The Campaign Builder's Guild

Johnn Four of roleplayingtips.com swears by Milenix's Myinfo.  http://www.milenix.com/

I haven't yet sprung for that one, but it's been on my list for a while.  In the meantime, I've been using MS Binder, which comes with Office.  You have to kind of hunt for it, though; it's not part of the default installation options.  It's a little clunky, but it does allow you to keep several related documents together and switch between them relatively quickly.  I generally keep several spreadsheets and Word docs, and a database if necessary.

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Midgardsormr is a Saxonized version of the Midgaard Serpent of Norse mythology.  I have an affinity for all of the Great Worms: Oroborus, Tiamat, the Ketos (or Cetus) of Greek mythology, Leviathan.

I participated in some development discussion on Fudge many years ago, and I've used it from time to time since then. If you'd like to take a look at how a psi system might look with Fudge rules, take a look here:  http://www.bryanray.name/sic/psionics.htm (Please forgive the MS Frontpage theme--I was young and dumb.)

I took what I liked from White Wolf's Mage and filtered it through a typical soft sci-fi psionics concept. It's too bad I never actually got to run that game.  Someday, perhaps.

A system like that could be made a lot more rigid to keep powergamers under control, or even relaxed a bit for more freeform games.  I could see doing something similar for super powers or magic or a number of other things.  The trouble with Fudge is that it takes a lot of work up front by the GM to set up the system, but its advantages are its immense flexibility and its ease of play for new players.

Anyway, if you want any clarification, feel free to ask.

The obvious places to look for inspiration are Europe from around 450 to 800 A.D, following the fall of Rome, and the Warring States Era in Chinese history, following the decline of the Eastern Zhou Dynasty.

Note that in both of those cases, although the tremendous political vacuum resulted in a great deal of social unrest, there was also much cultural advancement that accompanied it.  Old power structures tend to preserve the status quo, stifling innovation and cultural advance.  In the absence of such authority, people develop new technologies and philosophies rapidly in order to cope with circumstances.

To be more specific, it took the end of Roman hegemony to enable advances in mill and plow technology.  Prior to that, manual labor was done by slaves; there was little incentive to develop new technologies to make things easier.  With the collapse of the economy and government that made slavery efficient, the patricians and educated plebes found themselves forced to participate in agriculture.  Being Romans, they applied that knack for engineering that had previously been used almost exclusively for warfare and commerce and applied it instead to the new challenges they faced.

In China, the most fertile period of philosophical growth was near the end of the Warring States period.  The Hundred Schools began with Confucius at around 500 B.C. and ended with the death of the Qin Emperor in 206 B.C, shortly after which point Confucianism became the official doctrine of the Empire, a circumstance that lasted until 1905 A.D.: about 2,000 years of philosophical stasis due to the presence of a powerful authoritarian structure.

So, to reiterate my point, although life will be hard and vicious, there may be places where technology and culture are flourishing.

What about ICE's Sea Law?  It's been a long time since I read it, but they were usually pretty good about publishing consistent and detailed rules for things like that.  I'd dig it out and see, but I'm pretty sure my copy is boxed up in storage right now.

I don't know that you necessarily want to build in mechanical penalties, but maybe roleplaying ones.  I could see a mage with this kind of power slowly becoming more sociopathic as they begin to shed the limitations of mere mortal existence.  If you're a Stargate SG-1 fan, something like what happened to Daniel Jackson when Apophis' son gave him a taste of what it would be like to have the knowledge of the Goa'uld.  

I'll reflect on the other questions for a while and post if I come up with anything promising.

I like that notion.  Here's what I would do with it:  The goblin takes the item somewhere else where he can get paid something close to its actual value.  He now has more money than his entire tribe would be likely to see in his entire lifetime, so he attempts to retire as an aristocrat.  

Of course, a goblin aristocrat doesn't go over so well, and although he's clever, he might not be bright enough to properly defend his new wealth.  Within months, he's squandered much of his wealth and had the rest either stolen or swindled away.  Now he's got tremendous debt on a manor house he can no longer afford to keep up, and he lays all the blame for his troubles at the feet of the PCs.  

And now it's even become an object lesson about how to treat a windfall of cash.  Lottery winners beware!

Quote from: AllWillFall2MeThe Paths are The Path of Intellect and the Path of Will. The followers of the path of Intellect, known as wizards, use Int as their modifier. Followers of Will, or sorcerors, use Cha.

The terminology is a bit confusing.  If I were a follower of the path of Will, I'd expect to use my Willpower attribute for casting.  I never quite understood why sorcerers used Cha to start with, though.  

I kind of like how the epic mage is transformed by the powers he wields: trading his humanity for his power.  I wonder if you could sort of foreshadow that with some of the powers they gain as they rise through the lower levels.  

Quote from: AllWillFall2MeA Magus of Will has refined his will to achieve the impossible on a day to day basis. He replaces his intelligence modifier with Charisma to determine his mana pool.

This concerns me a little bit.  There is some benefit to the initiate of Will increasing Int, but Cha is likely to be much higher.  So at 18th level, a Magus of Will can potentially gain a LOT of mana, which seems stronger than the Magus of Intellect's bonus to charisma and initiative checks.

Another bit of spin on Sararken: Perhaps heat is a common form of punishment.  Criminals might be branded for minor crimes or staked out in the sun to die of exposure for major crimes.  The sun is a source of light, and it illuminates the truth.  Those who are not shaded by their righteousness will be scorched and withered by its heat.  

I also live in an area with harsh and dry summers, so it's easy to imagine the "dark side," so to speak, of the season.

It depends on where you want to start from.  If I am building an entire world at once, I start with the geology: where are the continental plates?  How do those form the mountains?  Where do the rivers run?  Then I move on to the climate: where will the dry and wet lands wind up, based on latitude and relation to the mountains?

Sometimes, though, politics drive the map.  My current project, Imperial Vendria, started with the political details, and I had to base my map on the descriptions I'd already written.  For that one, I started with a very rough sketch of where each nation would be and the features I had specified for them, then I drew in a rough coastline and sketched in the mountains and rivers, again based on my descriptions.  From there I was able to place the cities and other features reasonably, although my climates are not realistic.

The sketch then turned into the final map: http://www.bryanray.name/queen/img/map.png (warning: enormous image!)

That's not an entire world, of course.  It's just one continent; the rest of the world doesn't matter to the game, so there was little reason to detail it.  

If you want to really dive into the mapmaking, cruise by the Cartographers' Guild and ask some questions there.  You'll get far more advice than you could ever use!

Hello, everyone!

I am an immigrant from The Cartographers' Guild.  I finally decided to make my way over here and perhaps glean some tips as I continue to develop my campaign worlds.  I don't know how much I'll contribute yet, but I'll at least poke my head in to a few threads now and again.

-Gaming systems I use: Anything that seems interesting.  At the moment, my system of choice is the one that drives Unknown Armies.  I've modified it to run a low-fantasy play-by-post campaign currently in hiatus.  I'm also playing in an Alternity Star*Drive game and trying to get into a play-by-post Traveller game.

General gaming history: Like a lot of people my age, I started playing in junior high school and have never really stopped.  I cut my teeth on Rolemaster, of all things, moved on to some Palladium games--Rifts and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, to be specific, and then branched out into a few other systems.

Personal likes and dislikes: I enjoy character-driven games with a lot of cultural detail.  I dislike killing monsters and taking their stuff for it's own sake, but if it's the only way I can get a game, I'll put up with it.  I detest catching myself doing the things that annoy me; I suppose that drives me to constantly improve, though.

Strengths and weaknesses in game design: I am very good at creating plausible cultural constructions and finding ways to fit unlikely details together.  I tend to overcomplicate plots, though.  I realized I had a problem when I ran six consecutive adventures in which the party failed because they'd been betrayed.  My game was starting to resemble the TV show Alias--even I had a hard time figuring out which side some of the NPCs were on.

Published settings I have used/like: I tend to avoid published settings because they come with too much baggage.  When a world has a canon, I feel constricted in what I can do with it because I know my players will have expectations.  I ran a game in the Star Wars universe between A New Hope and Empire Strikes Back that went fairly well, but I used a military framing mechanism to keep the PCs from creating continuity problems.  Actually, I occasionally used the PCs to explain away continuity problems in the original story, such as the peculiar lack of Star Destroyers at the Battle of Yavin.

Major influences on my world-building: European history, Tolkien (naturally).  I can't think of other major influences, but I know they're there, influencing everything I write.

I have three campaign websites up right now: My old Rifts campaigns from 1993-1998, a Fudge medium-hard science-fiction game, and The Queen of Air & Darkness, a low-fantasy game driven by Unknown Armies rules.  I've grown a lot as a GM and as a world-builder (not to mention web designer) since my Rifts days; I hope that shows in the web sites.

Anyway, I look forward to getting to know all of you, and I hope I have something to contribute!