bruceb

On further consideration it strikes me that the campaign to save the dwarves is one that would do well begun with the PCs at level 8-10. I've been wanting one like that to get a better feel for some higher level play, and it would really open up the range of immediately available challenges.

And courtesy of various friends, here's a possible True20 campaign for the setting I spun up this evening.

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The PCs start at low level (1st, 3rd, something like that) as part of an expedition doing the scutwork of updating charts of previously explored regions. They might be in a seaship or a skyship (of course there are skyships, don't be silly), and their target area is the North Pacific and the coastal part of the continent that used to be called North America. It's known that particularly strange and evil creatures live in the ruins and transformed wild lands - mind flayers and other aberration races, in fact - so surveying is expected to be a matter of looking from a safe distance and gathering what information one can.

Imagine the expedition's collective surprise when it turns out there are others there, too.

Dwarves (and maybe other delving races) have moved in, or been banished there; anyway, here they are, clinging to their defenses in the face of aberration assaults. Boy are they glad to get some help.

From there the campaign combines dungeon crawling, outdoors adventure, and social fun. The PCs are assigned to the dwarf support mission on an ongoing basis. They'll argue their needs and case before officials, and eventually at the imperial court itself. They'll fight, and in time they'll lead. They'll invent and improvise. They will sometimes face tragic defeats, and sometimes heroic victories. In the end, they will be decisive in deciding whether this part of the world can be reclaimed from the aberrations.

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Color me happy.

I have sci-fantasy of the old schools on my mind the way maliszew has sword-and-sorcery pulp fantasy on his. I have this recurring desire to do something in the style of Asian historically inspired adventure as I knew it before discovering modern Chinese film adventure genres in the early '90s - something where Kurosawa and Shogun and perhaps Hughart are the touchstones, that is. This is a collection of scattered impulses that would likely work with True20.

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In the old days there were many kinds of true people, all over the world. In the very old days, they all kept their promises to the gods and spirits, performing the proper sacrifices and living lives in accordance with the spirits' principles. But humanity prospered, and prosperity always tempts those who have it to think that it's all because of their own efforts, and gradually almost everybody stopped making the sacrifices, never mind living virtuously.

Then came the day when the second sun rose.

Scholars like to argue about whether the yellow sun or the blue one came first. It doesn't really matter. What does matter is that the two suns fought, and Amaterasu, goddess of the original sun (whichever it was), died in the struggle. Her brother Tsukuyomi, the god of the moon, joined the fray, and he died as well. It took many of the greatest gods and spirits all banded together to defeat the intruder and reduce the new sun to the same status as the old one now that Amaterasu was dead. Both of them, and the moon as well, became purely natural things, uninhabited by any god or spirit.

The surviving gods and spirits who had served Amaterasu were greatly weakened, and could no longer protect the whole world. For their own sake, and to express gratitude toward the only people who'd remained faithful through tempting times, they concentrated on the beloved Home Islands. The rest of the world was left open to the powers beyond, and they came in to fill the void.

There are no good accounts of what happened outside our spiritual mantle, or even how long the darkest time lasted. The gods and spirits don't count time as we do, and with their protection wrapped around us so tightly, we became a little timeless as well. Suffice it to say that it was long enough for us for shed the trappings of the old age and rebuild in a manner suitable for our new circumstances...and long enough for every human being elsewhere to perish horribly. If any of our cousins in humanity survived elsewhere, we've never heard from them, nor found them in any of the great searching that began as the darkness weakened.

Ravening spirits and monsters from realms we don't know swept away not just humanity, but many kinds of beasts and plants, too. They brought with them things from their old homes to replace what they'd destroyed. Close up to the Home Islands, some echo of our spiritual mantle kept the very worst at bay, but the farther you go from our homeland, the nastier and stranger things become. Some sages point out that the roundness of our world is a blessing because it set a limit to how far away something can be from us and still be on the ground; if the world were flat and went on and on, there'd be no limit to the horrors possible.

In any event, in time the invasion tide did ebb. Some ambitious spirits resettled the dead suns and moon, and their illumination helped. Many other things did too, but this is not an academy of advanced scholarly arts, so we'll skip them for now. There finally came a day when our protectors could open the mantle so that we could travel into the surrounding world again without exposing our home to the greatest dangers. Now we travel to explore, to fight the evils as we can, and to reclaim the world one pace's worth of ground at a time. We have been faithful since the beginning. How could we fail now?

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The specific trigger for this was thinking of Shogun with John Blackthorne and the other Europeans as drow. That led to The Years of Salt and Iron, and to an old Spike Y. Jones bit in Alarums and Excursions (in which the Americas were created sometime in the 15th century by Japanese magicians out to slow down European encroachment from the east), and to Harry Turtledove's stories where homo sapiens didn't reach the Americas, and to this, that, and the other.

Possibilities include the drow in Europe, mind flayers and the other races in what I think of as the "illithid cluster" in some of the Americas, maybe beast people in part of the Asian mainland with goblinoid nomads in the interior...on like that.

The idea is to have something that combines traditional culture plus stereotypes and self-congratulatory reinterpretations with room for magic, techno-magic, and maybe some genuine high tech. Part of it would be just being usefully vague about what's magical in this, what psionic or otherwise pseudo-scientific, and so on. Given good phenomenological presentation, who's to say, really? It's good to provide some "see, it's really a robot" bits in sci-fantasy, I think, but also good to leave a lot open to interpretation.