Gygax 75: wrap-up & suggestions

Looking back on this challenge as a whole - the intention was to see if it worked as a set up for a Spelljamming campaign, short answer, yes if a little inefficiently. It was interesting to use a workflow that is not my habitual one to try something different. I am a big fan of 'learn the rule so you know when to break them'.

One thing I found about the challenge is the 'straight through, expand outwards' approach is not my usual one and works less well for me. I typically build a world in broad strokes, then zoom in, see what the implications are, elaborate, zoom in again, etc. Things like - what is in the Dungeon, why do we care (week 3) only became clear after the city was created (week 4) and the big hook for the whole campaign (week 1) seemed weak until well into week 4. I found myself iterating back around on the whys and what must therefore be in any given place. Not a dreadful burden but definitely, this is not the way I normally like to work.

Weeks 2, 4 and 5 were fine, the broader world work was stable for me. Week 1 - the theme of the campaign and how to pitch it and week 3 - what is in the dungeon changed somewhat.

Gygax 75: The Wider World (Week 5)

The brief for this final week of campaign-building is to pick at least three of many prompts to flesh out the wider world beyond the hex-map of Week 2. Of the multiple potential tasks to be picked we went with three:
- Other worlds and planes accessible from the setting
- Expanded locations around the hex-map
- rival adventuring party

First task we filled out some more on the other worlds of the system; see these links for background on the system and its inhabitants.

First Forge, the mercury sized discworld right up by the sun - here we have Fire Giants who we figured are a strange evolutionary offshoot - like Tasmania but for Fire Giants. They live almost entirely on minerals compared to most Fire Giants that can eat minerals but mostly eat meat. Hence they are scalier and tougher, creak as they move except at their primary joints - shoulder for a smith, etc. Their dialect is strange and their ettiquette is bizarre and insular after so much time on their own on a relatively small world.

Next, on Pond, the tiny water world that is the elven playground, this is a frivolous place, with a portal to the feywild, and the whole world is treated as a combination of resort and theme-park ride. If the inhabitants got more serious, they could aspire to dissolute. A deeply unhappy Elven Imperial Navy station occupies the moon in orbit. It is a place you get sent if you have deeply angered your superiors but not *actually* committed an offense sufficient to be imprisoned or tossed out of the Navy. A handful of bitter officers and resentful sailors crew the base and its ships.

We will go into Skyforest, our airworld in more detail later.

The Deep, our giant primeval ocean world keeps its secrets so tightly we shall not mention them here. People will not speak of this place to outsiders, either to protect it from hunters or to starve rival hunters of information.

The dragons of Smoulder also have been outlined in the world creation - between warlordism among the reds and a merchant republic among the golds they keep themselves occupied apart from attacking anything that comes into their atmosphere.

Lastly we have our enormous frozen water discworld of Ice-disc, where the kuo-toa dwell. We focus some more on their wizards who dominate society. They have a philosophy of magic of making unexpectedly powerful but specific magic items; such as a ring of invisibility that makes your image appear on the other side of your most dangerous foe. They have deeply esoteric tastes and values meaning it can be hard to establish a price if you can open trade with them. They can also be found cruising the sphere conducting weird experiments for their own inscrutable reasons - much more widely spread than previously thought.

Gygax 75: The Town (Week 4)

In the boles of four massive trees linked by bridges is found the town of Rendezvous. Dwellings and businesses are built along the centre of the great tree limbs, with walkways running vertiginously along the outer edges of the branches. The nicer neighbourhoods have hand rails or at least nets below. Bridges span between the limbs with businesses being in the busier sections closer to the trunk and dwellings being further out along the limbs. The dwellings tend to have most of their living space outside on broad verandas with smaller weather-protected cores. Lots of things are stored suspended beneath dwellings.

City plan w/ branches & bridges

Gygax 75: The Dungeon (Week 3)

For the challenge, the dungeon is supposed to be the place where real adventure begins. The prompts reflect a quite specific vision for setting things up but are helpful to get things started, then it runs itself.

For our dungeon, we delve into a Temple of the Boring Beetles - our dwarf analogue on this world. The whole dungeon is carved into the trunk of one of the giant trees. The entrance is carved elaborately, an optical illusion that distracts from the chute within. Going with archetypes for dwarves, this is both a functional place the beetles used and a death-trap for strangers. Their optical-illusion carvings will be a feature.

The guide instructs us to make some rolls to find the number of themes we are dealing with. There was a little discussion and iteration but the themes we finally settled on were:
Theme 1 - the abandoned outer halls (intruders, things that settled in a ruin)
Theme 2 - the last stand of the boring beetle cult (cultists)
Theme 3 - the corrupted sanctum (spiders, undead)

The treasure hoard at the bottom of this is mostly fine crafted wooden objet d'art and the library. The spider-vampire now in residence hoards knowledge, gathered some themselves and then invaded and took over the lower levels to secure the temples library.

Gygax 75: The Map Around the Dungeon (Week 2)

In principle, this is to set up the area around the dungeon that is to be the campaign start point. In our particular run through of the exercise, first we must choose a world. We decided to go with a site on world 3 - tropical air world and have it be part of the great tree bank. This is a huge, floating forest, canopy towards the sun, roots pointed outsystem in the air disc-world. We are running with an 'early phase sphere' theme so we are going to see how far we can get with just insects, plants and funghi on our starting world; no reptiles, dinosaurs, mammals yet. Insects dominate life here.

I searched up and printed off a hex-grid and together with the in-house testing team marked out where the elements identified in the challenge guide needed to be. This is the working version, the full-colour fancy version is below.

This is a place of difficult terrain - a labyrinth of broad tree branches that interconnect indirectly and lead to lots of switch-backing on a journey from place to place or courageous leaps or aerial steeds. The hex-scales are 1 mile but travel times will be longer but a given hex will also be 'deeper' with more stuff per hex being theoretically possible. Things could also be closer together than crow-flies distance might allow since direct paths may not be possible.

Gygax 75: Intro, Index & Setting

Having seen many people do Gygax75 - or more specifically having seen a bunch of people start and stall-out I took this as a challenge to see just how hard a world-building effort it is.

Origins

Dragons Never Forget starts it all off with a discovery: The Gygax ’75 Challenge: Introduction. DIY & Dragons brought it to my attention and collates a bunch of peoples attempts

For my attempt I printed off Ray Otus of Viridian Scroll free pdf version of Gygax75 on itch.io.

So the schedule of this will be
0. Introduction & Index (this post)
1. The Setting of the Campaign
2. The Map Around the Dungeon
3. The Dungeon
4. The Dungeon Level 2
5. The Dungeon Level 3
6. The Local Town and All the Trouble
7. The World Plan
8. Conclusion & Links to Other Challengers

My main theme for this will be adapting it to setting up a Spelljammer campaign. I have gotten tagged into a running a campaign once Spelljammer comes out so I need some sort of backdrop for it. This is not starting from nothing, but from a randomly generated Spelljammer crystal sphere that was rolled up using the rules in the boxed set.