Development History
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Qalidar began in 1988
as a side trip. My players, exploring the multiverse by way of a
pan-dimensional maze, found themselves being repeatedly foiled by an
assassin who knew its pathways better than they did. Eventually, they
found a way to track him down. There was a city on a dead world, a
network of hovels crowded into the towering metal frames of crumbling
skyscrapers. The assassin could be found there when he wasn't working.
That was Qalidar.
Over the years, the city continued to evolve, reaching out its rusting
arms to other worlds. The group I played with in college explored
Qalidar pretty thoroughly, and added some of their own personality to
its history. Years of quiescence followed for Qalidar, even after I
started playing again with a different group in 1999.
Eventually, in the cracks of a shattered and reconstituted campaign, I
found Qalidar again, now the very archetype of ruins and shadows, a
spiraling metropolis full of shrouded sages and cold horrors. The group
didn't last, but its new Qalidar became an inspiration for future
revisions.
Some time in late 2008,
Qalidar finally saw print as a True20 setting.
The core concepts you'll see in this game are mostly there, including
echoes, the transdimensional Storm, and many of the ruthless cabals
that shelter in Qalidar's shadows. One of the roads of the Spiral was
also detailed. An updated version with teasers for Qalidar: Resistance was released for
Peryton Fantasy RPG in 2012.
But before the Peryton RPG version, in 2011,
I started the Walk the
Spiral Campaign.
This was a series of adventures run across several conventions, using
the same characters, but different players every time. This was mostly
so I could test the rules of the game I was working on, but it also
gave me a chance to expose players to Qalidar from a different angle.
For Gen Con in 2012,
concurrent with the last Walk the
Spiral session, I handed out - I don't remember - seems like
hundreds of four-page flyers describing the basic rules and setting of Qalidar: Resistance. The contents of
that flyer later became the pages listed under "home" on this site.
In the summer of 2013, I
released a small run of books to sell exclusively at Gen Con. The
organization of the book was less than ideal, but the game was all
there - rules, setting, Storm, Spiral, Synarchy, vectors, and all. We
sold most of those. I gave a few to friends and I still have a few
laying around the house.
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