[Psychedelic Warlords] Starting Campaign Setting: the Planet Oriax

So I've been giving some thought to the actual setting for this thing.  The idea is to start out on a central hex on one planet, and then expand from there as the players see fit.  This limits the scope of the campaign at the beginning, but I find that narrowing down your options at the very start allows for a much easier "buy-in" from players.  This way, their options and opportunities for adventure can expand in response to the players' actions and interests.  Also, I don't have a huge amount of time for prep, and I'm chronically indecisive.  This takes a lot of the burden off of my hands by presenting me with fewer decisions to make over a longer stretch of time.

Anyway, here's what I've come up with so far:

The Planet Oriax, at various points in its history, has been:

- A poisonous, chaotic hellscape - the screaming, malformed, botched abortion of a degenerate star.  This rather overheated description can be found in the otherwise sober planetary historian Yivok the Lesser's Lives of the Planets.  He maintained throughout his life a particularly violent and irrational dislike for the planet.  He would never mention its name directly, referring to it as either "that spherical blasphemy" or, more cryptically, "the bloodshot eye of the anti-Father."  When near death, he reportedly asked to be carried out to an orbital observation deck where Oriax could be observed by long-range telescope.  Peering through the screen, he excitedly made an obscene gesture in the direction of the planet before expiring, a smile on his withered lips.

- The plaything of a generally irresponsible pantheon of Kirbyesque alien space gods, some of whose descendants exist today.

-  The capitol world of at least two galaxy-spanning empires

- A penal colony -- a dumping ground for all manner of criminals, heretics, and madmen.

- A pilgrimage site, famous for its monumental reliquaries, within whose gem-encrusted frames were housed the calcified bones of martyred titan-saints, standing in eternal vigil.

- A hedonic paradise of glittering palaces, calm oceans, and lush pleasure-gardens, serving a technologically and socially advanced society.

At present, it's a blasted, post-apocalyptic wasteland..  There are still forests, seas, jungles, and glaciers, but much of the planet's surface has been given over to desert.  The planet's littered with ruined cities and monuments, and the bones of massive extinct beasts bleaching under the harsh sun.  Warp-storms crackle across the landscape with alarming frequency, tearing open temporary holes in the fabric of space-time, and leaving madness and mutation in their wake.  The great, continent-spanning civilizations of the past have fragmented into small, isolated communities, whose eccentricities have only become more pronounced in isolation.  The immortal descendants of ancient Sorcerer-kings spend their days in drug-induced reverie and petty intrigue.  Some of these forsake their immortality and leave the safety of their hermetically-sealed crystalline palaces to seek adventure and death in the lands beyond.  Rival warlords jockey for position.  A few would-be conquerors have attempted to form empires, but so far, the largest political entities are independent towns and loosely-allied city-states.  The lands between are filled with strange and terrifying creatures, treacherous geography, fanatical cults, bands of predatory mutants, and the laboratory strongholds of mad wizards.

Oriax today is far from the center of interplanetary politics and trade, and its relative obscurity, dangerous reputation, and lack of many modern amenities make it an unpopular destination for casual tourists, though a few thrill-seekers arrive each solar year.  The bulk of off-worlders are adventurers of some description, lured by tales of vast, half-buried wealth, or with ambitions to carve out their own petty kingdoms in a savage world, far from the confines and strictures of life on the core planets.  Along with these trickle in a disparate collection of fugitives, refugees, exiles, explorers, spies, heretics, archaeologists, missionaries, and the sort of dangerous eccentrics who can find no employment in civilized space.


NEXT: The Free Town of Pazuzu: part Deadwood, part Tangier -- smack dab in the center of the starting hex.

Psychedelic Warlords: Appendix N in Pictures

So I'm working on a home campaign of my own for ConstantCon.  I plan to do Galbaruc eventually, but with that one, I think I often get bogged down in "getting the tone just right," and developing it as an internally consistent setting.  For right now, I thought it would be fun to throw logic and internal consistency out the window and go with something that's been lurking inchoate in the back of my mind for a while.


Here's what I'm going for:

Gygaxian Naturalists: Your Campaign's Monster Manual According to the Players

This may have been proposed before, but just in case it hasn't...

So I was thinking about Galbaruc, and monsters, and how I wanted to handle monsters in my campaign setting, and what I wanted to emphasize, and avoid, and I got to thinking about a session of Jeff Rient's Caves of Myrddin campaign I was in a few weeks ago. We were somewhere beneath the East Tower, having just descended to a new level, and we encountered a grayish, winged creature we took to be a gargoyle. This prompted a brief discussion on whether or not our characters would know what it was, let alone its strengths and weaknesses, etc. And then Jeff said we were free to use any out-of-character knowledge we wanted. In fact, we were welcome to open the book right there on the spot, and look up the relevant entry.*

This came as something of a shock to me. For most of my (admittedly short, by community standards) gaming career, this simply WAS NOT DONE. "Metagaming" was high on the hierarchy of sins. This was madness. This was the Pope handing out condoms at a Pride rally.

So we looked up the entry, decided we had very little chance of taking on such an opponent, and ran like hell. But I didn't trust the entry anyway. The whole thing made me paranoid. No, there was a reason Jeff was so blase about the whole thing. This wasn't a gargoyle at all. Or maybe it was, but it had some kind of crazy anti-gargoyle powers and shot napalm out of its nipples or something.

I loved that feeling of uncertainty-- of having information right in front of you, but not quite being able to trust it. For all I know, Jeff might simply be running with absolute transparency, and I was getting all worked up for nothing.

But this made me think about Herodotus' History, medieval bestiaries and the accounts of early travelers and explorers. We've got information, sometimes very specific information, but it's not exactly reliable. Often, this information is second-hand at best, and you have writers and illustrators, often with the best will in the world, working from garbled accounts. And all this is further confused by a thick fog of lies, exaggerations, wishful thinking, and pious tempts to imbue these creatures with religious symbolism. I have a T.H. White translation of a medieval bestiary that describes the panther as a symbol for Christ, attests to the miraculous ability of the beaver to detach its own genitals (and thus become a symbol of chastity) and depicts the crocodile as some kind of wolf-creature with eagle talons.

This would be perfect for gaming, and even better for ConstantCon games, where you have a nice big pool of players and their characters hopping from game-world to game world. There's already a sizable amount of rumor and speculation flying around about the Caves of Myrddin, for example.
The PCs are explorers -- they venture into bizarre, uncharted territories and CHART THEM. Dungeons are explored, passages marked, traps, secret doors, and mysterious items cataloged and referenced for later use. Secrets are bought, sold and traded. Bounties are offered by other players for the heads of particular miscreants.

There's really no reason monsters can't work the same way. The party encounters some strange critter or swarm of critters they've never seen before. Half the party is wiped out, but the survivors take notes. "Large, single red eye and a black beak, wings, covered in dense, foul-smelling white fur. Can breathe paralyzing fog at least once a round. We needed at least a 16 to hit, so AC is 3 or lower. The one we killed was still alive after we did 18 damage to it, but then the cleric (God rest his poor soul) got it for 8 points in a single hit and killed it, so we know it had somewhere between 19 and 26 Hit Points. They seem to travel in packs of 3-5."

Later, these creatures acquire a name, maybe a sketch from someone whose character encountered one, or, even better, someone reading that person's account of the encounter. Rumors about possible weaknesses are raised. What if it's some kind of demon. Would Holy Water affect it? Only one way to find out... G+ chat sessions become Explorer's Clubs. "Didn't you try smearing your faces with gnoll bone marrow, old boy? No?"



*Now that I think about it, this may have just been so we'd stand around dawdling and he'd have an excuse to roll for Wandering Monsters