After a significant hiatus, I spun up a new campaign, Lizard Kingdoms. This was a more directed creative process as it happened after ~6 years marinating on the teachings of the OSR. The ignition spark for this was the Mediterranean abyss of Shiveria by Chris Wayan. The specific image, captured from one of his re-painted globes was this, with the gates of Hercules closed and the 2000m deep basin behind that inhabitable - deep and hot. And filled with an ancient culture of lizardfolk.
With this as the setting core, I decided I wanted to run the Lizards as a long-cycle civilization rising and declining, just settling into a decline long-cycle. For ease of sizing things I stole south-west Europe as a basis and fiddled the Iberian peninsula to step down more gently into the Abyss - creating the Scaled Lands. This was to be our play-space.
The hook - that for long millenia the Lizard Empire had grabbed everything they deemed fit for habitation. The players come from a Magocracy, one outside the borders in the cold north. For ages great dragons dwelled in the border mountains preventing any incursion into the Lizard Kingdoms until one day they vanished. Noone knows when that day was exactly, the realisation of their absence was slow to come. The campaign pitch was 'the Wizard Kingdom is sending an expedition into the Scaledlands - you have decided to go with it'.
Lizardfolk of the Scalelands, by Evlyn Moreau
This was the set up, opening scene was going to be the players arrival in what was found to be the semi-ruined city of Sholtipec. Here came the challenge - the players were to have a significant flexibility of choice here - to stay within the city and explore, to venture out into the encroaching jungles, strike out for other cities, or go with the expedition while it ventured further south towards the route down into the abyssal plain. Addressing this challenge of knowing enough about what was going on regionally to be able to wing any of these aspects quickly meant that I could not follow my old approaches of just hand crafting city after city, I needed better methods.
At the same time I was discovering rich seams of city creation tables on sites - the two tent-poles being the legendary In Corpathium and what is now the awesome Infinigrad. With these I generated the focus city and just let the campaign create itself by implication from there. The bizarre mix of districts, their inhabitants and occupations created by 'district level' In Corpathium and 'building level' Infinigrad tables created a bizarre ancient city crammed with factions busily going about their business and utterly uncaring of these blow-in adventurers.
To create the macro rhythm of the world I ran a red team - pinging a broad group of old gamer friends to see who wanted to play what kind of faction. I asked each a couple of prompting questions and quickly got back strange dynamic organisations with their own agendas and views.
Lastly to set up the mid-scale dynamics and the locals understanding of their region I generated a bunch of local cities using Random Tables: Stupidly-Quick City-Building by u/OrkishBlade and A System for Creating Fantasy Hamlets, Villages, Towns, Cities, Metropolises by The Collaborative Gamer - this rapidly set up the neighbours in enough detail to know what they would be famous for - if at all. Some cities were unremarkable trading towns, some had strange specialties which they would be famous for across the region.
Altogether, with a lot of random generation and a lot less brain-power from me than previous campaigns I rapidly built just enough world that was required and set a bunch of pendulums swinging within it. There was no opening ur-plot, it was purely a 'stack the dominoes, unleash the players' set-up.
Note: I also dumped far too much time into attempting to model the population of the Scaledlands - building out a demographic model, then dropping on assumptions of how many people have levels, then figuring out how many wizards and sorcerers are around - to pretty much zero narrative or gaming-table use. I think I was originally trying to figure out exactly how many wizards could be crammed into the wizard district. This... was not an efficient use of my time, the answer should have been "as many as the narrative requires". It did come in handy for my *next* campaign but at this point it was a rabbit hole down which I fell.
Ingredients list:
- A tilted world
- The cream of OSR urban generator genius
- A crack red-team of cunning co-conspirators
- Intrepid adventurers
Result: managing to spin up a campaign world using a handful of ideas and a bunch of generators to put game-able flesh on those bones much, much faster than previous campaigns; weeks in place of months.
The first lesson for me is that once you have a core concept set for a world (empire on the down-swing, very old lizard folk civilization, hot climate, dragon cults) you can rapidly generate anything by consulting spark-lists and random tables. Like balls pouring through the pins on what I now know is a Galton Board rolling up random results on generators while keeping your core concept in mind is going to rapidly build out the campaign you want to have without you having to come up with everything yourself.
The second lesson for me was that other peoples random generators will push you out of your mental ruts and give you things you may not have come up with or would habitually avoid - and therefore refresh and renew your campaigns - creating implications and spin-offs for your plotting and adventure hooks. I found that a quick handful of randomly generated results for a new city would give a city, imply its people and politics and I could then spin out its links to neighbours and impact on the region around and fold that back into adventure hooks for the party to encounter - the implications practically writing themselves.
No comments:
Post a Comment