Day 5 – What is your favourite game setting?
The greatest buzz for me about this game is building my own world. There are some fantastic campaign settings out there and I’ve even used a few of them too. Forgotten Realms, Greyhawk, Dragon Lance, Matt Mercer’s Tal’Dorei, Parsanteum, Middle Earth, and more – all richly detailed worlds that have had so much work put into them.
And many volumes from these worlds occupy pride of place on my bookshelves too – as sources of inspiration for my own story telling. I have ambitions to produce a campaign setting of a richness and quality that holds up to these fine works.
My setting is titled Rift World and is an alternate history of Earth. In the year 150AD, Claudius Ptolemy published his masterwork Geographica which, amongst other things, placed the Earth in the centre of the universe. At the precise moment the work was published, an enormous fireball struck the earth plunging the world into darkness as clouds of ash and steam blotted out the sun. This was no coincidence. Ptolemy’s work had explained the motions of the sun, the moon and the planets, and also how other planes of existence revolved around earth – Eden, Elysium, Olympus, Limbo and others. And this fireball fixed everything in place.
The result of the cataclysmic collision was that these other ‘realities’ now occupied the same plane as the material world, and rifts into these other planes were appearing across the land. Great island chains appeared in the Atlantic, an enormous mountain range rose up in the Arctic north, swampy marshlands lay where once the dunes of the Sahara spread wide. And creatures of legend and nightmare have begun appearing on the edges of civilisation.
I’ll start blogging about this in due course. My players have already had a couple of games centred around the great city of Carthage in the year 425AD and they are pretty cool with it all. Fingers crossed. The map shown here is a sample of the maps I make these days, following this tutorial by an expert map-maker Jonathan Roberts.
So my favourite setting has always been my own. My favourite commercial setting would be Middle-earth (it’s where I first discovered heroic fantasy), followed by Forgotten Realms. And the one I’d like to see turned into a pen-and-paper game setting would be Vardenfell (the world of the Elder Scrolls).