Hollow World: Torn Asunder

The Sundering

Our beautiful world was torn in half.

Once, the world was calm, peaceful, fully known. We had no questions about the world we lived in--certainly, philosophers waxed eloquent about the possibilities of afterlife, the old superstitious concepts of an Outworld, full of daemons, but it was more an academic exercise. In the last two years, though, we have realised how wrong we were to ignore those wise ones.

Though a small world it was, its smallness gave us safety, security, and peace. These last two years have ravaged our world: the climate now varies two or three times a year, there are regions of the world that are always cold, farms no longer produce crops year round... Worst of all, though, are the phantasmagorical phenomenae. The gulf of void that separates the Lower World and the Upper World is, we fear, a gateway from the Outworld.

Strange things happen daily. People disappear, bodies are found sacrificed on strange altars, animals scatter when nothing is present, birds take flight in strange new patterns, and some even claim they see blood in the sky. These are read as omens by most people; they consider them signs of pending doom from Outworld. Meanwhile, others claim that the sundering of the world is a time of excitement, of opportunity for exploration, redemption, salvation.

Art shamelessly borrowed from a Google Image search. I think maybe it's from the MMO, Aion.

The World Within

Limits, boundaries, borders, barriers, limits--all can be summed up in the word definition. Our world is well defined: centuries ago, explorers ventured forth from the City and found the ends of the world, the curve of the sphere, creating the pocket that we live within.

The red magma sphere we call the sun spins in the centre of our world, and we are warmed by its glow. We know when it will shine, and when it will dim. We know how much light, darkness, heat, cold, wind, and water will be available to us next season and next year.

This world is finite.

Though we have an abundance of resources (food, metals, water, animals, plants,) we are bound and our hands tied by the limit of space. The ground is impenetrable, no matter how far we dig, and no matter how ardently we wish for more, we all know that some day soon we will be a people too numerous to dwell within this pocket world.

- from the pen of the Grand Master Librarian, Tykus IV

Savage SciFi: Sit-rep

We've played a few sessions of the Savage SciFi game, and I've been out of town for a couple weeks, but things are looking good now...

I have been more than pleased with everyone's ability to dive in to world creation. My goal at first was to create a small scenario and let the players work their way through it, and then call it quits. The problem with that? They ate it up. Every bit of lore I was creating (on the fly, by the way, *gulp*) the players devoured and asked for more.
Within the first session they were taking the lore I had given them and using it to try and figure out what was going on "behind the curtain." I love this kind of game!

The key, I think, has been to minimize pressure on myself as a GM. I'm relying on what I think is my best skill: improvisation. It was a bit rough at first, but by the second session I had a list of random-ish names, locations, ships, etc (no stats, of course) that I could draw on at a moment's notice if needed.

My players have been integral in the whole process, too. At the character creation session I asked them, based on the one-page world background I wrote, what they wanted to do and where they wanted to fit into the world. Each player contributed something monumental and integral to the world and its history, whether they realized it or not. This allowed me to build their characters into the scenario nicely.

Now, they have navigated their way beyond my initial idea, and I'm trying to do some by-post roleplay on G+ to see how they fill their in game down time and to see what leads and hooks they will chase down.
I'm not sure how many more sessions we will play, but I'm eager to keep these players around, and they may (if willing) turn into "my" group for the next game or games.

And yes, to my players, I have a nice way to wrap up the whole thing. I think you'll love and hate it. Mwa ha ha ha ha. Etc.

The Sci Fi Game

While Houses of Stone is on hiatus and I am a bit burned out on its creative flow, I have decided to run at least one game of Savage Worlds in a sci fi setting. It'll last 5 sessions.
I already have players lined up (in excess, surprisingly) for this game but I need to iron out world details.

The plan is to have one game session for world description from me and group character creation. Savage Worlds is fairly lightweight but has more to it than OD&D or B/X, and those are the only systems I've done character creation on G+ with. At a real table, it's fairly easy to talk to three or four people at once, pass around books, notes, and sheets of paper, and so on. I'm hoping that, with good people and patience, we'll be able to create characters as a group and establish the world properly on a G+ Hangout.

Right now I'm debating and designing the world. It's not going to be fantasy in space (i.e. Star Wars), but it definitely won't be hard sci fi, either. I tend to lean a bit toward the Mass Effect style--it's not about inter-ship combat, it's about people, doing stuff, on stations, planets, and ships. Interactions and shootouts.

Today's idea is that in the late 21st century, humanity is visited by a dying race, on their last pilgrimage across the universe before evolving into non-corporeal beings. Some handful of millions of them travel in convoy/flotilla. They were visited by a race from our solar system 50,000 years before, and that is how they gained the ability to travel the stars.
I'm also thinking that not long after this visit, humans realise they need to leave Earth, and are planning for the fact that a few hundred years later they will need a planet to settle. Perhaps the players will take on the role of a party scouting the galaxy for a New Earth. Or maybe they finished scouting and have been in stasis for the journey home--arriving on Earth 200 years or more later.

The thoughts... they drown out everything else in my brain. It's a good thing.

HoS: What Made it Fun?

Let's talk about what has gone really well in my five-session Houses of Stone game.
Quick recap of essential info if you didn't play:
- Swords & Wizardry Core rules (mostly)
- Sub-Saharan Africa in an alternate timeline
- History coming out the ears of every NPC, location, and item

I have run five sessions of this game so far, and enjoyed every one, and I believe the players did, as well. The first and foremost thing I think we all enjoyed was history.
The history in this world--the things the PCs had no knowledge of but uncovered by role-playing interactions with NPCs, by exploring locations, by investigating events, by inquiring about items and events--was pretty well laid out, if I do say so myself.
We only really "delved" into dungeons/caves in two of the sessions. Even then, though, only one was a real delve, where the PCs spent almost the entire session exploring the turns and twists of the underground complex. The very first session had about 45% of the time spent in the dungeon, but with a considerable amount of investigation and interaction happening before and after, arguably being the more enjoyable part of the game.
So, my point is, I think the players enjoyed learning by exploring, inquiring, and investigating what the history of the world was.

Second, I think everyone enjoyed puzzling items and contraptions. The simplest things, like a panel of buttons on a purely granite wall in an iron age world, activated by the Fibonacci sequence, was incredibly fun to see players work through.
The puzzles and contraptions, too, contribute to the history-delving of the world. Even though these are classic dungeon puzzles/traps/contraptions/conventions, they played right into the mystery of the ancient race who built the city.

All the World's a... Dungeon?

Disclaimer: This may be (and probably is) old news to many. Humour me and read it anyway?

I have been pondering the nature of dungeons recently. I love them. They can be an absolute blast to play in and to run, and the presence of their name in the name Dungeons & Dragons is no paltry attribution to alliteration.
Lately I have been thinking there are several elements that make a dungeon (especially the more old school type, less the modern "naturalistic" and "real" (hah) style of dungeons) so enjoyable, mysterious, and such great locations for adventure.
I think most people agree that "dungeon" in game terms can be a dungeon, a mine, ruins, a castle, etc. What I'd like to do is expand that working definition to include the entire world.

To quote Inigo Montoya, "Let me 'splain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up..."
Dungeon Key Elements:

• Sense of dread/fear/wonder
• The dungeon is out to get you
• Traps, doors not opening automatically, wandering monsters
• Exploration and mapping
• Hidden rewards / treasure
• Big bad pulling the strings

I do not see how any of those elements are NOT present in the above-ground. Obviously, there's a tradition within D&D and other RPGs of hexcrawl-adventure and such, which is much the same, but who's to say an urban adventure is not a dungeon crawl? The timing may be a bit different--it has a different beat or rhythm--but streets are corridors, buildings are rooms, and there are still treasures to be found and big bads to topple. (In fact, a city might be considered the equivalent of a megadungeon, as buildings, castles, sewers, dungeons can all be part of the city.)

Again, this is probably old news to you, but it was a sort of eureka moment for me recently and has made laying out adventures for my upcoming game way easier.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled internet.

Locations: Maurice's Shop

The following is a small shop to be featured in my Savage Worlds steampunk-fantasy game. One of the PCs has worked in this shop for the last seven or eight years, so I think we'll be visiting it from time to time in search of gadgets, knowledge, etc.
Feel free to drop this into your world or cannibalize it. If I had any artistic and cartographic skill at all, I'd have mapped out the shop. Maybe I'll sketch it out later and share that or get someone to redo it to look purdy.


Enjoy--

Maurice’s Shop
Small for a two story shop, Maurice’s has little need for floorspace to display products. At the front, the window opens so that a counter can be raised under an awning, as a display and demonstration space for products. Maurice can be found showing his gadgets--guns, watches, machines to chop wood, to boil water without an open flame--most of every day. Once the sun sets, though, he retreats the the back room, to tinker.

A man in his late fifties, Maurice always has an apprentice or assistant--usually a young person from a family of modest means who shows intellectual and creative potential. The assistant cleans the shop, fixes broken gadgets, and keeps the books (under close watch.) Loving the companionship, Maurice pays his apprentices well and offers room and board in the loft upstairs. Maurice himself lives in a small flat just down the street.

Having studied at the finest university in the capital, Maurice returned home and worked as a researcher in the library, writing and sharing knowledge freely on the physics and science of the world around him. He quickly found that his passion truly lay in creating devices that would help people accomplish mundane tasks more quickly, and decided to open a shop for just such things.

The shop itself was Maurice’s inheritance, some forty years ago, and is all that remains of his family’s legacy. In his father’s time, Maurice’s shop was a place for buying and selling of gemstones, precious metals, and other such mined goods. The good fortune that this business brought to the family allows Maurice to spend all his time inventing and not worrying about making sales. (Incidentally, everything Maurice builds sells wildly.)

Potential Events

• Explosion! The PCs are walking near the shop, or are making purchases, or working in the shop, when an explosion shakes the building just after twilight. Investigation shows that it was not negligence on the part of Maurice but rather someone has stolen a key component (a stabilizer, a gyropter, a magneton, etc) and run off with it. Maurice can pay well in gold or items for its return.
• Maurice’s shop is a great place to put a MacGuffin. Make it either the key item needed for a quest or the item that begins a major quest. Maurice could have invented any mechanical or steampunk device--even if he didn’t know it worked in the way needed for your mission.