Harley Stroh wrote:
Steampunk/Ravenloft/Greyhawk?
...
That's my kind of game. What caused the shift?
//H
Actually, the Tower of the Pearl did--
your adventure! (The pearl from it, not the tower.
Since you didn't specify what the powers of the black pearl were, I made stuff up.)
We started in Greyhawk. The players "lost" (TPK) against the villains (who were trying to use the Black Pearl, along with other artifacts, to plane shift Greyhawk into Ravenloft [or vice-versa...it gets confusing]). The players lost the battle, the bad guys won. A ritual was performed and the physical nations of Greyhawk and Ravenloft meshed, merged....melded...into one new land.
When the TPK occured, I had the players generate new characters & advanced the timeline 300 years but didn't tell the
players that they were still in GreyRavenHawkLoft. I used many of the RL core domain names (they started in Richemulot, which was what The Great City of Greyhawk "mutated" into). The players assumed that I was simply running a "Renaissance" era game with
feux French names.
I also really liked the higher tech level of many of the Ravenloft domains, so I just started throwing in influences from history,
The Difference Engine, the
Thief "sneaker" PC game, and the
Iron Kingdoms setting.
Blend heavily on "purée" and add in my own deep levels of psychosis, perversion and paranoia, viola! A whole new "low" in settings.
It was really difficult to develop certain ideas, since I was flying by the seat of my pants. I ran
Into the Wilds as one of the first adventures, but I had to modify the entire setting to reflect the steampunk attitudes.
For ex, the dwarven smithy in that adventure (I forget his name now) crafted a sonic engine that drove off the dire giant bats in the goblin caves/mountains at the players' commision.
They also discovered a strange new boat moored at the docks of the town---a boat with a chimney & large paddle wheel on both sides of the deck....this was the first-ever ironclad the world had ever seen....
Figuring out how to present information without giving piles of exposition, and without forcing the players to read a pile of boring history, became a little too much for me and the game fizzled eventually.
Too bad. The first set of characters (the TPK group) ran through Idylls/Rat King, dumped wholesale into Greyhawk. I was going to have the second group of players, 300 years later, stumble across Silverton and play it kinda like
'Salem's Lot.
Go on kiddies, back to bed and let the grown ups talk