Goodman Games

So it's interesting how a campaign world can start. Awhile back I developed a sandbox style campaign for a play by post forum using the Swords and Wizardry rules. That was 2 years ago and the campaign is in its second day mostly due to the players taking it away from the original old school style I intended. It's still fun though.

Now I'm trying to pull together a new group of players for a 'real world' campaign, mostly drawn from my pool of gaming buddies (boardgames, wargames) and decided to use the Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG.

Given I already had a pretty cool, old school setting (at least in my eyes), I decided to refit it for DCC. The basic idea is a small town on the edges of "The Empire of Man" which is about 51% human, 30% halflings, and the remaining split between elf and dwarf. The Empire is decaying, beset from within and without so can pay little attention to the town. The town itself probably would have died except it found a protector in a silver dragoness who set up a council split equally between the 4 races and she arbitrated any real disputes. Additionally she protected it from the local humanoid tribes of goblins, lizardmen and giants. And then she disappeared, her lair apparently destroyed (the real circumstances are a bit different but the players won't find that out for awhile). The town is now coming to grips with the need to defend itself and those in the town who disliked the way that the less common races had an equal say are pushing for change in the ruling structure, with racism becoming less subtle and hidden. There is of course an entrance to caverns and other forgotten structures beneath the town through a well, elements of horror, and more traditional D&D tropes. Basically there's something for most any style of player. I can pretty easily drop Sailors on a Starless Sea in (probably replacing the lizardmen with the beastmen) for the Level 0 funnel. But I worried a touch that the world still wasn't quite DCC styled enough (not enough 'weird').

Then I started playing with Campaign Cartographer (something I picked up recently along with most of their expansions). The most recent thing I did was to create a solar system using Cosmographer. One thing that's always intrigued me is the idea of two Earth like planets in the same orbit, opposite each other in that orbit (so that the sun is usually directly between. I put a larger planet in the outside orbit, so that whichever planet is close to it would get dragged back or forward a bit, so that they could sometimes see the other 'sister' planet in the early morning or evening skies (more like Mercury than Venus for us). Then I saw a 'destroyed' planet.. The graphics were either of flames or mostly smoke/debris. I decided to make the orbit for this perpendicular to the plane of the regular solar system, crossing the orbit of the two earth like planets in two places. The orbit of the debris is much bigger, and so centuries pass between each planet passing close enough to this debris to have any effect. But the effects are significant. Even passing somewhat near to the remnants of this dead world causes magic to behave very oddly (things like one spell completely turning into another, mercurial magic being completely random EACH time a spell is cast, corruption needing more luck to be avoided, etc). Strange creatures are awakened, and so on. But the oddest effect is that portals appear when the conjunction is the strongest and if you pass through one, you end up on the other world in the orbit which is almost like an alternate planet, not a completely different one. Many of the places will be similar as will the people, but their personalities and positions might be subtly or radically different. Perhaps it will be at a different stage of technological development due to different levels of resources. I can almost see the moment when a party jumps from one world to the other. They pass through the portal, and reapppear apparently where they left, but the stars are different. Or rather, the stars are what they would be half a year earlier or later.

All of this is sort of in the 'percolation' stage in my mind, but I'm pretty positive I'm going to run with something along these lines.

Cool stuff.

Love it!

I'm thinking that, in ficiton or RPG work, I like the idea of planets as much as a big homeworld. Kind of cool having an ice planet available when I need one. My setting I've been tinkering with, I had moons as off-world locations. Thing is, I like the idea that the "outer planes" are so beyond that humans can't really go there. Kind of like in Conan or Cthulhu, how they're "outside" where mortals go. Having planets and demi-planes (pocket worlds) lets me have off-site adventures in surreal places, but still have a "psychic" outer planes.

You may want to have the Mercurial Magic on a handy shared table, so any time a spell is cast you get some additional effect without having to roll for a given spell. I know there's a table in the book, I'm just saying. Or have several tables handy, that you can switch between.

And here's something I've been meaning to do for my games: print out pages of random die rolls, checking them off as they're used. Whether attacks or saves or mercurial magic, it saves seconds here and there which add up.