fallen and later Leviathan. Stat-wise the Mormo are Slayers. This is on purpose since it is later revealed that the progenitor
of the Slayers was Lilith (see: 
Notes and Comments:
