Each came of a different set of drivers, using a different world-building approach and a refinement towards better bang-for-buck in terms of DM effort. These were also the first 'blank slate' worlds I built after running a series of 'kitchen sink' campaigns since early teens which morphed and expanded as Dragon Magazines came in the door or Planescape products were acquired.
Today I will just talk about the first, Hikuru, which was driven by a mash-up impulse - coming after 3e Oriental Adventures and a couple of years of L5R I wanted to do something slightly different. I had played in a Birthright variant with an empire of elven, practically immortal, samurai. I needed something to replicate that and loved Brian Snoddys illustration of a Wang Liang. They had an Empire back in the day according to the bestiary - so this would be set in that day. Extremely long-lived giants with always-on telepathy seemed like a good building block for a globe spanning empire.
photo of 3e Oriental Adventures, art by Brian Snoddy
Worldbuilding
Setting up the world was all done old school - a world map, zooming down to the archipelego region where things would be set, making up a bunch of cities, factions, figuring out how the world worked then fishing about for what the initial seed adventure would be.
I had just missed the amazing Al Qadim on its first run through stores being too young, broke at the time - however in 2007 the modules were being re-released on DriveThruRPG or WotC back catalogue and I scooped them up. I ran the printers hard then tried to re-purpose as much as I could. This was my first glimmer at wisdom - try not to reinvent the wheel.
I had a second good idea in a nice 1-page concept sheet that mapped out the premise for the campaign and the world. As can be clearly seen below, this was to be Oriental Adventures interfacing with Al-Qadim through ships and pirates - the Wang-Liangs having conquered the Pangaea-like main continent of the world, they are ignoring the offshore Free Isles where all the cities of Al-Qadim flourish. We have four rivals on the borders of this Empire - rag-tag city states in the far west, where all the large, powerful rivals had been pushed over time, in the south a secessionist chunk of the Empire that has rebelled against the Wang-Liang, in the north high mountains with the homelands of the never conquered Yakfolk, in the south west the deep forests of the elves.
At this point I lost my sense of perspective - partially driven by deep procrastination surrounding night courses I was doing at the time. Hence maps. Lots of maps. Some neat ideas like tweaking which way each map-making culture considers as 'up' in its maps, but generally a massive time-sink down which I plummeted that no player ever saw.
The final map-handout that players actually got their hands on was this:
Of course, to kick all this off, on the off chance that the players should ever get there hands on a Spelljammer, I needed to sort out what the local system was. Needless to say, the party never got off-world.
I did establish that the elves and dwarves had their own off-world strongholds. Therefore there had to be some sort of Wang-Liang air-defence capability and so wyvern mounted bushi were a thing, with 'crown of the stars' style Spelljamming saddles. Very much inspired by the iconic Dragon #189 cover by Peter Clarke.
photo of authors Dragon #189, cover art by Peter Clarke
I did finally have another good idea and turned the standard map of the focus region into a point-crawl style dots-and-lines format; tying those back to my Al Qadim supplements.
Pitching the campaign A first attempt at launching a campaign flared out over summer 2007, when I threw all this set up at a set of players in May, asked them who they wanted to be, then threw a mystery at them which did not stick. I think we got 1-2 sessions with some gaps due to scheduling issues before it flared out and stopped in August.
Lesson learned - need bigger, hookier starting hook.
A year later I tried again; with a motivated player who wanted to pull the gang back together from a previous Planescape campaign. This time Pirates of the Carribean and old Sinbad movies were stirred in as I wanted to put the party on a boat. I cooked up a better one-pager for the campaign bible and off we went. Looking back at my pitch emails it was all setting - here is the weird mash-up, who do you want to play - rather than initial adventure hook. Note this for later. Session zero technique was non-existent. There was a lot of to and fro interactions individually with players about their characters but never a sit-to-table with everyone purely to build.
Running the campaign
Systemwise this was a 3.5e D&D campaign, using the Living Arcanis point buy system. I have not managed to hang on to the character sheets - definitely a human shugenja fleeing the empire, an orc samurai elf-hunter and a human ship captain and a water genasi sea-sprite neither of whoms exact class I recall - the captain was a fighter-adjacent type, the genasi was a magic-user I think?
I had one of what I think of as one of my better ideas running this campaign which was setting things up on the map, then looking at the points of interface for friction, then letting that drive events that the players could run into. Here we had the Wang-Liang empire to the north, a break-away Shogunate to the south, culturally identical just with different people in charge. Each nation had factions with different attitudes - the Shogunate factions were successors to Imperial ones and so depending on who was facing who over the border they could be restrained, cooperative or bitterly fighting.
The second useful idea I had was the ship crew - one player was the captain and just having the first mate come up and go 'what do we do captain?' was a really helpful nudger to have available. This was more or less a straight lift from Pirates of the Carribean - have a crew behind the main characters, not very effective, but there to add drama. I got what I regarded as a great compliment from one of the players going 'I never really paid attention to the ship crew, but I really got the sense they were real people'.
Inter-session was very much running down the logic of the opposing forces actions; what trails could be found, where were they leaving clues, what could the players pick up on. I was focused on throwing out clues for the players to track down the evil hand behind the curtain. In hindsight there were many places with single point of failure, no Three Clue Rule applied and I ran a real risk that the players could have missed something critical, gotten bogged down and then the campaign would have imploded. This was avoided by player savvy and good dice rolls, not by my fool-proofing the campaign.
In the end the campaign ran online for 13 sessions between September 2008 - March 2009 over AIM chat. Typical session was ~3 hours for a party of 4 + DM; 2 in Europe, 2 in America, 1 in Africa. The campaign went well, the big sequences landed - literally in that the finale was the players jumping from wyverns ridden by Wang-Liang samurai into a dwarven whaling refinery in pursuit of the evil elves. Of course they managed to detonate the whole island on their way out. Overall I would call the campaign a success and a well remembered one but massively inefficient from the point of view of my using my time. This was the last one I ran on my own sense of how to do things, being wholly deterministic and logic-driven with no random generators, just own ideas or re-painted Al-Qadim.
By the time I ran my next campaign, 10 years later, I have encountered the OSR and learned a lot from others.
Ingredients list:
- A Brian Snoddy illustration
- Two lines of lore in a bestiary entry in 3e Oriental Adventures
- Al Qadim, Land of Fate, Corsairs of the Great Sea, Golden Voyages, Ruined Kingdoms, City of Delights
- Pirates of the Carribean: At Worlds End
- The Golden Voyage of Sinbad
- Baking parchment, colouring pencils, too much time
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