I have started a few campaigns that haven't went anywhere which is fine. Seven in ten games don't make it past session three in my experience and only one in ten make it past ten. Nothing is ever truly wasted in this hobby, however, they'll return one day.
As such, I've started a new one (surprise surprise) I'd actually like to run at some point, probably for OD&D or some such. And I thought this time rather come at from just a "lore" or "primer" perspective, I'd also document how I set about making the campaign. It's never the same process twice but I'd also like to show some of the awesome things out there other people have made that helped! So here goes.
The Setting
I feel like compared to lots of other people in the GLOGosphere, my campaigns tend to be on the tamer side. Hell most likely isn't coming for you right now and the moon is no centipede's egg*. The Winds have not yet been tamed by the church but that's ok. I still enjoy the gonzo and take a lot from old appendix N stuff which I generally really enjoy reading and worms its way into my settings
Fable is also more specifically framed around a recent song called "No One Left to Kill in the Sky" by Seb Lowe. It's a song about, metaphorically, a mad emperor, who after the war is over and he's conquered the whole world, unlike the metaphorical Alexandre, turns his eyes towards the moon to conquer it instead. Interpreting songs literally for a campaign is great fun. Go listen to it.
Anywhoosies, in a land of 70-odd hexes, after a terrible war yoked the various peoples of Fable to the Red Emperor, things are mournful and quiet. The Emperor's draconian soldiers have forced order onto the extant roads. Most of the dead, those who choose to remain that way, have been buried. The horses still have not come back and won't for a long time. The Emperor has not yet learned the white apes have killed one of his sons in the White City of Eku and hold the other captive, but even if he did, people would not learn of it.
If one avoids the Red City of Edu and its dozens of failed towers and ziggurats to climb to the moon, one can almost feel at peace again, besides the ache in one's heart. Just peaceful enough to fear your neighbor. To fear the next war the Emperor plans. And it's this fear that creates giants. Because monsters are a sign something somewhere is fucked up. Good thing they're extinct right?
As Above, So Below
The cloud kingdom of the giants is as real as bedtime stories and things that go bump in the night. It is timeless, an archetype and very very real. To quote Pratchett [1]:
“They were myths and they were real,” he said loudly. “Both a wave and a particle.”
The Cloud Kingdom exists in the heavens, where the upper atmosphere touches the Ether, where the planets roll about in their great crystal grooves, tugging restlessly on the fates of men. They war and ally amongst themselves and the Saturnians, craven and slovenly foul creatures and the Martians, those proud and deadly Tharks of Barsoom. There under the hanging moon, silent and pale as a sun-bleached, they do battle, though few remain, slowly wiping themselves from history.
They pay little heed to the planet below, wave to their particle, inconsequential to them, carrying on their battles amongst the stars. Until they trip. And fall for what feels like nine days and nights and land in a turnip patch, losing their sword and horn and cussing all the while heaving themselves up, leaving footprints there behind them. At least that's how they myth goes. Time is a flat circle they say, a tightening spiral, where one cannot be certain what came first, the giant or its footprint.
But beneath the Red Emperor's land which lies beneath the Cloud Kingdom, a kingdom exactly as old as life grows fat on the mildewing results of war. Memento mori! Living Graveyards, growing bolder by the day, take advantage of the supply lines and infrastructure of their de facto Emperor who has made them so rich. Tunnels, cave systems and necropolii all connected via the Mythic Underworld, its ranks swelled with new naive soldier-shades now tax the living!
The dead who have been around centuries scheme madly. The dead who are new struggle to detach themselves from what they knew. People struggle to mourn for loved ones that scratch at their thresholds at night. Or rage against enemies they are impotent to kill a second time. They look to myths and rituals to aid them, customs the Empire outlaws now.
Lightning Strikes!
The impetus to write Fable down began as a mix of desires: to make a cool map to just relax, to make a world my wife might like to play in (simple and somewhat familiar), and to get a vison out of my head of three maps laid on top of each other to run an "As Above, So Below" type campaign. I wrote Fable on the map with an exclamation point and later added the tagline "Land of Myth, Menace and Magic" because it sounded fun and I like alliterations. Became important later.
The two major post inspirations were:
Phlox's excellent terrain generator post here.
And Squamousss terribly evocative post on undead here.
As is I think is usually the case for these undertakings, it was a confluence of events, inclinations and inspirations that leads to campaign.
Generating a Map
To generate the hex map I used Phlox's post above. It led to me making this:
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| Took me hours to learn how to figure out I could just skew a hex map in MS Paint |
I rolled the dice as directed and sorta placed the biggest regions first and organically placed everything else from there. My understanding is that this is more or less the way to do it and I like it.
For broad inspiration I rolled on these tables from Cairn 2e to get my biomes. Got lots of jungles and savannahs which I thought was cool. I learned what a pampas was and read about those for awhile. here are the raw notes:
long thin regions 14 (3d6)
Safe and free, not quick
Prairies, Heart Tree
Prairie Dog King dinner parties are not fun
He holds court at a great Heart Tree
~~~
Miniscule region, 1 hex
Free, not quick or safe
Cliffs, Land Scar
~~~
Safe, not quick or free
Thick regions are vast and broken up by other regions. Irregular, about 2d4 x 2d4 hex (3x8)
foothills, pit of cold fire
Mountain trolls
~~~
Safe, not quick or free
Inclusion regions are embedded or abutting other regions. 3 (1d4) hexes
Pampas, land of cowboys, silver face landmark
~~~
Free, not quick or safe
Really thick region. Irregularly shaped, about 4d4 x 1d8 hexes.
Jungles and crystalline forest, crystal land jungles?
Quick, not safe or free
Moorland, titan's table
I drew in the rivers by hand, realizing that a few of the hexes in the north-east somehow escaped categorization and made them a shallow sea, which all the river flowed towards. The rivers imply a sort of bowl or valley, mouth opened to the sea, the jungles and moors bordering a valley on three sides. I don't think its important that rivers follow real world rules (We don't seem so bent out of shape about ocean currents or jet streams) but I do think it's important we believe in our worlds to sell our players on them, and if realistic river behavior helps that then more of it I say.
From here I used the infamous Laws of the Land, rolling once, twice if "not safe", to develop some of these broad regions. I really like these because they force you to interpret them and that's good for the imagination.
For example, in the crystalline jungle to the south-west I've named the Tiger's-Eye Jungle (probably due to the crystals found in the area) I rolled and got
YOU MUST BE QUIET
YOU MUST NOT GO OFF ON YOUR OWN
This strikes me as a very dangerous place. From my notes "The woods are alive here, more so than usual, and they listen. The dense dense foliage makes most creatures hunt by sound and vibration including the drop leeches and hang man's moss. The craven nymphs of the ancient trees will seduce or capture and then kill and eat you if alone, but even large groups of them flee from small parties of two or three or more"
Locales
The final thing I did was populate the map with locations. Rather than one large city surrounded by wilderness, I wanted something cozier, something more extant. Small towns and forts here and there. So I used the rules from 1977's Traveller on making subsectors. In Traveller, each system (hex) has a 50% chance of having a world in it. A series of complex tables from there determine the starport, size, atmosphere and so on from there. I only needed the System Contents Table and a few changes
I turned the starport rating into locations and changed the rarity slightly to make civilization more likely around rivers (see above about realism)
towns and cities: +1 if river, -1 if not safe biome
A. Ruin
B. Lair
C. Village
D. Fort
E. Castle
X. City
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| Spreadsheets! |
I was not terribly worried about realistic Medieval population demographics when I made this. The world is a billion years old, so old that pterodactyls re-evolved on the jungles of Venus. We've frankly got bigger Cambrian jawless fish to fry. However, per OD&D there's a few hamlets around every castle (in case of the Conan rule), I picked a d5, and each village is going to be its own weird little place like all the weird little places out of Cudgel's Sage or any other Vance novel. The cities will be grand and venal filled with Leiber's smokey dens and surrounded by the weirdness of Howard's barbarians and their antagonists. It'll work ok?
Themes
To fill out all those "empty" hexes I'll also need a spark table for when I get stuck. I've learned filling hexes is a marathon, not a sprint and even the most vibrant imaginations get stuck after a while. So here are mine:
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| Moron can't even spell sorcerers correctly |
I find spark tables really help me keep thematically organized. If I can't think of a good motivation for an NPC I can choose one that relates to the theme of the setting. You can see here I decided to make the tag line thematically relevant: menaces will be those gonzo things from the weirder side of Appendix N or awesome stuff with cavemen like this adventure
A group of barbarians, Martian in garb and temperament, have set up a hall around a Jotun cenotaph, a portal that can take you to the jungles of Venus, fields of Mars, seas of the moon or the ice fields of Saturn, with the correct planetary stone. Or else at midnight it will teleport you to the planet currently closest to the horizon. It has a rough map on it that shows all the other cenotaphs in the region, accurate to about a dozen miles.
There are 21 barbarians including priest and leader.
Next post we can talk about the various regions and important NPCs and how I "stat" them out. Maybe we can use these barbarian guys here to do so. I'll also probably go over lairs and how I used OD&D's Monster's and Treasure and Underworld and Wilderness Adventures to do so.
*It's actually the carved-out eye of the Chaos serpent or in this campaign a Silurian Paradise full of lovey anomalocarids.
[1] Guards! Guards! by Sir Terry Pratchett. Required reading under penalty of having your figgins impaled.
