Marching West
I spent this morning trying to nail down some details for my upcoming West Marches-style game (which I posted about briefly here). I decided to take the same approach Ben Robbins talks about in his Layers of History post and start with some broad details about the larger history of the world that I can use to build from. Hereās what Iāve come up with:
The Scabbed-Over World
(Broad eras in reverse-chronological order)
- The Flocculant Throne rises and falls. A late-period human empire who worshipped rot and beauty. Gardens fed with blood, pleasure cults, somatic rituals, bacchanal. Decay masquerading as elegance.
- The Builders, pre-human entities who recognised that the land was unstable and tried to anchor it in place with buried machines and code built into architecture. They disappeared but their programs persist. Cold order eroded by entropy.
- The first fires. The world once burned sky-to-core. This isnāt a metaphor, the flame was either a god or a weapon or both. Its mark is everywhere, even when it no longer burns.
- The Plasma Lords, something prefiguring life as we know it. Oozes, semi-sentient fluids, shape thieves. Their presence is mostly theorised.
Since this is sword and sorcery I sort of like the idea of putting a race of ophidians in that timeline somewhere, since they're a bit of a staple of the genre. They may end up replacing the first fires, or at least being rolled into that burning world. We'll see.
So whatās happening in the present day? Well, in the rest of the world it doesnāt really matter. What matters is that we have a settlement - the current working name is āAshendrelā, but that might change - that sits on the border between civilisation and what Iām just going to call The Scab for the time being. Itās a grm, stubborn little outpost built inside the shell of a much older structure - probably a remnant from the Builders - that nobody remembers the purpose of. People live here because people have always lived here, and new people come here because they have nowhere left to go.
I like the idea that there are these massive almost biomechanical gates that open onto The Scab that are guarded but never opened. But, of course, we need a reason for them to open and for the PCs to actually venture forth beyond them (remember that itās a central tenet of West Marches play that the players are the only adventurers, so nobody else is going out into The Scab).
Because this is DCC, we need to start with a funnel - and a funnel means that we donāt begin life as adventurers. This gave me the thought that maybe the gates do open from time to time, in some ancient ritual thatās still observed even though nobody remembers why anymore (other than something vague like āweāve always done this, and if we donāt, Ashendrel will fallā). Iāve just watched The Hunger Games again and have tributes on the mind, so I had the idea that the gates open every seven years and some bit of old machinery within a dayās march of Ashendrel spins up again. People draw lots, and the poor tributes march out there to doā¦ whatever it is they do there. Nobody ever comes back.
This time, of course, we expect that at least some of the peasants will come back.
Thatās as far as Iāve got so far. I havenāt started mapping yet, but Iām really intrigued by the idea of not using a hex map. At some point yesterday I discovered Azgaarās Fantasy Map Generator', which is really phenomenal, and the second Iāve posted this write-up Iām going to spend a little time refreshing it until I get something that I like the look of. Then Iām going to figure out how to approach keying it. More on that when Iāve done it.