The Pitch: Crater Diving

The old folks say that when they were children the Empire straddled the continent entire, and that the Emperor sat upon a diamond throne in a shining city. Well, all that is gone since the five kings of the ancient kingdoms made war against the throne. The war raged for seven years. In the winter of that seventh year the Emperor was on the verge of defeat. Some say he summoned a great demon from Outside. Others say he slew his own priests and stole a weapon forged in darkness. Children and fools believe he became a ravening dragon. Whatever the truth is, the armies of the kings vanished at the gates of the Imperial City - along with the city itself. Instead a gaping wound was left in the earth and the land for miles around was left a wasteland.

The five kings allied in the war all suspected treachery in each other and, the armies destroyed and kingdoms impoverished by the expensive war, settled into an uneasy, inward looking peace while they rebuilt.

Curious types soon began exploring the crater where the Imperial City once stood and found it was riddled with mysterious tunnels and caves - as if the earth below the city had been rotten. When a group of delvers brought up a chest full of gold and jewels word exploded across the continent and treasure hunters, mercenaries, and cutthroats of all sort made pilgrimage to the crater to seek their fortune. Many of those who went down never came back up, but nonetheless many still make their way to this unhappy place. So many that a thriving boomtown was settled on the rim of the crater, catering to the wants and needs of the delvers.

Now people from across the continent make their way to the crater for information, magic, and hired-blades for there is no better place to find any of those precious resources.

The five kingdoms have rebuilt their peasantry and armories and eye each other hungrily across their borders.

And quietly, sages at the crater warn those who listen that the wound in the earth is growing.

You, a treasure hunter through and through, have journeyed from your homeland seeking your fortune at the crater.

Eridanus, the Dreaming City

Along the banks of Akash Ganga sits the Dreaming City, Eridanus. Ancient, dark, hive-like, its inhabitants live in the semi-twilight of its serpentine walls. The city has been built up over eons, packed on top of itself. It is said that there are places in the city that have been walled off completely, the inhabitants living in total isolation over generations. It is also said that the city is not always the same, that it changes and grows of its own accord.

Outside the walls is a massive nameless slum home to the city's wretched. A horrible noise and shaking wracked the slum, and a hole opened in the ground in the middle of a marketplace. Smoked billowed from it for five days and nights, and then something came out. The various eye-witness accounts are confused and nonsensical, but there is no question that it dragged many down into the darkness. There was one survivor, a wild-eyed old dwarf who somehow dragged himself back to the surface. He died hours later, ranting about gold and gems in the deeps. In his hand he clutched a brilliant red gem.

A few brave and desperate now journey into the darkness seeking their fortune.

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Still have at least one slot for Thursday, 8:00pm EST.

Urban Swords & Sorcery

Kotor Circa 1600

I have been thinking about the setting for my upcoming G+ DCC game. The main requirements are that there needs to be lots of opportunity for weird adventure in a small space.  The more I think about it, an a city fits all of my needs. I don't like bookkeeping in the ACKS sandbox rules sense, but I do want things to make a certain amount of sense. If the setting is too small, it is implausible to have access to things like armorsmiths, apothecaries, and sages. In a small town, it may even be difficult to find basic supplies for sale. A city solves this problem.

Krakow circa 1500

A city is also a plausible location for a megadungeon. Mines, caves, catacombs, sewers,  buried ruins.

Map of the Odessa Catacombs

In fact, in ancient city is wouldn't be implausible for their to be many layers of such things built upon one another.

For low-fantasy DCC it is important that the city be more like Vornheim, and less like Waterdeep. That means that the place is strange and magical, but the economy is mundane. There are no magic item shops, or wizard schools. Magic is strange and shocking, but yes, you can buy a horse or a suit of plate-mail.

I think if I am going to go for a city, it needs to be dense. Going halfway will make things too ordinary.

Cross-section of Kowloon

A city also explains professions like elven falconers. It's hard to imagine the more esoteric professions showing up in a tiny hamlet all at once.

Istanbul, 1638

A city gives plenty of options for adventure if it is large enough. Ancient ruins, dark under-cities, strange temples and laboratories; and there can always be outlying areas for wilderness adventure and other locations. Small towns will tend to cluster around the city providing a wealth of options.

There are more options still if it is a weird city. Portals to distant lands and other planes. Monstrous inhabitants. Shifting roads.

Istanbul, 1730

The Sector

Final (GMs) sector map:

As full descriptions are written for each world (they are just outlines right now) I will post them.

Decision! (And Time-Keeping in Space)

I have decided! After much flip-flopping I've decided that I will run a fantasy game online to scratch that itch and keep Stars Without Number to the table-top. That also saves me from having to deal with meticulous, AD&D DMG style time keeping in my table-top game and frees me up to post more here.

I realized that time-keeping in an AD&D style SWN game is really problematic when the party traveled to a planet 2 hexes away. They were traveling in a spike drive-1 ship so it took 16 days (2 to reach the edge of the solar system, 6 for each hex, 2 to get back in to the next planet). Traveling from one edge of the sector to the other in a slow ship would suddenly add many weeks to one party's timeline. Now, strict time-keeping does not matter for most purposes, but part of the point of running a multi-party SWN campaign was to allow them all to influence the world equally, which is hard to do without time-keeping.

Lost in the hexes

I have started working on things for my DCC campaign using some constraints. This is helping. I love running games but I often find myself breaking down into analysis paralysis during planning. I often find myself worrying obsessively about distances, hex sizes, and other things are not really that important. My constraints are helping enormously.

I have decided to make use of:

1 wide-ruled composition notebook
The Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG core book
The Tome of Adventure Design
The Swords & Wizardry Monster book

And maybe some modules if the mood suits me.

After about an hour's work I have a reasonably fleshed out area map. Normally I would never reach this stage because I would be too worried about hex sizes. The lack of scale is liberating. I could always take it, scan it, and apply a hex grid after the fact if I want some more precise distances.

I am also focusing on the small world notions of DCC RPG (the book suggests 100 miles square - 10,000 sq. miles -  as being plenty for a lifetime of adventure). What I have in my tiny map so far: one tiny farming village, one small town, a haunted* forest, a weird monastery, a few ruins, and plenty of woods, hills, and marsh to put more goodies into.

I think from now on, I will stick with drawing first, worrying about distances and the like after, this is working so much better for me.

*or at least that's what people say.

Of course now that I am finally getting smart about how to plan for a game, my group appears to be on the verge of disintegration.

Project: One World to Rule Them All

When I played a lot as a kid/teen I spent a lot of time thinking about campaign worlds. I drew up new ones habitually, devoured many of the 2ed campaign worlds and I even bought the first version of Campaign Cartographer and spent a lot of time learning how to use it. Now I mostly play in vaguely defined worlds with maybe a small region mapped - or maybe not. This works fine for the most part.

I have been thinking though that their might be advantage in spending some time creating a more detailed campaign world. A world that I could reuse across campaigns. I wouldn't start at a high level of detail, but at least I could put all of my campaign design efforts in one direction. As I add things for different games they could all just go on the map somewhere.

Now let's see if I really start or if this stays in the realm of imagination.

New Pathfinder Campaign

Getting prepped for our new Pathfinder campaign I find it remarkable how useful the Rules Cyclopedia and Swords & Wizardry core rules are to me. So much solid advice and useful tables - like the random dungeon stocking tables. I have yet to actually reference any of the Pathfinder books (not that they are bad, but like all later D&D they are just lacking in actual utility). I wish we were playing a different system . . . but we have to keep the players happy I suppose.