Setting up coherent other worlds for Scale-and-Planet campaign (RPG Blog Carnival )

In My Campaign gives us this months prompt Other Worlds for the RPG Blog Carnival.

Portraying Other Worlds

Considering how to make worlds that are different but feel coherent within the same campaign - what are the dials you twiddle and what stays the same?

This is an idea I am road testing with my 2d20 Lizard Kings campaign; the core theme of it all is that the scalyfolk are in a post-imperial expansion - but have just retrenched not gone away. There are tons of things littered around from different eras of their imperium, representing different ideas they had - including their push to their nearby worlds.

This is a live, relevant question because I am returning to Corrus, the world of the Lizard Kings, where one of the core setting ideas was the concept of Near Mars and Far Venus - a thinly atmosphered world nearer the sun and a thickly atmosphered one further out would cancel out to be roughly habitable - making three worlds in this system operating on a John Carter-esque sword-and-planet paradigm. Inter-planetary escapades were always intended as part of the mix - but now I have the wisdom to front-load the good stuff and thus I ought to be figuring out that world-striding aspect of things.

Original system sketch from ~ 2019

It may be smudged and barely legible but those notes read "Near Mars, Ancient civilizations, canals" and "Distant Venus, Jungle world w/ Saur Cavalry [crocodile worshippers?]" and I have some more notes that tag distant venus with giants and dinosaurs, near mars with Dune-esque deserts, gnolls, crystal forging, miners and alchemists with great tree.

So how to make these three worlds - tentatively named Nemas, Corrus and Favens - feel coherent, yet different?

I've had some thoughts before on distinguishing mirror worlds with house-rules and modified rules for those worlds feels like a good idea but one tool in the box but it does not go far enough. Mirror worlds should be very similar, with a twist, these other worlds should feel distinctly different within a shared milieu.

I want the 'Still Here' motifs of the lizardfolk across all worlds:
- lizardy deep time nonsense
- a multiplicity of heat cults
- nature-bending
- same general pantheon

Traffic between them has been complex but achievable for a good long period of time - so like very distant continents, semi-legendary lands that few have actually been to and many disbelieve exist.

Common across them all will be relics and ruins of the 'high tide' of the lizard imperium - portals within those ruins will be the easiest means for the unofficial travel of adventurers.

Rapidly filling out worlds

With whole other worlds to play with, I think batching some off-the-shelf ideas by theme might be good to start.

Nemas - all of the desert tropes, harsh, high entropy system of sandstorms burying and uncovering the past - al Qadim, John Carter, Ultraviolet Grasslands, Painted Wastelands, Nagash-type undead, Skorne of Iron Kingdoms.

Favens - giants and bigger dinosaurs - stranger jungles, fungal, seas and swamps - highly contested, previous inhabitants have not gone quietly - Lustria, Thousand Thousand Islands, Yoon Suin, Moonsoon. The core world already has deep, hot jungles in the abyssal dry sea - some dinosaurs already live there. Perhaps dinosaurs are an invasive clade here that has thrived?

Binding worlds together

To pull all this together I need some coherent overlays to allow them to form a connected scale-and-planet setting. Thematically this is how an empire falls apart in three bits:
- on Nemas, the fading remnants of the old ways persist amid the shifting sands and along with the remnants of others
- on Corrus, the rump empire continues, retrenched to the deep abyss - here mammals contest them
- on Favens, invigorated but chaotic - the lizardfolk thrive but have slipped the yoke of empire and all sorts of polities are active

The driver for all lizardfolk is heat - such as the sun; Favens was the original homeworld of the lizardfolk, the thick atmosphere retaining the dimmer sunlight; Corrus is where they found a balance of heat and space, Nemas borders too hot, but the solar cults thrive here. Nemas has more weird arcano-tech, Favens has mutants and war-beasts plus the original homelands of the lizards.

Culturally Nemas is a split between true believer solar cultists who are willing to suffer for proximity to the sun, the remnants of the colonial lords and their holdings and a strong culture of xeno-arcanists who pore over the magical secrets of the ruins and ancient cultures here. The other antique cultures also persist - insects, trilobites, liches of all sorts.

Favens is dominated by strong and highly splintered culture - many subspecies of lizardfolk, serpentfolk, grippli - it is as Africa to humans, the font of diversity, many languages and peoples, along with scalykind analogs of giants, dwarves, etc. With dinosaurs and giants thriving, settlements are clustered in defensible positions with large parts of the world 'wild'.

We also have multiple spiritual poles - on Nemas, closest to the heat of the sun, it is the promised land. On Corrus, there are the most diverse of all the cults with many of the non-solar heat-worshippers present as well as the largest realm with the old orthodox solar religion as state religion. On Favens there are the sacred origin sites and a plethora of traditionalist sects and non-solar cults as well as the current reformed heat-cult.

Wrap-up

Falling back on my 'Azgaars' factors of culture, nation, biome and religion we have more or less dinged all of these giving us a decent enough framework to work within. The same generic encounter table combined with the planet-appropriate filters would allow different-but-coherent encounters to be generated for those other worlds. With more time, tailored encounter tables would be good to have but until it is clear that planet-hopping is imminent I am going to focus prep elsewhere.

For locations, I will do the sweep up of sources mentioned above, note a dozen or so interesting ones for each worlds and then use that as the structure to build around.

Together those would give locations and encounters specific to the worlds and then I can drop the players into some sort of coherent sandbox should they manage to find an old interplanetary portal. Which can also be phrased as "I now have license to drop functional interplanetary portals into the campaign" because I can catch them on the other side should they choose to step through.

Campaign Spin-Up X - Back of the Envelope Campaign Planning

I wrote about "rebooting a campaign with 2d20 Conan" - spinning up a new campaign in the Scaled Lands.

In the grand tradition of getting going by making promises and getting yourself deadlines I poked a list of players and then was committed to at least running something. Shortly after I had a flight for work so that was me stuck in a place with nothing else to do so I worked up the guts of what I needed on the back of an envelope.

Altogether this serves as a nice illustration of constraint breeding creativity. This world had been the campaign where I 'applied the OSR' after discovering all the blogs and wisdom, I had put a lot of thought into it pre-pandemic, including using it for NaNoWriMo, but I had none of that with me when I did this.

First I blocked out things I felt I needed to prep, to declutter my brain and help corral my thoughts into some kind of order. Up in a corner I stuck a to-do list of tasks as I thought of them, again to note and refocus.

Then I started properly thinking of the immediate recent history - the ramp-in to the start. I thought of the forces at play to give factions kicking around, recalled those that I remembered from before, gave names to some that had just existed as 'the infernal fire cult' before.

I thought through what stuff I wanted to see, what were the various secrets for the players to find and what kind of big interesting things could they get up to.

With Yaksha's hexfill method recently in mind, I wrote a d10/d4 encounter table - 10 factions likely to be found out and about and four examples for each.

One of the key reasons I wanted to return to the Scaled Lands is that I hand some wonderful art for the place commissioned from Evlyn Moreau and I never got to use even half of it before the old campaign collapsed. I had a think through how to use that art for best fun.

August Blog Bandwagon: Setting Pitch for the Lizard Kingdom Deeps

tl:dr; I wanna run an explo campaign because I have a map too cool to never see the light of day.

This is bandwagoning in after The Foot of Blue Mountain Setting Post! Talking About the Spokelands and Draw the Rest of the Owlbear Setting Pitch for the Tower Lands, seasoned with some of Matt Colvilles campaign pitch formatting.

The Pretentious Doc / Region Info / Pitch:

The Lizardfolk built a great empire, said to encompass most of the world. It is said they ventured forth from the steaming depths of the land that lies deep below the levels of the sea. Noone is sure because for centuries they have been walled in behind the dragons who lair along their borders. The dragons have gone, who knows for how long before the probing of a brave or foolhardy few revealed the borders were now passable.

Art by Evlyn Moreau

Tales come back, of dwarfholds conquered and abandoned, of cities of the lizardfolk consumed by the jungles, of towering walls to keep away titanic lizards, of great fish drawn from oceans beneath the earth, of impossible flying creatures that soar the abyssal forests.

The more learned say that something has happened, a shift among the lizardfolk, that has them abandon their old borderlands.

Now adventurers, both crown sponsored and freelance, venture forth to see gold and glory is now free for the taking.

The Player Doc / Player Buy-in

Sandbox Adventure in a Mysterious Jungle Empire

Summary of campaign style: Exploration, Mystery, Deep Time, Factions, Ruins

The scaled-lands are the high-standing border lands between the lands you come from and the deep abyssal basin where the lizardfolk dwell

Blank basin map by Evlyn Moreau

Mechanically this would be an large roster of players, run when there are at least three, aiming to be as close to episodic 'ending back at base' as possible.

Ruleset - would love to try Shadowdark, could go with 5e with gritty realism if that is what people prefer.

Shop Talk
Combat: Medium
Roleplay: High
Travel: High
Starting Level: 1

This is a resurrection of old campaign material - but less a rework of the setting and more a repositioning of the start point to put the players in the thick of it directly. This is me slamming the levers over and going straight to the good stuff - the deep abyss...

I did a bunch of work in this setting, first setting up the original Lizard Kings game which flared out ~ 5 years ago and culminating in a NaNoWriMo novel draft in November 2019. I got art including maps done for this by OSR luminary Evlyn Moreau. Part of the motivation for all this is to finally be able to bring out the magnificent map she did of the lizardfolk imperial core - the completed version of the structural form above.

Art by Evlyn Moreau

Despite all this world-building, one thing I would love to deploy kicking this off would be Beak, Feather + Bone to collaboratively build a starting city.

Open systems and open table gaming

tl;dr: some 'I roll perception' is fine when open gaming with mixed cultures and generations where the shared references might be fewer than in beforetimes.

A thing I like to encourage at my tables is 'describe what you are doing don't just roll the ability.' This is one of the tenets of old-school play that I think particularly worthy - maximising the opportunity of us being a bunch of creative humans around a (perhaps virtual) table.

But for this to work, either the DM has to go into high detail for each new environment or the table has a strong 'open system' of shared cultural references - otherwise nothing can be assumed and the DM has to go to tedious length to cover all the detail.

So what does this mean for open table gaming? What does this mean for gaming with mixed generations? With mixed cultures? What do you do when you cannot assume any shared cultural touchstones?

d6 solar cults of the Scaledlands

For tis the Solstice let us talk about the sun. In honour of the Baleful Glare of the Hateful Day-star we have d6 Solar Cults of Sholtipec.

1. Children of the Solar Queen - build ever higher, seek the life giving heat. Great spires, temples, mirror-dish topped ziggurats, all to gather and concentrate the glorious rays

Once national cult of the lizard imperium, now supplanted by a cult of elemental fire. Remnants can be found in the old high-land strongholds left behind in the great retreat.

Dancer of the Solar Queen by Evlyn Moreau

2. Withering Sun - all exists at the permission of the sun, all decays, withers, collapses beneath the weight of the suns mighty gaze - so hasten that decay, tear down all that offends the suns gaze that the new brighter realm be born

Typically followed by natives of the scaled lands from before the lizardfolk came. Resurgent since great retreat. Some renegade red dragon cultists have started venerating the Withering Sun alongside their draconic patron.

3. Devouring Sun - weakness is anathema, contest for space in the light of the sun through strength of arms. All the suns light falls upon is the rightful domain of her faithful. Bring all to her faith, destroy those who fail to see the light.

Mostly followed by human cultists from the desert world nearer the sun. To the faithful, a unifying force that sustained them against tides of darkness, to others, a scourge.

4. Scouring Sun - ascetics, do more with less, adversity is the crucible for the spirit, be kind for we are all one another can rely on, there is no help coming under the baleful glare of the devouring sun

Rare, mostly found within odd planetary wanderers, refugees from the Devourers and mystics.

5. Nourishing Sun - sunlight brings growth, her moods mark the seasons, through her generosity we have the plants that feed us, the light for our days. Steward her bounty, tend to her garden, pass on her gifts to those that come after you

Most popular of the local variants, followed by much of the peasantry

6. Searing Sun - simplicity is best, exposure yourself to the light of the sun, cleanse your soul beneath its gaze, live in the wilds, reject caverns and roofs.

Part of the pantheon together with Grandfather Crocodile and the spirits of nature followed by the local saurial and lizardfolk population in the once-imperial lands.

Bonus: The Staircase to the Sun - the huge artefact at the heart of the city of the same name, onceo known as the Labyrinth between Worlds. A stolen dwarven solar forge at its heart drew power from the sun to open gates between worlds then over time something in the complex of artefact, site and spells began to open more portals to places where the sun was shining on other worlds - first at night and then more and more until the sun always shone within the Staircase. The different shades of light from the daylight of different worlds mixes to make day and night within sight of the great tower of the Staircase an eternal glorious dawn. As the grip of the Children of the Sun and the lizard imperium has loosened of late, more and more of the other solar cults have been drawn to the city to contest posession of this mighty artefact.

Campaign spin up II: applying the OSR

tl;dr: how I crushed the time to spin up a campaign setting by bulking out a skeleton of inspiration with the best of OSR random generation tables.

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

Retrospective of campaigns run - what worked, what did not

I saw a retrospective on a persons gaming (Failing Better on Against the Wicked City) and decided to tot up all the gaming I have been involved in over the years. The big thing I noticed here was there was quite a lot of gaps between games that actually gets accounted for by flare-outs, campaigns that never got off the grounds even after eating quite a lot of time in some cases. I will dig into the flare-outs and what went wrong in another post, but first - the great victories, the glorious campaigns run.

I guesstimated the hours spent running for the different campaigns to get an idea of how long all the campaigns ended up being at the table. This was surprising to me, I had felt some of them to be a lot longer than others but that may just have been prep time I sank into them vs how much actual play time happened.

City building: Reasons strangers come to Sholtipec

Strangers come to Sholtipec to seek many things. The abandoned parts of the city have been un-evenly gleaned and the active core still produces crafts and answers that can be found nowhere else. Still an administrative centre within the Scaledlands, the ways lead from the dragon cult-cities back to Threshold and the deep homelands.

I built this table to have a skew by using d6+d12 in place of 3d6. This makes the 6-12 block equally probable among themselves to allow equal weight to the main activities of the city. The tails on either side are then reflecting the stranger aspects of the city.

d6+d12	Things to seek in Sholtipec
2	Answers from the Great Library
3	Military assistance (official or mercenary)
4	Gemwork
5	Decisions and warrants from the Temples
6	New intoxicants from the Hives (dusts, honeys or bugs)
7	Eel delicacies from Crystal Ponds
8	Cult affirmation for deeds or sacrifices
9	Sage suppositions from Drumspires
10	Space for dwelling/activities
11	Fuel, heat
12	Fashion, garments
13	Exoteric equipment
14	Reagents & ingredients
15	Information or intelligence
16	Art, culture or performers
17	Vengeance, assassins
18	Magic crafts (made in Drumspires or dug from Rooftops)

The purpose of this table serves both as a motivator for anyone encountered on the street - either as a stranger, this is why they have come, or as a local this is the aspect of the city they are involved in. Similarly for buildings, it can give a tag to the activity within; though for an out-of-district result, this can be assumed to mean that some non-normal activites are dominant at this place just now.

City building: aspects of Sholtipec

Building the centre-piece city of my last campaign, I tried to spend time prepping the toolkit instead of creating specific detail; for instance in the first post on the city we saw what the population make up was. Now we will look at building generation tools.

A lot of this was seeded by the Infinigrad suburb generation tools on Lizardman Diaries but I felt I needed to cook up a few more specific tables to help specific more closely what I wanted.

For background the city, Sholtipec, is old; first growing up around the Great Library, then becoming a bastion of the Lizards Empire after they crushed the Gray invasion force nearby. Buildings and populations reflect all those epochs through to the current long, slow depopulation and retrenchment. So while the generalised chaos and atmosphere of the city can use the Infinigrad generators, beneath that I wanted an original epoch of the building.

So a given building in the city would roll a d10:

d10	Epoch	Building Aspect
1	Ancient	Eldritch carvings, non-euclidian spaces, illithid-inspired
2	Elder	Stilted, tree-dwellings, organically grown, magically mutated
3-4	High Lizard	Fortifications, neuva-aztec; insulated buildings
5-7	Dragon Era	Multi-racial build-outs; different sizes; big dragon-sized
8-10	Late	Repurposed buildings

This would give me a start point for who built the building, replacing the 'raceoid' originators from Infinigrad and then allowing me to use the rest of those generators more or less as is.

d10 Things the lizardfolk aristocrats are in a twist about

d10 Things the Lizard Aristos are in a twist about this week

1. That someone has bred bees to produce something indistinguishable from moon bee imperial jelly! But the rituals!
2. The dragon gods are thirsty and someone drank the holy offering beer!
3. The war in the East has disrupted trade and the price of scale wax has skyrocketed
4. Cold snap. Everyone slow and grumpy.
5. Imitation gold scale paint now indistinguishable from the real thing. Poor people are wearing it! Existing artful designs now worthless for flaunting.
6. Heirs of two rival castes discovered sharing a sunning stone. Scandalous!
7. The flies taste different since Tuesday. Not bad, per se. But different. And different is bad.
8. Those damned humans left corpses in the swamp. Again. The value of the swampedge property is plummeting.
9. Lady Ysscale is holding a party, but failed to provide adequate frog legs. Some of the guests left hungry.
10. How is green this season's colour? The common lizards are green. It is all because Lord Twiss married that jumped-up serving lizard, and no everyone is slumming it with green scalepaint.

With thanks to: ArkosDawn, Thriftomancer, Vance, Spekkio, stm, MerlynZero, mtb-za

Quick City Generation Resources

tl:dr; there is a wealth of city building resources, I describe two approaches I use to save heartache as a DM.

I find that published books tend to be somewhat 'build up from map' which I used to do myself; identify every building, roll up the inhabitants. I used to do this but found that players blew through town without interacting with a large fraction of the prepared work and as time became constrained by life, I stopped.

More recently I use thematic generators, that give me a broad sense of how the city works then I can ad-lib from there as needed.

My go-to fast town building is Stupidly Quick City-Building from r/DNDBehindTheScreen coupled with steps 3 & 4 from creating fantasy villages, towns and cities to get the layout.

For more detail I have used the truly awesome in Corpathium from Last Gasp Grimoire.

Sholtipec (2019 campaign) was created using In Corpathium to give a framework then the outcomes of the generator translated into setting appropriate issues. E.g. fungal infestations were pushed towards being encroachment of the jungle, locations were swapped around for dramatic license (move the mysterious quarter away from beside the main gate.

Sholtipec ended up having a page per district with a selection of major locations that could be located on the map as needed and a span of emergent neighbourhood behaviour that came from those tables. Medium work, very 'guided by the dice'.

Thenya (2020) was created using Azgaars Fantasy Map Generator then working up from that using suburb generators for Infinigrad, the Endless City to put some flavour descriptors on each of them. This was modified using a tweaked set of tables for inhabitants to make a menagerie world - adding d50 fantasy races from Skerples into the Infinigrad raceoid mix.

Thenya ended up having a single page with a section per neighbourhood for major descriptors and detailed handled elsewhere - events and locations were referenced in the session play sheets (e.g. a tavern name and the episode number on the city sheet). NPCs were all aggregated to a cast list with some descriptors.

I find that broad scene setting works better for me than detailed building-by-building mapping in an effort/reward sense. I can only admire Bearded Devils mapping dedication but for me, more work at the macro level (who is likely to be in a district, what is the district like) has help to create more memorable character for the city as the streets tell the story without the players needing to interact with the specific buildings and their inhabitants.

The Shifting Sand Tower from Towers of Krshal

Towers of Krshal turned up - had it printed from Lulu and read it avidly.

To test run the tables I set out with the tower generator to see what I could create as a spare tower for Sholtipec

Following down through the tables give me an unexpected 17m tall single story tower with an accessible roof. Relatively ordinary round, stone walls, inhabited by ordinary townsfolk and with 2 levels of basement.

So what have we here?

First off accessible roof means that we can somehow traverse the whole tower - obviously it has a dangerous spiral stair running up the interior of the walls. Why one ludicrously tall single room - because there is something suspended from the ceiling in it. An orrery or difference engine, maybe a hive or other thing the inhabitants or tending. This place is not a temple, or cult, whatever the inhabitants are up to it is odd but secular.

I think we have a pendulum based seering engine here - with the apparatus hanging in webs and chains from the top of the tower; its progress across the floor of the room dictating the activities of the inhabitants.

The apparatus is a complex sand cascade, with many colours of sand being fed into the top of the apparatus and their paths through the structure modified by the tick of the pendulum and the shifting of its parts. The blends of the sand, the intensity of the colours and where it lands on the floors provide weather forecasts, crop timings, and other 'almanac' factors that guide the inhabitants throughout there lives.

The basement is filled with all of the reference books.

Some of the reference books have never been opened in the life time of the current inhabitants; some reservoirs of sand have never flowed in all that time. Some streams are beginning to turn up now; flecks of dark bone, greenish metal. None of the inhabitants know what this means and have found no references in the books of the first cellar. They have not yet ventured into the locked second cellar yet, noone has since the last invasion from beyond the ocean.

Sholtipec of the Scaledlands - who lives there?

The Scaledlands are a melange of all sorts of creatures; more or less living in harmony under the Pax Saurus of the Lizards. To start filling in the cities of the setting, first we want to know who lives there.

From the DMG3.5 (pp139) we take the integrated community ratios and have:

37%	Lizardfolk
20%	Humanoids (incl. humans, goliaths, tabaxi, etc.)
18%	Goblinoids (incl. orcs, goblins, bugbears, etc.)
10%	Dragonkin
7%	Kobolds
5%	Half-dragons
3%	Planar, other

The dragonkin are the big, "distant cousin to dragons" from Monsters of Faerun (pp44), half-dragons are the close descendants using the template from the Monster Manual (pp146). The big categories of lizardfolk, humanoids and goblinoids cover multiple races but for now this is our starting table.