Into the Eastern Lands
I've been anticipating the characters' journey eastwards for a long time now, so I have a cunning plan. Basically, I want this part of the campaign to have a slightly surreal feel to it, just enough so that the players don't quite know what to expect. As adventurers from the Young Kingdoms, they should feel rather out of place, and events need to have a rather peculiar tinge - both odd and specific.
I have been hanging around the net like a bad smell for a while now, soaking up various blogs with roleplaying ideas, session reports and so on, more as a way of getting myself back into things than anything else. When I stopped roleplaying due to major life moves, the internet was only just starting to take off, and I've missed a lot, some of which I'm quite pleased about, to be honest. However, there have been some developments that flashed by me completely. Just to give you some flavour, the D&D related scenarios I have from my previous roleplaying incarnation are, at their most recent, 2nd edition AD&D. I missed 3rd edition, 4th edition (although that is probably just as well) and I also missed Pathfinder and the advent of 5th edition D&D. I'm now catching up, and I have to say that amongst the dross there is still a lot of really useful material out there; the Pathfinder Adventure Paths look as though they will make decent long-term campaign elements. Downloadable PDF websites such as Drivethrurpg, RPGNow and the DMguild are great resources, as are game publishers' own websites (I'm thinking of Goodman Games for Dungeoncrawl Classics and The Design Mechanism for Mythras, among other things).
One element of all this that I am really enjoying is the plethora of blogs. I'll probably write a separate update entry on some of these, but one that really caught my eye is Monsters and Manuals. The writer is, I think, an academic who works in the UK, and some of his ideas are really inventive. He has published a campaign setting via Lulu, which you can also find at Drivethru in PDF form. I bought the book, because I prefer to support independent writers as much as possible:
Yoon-suin is a unique setting, kind of a cross between Nepalese, Tibetan and Thai mythologies, with all sorts of twists. The basic geography, political and cultural elements are provided, but the actual application of them is in tabular form, so any campaign set here will vary. It's exactly what I wanted for the expedition my players have embarked upon, and I have sort of mapped various bits onto Lawrence Whitaker's Elric! gazeteer:
I am hoping that the combination of the two will keep things strange enough that the characters feel culture shock, or at least rather out of place, and it seems to be working so far. One of the major strengths of Yoon-Suin is the vast amount of detail included in the form of encounters and locations, and I will be dropping these into the games as and when appropriate.
I have been hanging around the net like a bad smell for a while now, soaking up various blogs with roleplaying ideas, session reports and so on, more as a way of getting myself back into things than anything else. When I stopped roleplaying due to major life moves, the internet was only just starting to take off, and I've missed a lot, some of which I'm quite pleased about, to be honest. However, there have been some developments that flashed by me completely. Just to give you some flavour, the D&D related scenarios I have from my previous roleplaying incarnation are, at their most recent, 2nd edition AD&D. I missed 3rd edition, 4th edition (although that is probably just as well) and I also missed Pathfinder and the advent of 5th edition D&D. I'm now catching up, and I have to say that amongst the dross there is still a lot of really useful material out there; the Pathfinder Adventure Paths look as though they will make decent long-term campaign elements. Downloadable PDF websites such as Drivethrurpg, RPGNow and the DMguild are great resources, as are game publishers' own websites (I'm thinking of Goodman Games for Dungeoncrawl Classics and The Design Mechanism for Mythras, among other things).
One element of all this that I am really enjoying is the plethora of blogs. I'll probably write a separate update entry on some of these, but one that really caught my eye is Monsters and Manuals. The writer is, I think, an academic who works in the UK, and some of his ideas are really inventive. He has published a campaign setting via Lulu, which you can also find at Drivethru in PDF form. I bought the book, because I prefer to support independent writers as much as possible:
Yoon-suin is a unique setting, kind of a cross between Nepalese, Tibetan and Thai mythologies, with all sorts of twists. The basic geography, political and cultural elements are provided, but the actual application of them is in tabular form, so any campaign set here will vary. It's exactly what I wanted for the expedition my players have embarked upon, and I have sort of mapped various bits onto Lawrence Whitaker's Elric! gazeteer:
I am hoping that the combination of the two will keep things strange enough that the characters feel culture shock, or at least rather out of place, and it seems to be working so far. One of the major strengths of Yoon-Suin is the vast amount of detail included in the form of encounters and locations, and I will be dropping these into the games as and when appropriate.
Comments
Post a Comment