though this post could arguably be placed in the general discussion forum, i really felt that because DragonMech has had such an impact on the campaign world it ought to go into here.
in essence, i'm using this thread to bounce some ideas off you folks regarding a campaign setting that i'm constructing for use sometime after January. please, please kick in some ideas and criticisms as we go along. feel free to use part or all of this stuff, but please credit m'self with anything you strip out and use verbatim.
so...right. on with the show.
first, let me start by describing the game idea that led to me needing to build a whole setting. it's actually fairly simple, but i've never seen or heard of anyone else running a game quite like it. the premise follows fairly closely with the idea of a group of folks shipwrecked on a fantastic and exotic desert island...a strangers in a strange land sort of scenario, but i'm taking it in a slightly different direction and upping the scope of the desert island.
i'm doing this by stealing...err...borrowing...from an old, old D&D (and later AD&D) supplement called "Spelljammer." you older, luckier cats out there know what i mean, but for you others...Spelljammer was, essentially, airships in outer space. that's pretty basic, but fairly accurate. big ol' wooden monstrosities with open decks and tons of magic to keep everyone from suffocating or freezing or whatnot in the cold hard depths of space. thing is, as much as SJ is what inspired the whole thing, DragonMech has had a much, much larger impact on the setting. you'll see.
the barebones plot of the game is going to run like this: a huge interstellar war is raging across the known galaxy. our intrepid band of heroes (if that's what they turn out to be) begin the story aboard a massive passenger ship (i keep picturing the old Hammerhead warships, if you remember them.) bound for...wherever. along the way, their convoy is waylaid by a large force of enemy ships. while the ship's escorts are being blown out of the water (so to speak), the Hammerhead makes a break for it and spelljams away randomly. unfortunately for the unarmed cargo/passenger vessel, several of the attacking ships give chase for several days, driving the ship deeper and deeper into unexplored space. after a week or so of running, the Hammerhead suffers some sort of problem that slows it just enough to take a serious beating from her pursuers. the captain of the Hammerhead spies a habitable (though far from hospitable) planet orbiting about .8 AU's from the system's sun. (1 AU is equal to the distance between the Earth and our sun. really.) he makes a break for the planet and gives the evacuation order as they approach the massive desert world. the vessel's life boats, not designed or protected against reentry, won't survive the trip into the atmosphere, so the captain plunges the Hammerhead down, suffering even more damage on the way through the atmosphere. once it loses enough speed, the life boats start to peel away from the main ship as it streaks through the sky. not designed to operate in a gravity well, the lifeboats make a sort of controlled plummet to the surface. the Hammerhead, similarly unprepared for the planet's gravity and burning brightly, disappears over the horizon traveling southeast.
that's all intro story that'll be explained to the players during the first session. gameplay actually begins at the crash site of the PC's lifeboat in the middle of a vast, empty dune sea. the game's focus is on the PCs having to traverse this vast desert, meeting the people and things that inhabit it, and, hopefully, reuniting with other crewmembers and passengers until, ultimately, they find and repair the ship (if that's even possible) and get back to civilization as they know it.
now that you know the premise, we can begin with the local setting information itself...the real focus of this thread, actually.
-c
mixing it up
Moderators: DJ LaBoss, finarvyn, Harley Stroh, walrusjester, mythfish
hopefully i haven't scared too many of you off by being long winded. it's so much easier to explain concepts with real words rather than LOLLLIOEL!!!1 U R S0 L338!
right. sorry. anyways...back on topic.
so, setting info. let's start with sweeping panoramas and we can move in on the little things as we go along.
this planet...let's call it Mendia, just for kicks, is a vast desert world, and i do mean vast. i'm thinking roughly twice the surface area of the Earth, but without any bodies of water to break it up. that works out to a ridiculous number of square miles of desert. gravity is Earth standard, and you can make of that what you will. (yeah, planetary density has to be lower, but...i don't have to back this stuff up with science y'know. it is, after all, a fantasy game...but i have thought most of it through.) climate is almost unbearably arid. the range the planet goes through is around 140-160 degrees F at the equator (more on this later...i've set it this high for a reason) to about 60-70 degrees at the poles. (these are average yearly temperatures. summers are hotter, winters are colder.) seen from space, the world is composed of five fairly distinct bands arrayed...laterally? (the bands encircle the globe in the same direction as the equator. i think that's laterally.) these areas are:
1 - Polar (North) - roughly 65% of Mendia's water is concentrated in this region. (another 30% is concentrated at the south pole, and the rest is fairly evenly distributed) because a planet's worth of water has been condensed into such a small area, the north pole is a plant covered ocean/swamp at its center. as you get further from the center the swamps give way to rainforests, then forests, then grasslands. this green ring is repeated on the south pole. most of the water at the poles is actually contained in massive underground oceans. very little (comparitively) remains at the surface. i figure the ocean/swamp would have a radius of about 100 miles, with the rest of the green belt petering out after another 500 miles or so.
2 - Northern Desert - making up most of the northern hemisphere, this desert is mostly made up of massive dune seas that exist around slightly more solid regions of hard-pack and rocky outcrops. a few mountain ranges jut upward from the desert, but the constant erosion of the sand-laden winds has weathered all but the most impressive peaks down to barely more than a few thousand feet tall. oases dot the landscape at irregular intervals, and a fairly consistent south to north wind blows across the sands just about all the time. since there's very little to break up the landscape, enormous dust storms can and do sweep across the desert every now and again.
3 - Equator Storm - just like it sounds like, a massive dust storm rages along the length of the entire equator. this storm, fueled by the massive global warming across the planet, never dies. (i've really worked out the weather for why this would happen. it looks pretty good on paper. basically, the equator is the hottest place on the planet. it catches tons and tons of solar radiation and is unliveably hot all the time. this heat at the equator, coupled with the much cooler temperatures at the poles, fuels a global wind that tends to push air along the ground away from the equator and towards the poles. a return current of air flows from the poles to the equator above this poleward-wind. this interaction would also, i think, result in a permanent rainstorm over the two poles. i like the model anyways. any of you meteorologists out there want to contradict me feel free.) anyways, this storm coupled with the extreme temperatures serves to completely isolate the northern and southern hemispheres. i figure that the stormband itself would be about 200 miles thick...which is to say 100 miles on either side of the equator. (obviously, the entire 100 miles isn't of equal strength...i'm just guessing that that's about where temperatures would get to the point that they were unbearable, and where the winds would start to get really out of hand.)
4 - Southern Wasteland - at first, the southern desert looks much the same as the northern desert. upon closer inspection, however, the southern desert is far more lifeless than the north. we'll get into why when i cover my ideas for history.
5 - Polar (South) - essentially the same as the north pole, but on a significantly smaller scale.
since i'm about done in for the night, i'm gonna go ahead and justify keeping this in the DragonMech forum by spilling some of the beans in advance of where they really ought to be spilled.
the Equator Storm is going to be a big part of the story. the peoples of the southern hemisphere have developed mech technology in limited amounts and applications...most notably, they've been using them to mine the more plentiful mountain ranges of the southern wastes, and have built several city-mechs to serve as the ultimate mining towns...no more ghost towns when the mine runs out, 'cause now the whole city can just move to wherever the ore is!
essentially, one of the things i'd like to do is have the southerners send an expedition through the EqStorm in a specially equipped mech just to see what's on the other side. from there, i'd like them to find out just how much more water the kingdoms of the northern pole have at their disposal, and send them to war over it. i'm not talking about sendng hordes of mechs across because the practicalities of trying to get the damn things to travel that far in a limited water environment like this desert are almost insurmountable...in fact, i've pretty much decided that the only mechs that can make the journey from south to north will be city mechs...of course, you can put a -lot- of soldiers into a city mech...
anyways, gotta get to bed. more on this later.
comments?
-c
right. sorry. anyways...back on topic.
so, setting info. let's start with sweeping panoramas and we can move in on the little things as we go along.
this planet...let's call it Mendia, just for kicks, is a vast desert world, and i do mean vast. i'm thinking roughly twice the surface area of the Earth, but without any bodies of water to break it up. that works out to a ridiculous number of square miles of desert. gravity is Earth standard, and you can make of that what you will. (yeah, planetary density has to be lower, but...i don't have to back this stuff up with science y'know. it is, after all, a fantasy game...but i have thought most of it through.) climate is almost unbearably arid. the range the planet goes through is around 140-160 degrees F at the equator (more on this later...i've set it this high for a reason) to about 60-70 degrees at the poles. (these are average yearly temperatures. summers are hotter, winters are colder.) seen from space, the world is composed of five fairly distinct bands arrayed...laterally? (the bands encircle the globe in the same direction as the equator. i think that's laterally.) these areas are:
1 - Polar (North) - roughly 65% of Mendia's water is concentrated in this region. (another 30% is concentrated at the south pole, and the rest is fairly evenly distributed) because a planet's worth of water has been condensed into such a small area, the north pole is a plant covered ocean/swamp at its center. as you get further from the center the swamps give way to rainforests, then forests, then grasslands. this green ring is repeated on the south pole. most of the water at the poles is actually contained in massive underground oceans. very little (comparitively) remains at the surface. i figure the ocean/swamp would have a radius of about 100 miles, with the rest of the green belt petering out after another 500 miles or so.
2 - Northern Desert - making up most of the northern hemisphere, this desert is mostly made up of massive dune seas that exist around slightly more solid regions of hard-pack and rocky outcrops. a few mountain ranges jut upward from the desert, but the constant erosion of the sand-laden winds has weathered all but the most impressive peaks down to barely more than a few thousand feet tall. oases dot the landscape at irregular intervals, and a fairly consistent south to north wind blows across the sands just about all the time. since there's very little to break up the landscape, enormous dust storms can and do sweep across the desert every now and again.
3 - Equator Storm - just like it sounds like, a massive dust storm rages along the length of the entire equator. this storm, fueled by the massive global warming across the planet, never dies. (i've really worked out the weather for why this would happen. it looks pretty good on paper. basically, the equator is the hottest place on the planet. it catches tons and tons of solar radiation and is unliveably hot all the time. this heat at the equator, coupled with the much cooler temperatures at the poles, fuels a global wind that tends to push air along the ground away from the equator and towards the poles. a return current of air flows from the poles to the equator above this poleward-wind. this interaction would also, i think, result in a permanent rainstorm over the two poles. i like the model anyways. any of you meteorologists out there want to contradict me feel free.) anyways, this storm coupled with the extreme temperatures serves to completely isolate the northern and southern hemispheres. i figure that the stormband itself would be about 200 miles thick...which is to say 100 miles on either side of the equator. (obviously, the entire 100 miles isn't of equal strength...i'm just guessing that that's about where temperatures would get to the point that they were unbearable, and where the winds would start to get really out of hand.)
4 - Southern Wasteland - at first, the southern desert looks much the same as the northern desert. upon closer inspection, however, the southern desert is far more lifeless than the north. we'll get into why when i cover my ideas for history.
5 - Polar (South) - essentially the same as the north pole, but on a significantly smaller scale.
since i'm about done in for the night, i'm gonna go ahead and justify keeping this in the DragonMech forum by spilling some of the beans in advance of where they really ought to be spilled.
the Equator Storm is going to be a big part of the story. the peoples of the southern hemisphere have developed mech technology in limited amounts and applications...most notably, they've been using them to mine the more plentiful mountain ranges of the southern wastes, and have built several city-mechs to serve as the ultimate mining towns...no more ghost towns when the mine runs out, 'cause now the whole city can just move to wherever the ore is!
essentially, one of the things i'd like to do is have the southerners send an expedition through the EqStorm in a specially equipped mech just to see what's on the other side. from there, i'd like them to find out just how much more water the kingdoms of the northern pole have at their disposal, and send them to war over it. i'm not talking about sendng hordes of mechs across because the practicalities of trying to get the damn things to travel that far in a limited water environment like this desert are almost insurmountable...in fact, i've pretty much decided that the only mechs that can make the journey from south to north will be city mechs...of course, you can put a -lot- of soldiers into a city mech...
anyways, gotta get to bed. more on this later.
comments?
-c
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Phasma Felis
- Far-Sighted Wanderer
- Posts: 14
- Joined: Mon Aug 16, 2004 11:40 am
I'm really liking this. I particularly appreciate the use of Spelljammer for background, and I like the work you've done on the climate. You might want to think about how it was possible for civilization to develop at all with such limited water. On the other hand, you might not. Sensible biospheres were never a part of Spelljammer.
Hm. This also makes me think of the backstory to the (excellent) RTS game Homeworld: a sentient race struggles to survive and develop over thousands of years on an arid desert world that seems to be totally unsuited to them. After several millennia, they develop DNA mapping technology and discover that they are in fact not natives to their world. In Homeworld, this develops into the discovery that they were exiled there by a hostile race, and they build a fleet to seek out their homeworld (and have to deal with attacks by their exilers along the way). You might want to go a different direction with it, but having that lost-civilization thing going on might make an interesting surprise for your PCs.
Hm. This also makes me think of the backstory to the (excellent) RTS game Homeworld: a sentient race struggles to survive and develop over thousands of years on an arid desert world that seems to be totally unsuited to them. After several millennia, they develop DNA mapping technology and discover that they are in fact not natives to their world. In Homeworld, this develops into the discovery that they were exiled there by a hostile race, and they build a fleet to seek out their homeworld (and have to deal with attacks by their exilers along the way). You might want to go a different direction with it, but having that lost-civilization thing going on might make an interesting surprise for your PCs.