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.

Unfocused Thoughts: Cuccagna

This is another one of those "I'm probably not going to run this but I need to get it out of my system" posts.  It is inspired by my thinking about why I was intrigued with Isle of the Unknown - and was ultimately disappointed with it - and my recent reading of The Dying Earth.  Also The Tempest.

• Cuccagne is a warm Mediterranean-type island inhabited by a bunch of petty, venal wizards.
• If I placed it on Earth, it would be somewhere west of Sardinia and Corsica.  The rough date would probably be around AD 1250 but...
• The island would sorta be "timeless," or at least not like the areas around it.  I'm thinking it would look vaguely Carolingian with large dashes of the later portion of the Western Roman Empire.  But fancier and more decadent in that word's modern sense.
• I'd try very hard to make the place seem idyllic, as opposed to the crapsack sorta thing I normally do.  Fields of wild flowers, crystal clear streams, scenic sea-caves, that sort of thing.
• However, I'd also want to make sure there is a (fairly obvious) dark side to all that stuff.  The archetypal encounter I imagine would be the PCs finding a nice Roman-style villa somewhere and being met by a man who offers them a place to stay and some nice wine.  Since PCs are too smart for that shit, they refuse.  When they do so he gets all made and turns into an oozing snake thing and tries to eat them.
• I also want to contrast the idyllic setting with the petty motivations of the NPCs (and the PCs if I know anything about D&D players).  The wizards are too busy plotting against each other to notice how beautiful - and dangerous - their surroundings are.
• I imagine that most settlements are fairly small and most live in the shadow of some terrible wizard who vomits rainbow colored goo into a human skull or something.
• There might be one big town that acts as a port on the island.  That's probably where PCs start.
• For the monster list, I would strip out most of the D&D monsters that aren't directly from some sort of folklore.  Once that's done, I'd shove in a bunch of freakazoids made by wizards that are all fucked up.  One could easily meet a unicorn or a oozing-snake-thing, but never an orc.
• Europe, the Levant, and North Africa are assumed to have the religions that would have been present in those regions c. 1250.  Cuccagna, on the other hand would be a bastion of weird mystery cults and creepy paganism.  Sorta like the Wicker Man, but with more painted chthonic chambers and maenads.
• Ruins and dungeons would either be "Atlantean" or Greco-Roman in origin.  I envision this as a hexcrawl setting.
• I imagine there would be quite a lot of Yojimbo-style action with the PCs playing wizards off of each other between dungeon or wilderness romps.
• Maybe it's the time of year or the fact that I live further inland than I used to, but I definitely want this to be an island.  
• Part of the "this isn't crapsack" thing will be my not worrying about farmland and also having a gold standard for coinage.  Gold is so common and easy to come by there that giant gold coins - ten of which way a pound! - are as worthless as tiny silver coins in the rest of Europe.

Ok, hopefully that got that outta my system.

My Woeful Ignorance

I've played in and run quite a few campaign settings in my time.  During high school and very early college -- and arguably even know -- I suffered from an acute case of Gamer ADD.  My old flames includes the Forgotten Realms, Rokugan (the 3.x version), Eberron, Ravenloft, The Wilderlands, and Warhammer's Old World.  With the exception of WFRP, I used 3.x to run all of these settings, since that was the system I was most comfortable with at the time.  There are other settings I've read but never run or played.  I've read a smattering of Dark Sun, EPT, Blackmoor, Harn, and a few others.

However, there is one setting I have neither run no read anything about: Greyhawk.  Aside from vague references in 3e, such as the deities and spells like Mordenkainen's Shit Covered Hovel, I don't really have any grasp on what Greyhawk is and what makes it tick.  If there is a single D&D topic I'm ignorant of it's Greyhawk.

There are multiple reasons for this.  First of all, there wasn't a very clear "buy this product to learn about Greyhawk" for 3e.  Sure there was the D&D Gazetteer, but at that time I was more interested in making my own milieus (read: filing the serial numbers off of Erathia).  It also isn't terribly clear from the title that it details the World of Greyhawk.

The other major reason is that whenever I do go through my periods of Gygax idol worship, I'm more interested in emulating what he did than playing in his world.  He made his own milieu, so the the most Gygaxian thing one can do is not play in Greyhawk but make your own damn Greyhawk.  This is obviously an overzealous and flat out stupid opinion, but it's one I hold on to nevertheless.

Due to comments to my recent post, I can't help but feel that I may have missed something.  While the game I run is more or less based on B/X D&D, there is a certain ineffable quality to 1e that attracts me.  It is both highly fantastic and gritty and dirty all at the same time.  Perhaps that's why the Dark Country campaign has incorporated an ever increasing amount of AD&D material in recent weeks.  Something in me thinks that looking at Greyhawk would help me get closer to defining the je ne sais quoi of Gygaxian AD&D in a way just the core books do not.

Of course, I don't really know where to start.  So I ask you gentle reader: is there some product or place where I might find out about Greyhawk in its most interesting form?