Setting Challenge, Day 3

So I gave more thought to the background for Sunken Realms and here's what I've come up with:  There's an elemental cycle, and currently the cycle is in the Water Age.  Each race is associated with a certain element.  Currently I'm thinking of mixing the classical western elements with the eastern ones (Wu Xing), so the elements and their (tentative) pairings are Water (Halflings), Fire (Orcs), Wood (Elves), Earth (Dwarves), Metal (Humans) and Air (Gnomes).  Right now the last two pairings are something I will have to think about, because I'm not sure if they fit.  And I'm also not sure what associations to give to each element.  That will be for another time.

The cycle suggests some interesting potential plot ideas and or colour for the world.  For example, cults of the next element in the cycle could spring up, trying to hasten its arrival... or maybe the previous element hasn't quite been stamped out yet.

I also idly mused that the magic system would be different for each element.  But this seems really ambitious for a thirty days, and also gets away from core D&D as well.  I still haven't decided how close I want to stick to making it a straight up D&D game, but in that case I would be required to think of the interaction with the regular fire and forget system.  Certainly something to keep in mind.

I'm also not sure where to stick certain effects.  For example, where should lightning go in this system?  How do bards and clerics fit in?

Other idle ideas that came to me in brainstorm mode:
- There is a massive permanent storm, that slowly travels about the world.  Inspired by Jupiter's Great Red Spot.
- There is a God of the Storms, and his twin sister is the Goddess of gentle rainfall.
- There was an advanced civilization that was destroyed at the end of the last age and its great cities have been swallowed by the seas, the majority of its wonders lost.  Clearly an Atlantis analogue, and a handy source of dungeons and lost artifacts.
- I need to add in rules for naval travel, and research different ocean phenomena.
- There are a lot more variety of elementals that need to be written up.
- Aquatic races should be more common.  Mermaids, Sahaugin, etc.
- Still need to find a place for dragons...

Setting Challenge, Day 2

So Sunken Realms was pretty much the most vanilla of my ideas - it was pretty much plain-Jane Dungeons and Dragons with boats.  Now's the time to flesh it out some what.

So the elevator pitch was basically: Water world ruled by a mighty Spanish halfling empire.

Why a water world?  The exact idea is lost to the mists of time; as far as I can remember it just seemed like a cool idea at the time.  If I had to guess, it's from the monoclimate school of design (Black Sun, etc).  So I'm going to pull inspiration from Water-world, the Pirates of the Caribbean series, Pirates of Black Water, Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker, etc.  I'm imagining a world dotted with islands, with weird magic and swashbuckling action.

Well what's with the mighty Spanish halfling empire?  I like Halflings.  Especially D&D 3rd Edition's rendition of them.  Not exactly sure why that is and why that appeal doesn't move over to the other small race in the game, gnomes.  At the present I'm planning with sticking with the default races so gnomes are still in, but that may change by the end.  But the other thing is just the unlikeliness of the small guys being out on top.

I suspect the Spanish thing is because I was taking Spanish courses at the time.  I'm not sure how blatant this will be.  I think it adds a nice exoticism but avoids the "tonnes of z's and apostrophes" syndrome that can happen in a lot of fantasy.  Of course if it goes too far the other way, it pulls you out of the world and reminds you of the artifice.  So I think this will have to be on a case by case basis.

So the next question that comes to mind: how did the halflings become dominant in a world where pretty much every race is bigger than they are?  What I've come up with is that they have access to potent magics, which give them an edge in the nautical environment.  Currently I'm thinking that it's an elemental magic system, and the halflings are masters of Water magic.  The world is currently in a Water Age - hence the reason the world is covered in water.  So the magic system will need a lot of re-thinking - I need to decide if I'm going to add a new magic system beside the existing one, replace it completely.

Campaign Setting Challenge

So years ago, Wizards of the Coast launched a Dungeons & Dragons setting search.  Basically, they put out a call to their fandom for original campaign settings.  You didn't have to be a professional designer - if the panel of judges at Wizards decided that you had a pretty cool idea, you could eventually see your work in print.  Eventually, Eberron was the proposal that won.  Which is fine, because Eberron is pretty cool.

Anyway, like just about everybody who knew about the contest back then, I had a bunch of ideas.  I never submitted any of them, the ideas being pretty crude and unrefined, but I did give it some thought.  Talking with some friends of mine, reminiscing about this contest.  Eventually, we came up with a challenge similar to Script Frenzy or NaNoWriMo.  Write 50 pages of RPG material, all in one month.

So my contribution will be to dust off one of my old campaign setting ideas and see if I've learned anything about design in the last decade.  For this I've chosen the most straightforward of my settings, Sunken Realms.  I plan on putting my thoughts and ideas as a sort of "commentary track" as I work on this.  The pace seems like it will be much easier to maintain than the other competitions of this sort that I've done in the past (I only need to do less than 2 pages a day to hit my target) so this should be completely doable.

It might seem a little like cheating to dust off an old idea for this, but:
1) I'm going to be writing everything from scratch, and
2) What I *do* have is pretty thin.

Sunken Realms can pretty much be described as a water world run by expansionist spanish halflings.  See, I *said* it was pretty thin.  Hopefully over the next month we can flesh this out so that it's at least somewhat interesting.

Supplement Categories Redux

In my last post, I missed out on some supplement categories.  Well, two categories and some subcategories are what I can think of off the top of my head:

• Modules: These materials detail a series of encounters.  This doesn’t really fit under the labels of either Mechanics or Setting, though most adventures include setting so I guess there’s a case to be made that this is a subcategory of that in its most generic sense.
• Meta discussion: These supplements are more about how to play the game in a more general sense outside of the rules.  This typically takes the form of advice and suggestions on how to do things like how to run a certain type of game, how to handle a certain type of player, how to modify the game to get a desired play style.  Heck, discussion of play style fits in here as well.
• Gear: These supplements detail equipment: weapons, tools, armour, etc.  This is really a subcategory of mechanics.
• Characters:  These supplements detail characters in the world.  Can include rules, but this is typically mostly setting.

These supplement categories I forgot to include because I rarely pick up supplements of the above type (not to mention that I think that half of them are instances of the previous two, Mechanics and Settings).

It’s interesting (to me at least, in that I’ve never really given it much thought) that due to the nature of RPGs, you’ll always have a setting, even if it’s an “implied setting”, i.e., a setting that is not spelled out but is nevertheless there when you run the game due to the rules.  Because a game has to be set somewhere, and the nature of defining the rules will create an implied setting automatically if you don’t choose to use an explicit setting.  And there will always be an implied setting whether you have an explicit one or not.  It occurs to me this is also why some games can feel like they have a mismatch of setting and mechanics – because the setting tells us one thing is true while the rules (and thus the implied setting) are telling us another.

On Mechanics and Setting

One of my vices is one common to others in the RPG hobby – the obsessive-compulsive need to buy as much material as you can.  In a way, it’s really weird – for a hobby that is to me so much about using your imagination, I spend an awful lot of time collecting minutiae that in a lot of cases I’ll never get to use.  Technically, once you’re introduced to the concept of role-playing, you never really need any more external information – you can play for a million years with the first edition Dungeons & Dragons rules and have it not get stale.  Of course, there’s reasons to get a new RPG beyond just the concept of role-playing in general.  Most importantly from where I sit, is that new material has the potential to be inspirational.  They can fire the imagination of any aspect of the hobby, and that makes them pretty valuable to me.

Generally, pretty much everything you’ll pick up will be one of two categories:

• Mechanics – The basic rules on how to play this particular game.  While all RPGs are advanced versions of “Let’s pretend”, each has different ways to resolve things that happen in the game so that it doesn’t devolve into, “I shoot him!” “Nuh-uh, you don’t!” “Yes I do!” ad nauseum.  The mechanics answer the questions like, “How do I know if something my character has attempted is successful?” and “How far can my character jump?”
• Settings – The materials describe a game world to play in and they way it works.  Middle Earth of the Lord of the Rings trilogy is a different setting than say the world of Harry Potter, even though both have elves and wizards and magic.

Inspirational mechanics are usually when rules are presented in a way that I’ve not seen before, or a novel application of existing ideas.  Inspirational setting material is pretty much the same but for settings of course.

That said, I have to admit that sometimes after I’ve picked up a new game, I wonder to myself, “Why did I buy this again?”  And sometimes it’s hard to justify.  I can content myself with the fact that I get some inspiration from just about everything I’ve picked up, but on the other hand I have a feeling I’ll never actually get to play most of these and so their utility is a bit diminished.

I’ve picked up a lot of games over the years, and I’ll be going through my library in the near future, giving my thoughts on each.

The Necessary First Post

So here I start up yet another blog.  What’s the purpose of this one you may ask?  Well, it’s a place for me to chronicle my creative pursuits in the specific area of gaming.  Sure, this probably should have gone in my very anaemic “personal” blog, but hopefully this one will focus more on more interesting stuff and less on day to day banality.

I should start out by clarifying what I mean by gaming… I currently see the majority of posts I make here to deal specifically with role playing games, with a smattering of video games on the side.  At least at first.  I’ve been playing RPGs in some form or another for around two decades, and if I had my way I’d be playing a lot more.  Unfortunately life gets busy as you gain more responsibilities in life, and time becomes more and more a precious commodity.   So rather than playing games, I spend a lot more time these days thinking about them.   And now, as is the way of things in our digital age, I’m going to publish my thoughts so they can be read by a world that is probably quite indifferent to them.

I’m going to assume that if you’re still reading, you know a little something about what I’m talking about, so I’ll refrain from many asides into basic definitions.  If you got this far and you’re still reading, you either have the basic required knowledge or your my mom or something.  In which case I promise I’ll come visit soon.  I suppose that if there’s any baffling jargon, you always have the option of leaving comments to as for clarification too.

So welcome, and if you’re reading this, I hope you find something interesting to take away from it.