Unfocused Thoughts on Operation: Mobile Armor

I like mechs and the various anime and video games that contain them. I haven't talked a lot about them on this blog, but in pretty much every other venue where I post about stuff they are a running theme of mine. The main reason I have not talked about them on here that much is that I have yet to find a ttrpg for mechs that I like. The ones I've seen are either too fiddly in a particularly 90s way - build points and all that - or are some of the more modern rpg designs I can't stand - pbta, blades in the dark, 4e, that kind of thing. I am also reliably informed by an expert that the particular niche I want for a mech game isn't currently being filled.

So what's a girl to do? Well since I am ostensibly a game designer now (gasp!) I guess I'll at least think about designing a game. So I'm going to list some stuff I'd want and try to express the general tone and hope that either gives me an idea of where to start or that some brave and intelligent reader will stop me from tilting at windmills by pointing out my expert was wrong and they missed or x or y game I should try.

• The series I most want to emulate with this is Mobile Suit Gundam: 08th MS Team and Fang of the Sun: Dougram as well as other real robot type anime like Patlabor and probably a variety of other UC Gundam series such as the original, Zeta, ZZ, and the other two in the gritty gundam trilogy, 0080: War in the Pocket and 0083: Stardust Memory.
• I want the PCs to be members of some sort of military org - whether regulars or irregulars - who perform various missions with action being both in and out of the cockpit. In researching for this I found out that there is actually some real world equivalent to the out of mech scouting we see in some episodes of 08th MS Team in the form of people dismounting British WWII cavalry tanks to scout. Neat!
• Sandro referred to this as the "Ace Combat" type after the series of jet fighter video games and yeah that sounds about right.
  
• I don't want heavy mech customization at the start but I would like some system where damaged mechs need to be jury rigged or refit with various new parts based on the campaign. Mech customization happens as the mech develops a story in the fiction of the game world.
• Rules wise I'm currently split one of two ways - either a version using the Cepheus Engine or some variant or one using BRP with some influence from the old and out of print BRP Mecha book.
• I do see the campaign idea as very similar to "what if you ran a traveller merc game where everyone were members of various tank crews" and I do think Cepheus has some pretty robust vehicle combat rules. The problem is figuring out how to make combat machines that act like they do in the shows I want to emulate and still function within those rules.
• I think I need something like both Dougram and Gundam have that explains why these machines can do things like make surprise attacks in an assumed technologically advanced future. Gundam has Minovsky Particles which jam stuff* and the planet from Dougram passes through a nebula which interferes with electronic communications - though apparently not the controls of mechs. I think having a planet be honeycombed with tunnel systems that mechs could retreat into (and which they were partially developed to navigate) might be a good idea.
• In my head I'm largely imagining the campaign frame I tried way back in college for a mech game where a proxy war is being fought on a far away planet with an imperial power fighting an insurgency on it and the insurgency being secretly armed by a rival power. The PCs in this old campaign were members of the insurgency who stole some mechs and then were going to use them to carry out quick but devastating attacks on the imperial flank.

That's it for now and I guess is not much but maybe someone will save me from having to write my own system by suggesting something I'll like in the comments!

* I think the initial fighting of the One Year War also seems like it would've obviously destroyed a great many satellites required for the normal kind of surveillance we're talking about.

The Office of Scientific Investigation

Working for the OSI can be quite dangerous.

1945: the year that changed the world. An act of war that unleashed destruction on a cosmic scale also ushered mankind into a new age. The Atomic Age! Understanding this same destructive force could hold the key to unlimited energy and an understanding of creation itself. At the same time, scientific discoveries about the nature of outer space have opened mankind up to the possibility of a future among the stars. Still other new developments of the age reveal unguessed secrets about the ancient past and even about the nature of time itself.

With these new advancements come new threats. Scientists dabbling in forces newly unleashed create hideous mutations or strange intelligences never before conceived of. Foreign agents seek to steal advances in engineering using their own strange devices. Mankind's use of atomic power may also have attracted the attention of beings from other stars with technology far in advance of anything seen on Earth, if the contactee movement is to be believed. Given the stakes of these new discoveries, any or all of these potential threats could not only spell doom for the country but also the entire world.

With these threats in mind, the member states of NATO decided to create a new body - the Office of Scientific Investigation. From its offices in a secure bunker within the Nevada desert, members of the OSI act as a combination of research, law enforcement, and espionage agency. Its membership is composed of academics, soldiers, law enforcement officers, and secret agents from NATO member countries. Their task is to investigate and contain the new threats of this new age.

The year is 1952, and the OSI has already been involved in a number of classified cases. From what has leaked to the press, agents have foiled a Soviet plot to fake an interplanetary invasion, discovered an island populated with pre-historic life in the Pacific, and investigated the remains of what some believe to be an ancient spacecraft. Fighting enemies both foreign and domestic, wherever science goes awry there you will find the OSI!

Unfocused thoughts on Immer

Recently, for reasons not entirely within my own understand, I've been reading about Minaria, the setting of the board game Divine Right. Just a cursory glance over the material gave me a slew of ideas for a game, particularly for a region in the kingdom of Immer called the Wildwood/the region of the Gorpin Woodsmen. This post will cover what attracted me to the area as well as my own ideas for the tone, adventures, stuff like that.

• Immer is a kingdom of two ethnic groups who settled in two waves - initial human settlement and then conquerors. However, now the native population is allied with the monarchy as a way of having a balance of power against the powerful dukes.
• The monarchs of Immer are often puppets of a group of magicians called the Eaters of Wisdom, who have done what they can to make sure the monarchy is both strong and under their control. Most monarchs of Immer now study wisdom at the School of Thautmaturgy before ruling.
• Despite a strong monarchy, Immer is definitely feudal - with dukes and horseman set up across the kingdom to respond rapidly to threats from goblins, barbarians, and elves.
• The Gorpin Woodsmen are the descendants of the servants of a rogue duke who was defeated (along with his elf allies) during an attempt to make himself independent.
• The Eaters of Wisdom remind me of multiple factions from the First Law trilogy, and having them act as kind of jerk-ass merlins is real appealing to me.
• My idea is that the Wild Wood is currently being reenforced by the queen of Immer due to its position along the gold-possessing River Rapid and the border with the goblins of Zorn. She is being advised in this matter by the Eaters of Wisdom.
• I have access to a copy of the boardgame through Tabletop simulator, and using that I distributed personalities to the factions I thought might come into the game in one way or another, that is Immer, the Eaters of Wisdom, Zorn, Elfland, Muetar, and the Dwarves (who I included because this would be a D&D game and it'd be useful to know what's up with the kings of all the available PC races). What I got was...
• The Queen of Immer is starry eyed and looking to prove herself in combat. Which works out real well because...
• The Eaters of Wisdom (or at least the ones advising her) are military geniuses.
• The Goblins of Zorn are led by an extremely gullible king. Perhaps he too is being manipulated by an Eater?
• The King of Elfland is "known for his lack of valor." Because I'm currently reading the Corum series, I'm going to borrow from that and make him not a coward so much as so aloof he doesn't realize how fast wars happen.
• The King of Muetar is money grubbing. I think that's a good dynamic for their closest human neighbor - he can be persuaded to aid for huge sums or may foil the planes of the Queen of Immer to gain gold.
• The Dwarves are ruled by a king as "irascible as a dragon." Sounds like dwarves.
• There's also a religious tension in Immer, with the monarchy promoting "patriarchal worship" and the original religion of the region (and the conquering ethnic group) being a triple maiden-mother-crone goddess.
• The region also borders the Temple of the Kings, which only allows kings inside and serves as the chief temple for the strongest gods of Minaria. I may also make parts of it accessible as a dungeon to any PCs.
• The ideas I have swirling in my head relate to a faction of the Gorpin seeing the Queen as someone who can reinvigorate the goddess worship, the Eaters attempting to manipulate  her not to, and the queen herself's desire to win military victories in order to enter the Temple of the Kings.
• PCs would be the standard types of freebooters and cutthroats, but hopefully the adventure hooks lead them to siding with one faction or another.
• Dungeons would include the aforementioned temple of the kings, goblin pits, old elven ruins, the ruins of pre-kingdom Immer, and the strange wreckage created by the Invasion of Abominations/Invasion of the Things that Crawl and Things that Fly.
• The aforementioned Abominations, their invasion, and their disappearance will probably feature as a big campaign mystery and maybe relate to the goals of the Eaters of Wisdom.
• Aesthetically I imagine the setting as kind of... pre-D&D fantasy art; especially the covers of the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series.
• I imagine the men of Immer as having a kind of Rurkidi vibe - layers of viking, slavic, and steppe peoples, though I may make it more of a Saxon/Norman thing. Either way they need to have cavalry, and they like green, gold, and garnets.
• I think the goblins of Zorn represent the full range of goblinoids but probably expressed more like Tolkien's varieties of orcs.
• I want to figure out a size for the map hexes above, but I'm also trepedatious about doing a zoomed in map on the area I want to cover because the original map used the cursed hex alignment of absolute columns.

That's all for now.  I got other posts about other things coming up though so stay tuned. Oh also check out my patreon where Huth and I continue to put out Nightwick Abbey stuff.

Unfocused thoughts on Kukoshi

This is one of those posts I write to exorcise an idea I have so I can keep running whatever I'm running (in this case, Nightwick). Sometimes that works. Sometimes it doesn't. This one is actually within the World of Nightwick.

• Kukoshi is a small island off the coast of the main island of Noppin - the fakey cakes Japan of the World of Nightwick. It's position (and map) is analogous to the real world island of Shikoku.
• The bulk of the island is dominated by the Forest of Graves. Once the island was the burial site for the emperor and his court, as well as nobles who could use money or influence to get the same privilege.  Now there are so many graves and tombs about the island that one can easily stumble upon a  site that has gone unseen for generations while gathering firewood or picking mushrooms.
• The forest also is teeming with the spirits of the dead who call to mortals to join them.
• The places of the dead were originally set up and tended by the Genbu clan, whose minds were poisoned by some demon or other - as is often the case in the World of Nightwick.  They built a sprawling fortress called Kumonoso Castle.
• At some point they gained so much favor with the emperor that they attempted to seize him, bring him to Kumonoso Castle, and act as permanent regents.  This obviously angered the other powerful clans at the time.
• The clans from the mainland besieged and destroyed Kumonoso Castle.  During the siege they found it a place of madness and great evils, and many of the creations of the Genbu Clan still haunt the ruins - and the entire island - to this day.
• Today the dominant clan on the island is the Tsuru clan, who rule from Sato, which was once a village near the shadow of Kumonoso.  Now it's a sizable town capable of having city adventures.
• Two other clans inhabit the island. The Okami clan is made of a cadet branch of the Genbu that helped the old clans destroy them in the long long ago.  They are still rumored to use foul magics and are particularly known for making their adversaries contract a form of madness that makes them act like dogs. They are secretive, but not openly hostile to the Tsuru clan.
• The other main clan is the Byakko clan, which has been given control over the western part of Noppin because its leader jingles little baubles in a way that the emperor particularly likes.  They have seized a castle from the Tsuru clan - Orizuru Castle - and obviously intend to wage further war against them.  It is likely that their ultimate goal is to take Sato itself.
• Religion on Kukoshi, and in Noppin in general, is divided between the monks of Law and the yamabushi who deal with the traditional Old Gods of the islands. While the priests of the two religions may fight, most of the realm embraces some level of syncretism between the two beliefs.
• The religion of the Law in Noppin is an esoteric Eastern branch that does not necessarily oppose appeasing the Old Gods but focuses on conditioning one's mind and body to become one with the Law upon death. To do this monks often do things such as squeeze their bodies into metal cubes to cause their bones to "align" with the right angles of the Law.
• They do not conceive of the Law as a deity but as a kind of divine state outside the universe. They do believe that the Law has saints, which function much as they do in the Western and Zenopolitan churches.
• The overall structure of such a game would be like the one I used in Yavana, with most of the adventuring being hexcrawling with some mid-sized dungeons and the occasional town antics. Kumonoso Castle would be a fairly large dungeon but not "mega" in the campaign oriented sense.
• I plan on borrowing Anthony's warrior societies for fighters, but also include ones for thieves (shinobi schools).  It's likely that I'll pre-place NPCs who are teachers for these societies, and one or two of them might even be tengu.
• Other dungeon ideas include the Moon Tower of the Tengu, the tombs of the old emperors, a more recently cursed castle, and a waterfall/cave holding the demonic princess of the Genbu clan.
• Monsters will be largely taken from yokai.com because that site is great.
• I would likely run this using Old School Essentials with houserules for Yamabushi and Namazu.
• Obvious influences include the first two Onimusha games, Sekiro, Throne of Blood, the manga of Inuyasha (which has a lot more horror elements than the anime), Kwaidan, the first Yokai Wars movie... a bunch of other stuff probably.

Mechwarrior: The Legend of Curly's Lostech

This is another mech-based campaign idea. I've been on kind of a mech kick since rewatching Evangelion with my wife and have been thinking about various mech campaigns. This is one I came up with a while ago and have thought about adapting to Traveller or other systems (maybe even Lancer) at various points. If I ever ran this I'm not sure what rules I'd use since the current Battletech RPG looks kinda naff.

If you don't know anything about the Battletech setting I recommend watching the intro cinematic to the video game. "Some Indian" who writes Straits of Anian I think correctly identified it as doing an excellent job telling the history of the setting using only visuals.

An AWOL Kurita mech waits in ambush on the devastated planet of Alexandria

Alexandria was once a jewel of the Star League. A high population world nearly entirely covered with urban environments and manufacturing zones, it was home to several mech factories and produced many of the designs still seen in the Succession Wars. It's position along the central spine of the Inner Sphere also made it strategically important for maintaining hegemony over space.

Unfortunately, when the Star League disbanded it ended up wedged between houses Steiner and Kurita - both known for their bellicose militarism. During the first two Succession Wars  the planet was pounded with everything each house had at its disposal, including notably treaty-defying orbital bombardment. Between the wars the two sides would raid across their borders and often the target was Alexandria. Now most of the planet is rubble and few have any reason to visit the dying world.

The current inhabitants live a meager life in the ruins. They run in factions that are little more than heavily armed street gangs. The only way to eek out a living, it seems, is by squabbling over the ruins, the planet's atmosphere likely incapable of supporting crops. Somewhat recently, a group of pirates with a company of mechs and even more conventional fighting vehicles landed on the planet and has been attempting to use it as a pirate port.

You are members of the 2nd Legion of Vega, stationed a few jumps away from Alexandria. A sink for dishonorable warriors, washouts, burnouts, and even political prisoners, the Legion of Vega is noted for its unconventional tactics, poor morale, and miserable duty assignments. Despite being assigned to this forlorn hope, it looks like your luck is about to change. A member of your company has heard a rumor that one of the factories on Alexandria would need only minor repairs to become operational again, and may even have a huge store of Lostech!

Luckily for you discipline in the 2nd Legion is so lax that making off with a drop ship and hitching a ride on a jumpship to Alexandria seems to have been met with a very muted response. If you get the factory working, maybe they'll forgive you for going AWOL because of the wealth you'll bring to House Kurita.  If not, you can always be the petty tyrant of your own planet.

Unfortunately there seems to be a problem.  Someone is occupying the factory... and its the pirates...

The Magnificent Mech Pilots

This is one of those posts where I do a kind of campaign pitch in order to cement my ideas in case I want to run it or just to get it off my chest. What I describe below is based on the official Lancer setting but I have decided to switch out blink gates for something more like heighliners or Battletech jumpships for wrap-my-brain-around-it reasons. All distances within a system are done at high but not quite relativistic speeds.

There is a dark power growing at the edge of known space.

It began with the Far Field teams - brief reports that surveyed planets already showed evidence of human habitation mining, and even manufacturing, then whole teams went missing. Nothing was done, despite the anomalous reports. Far Field teams go missing all the time. It's one of the hazards of the job.

Then the attacks started. Union officials and even the victims said they were carried out by pirates. They still do. For pirates, though, they are exceedingly well equipped. They do act like pirates though - taking ships, armor, and sometimes even slaves. In one instance at least it seems they forced an entire colony to evacuate and seized to expand their manufacturing base, sealing off communications with the Union shortly afterward. The captives who have escaped have escaped claim that it is the work of someone the raiders refer to as the "Baron." This has led the few in the core who care what's going on to point their finger at the Karrakin Baronies, but anyone can call themselves something.

Though if they were involved that would explain why nothing is being done. Despite these bold attacks on colonies that are ostensibly part of the Union, few resources have been sent to the frontier. The Council has stated that it is the job of existing auxiliaries to patrol these areas for pirates, a clear underestimation of the threat posed. A few on Cradle and a great deal more in the colonies believe that the Council's refusal to act is partly based on the control the Baronies have over their manufacturing base. Perhaps they are behind it, or perhaps they are trying to keep the Union out of what they consider an internal struggle.

But now the situation has changed. Through the industry of the colonists, the bureaucratic maneuverings of a sympathetic Council member, or the good hearts of the pilots themselves, a troop of the most elite mechanized cavalry in the Union - Lancers - has arrived at Matterhorn Station, near the bulk of these attacks. Despite being few in number and without much in the way of official support, these pilots have the potential put the pirates on the defensive.  Maybe they could even discover who the mysterious "Baron" is and put an end to his sinister ambitions.

Sinister Science Seeds

At the suggestion of Huth I have created a number of hooks for investigative/horror games based on 1950s sci fi and horror movies.

1950

• Reports of flying saucers in a remote area of the country attract government officials, but the intelligence behind the saucers may not be "otherworldly" at all (The Flying Saucer)
• A government investigation into piracy leads to an island dominated by life from another epoch (Two Lost Worlds)

1951

• Scientists observing a mysterious body passing through our solar system believe an intelligence from it has landed in a remote location on Earth.  This intelligence must be apprehended, and interrogated! (The Man from Planet X)
• Strange substances found in the South American jungle awaken alien parts of a white overseer's genome (Bride of the Gorilla)
• A group of arctic researchers and military personnel uncover a spaceship and the entity it contained (The Thing from Another World)
• A cosmic object is on a collision course with our solar system and threatens to wreck havoc.  Experts must work to prevent the disaster or to otherwise ensure the survival of humanity. (When Worlds Collide)

1952

• Strange extraterrestrial transmissions seem to be coming from intelligent life.  Is it a hoax or a genuine alien?  Either way it could throw the world order into chaos. (Red Planet Mars)
• One of a number of lost airman is recovered, raving about a strange civilization unknown to man. (Untamed Women)

1953

• Investigators attempting to stop an alien plot find their inquiries blocked by the police.  Could this be the result of mind control? (Invaders from Mars).
• Freed from its body, the brain of a sinister madman find it has new and terrible powers. (Donovan's Brain)
• Atomic testing awakens a creature not seen in millions of years.  The creature begins a rampage through mankind's greatest cities. (The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms)
• Investigators learn mankind may be the true threat when they must decide what to do with the discovery of a benign group of extraterrestrials. (It Came from Outer Space)
• Astronauts threaten the Earth after being mind-controlled by extraterrestrial entities discovered while on a mission. (Cat Women of the Moon)
• Investigators awake to find that they are the last survivors of humanity and that the automated engine of man's destruction is seeking them out. (The Robot Monster)
• An unintelligent but seemingly monstrous phenomenon baffles scientists and threatens lives as it seeks to engulf a town (The Magnetic Monster)

1954

• An expedition into the remote wilds of the Amazon discovers a monster whose biology is completely inimical to human science. (Creature from the Black Lagoon)
• The bottom of the ocean may hold more terrible creatures than the farthest stars, especially when they decide to attack those on land. (Monster from the Ocean Floor)
• A mad scientist uses advanced (perhaps extraterrestrial) technology to create towering robot monsters. (Gog)
• Scientific experiments create horrendous monsters out of normal earthly creatures. (Them!)
• Aliens secretly encourage human exploration into science in the hopes that the resulting monsters will wipe out mankind. (Killers from Space)

1955

• An alien intelligence extends its hive mind to the animals and then humans of a small, isolated town. (The Beast with A Million Eyes)
• A criminal organization uses a scientist to create technology to aid in their crimes - including immortal zombies. (Creature with the Atom Brain)
• An astronaut returns to Earth infected with an alien organism that threatens the whole of humanity. (The Quatermass Xperiment)
• An attempt to put an inhuman monster on display ends disastrously when the creature is freed and terrorize the area. (Revenge of the Creature)
• A think-tank of scientists and politicians turns out to be a front for an alien conspiracy. (This Island Earth).

1956

• A mad doctor creates mutilated horrors out of human test subjects in order to better understand the nature of the body and the mind. (The Black Sleep)
• A mad dictator uses super-science to engineer his people into the perfect subjects. (The Gamma People)
• An alien invasion replaces people with identical replicas. (Invasion of the Body Snatchers)
• Explorers discover a subterranean civilization similar to a lost empire, but adapted to its fantastical surroundings. (The Mole People).
• Mysterious deaths in a mining community are the product of creatures awakened by nearby atomic testing. (Rodan)

1957

• An alien entity seeking to make contact with Earth comes from such an unearthly environment that its physical presence is poisonous to humans. (The Astounding She-Monster)
• Creatures created by atomic testing absorb the memories and intelligences of those they devour, allowing them to plan a world-wide empire. (Attack of the Crab Monsters).
• An alien renegade uses its powers to help it control humans in a remote town but is soon pursued by an alien of the same species that seeks justice. (The Brain from Planet Arous)
• A strange substance brought to Earth by a meteorite threatens to destroy a small town as it replicates incessantly. (The Monolith Monsters)
• A creature terrorizing an isolated village in a remote part of the world is actually a normal insect that was exposed do strange radiation when NASA shot it into space. (Monster from Green Hell)
• A group of seemingly-human like aliens attempt to take over the world with an advanced robot. (The Mysterians)
• An alien's mutilation of Earth creatures (including humans) is actually its attempt to find a cure for a terrible blood disease ravaging its home planet. (Not of this Earth)
• A man is turned into the living embodiment of a monster from folklore after conducting experiments on himself using animal blood. (The Vampire)

1958

• An organism deposited by a meteorite may hold the clues to early life on this planet, but the conditions now are such that the creature grows exponentially and becomes dangerous to humans. (The Blob)
• A sinister scientist uses advanced hypnotherapy to turn those seeking treatment into mindless slaves. (The Electronic Monster)
• A scientist's experiment turns him into a half-man half-monster and relegates his intelligence to a place incapable of dealing with his new form. (The Fly)
• An alien entity seeking to sabotage mankind's scientific advancement takes possession of human children. (The Space Children)
• A mysterious fog in a remote area is actually the portal to another world, and it unleashes a terrifying monster. (The Crawling Eye)
• Radiation gives a man strange powers that he turns towards crime and violence. (The H-Man)
• The strange behavior exhibited by a number of townsfolk may be evidence that they have been replaced by alien entities. (I Married a Monster from Outer Space)
• Experiments into ESP, telekinesis, and atomic radiation go awry, creating a thought-creature hungry for human brains. (Fiend Without a Face)

1959

• A scientists experiments on himself allow him to access other dimensions.  At first he uses this for self-advancement (and even criminal pursuits) but soon realizes it has a horrible toll on his body and mind. (4D Man)
• A sink hole in Florida reveals that ancient monsters aren't just found in far flung locations. (Attack of the Giant Leeches)
• Invaders from another planet seek to conquer Earth using their power to make items invisible to the human eye. (The Invisible Invaders)
• A doctor seeking to end world hunger accidentally makes a group of giant, ravenous shrews.  (The Killer Shrews)
• A scientist unlocks the secret to eternal life, but it requires him to take the brain tissue from living subjects. (The Man Who Could Cheat Death)
• Aliens take on the form of adolescent humans to hopefully catch human authorities with their pants down. (Teenagers from Outer Space)
• An attempt to arrest the aging process turns a woman into a hybrid insect creature. (The Wasp Woman)

Here's a bonus one from 1963, since Blue Oyster Cult wrongly thinks its from the '50s.

• A scientist's experiments with vision allow him to see things normally outside the human possibility space.  What he sees causes misery and madness. (X: The Man with X-ray Eyes)

Unfocused Thoughts on Karse

Normally I do these posts for something I haven't developed as much as I have Karse, which I've posted about a few times, but I want to nail down some of the bigger picture stuff and think about how I would actually run it.

The name, I should note, comes from taking Sark and Gygaxifying it.  After hearing it said "Cars" by a number of blog readers I play online games with, I added the E to make it clear it rhymes with arse.  Apparently there is a place in the Forgotten Realms called that, but I haven't thought of a better name yet.

• Karse is made up of a set of islands - a largish main island shaped like southern Britain, smaller islands that are like a split off version of Wales and Cornwall, and an archipelago like the Heberdies stuck at the top.
• The main island is home to a fair number of towns and one city - the capital of Nindle.
• The area between these towns is sparsely populated moors and marsh or the occasional greenwood. 
• These between-spaces are the haunts of giants (leftovers from the first race to live on the islands), fairies and elves (the second race), the undead, and vicious bandits.
• In a crater lake north of Nindle there sits an island.  On that island are the ruins of Llamalot, the capital of Rutha the Unconquered who united the peoples of Karse long ago.  This acts as a large dungeon/ruincrawl for those who like that sort of game.
• Travel between towns is fraught even in the day time.  Visibility is rough due to the almost ever present mist which is only occasionally banished by the Sun, whose glare then blinds the Karslish eye unused to its presence. 
• The most famous giant roams the remains of the road between Nindle and the ruins of Llamalot.  His name is Headless Jack.  Once he had two heads, but Brutus, the son (or maybe father?) of Rutha took off one of the heads and now he roams the countryside mourning the loss of it.  If you hear his cries come from across the moors you'll get the shits.
• The idea, in case it was not clear before now, is to create a kind of spooky/miserable setting based on British folklore, folk songs, Arthurian Myth, Celtic Mythology, and filtering that through the World of Nightwick as already established.
• Other monsters include fomorians, linworms, nuckalavees, and any number of other British or Irish bugaboos.
• Social class would play a big part in town - where the gulf between the nobles and the peasantry is vast - but very little part in the misty wastes between them.
• Brian Froud and Alan Lee are major visual influences but you kinda have to imagine them with meth mouth.  The over all effect, I hope, will be something like a mix of Excalibur, Jabberwocky, and Hammer Horror.
• I'm not sure if I would use some version of D&D for this (either OSD&D or 5e) or some WFRP derivative, given the tone.

Unfocused Thoughts on the Fyrdlands

For a bunch of reasons I don't want to get into I wrote a new setting that would allow me to hand someone the PHB and make a character without my telling them X or Y thing was off limits.  It started out as a C&C project but quickly became a 5e one for more reasons.

Anyway here's some stuff to know about it and to help me crystallize some of the ideas in my head.

• The Fyrdlands is a coldish border region north of the Realm of Man.  It was previously colonized by some humans who wanted to escape the Realm of Man but now the Realm has begun to push into the region itself.
• The area lies on the southern border of what was once the land of a powerful entity referred to primarily as the Prime Evil but also as the Dark Enemy and the Shadow.  He was destroyed long ago but many of his lieutenants and evil spawn remain.
• Some of the most famous of these surviving "lieutenants" are Elemental Evils, which some ancient texts believe only came about when the Prime Evil was destroyed.
• There may be other big-time lieutenants (Vecna maybe?) who have quasi-god like powers.
• There are also the races he created: Goblins (from Dwarves), Hobgoblins (from Elves), and Orcs (from Men).
• Some evil wizards have used the work the Prime Evil did to create their own monsters, such as the Dragonborn which may only be chromatic due to their being an evil experiment (though their personal alignment is up to them).
• Elves and Dwarves lived in peace for a time but warred because the Dwarves supposedly did not actively help in defeating the Prime Evil.  Both those races dwindled and it allowed for the servants of the old Enemy to return, filling the Fyrdlands with goblins and orcs again.
• Tieflings are the descendants of Men who chose to side with the Prime Evil.  They founded a strange culture known as the Nations of Night which flourished sometime before the birth of the Realm of Man and ruled the goblinoids of the Fyrdlands through governors.
• The Nations of Night collapsed for reasons unknown to Realmish folk.
• The original wave of Realmish settlers (actually fleeing the Realm) came a few hundred years ago.
• The PCs are assumed to have arrived in a Realmish settlement from the direction of the Realm.
• Some new evil is stirring in the wilderness in the area causing orcs and goblins to return and breathing out fresh horrors.
• The local town (which I think I need to rename) is ruled by a Marques (who also needs to be renamed).  He generally would like to control the old settlements as well.
• The chief religion is the Unconqured Sun who, in addition to having other divine aspects, allows for the worship of smaller gods.
• Many of the setting elements not present here will be stolen from the Jennell Jaquays penned Forgotten Realms supplement "The Savage Frontier," which is a book I think is phenomenal attached to a setting I basically hate.

That's probably enough for now, though this one might need multiple posts.

Star Wars: War on the Frontier

This is a revamp of my War on the Final Frontier campaign for Star Wars.  I did a Star Wars pitch after seeing the Force Awakens, so it seems natural I should do one after seeing Rogue One.

The year is 5 BBY.  The Galactic Empire is approaching its zenith and the Galaxy is in the midst of the Dark Times, but the Empire has not yet gained control of certain corners of space.  The Outer Rim, ever lawless and independent, has proven a tough nut to crack, even for the crack Imperial Navy.  However, their expansion into this region has been aided recently by the acquisition of nine systems known as the Habin sector, after its capital.  This sliver of space will prove vital to imperial operations as it will serve as the primary root for materiel from the Core and also has an industrial planet of its own.

The players are members of Rebel Intelligence.  Their mission is to head to the Habin Sector and make contact with any criminal organizations or potential rebel cells there.  They are to persuade these entities to join the Alliance or, failing that, make sure that they are sufficiently indebted that they can be relied upon for "favors" in future operations.  As a secondary goal, they are to sabotage whatever Imperial projects they can, but not at the expense of the long term operation.

Their cover is to be bounty hunters and merchants in the hope that this will provide them an "in" with meeting the local criminal organizations and give them significant room to move within Habin society.  Execution of the functions of these covers will be necessary to maintain them, but in a sector so close to the Outer Rim, it should be easy.  The players are encouraged to remember that the long term mission of alliance building and intelligence gathering is paramount and will require sacrifices.

Rebel brass believes the first organization you should contact is that belonging to Borba the Hutt.  He supposedly operates out of a deep space station known as Goti Station, but its current whereabouts are unknown.  An informant has promised to reveal its location for 10,000 Imperial Credits.  He wishes to meet at a warehouse on Habin.

Notorious murder and criminal Dr. Evazan has been sighted in the system and both Borba the Hutt and the Imperial Security Bureau have placed sizable bounties on him.  Interestingly, the ISB bounty specifies that he must be brought in alive.  Getting the bounty for him could prove useful for future operations in the sector, but he may know information that may be useful to the Rebellion.

Spies at a listening post within the system report that the garrison on the fortress world of Dostroth has been recently reinforced, and rumors persist that it is due to the arrival of a high-ranking Imperial official.

 

Star Wars: Goti Station

New year. New blog post.  This one is about Star Wars.

I recently watched the original trilogy with my wife, who had never seen a New Hope or Empire and hadn't seen Jedi since she was a child.  She loved them, and I was reminded of how much I loved them.  Hence this campaign idea.  I hope to run something like it later in the year, but right now I'm running WFRP again in Middenheim, my favorite fantasy city, and I am hoping that campaign will last long enough that this one can't start anytime soon.

Goti Station was once a mining colony on the outer edge of Hutt Space.  It is essentially a collection of asteroids connected by durasteel struts and turbolifts.  In the first years after Palpatine declared the New Order, a crime lord named Borba the Hutt* purchased the colony as well as a number of very large hyperdrives.  He affixed these to Goti Station and shot the entire thing into deep space, far from any star.

Borba now uses the station as a mobile command center for a vast, and territorially disparate, criminal empire.  Goti Station floats in the blackness between systems, making jumps to crucial junctures between planets and then moving on before imperial agents can catch the scent.  Their are sometimes complications, like asteroids tearing off in hyperspace, but nothing so great as to deter Borba's plan.

The PCs are fugitives from the Empire - force users hunted by the inquisition, bounty hunters who violated proper jurisdictional codes, princes who made enemies of a Grand Moff, etc.  They have made their way, through the use of contacts or through Borba's actively seeking them out, onto Goti Station.  In exchange for credits (or more likely Borba's company scrip) and refuge form the Empire, the PCs must perform services for the various miscreants who run the station.

These typically take the form of adventures on planets near the current location of Goti Station.  The GM (i.e. me) will create 1-5 hooks each for 2 to 3 nearby planets.  A single hook may be an isolated adventure, a connected mini-campaign comprised of multiple hooks on the same planet, or part of a web of scenarios that includes multiple planets.

Whenever the PCs kick the hornets' nest of Imperial Law Enforcement too hard, Goti Station will have to jump somewhere else and a new list of hooks will be created.  Should they decide to kick the hornets' nest, pick it up in their hands, and proverbially rub it on their genitals, then the Empire may very well find and attack Goti Station, forcing the PCs to either fight to defend their shitty home or to leave it in search of a new hiding place.  The later option would necessitate a new campaign model, but since it would develop organically out of the players' actions I think that could work.

Typical threats would include gross crime lords, trandoshan slavers, bounty hunters, imperial inquisitors, dark side prophets, and the robed weirdos of the Emperor's ruling council.  Why those guys?  Because those guys are why I like Star Wars.

*Borba is not actually a Hutt.  He is a Tarsunt that underwent extensive genetic modifications in order to be accepted by Hutt crime bosses on Nar Shadda.  His hideously bloated form must now continually float in a bacta tank or he will die.

Superheroes: Year One

Despite my posts about the end of the world, I've actually been running FASERIP/Marvel Superheroes for a few weeks now.  I've been missing making hexmaps and figuring out what ruins go where and whatever, which is why I was thinking about those other ideas, but I'm having a lot of fun running a supers game.  This is the first time I've ever been able to get one to go for more than one session, mostly because my players seem into it.  I'm still trying to find my sea legs with it, but I think it's going well.

I originally wanted it to be kind of a sandbox-y affair but that ended up being untenable in part because of the nature of the genre and in part because my players wanted to start sooner than I could get one prepped.  What we've been doing instead is a thing that I think is a fairly common practice on G+ where I throw out somewhere around three different hooks and they pick one to pursue.  Most of the first few sessions were them trailing after Mysterio (report on that shortly), but the other threads were open if they wanted them.

This pitch is not based on what I am running.  Instead it's based on something that came up in a conversation I had with Cole.  The premise is that it is the first year that anyone in the world has been a superhero, your PCs are those first superheroes, and you are in the most crime ridden city in the US.  For this idea to work, you probably need something within the power-scale of Robert's Marvel '78 houserules.  My gut says that you should try to stick to "basically a tough human but with fancy gadgets," but seeing the players try to figure out how to turn any situation into one where their powers are useful is part of the fun of the game.*

However it's not really who the characters are that makes this idea interesting but the structure.  It is, to borrow Zak's parlance, an anti-sandbox.  The city needs to be so crime ridden that the upright heroes are fighting an uphill battle.  The cops either "don't go" into certain districts or are so corrupt that they implicitly or actively support the criminal activities of the various crime lords.  Crime lords that, at the start, are of the more mundane variety.

I hope to be able to go into this more at length in a future post, but here are the basics of how you set up your anti-sandbox:  First you divide the city into districts and give each one (or groups of them) to various crime lords.  You don't want too many that the prep becomes overwhelming but you also don't want to have all the power in the hands of a single figure.  Even Kingpin had to tangle with the Maggia.  Next you create some rackets the crime lords are running.  In the end you're going to want the rackets to be in a kind of onion-skin pattern, with hints in each leading to some deeper secret, but all you really need to design at the beginning are the outer layers for each crook.

PCs get hints about these rackets from their contacts, friends, or just from beating up some thug they know to be associated with the appropriate gang.  As they bust up the various rackets eventually one or more of the crime lords will collapse.  That's when the game enters Year Two.  The costumed antics of the PCs inspire villainous NPCs who become supervillains, replacing the structured organized crime of the crime lords with madness and pumpkin bombs.  Eventually the threats might become even greater - requiring the PCs to enter Subterranea or travel to the Savage Land or to outer space or whatever.

This structure has some quirks to it.  The main one is that it turns from an anti-sandbox where the players are making their decisions to a more typical supers game where the heroes are reacting to crimes.  This might be a bad thing or it might not be depending on what you think of typical supers games.  Layered within that is a more positive element, I think, which is that the game has a more obvious sense of advancement.  You have kinda three tiers - crime lords, supervillains, cosmic threats - and advancing through them is not something one normally sees in a supers game.

The biggest negative I can see is that it's hard to integrate pre-existing heroes into this scheme.  For one thing, I can't really think of a Year One type thing that involves a team.  I guess you can do the Bat Family, but even then Robin and Bat Girl are pretty clearly aspects of a post-Year One Batman. Some of you may not see a problem here, but I've found running a game for people playing pre-existing heroes extremely fun, in no small part because they roleplay more than I've ever seen in any other game.**  Also, superheroes are kind of silly.  I think they're silly in a wonderful way, but making something intentionally silly is a good way to tell your players "this setting doesn't matter."  Picking Moon Knight or whoever alleviates this somewhat because the character is taken seriously in the comics even if the things he's doing are inherently silly in a real world context.  

A smaller negative would be the lack of enemy variety within a tier.  You'd spend a good chunk of your early career not fighting a guy in a costume.  That's kinda lame.  However, I think the progression from tier to tier will help alleviate that somewhat.  Plus, Marvel Characters don't swing as wildly in power over time as D&D ones due, so you can always try to punch above or below your weight class.

* That is a post all on its own I plan to do semi-soon.
**Post on this coming later too.

War on the Final Frontier

A number of years ago - just a bit longer than a generation - a number of independent companies began the privately funded colonization of the Arucanis Arm.  This remote section of space is believed to contain a number of species and civilizations that the Federation has yet to contact.  Needless to say, the Federation government was alarmed but at the time its leaders decided to respect the right of the colonists, who were mostly humans but with a few members of other Federation species, to self determination.

But war does strange things to people, and the war with the Klingons has gone on longer than any in the Federation expected.  The current stalemate as well as rumors that the Klingon empire is seeking an alliance with the Romulans have made the Federation council desperate.  They have begun seeking their own allies in unlikely places, and a number of council members believe that it is time someone investigate the situation in the Arucanis Arm.

The Arm lies in an extremely strategically important are where the initial Klingon advance at the beginning of the war managed to create a sliver of Klingon occupied space between the Federation and the semi-independent colonies.  If the colonies and unknown civilizations of the Arm could be convinced to join the Federation in the war, the Klingons' main supply lines to the front would be severed.

You are the crew of the USS Reliant and your mission is to survey the systems Arucanis Arm, make contact with the colonists as well as the unknown species, and convince them to join the war against the Klingons.  The Reliant is a New Light Cruiser, a wartime design that provides a not inconsiderable amount of firepower at a relatively low cost.  Unfortunately, this is possible due to the fact that much of the crew amenities have been stripped out, and thus this assignment is more spartan than a Federation exploration or battle cruiser.  However, the Reliant was chosen for a very specific reason: the common nature of its class will mean that the Klingons are less alarmed by its crossing their borders into the Arucanis Arm.  The Federation feels that any other ship would likely tip the Klingons off to the purpose of the mission, and thus endanger it.

Starfleet has made contact with the company that settled the closest section of the arm, now a small merchant empire headed by one Harcourt Fenton Mudd, a criminal from Federation space and fairly recent arrival to the Arm.  How he came to be in charge of the company is as yet a mystery, but he has agreed to help the Federation in exchange for amnesty and possible asylum at some future point.  The aid he is willing to provide at this point does not include fighting men or ships, but his company can offer their space stations to the Reliant for refueling and shore leave.  Mudd is also adamant that Starfleet inform you that he has quite a few suggestions for the latter purpose.

----------------------------------

This posts premise and title is taken from the somewhat obscure game Protostar: War on the Frontier, which the internet consistently tells me is mediocre at best.  However, I thought it had a good setup for a game that would be easily adaptable for settings of most any genre, though sci fi is obviously the easiest for it to port to.  I have expressed it in terms of Star Trek rather than Traveller partly because I think those terms are more broadly familiar, and partly because I've had a deep desire to run Star Trek that coincides with, and to some degree predates, my recent Traveller mania.

If I were to keep it Trek, I'd almost certainly borrow from a number of "non-canon" sources including the material for Star Trek Phase II (the unaired series, not the fan series with the same name), the closely related Star Fleet Universe (including that ship design up there), FASA's Star Trek supplements, and the animated series.  I'm not sure what system I'd use.  The two options that I would be most likely to look at are a kitbashed Traveller converted for Star Trek shenanigans or FASA Trek itself.  The first has some advantages, namely that I know I like the system and I have a bunch of red, blue, and yellow d6s, but it would probably take the most work.  Having looked at FASA Trek recently I see a lot to like there, but I'd probably have to houserule the combat into basically being regular old BRP combat before I'd use it.

I could also use part of the Terran Directorate setting, exchanging the Klingons for [Click], but there are a number of adventure ideas I can think of for this that would work better with Star Fleet do-gooders.

Adventures in a Galaxy of Fear

The Directorate Sees All

The Terran Directorate believes that the iron grip of its power stretches across the whole of Space and that its Steering Committee controls the fates of man and alien alike.  It is certainly true that the Directorate is powerful and after the recent wars, plagues, and a few corporate take overs there exist only a few minuscule polities that are able to maintain any sort of independence. Most organisms in owned space are, nominally at least, owned by the Directorate and subject to its edicts.

A Meeting of the Infamous Steering Committee

The heart of the directorate is, of course, Terra.  The sacred home of humanity now almost entirely consists of an enormous and highly stratified city.  Its class of exceedingly rich, genetically modified nobles live in great dome-estates above the class while those who cannot afford those luxuries must toil away in the labyrinthine tunnels beneath the surface.  The few remaining habitable zones on the surface either serve as private reserves for the nobles.  The rest was destroyed long before the existence of the Directorate during the Time of Troubles, an event that the Directorate often uses to justify its own existence.

Terran Nobles Often Have an Otherworldly Appearance

But the range of worlds claimed by the Directorate is vast, and that is only Terra.  While genetically modified nobles often govern other worlds, many of the Directorate's upper class are little more than common humans - though no aliens may enter their ranks.  Access to technology varies widely across the worlds, and many possess only a smattering of sapients who live and hunter gatherers and remember the sublime light of the Directorate as little more than a warped myth.  

This Froguloid Has no Idea of His Citizenship Status...

...While the People of the Metro-World of Clovis Benefit Enormously from Directorate Trade policies

As such, the ability of the Directorate to directly affect the lives of most of its citizens is minimal, though often crack downs will occur when one of the genetic elite is dispatched to crack heads and bring the localities in line with the will of the Steering Committee.  The effect of all of this is to create a kind of standard culture for so-called "spacers" - even if this is highly variable, again due to the scale involved - and billions of separate ones for the inhabitants of various planets.

The most recent project dictated by the Steering Committee has been the colonization and exploitation of the so called Boom-Worlds.  These worlds exist in a remote sector far removed from Sacred Terra, but a recent solar catastrophe in the sector's Galactic Southeastern edge have brought them to the Directorate's attention.  The solar event is believed to have dispersed a large number of heavy atomic particles that would be suitable for extraction and refining in the service of the Directorate's military and monetary ambitions.

A Depiciton of the Boom Worlds Drawn by One of the Directorate's Most Powerful Astro-Psychics

Early colonists also claim that the event destroyed a vast interstellar civilization.  While it is the belief of the Directorate that these peoples and their rules must have been inferior, since they were destroyed by a mere exploding star, the ruins of this empire have attracted scholars and looters from across Space.  So have the remaining alien populations on the planets that saw only small amounts of increased radiation from the event.  Xenologists claim that many of these populations show notable physical changes from depictions of members of the same species from before the solar incident.  In some rare incidents aliens have shown bizarrely aggressive behavior that would seem at odds with their previous levels of sophistication.

Adventurers Exploring one of the Many Alien Ruins in the Boom Worlds

Access to these worlds is made possible only by a genetically modified group of tortured humans whose minds work in tandem in order to maintain the massive warp bubbles involved - far larger than those used by normal Directorate ships.  The fact that these near catatonic members of the human race are a rare commodity in the Directorate means that access to the Boom Worlds is extremely limited, with regular travel only available to megacorps possessing writs from the Steering Committee itself and the convicts they sometimes employ.  Return trips are even harder to arrange for those not carrying raw materials on the megacorps' massive barges.

It's Hard to Sustain a Warp Bubble

Despite the isolation and the inherent dangers of the region, many see the financial opportunities and distance from the hands of the Steering Committee as a chance for a freedom that is impossible in other regions of space.  There's money to be made in those stars.

Unfocused Thoughts on Castle Drakenstein

"No!  You musn't go!  We People of the Mountains believe fucked up shit happens at the castle."

Tunnels & Trolls is a game that fascinates me.  I've run a session or two using the quickstart -- which I don't seem to be able to find at the moment -- and I remember having mixed feelings.  However, Scott Driver's love of the game combined with its lighthearted tone have made me want to revisit it at various points.  I think, for example, it would make a kickass system for the Land of Ooo.

One thing I particularly like is the idea of a dungeon "proprietor."  I especially liked Scott's making his a messed up parody of himself.  So I decided to see what I could come up with for myself.  Thus was born Castle Drakenstein.

Note: this is another one of those settings I'm not likely to run.  This is especially true because the overlap with Nightwick Abbey is pretty heavy.  However, I'd like to have something if I ever decide to give T&T a second chance.

• The general theme would be horror movies of various sorts, particularly the Universal and Hammer ones, with a smattering of 50s sci fi, horror literature, swords & sorcery, ufology, and metal stuff thrown in willy nilly.  It might be best described as "the kind of castle a horror host would live in."
• The proprietor, Baron Edric van Drakenstein, is a capricious and melodramatic lich who has a habit of dressing like the above picture.  He is usually sulking in his chambers beneath the castle, playing an enormous pipe organ.  When he's in a manic state, however, he will often appear to badger the delvers with terrible puns, horrible monsters, and incoherent whining.  This is all done with an excessive amount of gesticulation.
• Dungeon levels/sublevels will have themes based on various types of movies.  For example there would be a Frankenstein lab (this would also include things like Mu-tants), a Dracula crypt, a cavern that looks suspiciously like the forest from The Wolfman, etc.
• Monsters will include Wolfmen, Wolfwomen, Mu-tants, Frankensteins, Draculas, Draculaensteins, Skeletons (a la Jason and the Argonauts), Orcs with Halloween masks on, Froguloids*, Creatures from Various Lagoons, Gorgons (complete with purple back lighting), CHUDs, Morlocks, Zombies (both flesh eating and voodoo varieties), Flatwoods Monsters, Igors, Jersey Devils, Swamp Monsters, and a lot more.  I'm too lazy to think of more now, but that took me like a minute so whatever.
• Sections of the dungeon will disappear based on the good baron's mercurial moods.  If somehow the delvers were to integrate Edric on this point, he would declare "the map was ugly!" and complain about how hard running a dungeon is.
• The Baron is just the most recent in a long line of fucked up liches in the van Drakenstein family.  They all look eerily similar, but that's easy when your face is a skull.
• The castle is on a high mountain and only appears at night.  A village lies at the foot of the mountain, and the peasants have various nonsensical excuses for why they don't move.
• Various magic items and/or technological gizmos would only work on the levels whose genre matches their theme.  So the ray gun you found on the Devil Planet level doesn't work in the Tomb of the Mummpire. 
• SFX provided by Ray Harryhausen.
• There will be a lot more lighting than in most of my dungeon complexes.  In this case it will appear like the various psychedelic lighting tricks used to make Hammer movies so lurid.
• I like the idea of the more traditional fantasy monsters in the dungeon thinking all this horror movie stuff is stupid and complaining.  They stick around because they get a hot meal and a place to sleep.
• DRACULAS HATE WOLFMEN!
• The system would obviously be T&T, but I'm not sure what edition I would use.  I only really have experience with the quick start.
• I suppose there would probably be some TOS Star Trek references in there.
• One of the Draculas, or perhaps the Baron himself, would have a gallery of busts of himself in different extravagant hats.

Ok, I feel like I'm reaching now, so that's it until I get more inspiration.

Unfocused Thoughts: A Barbaric Age

The Great Cities have risen and fallen,  civilization's grip on mankind has grown weak and arthritic, dark powers seek to renew forgotten covenants, and primordial beasts reclaim the wilderness. -- Korgoth of Barbaria, "Pilot"

Ah, another setting destined for the creative detritus of my wandering mind.  Hopefully this will get it out of my system and I can get back to Dark Country and Uz* related things.  The impetus for the idea came from this post by another Evan** whose blog appears to be defunct.  Anyway he points out that OD&D using the Outdoor Survival map is a rough place to live, and it's filled with roaming bands of armed humans.  That's saying nothing of the castles.

Anyway, that reminded me of Korgoth, 80s S&S movies, and the Greek Dark Ages for some reason, so here are some setting notes.

• The map is (obviously) the one from Outdoor Surival.  Ponds are castles, buildings are towns, deer are probably going to be villages and the little wolf-looking things (I can't really see what they are from the maps online) are probably what Scott would call an "8 page module" dungeon.  I may cut the villages out or make the monster layers if I want to make it very "barbaric," which I do.
• Basic premise is, as stated above, our civilization has crumbled and a civilization that looks suspiciously like pre-modern Earth has risen in it's place.
• Rules would be OD&D plus some classes and monsters from the supplements and probably some copious house rules.
• Part of the idea would be to develop things (house rules, setting info, monsters, etc.) through play and the needs of play.  I want the setting to have an overall flavor, but it's a bit closer to baseline D&D than is say... Uz.
• While I want to retain some of the barest Tolkien elements, I want to emphasize some of the other source literature a bit more.  If orcs are in it then they'll be the pig-faced guy from the three Deathstalker movies or something equally stupid.
• Since it's a far-future Earth I plan to make good on OD&D's promise of Robots.  Ray guns are probably but not a replacement for magic items in the way they will be in Uz.
• I'm not sure what I'm going to do yet with alignment.  If I go with a REH style split between barbaric and civilized people I may use it to get that across; however, it seems like this setting is going to be pretty barbaric all around, so I dunno.
• I wanna go back to using some mythological monsters I haven't gotten to use with Nightwick Abbey or Uz.  I miss Minotaurs.
• If it looks like I'll run this at some point -- which seems unlikely right now -- I'll probably work up some kind of "underworld" for beginning play.  OD&D's wilderness can be rough on level 1 characters.
• On that note, I may steal a page from Scott and use the CSIO 4 Level dungeon for that.  I wouldn't have to draw many maps right away and it seems like it would be fun to stock.
• Speaking of the underworld: I need more dungeon NPCs!
• I'd generally take the "whatever you want to play" approach to PC races, but I think I'd like to work up some writeups for things like lizardmen and other weirdos.  I swing back and forth between human only campaigns and campaigns where you can play minotaurs.
• The basic culture of the area would probably be movie-style-medieval, with a thick layering of bronze age and classical crap over it.  Some clerics might worship God, while the next one over is a fan of Apollo, and that wizard is totally a Satanist.
• The various castles on the map would be generated using the rules for such things in Underworld & Wilderness adventures.  I'll probably also add a few fighting men whenever that seems appropriate.
• The towns will use a combination of the guidelines for determining population in the Greyhawk Folio and in the Ready Ref Sheets.
• Place names will be a mix of historical place names and shit I like spelled backwards.  Expect the return of Vennax the Mauve.

That's it for now.  Hopefully the idea will stop bugging me now.

*More on that later

**There can be only one!