Starting a What!?!

So I had an awful bit of inspiration the other day. I want to create and publish a true tabletop campaign setting for commercial sale. I have been doing research into how I can do this on the cheap and think I have a pretty good grasp of the budget for such a thing. How that money is going to be raised is a different issue that will be worked out later when we have a product to work with. For now though I want to concentrate on producing the setting.

The first thing to go through my head was that I immediately need to involve Clint, the DM for the Pathfinder Campaign I’m playing in, because he and I have been talking about designing a campaign setting together anyways. We have similar design philosophies when it comes to mechanics and settings and have been bouncing ideas back and forth between each other for various RPG related topics for a while now. This seemed like the perfect opportunity to collaborate on a project with him and give us both a chance to take a step into the industry we both love.

Right now we’re working on figuring out what type of setting we want to create. We both have campaign settings already created that could be published, but I want to create something new with him from the ground up. If we can’t come up with any ideas we will probably flesh out and publish one of our existing settings first. In the meantime I’m going to type out some of my brainstorming and the thought process behind the creation of a setting that I go through when I create something like this.

Normally I’m inspired by something I watch, read, or see and then write down that idea in a margin, notebook, or the back of a piece of paper and come back to it later when I have enough ideas to flesh it out. This is different than normal though. Now I need to do something that will force some inspiration. I’ve been looking at legends, watching some movies, and delving into Wikipedia over the past few days searching for inspiration and I’ve had a few things pop up.

First and foremost though I need to decide what type of unique things will make up this world and what potential systems we will use to create it. This has to be a commercially viable product so we need a hook and we need to apply it to a popular system. I think the best system to use will be Pathfinder. It is popular in the community, we can use the Open Gaming License to link our book to it, and we are both pretty familiar with the system at this point. Clint and I have some issues with the system that we’ve discussed at length before, so we will probably want to alter the system a little to fit our own tastes, maybe a couple of simple, custom systems that are potentially appealing to other people.

Clint and I are also fans of firearms in fantasy settings, magic systems that have built in catastrophic failure systems, and unique/different races. So I’m pretty sure we’ll end up with some type of firearms and a magic system along the lines of each of our magic failure systems from our individual campaign settings (both of which are using a variation of the Taint mechanic). The unique/different races thing will be hashed out more when we’re closer to defining the actual setting itself I think.

So starting from the ground up…

Any world I build I start with a grittier, low magic setting. Typically I think of an Everway style setting. Magic exists, and you might see it in use every day, but it isn’t (always) world shattering stuff and everything comes with a price or potential for failure. So we’ll start off with that type of assumption. We can discuss the potential existence of deities, dragons, and odd-ball races later.

The night I sprung this on Clint the wife and I were watching a Jimmy Stewart movie from the 60’s called Shenandoah. Great movie, depressing as hell, but still great. It’s about a family from Virginia that gets dragged into the Civil War against its will and gets screwed over by both sides and other people. It’s a good look into some of the issues of the day. This immediately inspired me. A good setting should always have some type of brewing or active conflict. It gives you a lot of things to work with. Just like the civil war, there’s got to be a lot going on under the surface so that no side is clearly good or evil.

There was a lot of things going on during the American civil war other than slavery (which despite the arguments to the contrary, it really was mostly about slavery even though the South tried to dress it up as more than that). Both sides in the conflict weren’t doing good things and weren’t necessarily fighting for the right reasons. I won’t get into the specifics here, but both sides were doing bad things and both also had good things. It is a very complex situation and both sides are shades of grey. Sounds like the perfect thing for me to use.

So a big civil war type situation is all well and good, but it needs more. Obviously it requires two sides of a larger and stronger nation. What else can I add though to make it more than just an analogue for exploring the issues of the civil war? Obviously more drama is always a good answer. What if we expand it? What if this civil war is fall out from the collapse of what used to be a larger empire? Like, say the Roman Empire or the United States collapsing into 3 or more chunks. Maybe this former empire broke up into 3 major chunks and a few smaller minor kingdoms/city-states.

What if two of these major chunks didn’t agree on whether or not they were one or two nations? One remnant claims that this other one is part of it and demands taxes, conscripts, and resources while the other claims it is independent. The third chunk is remaining entirely neutral in the matter. To make matters worse, this empire used to be a stabilizing influence across the entire continent and with their collapse and being on the brink of war with itself it has freed up the other powers of the continent to do what they want. Maybe this empire was more of a bully than police, maybe a meaner Roman Empire.

Maybe there’s an “evil” nation starting to amass their own armies to attempt conquests upon their neighbors. Oh, there could be an extremely well-defended city-state somewhere that is considered a Freeport type city with massive monetary influence. Kind of like a Singapore or Tortuga. (I really like these Freeport city ideas for some reason, that might be my politics influencing me.). [after popping in Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust] OH! Dhampier are awesome. Maybe we can use them somewhere, like that “evil” nation!

Wikipedia led me to pre-Columbian Mesoamerican cultures… again… the thought of a Mesoamerican style culture with sacrifices and elaborate ceremonies is always a fun thing to contemplate being an influence upon a Western European style culture.

A viewing of Howl’s Moving Castle made me think about an idea I had long ago for an Arcanatech style setting and a class that a navy buddy of mine helped me design (the Articifer, a base class that was all about making constructs and magic items. Mostly constructs). Might not fit with the low magic/magic with consequences though.

What types of traditional fantasy tropes exist here? What types of ancient secrets are around? Potentials for dungeon crawls? Can we develop an item creation system outside of the normal magic item system, maybe with alchemy, unusual materials and superior craftsmanship instead? What type of geographic landscape are we looking at here? How many traditional races are there and where do they live?

What I’d like to see is about 80-95% human coverage of the continent with the rest split up between the rest of the races, whatever they are. I hate elves so can we make them real jerk-offs? I’d like to see them as xenophobic, racist assholes. It just seems appropriate.

Maybe there’s a place where there’s just a cubic ass-ton of minor kingdoms and city-states that are constantly at war with each other. This could be a great place for a Kingmaker style game to take place. Maybe there are some vast swaths of unclaimed territory on the continent, at least not claimed by any of the important nations. This could be where the remains of a great and ancient magical empire was and the landscape is dotted with magical beast/mutants and ruins that are extremely dangerous to go after. Especially when there are easier ways to make your fortune in the constantly brewing conflicts elsewhere.

There is of course that Mercenary setting that Clint had me help him out with. That was neat. It could be adapted to its own setting outside of Hekinoe but that is pretty well established.

Hmmm… That’s a pretty good list of random things to work with so far. Maybe after I read Clint’s ideas (and he reads these) we’ll be able to hash some more out and start laying down the foundation.