Initial Creation

Temple Ruins

Temple Ruins – One of the Original Inspiration Images for the Curabel Setting

My plan to post my player’s session summaries with commentary hasn’t progressed much in the last few years. However, I have managed to put together a mediaWiki installation that includes those summaries — all but five out of two hundred and twenty-one! — along with much of the other campaign materials that were originally hosted on our group’s G+ community page. Here are the links to the relevant pages on the wiki, along with a quick description of what you can find there:

I hope to add the Excel spreadsheet of NPCs created by the players shortly (the DM version will need to remain secret a bit longer).

Readers might also be interested in the documents hosted on the wiki related to my group’s recently concluded Stars Without Number campaign and our upcoming return to the Curabel setting for a Old School Essentials (B/X D&D) campaign that I’m calling “Graveyard of Empires: After the Fall.” I will have more to say about both of those campaigns, especially the latter, in the coming months.

Dwarven Miners, from the AD&D 1e Players Handbookk

Dwarven Miners, from the AD&D 1e Players Handbook

[This is the sixth post in a series dissecting the campaign ‘bible’ document I drafted while planning my AD&D 1e campaign. See here for an introduction to this series of posts. One thought I’ve had is that I should create some random tables for generating customized backgrounds depending on a PCs race and home island. Rather than append that to this post and revise the previous ones, I will post something on this after completing the geographic and racial survey of the setting.]

An examination of the dwarves and their homeland on the southern island of Curasur (“South Island” as per the pseudo-Latinate imperial convention used elsewhere in the setting) has proven very difficult to write. Mostly, this is due to the central role the race and its history has taken in my current campaign – the nature and eventual fate of the dwarven race’s ancient kingdom has not been fully pieced together by the players and I don’t feel like spoiling one of the game’s mysteries here. There are some things, though, which I can reveal about my initial conception of dwarves in the campaign setting by discussing some of my inspirations. Here is the description of the dwarven homeland from the campaign bible document:

The “South Island” is the stronghold of the dwarves.[1] Originally known as Zur’Khel (Home Fortress), this is the ancestral home of all dwarves in Curabel and the seat of an empire that had ruled most of the isles up until several centuries before the Imperials arrived (the collapse of that empire is a mystery). Slavery and ill-treatment have soured the dwarves on outsiders in general. Elves call this island Silverhome (Mithrihal). This isle supplies metals and precious stones throughout Curabel.

[1] Note: Curasur technically refers to several of the southernmost islands (hence the plural construction). However, in common usage, the name refers to the largest of these islands.

Dwemer Cavern Concept Art (Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim)

Dwemer Cavern Concept Art (Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim)

A Symbiotic Relationship between Magic and Ancient Technology

The first big inspiration for the dwarves described above were the Dwemer elves in the Elder Scrolls series, both as something to borrow from and also react against. As the party in my campaign has discovered, the ancient dwarves once ruled the islands of Curabel and ruthlessly dominated and enslaved the native islanders using technology more advanced than anything the current civilizations of the islands possess. This clearly owes something to the Elder Scrolls series, as does the mysterious collapse of the dwarven empire two thousand years before the current campaign’s kickoff. However, unlike the Dwemer and most other dwarves, I didn’t like the idea of a major race being averse or indifferent to using magic – in fact, it just seems natural that the two would be combined by any powerful civilization that theoretically has access to both. The ancient dwarves of Curabel were therefore also the greatest mages known to the world because how could they not be if they were the undisputed rulers of the islands? In fact, while I have used some “steampunk” type contraptions and automata, the majority of the dwarven technical creations that have come up in the campaign have been magic-powered (or electrical, which amounts to the same thing).

Of course, I didn’t want to stray too far from any prospective players’ assumptions about the race (or those written into the rules as presented in the AD&D 1e core books). Therefore, I decided that whatever disaster had brought the dwarven empire to an end also soured the remnants on the techno-magic of their ancestors – making the “current” dwarves of the campaign world standard enough. Players could then have their “normal dwarves” (or perhaps “fallen dwarves”?) explore the more alien ancestors of their race if that interested them (and it certainly has).

A Clan of Fundamentalist Dwarves Confronting the Shortage of Females (Poor Dopey is Doomed to Be a "Lost Boy")

A Clan of Fundamentalist Dwarves Confronting the Shortage of Females (Poor Dopey is Doomed to Be a “Lost Boy”)

Patriarchal Fundamentalism as a Means to Create Adventurers

The other influence on the dwarves started with me considering the logical ramifications of the clichéd idea that dwarven women were rare. What would that mean for their society if we also assume it has the patriarchal clan structure often seen in standard fantasy settings? Musing on that subject led me to think of the so-called “lost boys” of fundamentalist Mormon sects (see Wikipedia for more information on this phenomenon). To terribly over-simplify things, a traditionalist society with an endemic surplus of men will often develop a system to excommunicate “extraneous” males so that the socially powerful have less competition for mates. In Curabel, that means the dwarves have a complex system of social expectations with often contradictory requirements so that punishments for violation can be enforced arbitrarily by the patriarchal leaders of the clans. Younger sons and dwarf boys from socially insignificant families can easily find themselves in violation of some of the arcane (in the non-magical sense) rules and therefore exiled  — which is, incidentally, a perfect way to create adventurers out of members of an otherwise insular society. While my current campaign in the setting hasn’t explored this idea in too much detail, the two dwarf player characters created backgrounds for themselves as an exiled heir to a clan leadership ousted by an uncle (think Hamlet) and the youngest son of an influential merchant. I imagine if they ever return to their homes, these “lost boy” issues might become more of an immediate concern.

So that’s the basic kernel of the idea behind the dwarves of Curabel: fundamentalist Mormons from Morrowind. More about the dwarves and their history has been revealed since the inception of the campaign, but I will discuss those as I post annotated session summaries (hopefully beginning next week).

[This is the fifth post in a series dissecting the campaign ‘bible’ document I drafted while planning my AD&D 1e campaign. See here for an introduction to this series of posts. Technically, this installment should have dealt with the dwarven settlements on the island of Curasaur, but that is a more involved post given how the campaign has panned out so far and needs more time to draft.]

The First Problem with Elves, or “How Elrond Destroys History”

 

High Elf Warriors, by Adrian Smith

High Elf Warriors, by Adrian Smith

As described in the first edition core books, elves are problematic for any campaign setting intended to have a historical background that is meaningful yet not overly deterministic. The core of this issue is made clear on page 13 of the DMG: a venerable high elf — the presumed standard elf as per page 16 of the PHB — with a bit of luck and healthy living can hope to see their 1500 (if not 1600) birthday. In other words, the default AD&D setting has NPCs running around who in our world could have been personal friends with King Hygelac of the Geats (d. 516 C.E.) long before his story was co-opted into Beowulf. Consider for just a moment how different our conception of history would be if eye-witnesses to fifteen or sixteen centuries were wandering around and able to answer our questions. Yes, yes … I know that elves are supposed to be aloof and insular with no concerns about the world outside their society because Tolkien said so, but aloof is not the same as ignorant. That’s not even getting into the question of why a race that must put up with the world for longer than anyone else would think it’s a good idea to sit back and let the chips fall where they may rather than actively seek to shape their environment.

In any event, it all boils down to the fact that by-the-book elves undermine our standard view of historical knowledge in which its possible to have competing narratives of events that only happened a couple hundred years ago and to be completely ignorant of basic information about life a thousand years ago. You want an ancient civilization that no one knows much about in your standard setting? It’s going to have to be many thousands of years since its fall or else your average elderly elf may have visited that civilization’s capital city in its heyday. For reasons that will become clearer as this series and the play reports to follow progress, this was not a satisfactory solution for me. Instead, I decided to peg the lifespan of high elves to the standard given for mountain dwarves, effectively chopping off a thousand years. That made it possible to have ancient history that was mysterious and yet not so ancient as to be meaningless. Now it was time to tackle the other Tolkien-inspired clichés.

The Second Problem with Elves, or “Can You Have Non-Apathetic Elves that Don’t Rule the World?”

Example of an elf less apathetic about the world

Example of an elf less apathetic about the world

AD&D elves have a lot in common with Tolkien elves and Tolkien elves are worn out from their endless struggles against evil. In the original context of The Silmarillion or Lord of the Rings, that makes perfect sense. Outside of that context, though, it is hard to justify the kind of apathy among elves that would lead to the human-centric world that is also an assumption of the AD&D rules. This is not really a great insight on my part — others have wrestled with this same issue and one common solution has been to depict elves as victims of the human race’s expansionist tendencies who now hang on the edges of society as a marginalized people (e.g., Dragon Age, The Witcher series). That’s not bad, but that solution is becoming a bit of a cliché in its own right and my solution was to assume that act of marginalization was in the Curabel setting’s past and to consider what a elven society that has come back from the brink of extinction at the hands of mankind would look like once the counter-revolution is over. In other words, what kind of society would those Bolshevik elves create once freed from the Tsarist oppression of a human empire.

The Northern Island: Elves as Political Exiles

The description of the elven homeland in Curabel is a succinct two paragaphs, but there my intention was to pack a lot of implied background into these lines:

Curanost
The “North Island,” originally designated a penal colony for elves, has now been adopted as the elven homeland in Curabel and rechristened Valhal (Wood home).[1] These elves are friendly with humans – especially descendants of the imperial colonists – but human forgetfulness of history sometimes strains that relationship. This isle supplies the great trees for ship masts throughout Curabel.

Vallande is the only city-state on Curanost – indeed, it is the only city of any size at all on the island. The city is notable for its lumber yards, sizable harbor, and plentiful parks.

[1] Note: Curanost technically refers to several of the northernmost islands (hence the plural construction used). However, in common usage, the name refers to the largest of the north islands.

Ostensibly, these paragraphs just tell players that the elves have taken the northernmost islands as their homeland and that they are generally friendly with humans. For the purposes of the campaign as played to date, that has been sufficient because my players seem much more partial to dwarves and their society/history. However, here are some of the hooks built into this description:

  • Elves are political exiles and Curabel is their penal colony. The unstated assumption here is that they were designated enemies of the human empire, hence their special closeness to the descendants of the imperial colonists who led the rebellion against that empire. This has come up in the ongoing campaign in the person of an Elven sage named Aldus Runnelbrook. Aldus, who now runs a bookstore, was a leader in the rebellion and responsible for organizing the underground presses turning out anti-imperial propaganda.
  • The Elves have a strained relationship at times with humans because that other race is forgetful. In other words, elves remember the revolutionary struggle vividly and oscillate between pitying and resenting the ability of their human allies to forget the danger posed by the bourgeoisie — sorry, I mean empire. Aldus, for instance, tends to be more understanding and councils his human descendants (from a second marriage to a human) to be watchful but merciful; his oldest son (from a first marriage to another elf) still feels the loss of his mother shortly after the rebellion strongly and is more warlike, recommending a policy of preemptive violence.
  • Their island is heavily forested, inspiring their renaming of the island and explaining the ongoing trade relationship with the sea-faring human city-states. This fits with the typical view of elves as a people more in touch with nature (even if the existence of massive lumber yards indicates a slightly more utilitarian ethos). However …
  • Note the mention of “plentiful parks” in the description of the only city-state on the island of Curanost. It seems like a throwaway fact, but my intention was to imply a underlying uneasiness among the elves in their new homeland — a place of wild tropical forests very different from the more temperate (and orderly) forests they lived in prior to exile. They are still closer to nature than humans, but they keep it at arm’s length because it is in some sense an alien environment. Their parks and gardens are a way to keep their past alive artificially amidst new surroundings much like many of them keep the past conflict with the imperials alive when others have begun to forget.

What this all adds up to is an elven race that is significantly shorter lived than the AD&D standard, deeply involved in the post-colonial era of the Curabel islands but ignorant of their history before that time, and somewhat preoccupied with both old grievances that other races don’t recall as vividly and memories of a former homeland to which they can never return. This answers my desire in the Curabel setting to have the history of the islands be important (i.e., not too ancient) but somewhat mysterious (or at least open to competing interpretations) while explaining how the elven race can be both deeply concerned about the course of history and active in shaping it without dominating the current society of the islands. It’s also convenient that the changes are subtle enough that most of your average player’s expectations for the race are still fulfilled despite these tweaks and that no special background information would need to be provided because the more significant ramifications of the changes would only impact older, NPC elves — the player could discover the small changes in the campaign setting’s conception of elves during play rather than through an info-dump during character creation.

[This is the (somewhat delayed) next post in a series dissecting the campaign ‘bible’ document I drafted while planning my AD&D 1e campaign. See here for an introduction to this series of posts.]

In Media Insulae

Jongkind-Johan-Barthold-View-on-harbour-Rotterdam-Sun

“View on Harbour Rotterdam Sun” by Johan Barthold Jongkind (1819-1891)

After the introductory remarks on the Curabel’s geography, my campaign bible zooms in to consider each of the three largest islands in the archipelago. First among these locations is the central island of Midland, home of the most powerful human-dominated city-state and my eventual choice for kicking off the first campaign in the setting. Given that this would seem to be the most mundane and ‘realistic’ of the Curabel population centers, I actually spent a good bit of time considering how to subvert player expectations without losing grip of verisimilitude completely. The key to achieving this was imagining what a failed colony of an imperialistic and mercantile nation would look like — in other words, a thought experiment about it would have been like if a major outpost of something like the Dutch East India Company decided to declare its independence*:

The “Middle Island” was the administrative seat of the colonial government. After the rebellion, it became the seat of power for the strongest human city-state (Midmark – founded by the disaffected naval commander who led the rebel forces against the imperial armada). Called Midland now, this island still has the largest port and naval base in the isles. Elves call this island Valmor (Tree Grave; Val = tree, mor = death) in reference to the many ship masts swarming the harbors, while the dwarves call it Xen’Khel (Far Fortress) since it was once their northernmost settlement. This isle is home to a fleet of merchant ships that facilitate trade throughout Curabel.

Several facts that could be translated into adventure hooks are established here: first, this location will be a prime spot for players interested in embarking upon ship-based and other aquatic endeavors; second, ruins and other locations associated with the imperial occupation should be easily accessible from this location; third, ruins from the ancient dwarven empire would exist nearby but would be from that civilization’s frontier. At the same time, I once again managed to work in some pseudo-linguistics that both extend the logic of one language (the dwarven use of Germanic compounds somewhat like Old English kennings) and indirectly characterize another culture (the specific metaphor used by the elves invoking the old tree-hugging clichés of the fantasy genre that I will soon be complicating).

Looking back now, it was probably a foregone conclusion that Midland would become the jumping off point for my first campaign set in Curabel. The clearest evidence of this is the very next paragraph, the only instance in this high-level overview of the islands’ geography in which I start to sketch out the specifics of a settlement — the city-state of Midmark, City of Gulls and natural powder-keg for simmering animosities between descendants of the colonial rebels and their erstwhile native islander allies:

Midmark proper is a large city, often called the City of Gulls, on the island’s main bay. While it may be mid-sized in comparison to some mainland imperial harbors, it is by far the largest urban center in Curabel and boasts a plethora of shops and other adventurer amenities. The city is divided into several districts, although businesses related to sea-faring can be found in all but the most upscale areas.

Most likely I was only resistant to the idea of committing to Midmark as the first adventure location because conventional wisdom claims that the ideal is to start players in a small settlement with equally small problems so that they can gradually discover the larger world and its more serious problems as they advance in level and become better able to deal with the greater danger. Keep on the Borderlands and Village of Hommlet certainly suggest that pattern implicitly, and later editions of D&D turn that implicit endorsement into explicit advice. The City of Gulls, on the other hand, is the political center of the islands with its superior naval force and “plethora of shops.” The logic of the conventional wisdom would suggest that starting PCs would be overwhelmed by the dangers and intrigues of a large city or relegated to bit-part players in a location that must (logically) have far more powerful NPCs. Of course, that kind of worry about artificial balance and careful DM shepherding seems anathema to general OSR ethos — after all, why wouldn’t prospective adventurers head to the biggest urban center available to them? Also, wouldn’t these adventurers be more likely to find employment opportunities commensurate to their skill level in a place where the forces of civilization have already eliminated the most hazardous dangers (if we exclude for a moment those more subtle dangers made possible by the mechanisms of civilization)? In fact, the next paragraph lays out a rationale for why a starting location near the center of civilization can make sense for low-level PCs:

In addition to Midmark, the dwarven fortress of Xenilum’Khel (“Second Farthest Fortress”) is located in a mountain called Ramithil on the western side of the large bay. It is new and relatively small relative to the great dwarven khels of Curasur; it is also very friendly with Midmark and travel/trade between the settlements is brisk. Further inland there is an older, abandoned dwarven fortress called Xen’Khel (“Far Fortress”) that has been picked over extensively by adventurous humans from Midmark and inquisitive dwarves from Xenilum’Khel. It is widely believed that the dwarves built their new fortress for more convenient access to the water and trade, but some voices whisper of dark secrets locked in ancient halls beneath Xen’Khel that have never been penetrated by post-imperial explorers.

Leaving aside for a moment the active dwarven settlement, a mega-dungeon in close proximity to a large city that has been picked over by previous adventurers seems no less appropriate for low-level PCs than a compact but pristine adventure site within walking distance from some backwater hamlet. In truth, though, I didn’t even need to go as far afield as Xen’Khel to provide adventure sites for my players and at this point in the campaign (50+ sessions) they will most likely be skipping those previously looted ruins for the “dark secrets locked in ancient halls.”

* One of the big inspirations for Midmark was the Neil Stephenson’s depiction of Amsterdam in his novel Quicksilver — in fact, many of my notes for the campaign’s first session borrowed imagery and language from that book (I especially liked the floating shipyard he describes). Amsterdam, of course, is the exact opposite of a company outpost but I would like to think it’s reasonable that if a Dutch East India Company settlement on the other side of the world did declare independence and slowly built up their own naval-centric city-state over a couple of centuries they would almost certainly end up mimicking their one-time home.

[Next in the series: Why AD&D’s standard, Tolkien-inspired elves undermine attempts to make a setting’s history meaningful yet mysterious and how I solved that problem while turning the race into Bolshevik-like political exiles]

[This is the third post in a series dissecting the campaign ‘bible’ document I drafted while planning my AD&D 1e campaign. See here for an introduction to this series of posts.]

Geography is Destiny

Deep Jungle by lyno3ghe

Deep Jungle by lyno3ghe (http://lyno3ghe.deviantart.com/art/Deep-Jungle-177097879).

The next section of the campaign bible document consists of a high-level summary of the islands making up the archipelago of Curabel, broadly divided into major islands with centers of civilization, second tier islands with smaller populations of note and/or adventure locations, and small islands with some special claim to fame. This was not intended to be an exhaustive list, with my thought being that this area would have countless small islands (many uncharted) that would make introducing new adventure locations on-the-fly without breaking the players’ suspension of disbelief easier.

More important than the geographic thumbnail sketch, though, this section of the bible is where I first decided some of the finer details of Curabel’s history, invented some (hopefully evocative) bits of its peoples’ languages, and introduced the small tweaks to the standard demi-human races that would set them apart (somewhat) from their fantasy archetypes. Many of these ideas were suggested to me by the geography of islands and how that would practically impact the development of different populations and any attempt to govern them — whether by a native empire or colonizing force. Besides pointing out the practical/gaming rationale of the islands’ layout, I will be calling particular attention to these socio-political points in the following commentary.

Geographic and Linguistic Overview

Isles of Curabel

Curabel is the imperial name for a chain of islands in the tropics of a world called Meidia. While the imperials were driven out centuries ago, the isles split into city-states following independence and no new human or elven name for the entire chain was adopted. In imperial common, the name meant “Beautiful Islands” (Cura = islands; bel = beauty). The native dwarves called the islands Weland’Khel (Water Fortress; Khel = fortress, Weland = water) and ruled the islands sometime before the arrival of the imperials – leaving behind many ruined cities and strongholds. Native humans adopted first the dwarven then imperial names.

Jungle Ruins with waterfall

Jungle Ruins by Electricleash

I suppose it goes without saying that, like many RPG players of my generation, J.R.R. Tolkien was a major influence on my early life — and, eventually, my decision to get a PhD in medieval literature. This first little bit strikes me as reflecting that early influence, with the pseudo-linguistic investigation of place name derivations. Looking at this now, it seems like my idea of “imperial common” is partially indebted to Latin (noun preceding modifying adjective; third declension plural form) and the Dwarven seems a bit Germanic — specifically Afrikaans according to Google translate (which is weirdly appropriate if totally unplanned). While my work on Curabel’s fantasy language is not terribly complex or extensive, I do try to be consistent in the few words and phrases introduced to the campaign and this has paid dividends during actual play (link to come when I start posting play reports).

Most of the islands in Curabel are covered in tropical rain forests, although there is also a chain of mountain peaks running north-south through the islands. On some of the largest islands, like Curmidden, Curanost, Curasur, and Crescent Isle, open land has been reclaimed from the jungles and is cultivated by civilized races to supplement their mostly seafood diet.

A rather pithy statement of the geography of the islands that also inspired a bit more elaboration of the imperial language, which continues to show a Latin flavor (-midden/middle, -nost/north, -sur/south).

While most of the smaller islands are uninhabited, all but a handful of the larger islands have several layers of civilization both modern and ancient. First, there are the current cities and towns of Curabel. These include the larger city-states as well as innumerable fishing villages. Next, there are the abandoned imperial outposts from the colonial era, many of which were erected in remote areas after the rebellion started. Some of these were never completely cleaned out and many have been taken over by monsters and wild creatures. Finally, there are the ancient ruins of the dwarven empire, which range from the thoroughly looted and well-explored to the untouched and mysterious (the exact state often depending on proximity to later settlements).

This is probably the key paragraph in this section of the text, setting up the framework for typical adventures on the islands of Curabel. The significant detail here is the idea of there being layers of civilization from various eras, making Curabel a “graveyard of empires” as I eventually termed it in the advertisements for prospective players. These layers are as follows:

  1. Current fishing villages and city-states of Curabel
  2. Remnants of the imperial occupation, including outposts built during the rebellion in remote areas
  3. Truly ancient dwarven ruins either picked clean by previous adventurers or still undiscovered/untouched

The first layer of villages and city-states provides the relatively safe locations that could serve as bases for the PC party and adventure site for more investigative/intrigue based scenarios involving imperial spies, political and mercantile rivalries, and tensions between the native islander population and colonists.* Surprisingly, this has been the main focus of the majority of the current campaign’s forty-five sessions (to date) — my assumption at the beginning was that the players would concentrate on the exploration and treasure-finding opportunities provided by the other two layers of abandoned imperial installations and dwarven ruins.

[This section is a little too long for a single post, so the discussion will be continued in the next installment with a look at political exile elves and Mormon dwarves.]

* I was delighted to see Arnold K. discuss the advantages of city-states on G+ the other day given how inspiring his work was when putting together my campaign house rules. While my cities are not as gonzo as the ones he describes, the basic point he makes about smaller political entities allowing for more variety in the campaign setting is very correct. It has already come up in the Curabel campaign with the party only having visited two cities, a metropolis serving as the center of human political and military power largely controlled by the descendants of the rebel leaders and a center of mercantile activity ruled by a council dominated by competing guilds.

[This is the first post in a series dissecting the campaign ‘bible’ document I drafted while planning my AD&D 1e campaign. See here for an introduction to this series of posts.]

Temple Ruins

Ta Prohm in Cambodia was built by the Khmer King Jayavarman VII as a Mahayana Buddhist monastery and university

Many of my original scribbles in the margins of notebooks about the Curabel setting are lost, but the most important bit of early planning survives as the first section of the campaign bible. Entitled Basic Design Notes, this section consists of a short numbered list of setting features and a paragraph fleshing out those points. These two items were copied verbatim from my earliest notes in order to focus my thoughts while drafting the other sections of the bible with the expectation that they would be deleted before sharing the document with prospective players. I eventually changed my mind about that, though, after realizing that they provided a perfect statement of my expectations and goals for the campaign.

Quick Summary of Campaign Design Goals

  1. Sandbox-type game
  2. Distant “enemy” – no imperative to deal with larger issues
  3. Tropical island setting (Caribbean, Pacific archipelagos)
  4. No big continents nearby
  5. Lots of ruins in jungles (ancient technology)

This list can be conveniently divided into two parts: the first two items describing the structure of the campaign, and the final three items that define its content.

Campaign Structure

The first two items on the list highlight my intention to make the campaign reactive to the self-defined goals and motivations of the players. As a sandbox, for instance, the campaign would need to offer a long list of adventure hooks from which to choose and locations to explore; this choice front-loaded my preparation work and required a broad but shallow treatment of a large number of campaign elements along with in-depth preparation of a short list of high probability adventures (e.g., a introductory mission geared to low-level characters easily discovered near the starting location). It was equally important to me that the campaign not degenerate into a nominal sandbox in which a particular course of action was obviously correct or necessary. This concern informed the second point about avoiding an in-game imperative to deal with some larger issue or enemy, an insidious type of railroading in which players are offered a host of choices but then feel compelled by the logic of the setting to deal with one particular existential threat. Any player agency in those circumstances is illusory since the immanence of the threat, whether its an archetypal dark lord or impending apocalypse, will necessarily cause conscientious players to favor actions addressing that single element of the campaign setting to the exclusion of any other goals. This is not to say that having a few potential long-term nemeses is bad, since they can create excellent motivation and tie a long-running campaign together, but these threats should be designed so that they build slowly and don’t demand the players’ constant attention — in other words, a distant and long-simmering threat that is part of the background noise of the setting rather than its focus.

Campaign Content

Jungle by HeavenlyDeamonic

Jungle image by HeavenlyDeamonic (http://heavenlydeamonic.deviantart.com/)

The three items on the list that define the broad outlines of the campaign’s content reflect my desire to try something new as a Dungeon Master and, in my gaming experience, somewhat less common in fantasy role-playing settings generally. That is to say, the default AD&D setting in my experience is pseudo-European, located on a single major continent, and most often draws on popular conceptions of Celtic or Scandinavian (i.e, Viking) culture when defining its more exotic elements. A campaign set on a tropical/equatorial archipelago covered in ruin-infested jungles and distant from any major continents or kingdoms struck me as the opposite of this vanilla setting, offering plentiful opportunities to play around with under-utilized rules (weather, disease) and monsters (dinosaurs) while also allowing for the reinterpretation of old standbys (dwarves, humanoid monsters). Finally, this type of setting fit well with my proposed campaign structure since the distant and long-simmering threats could easily be located on a distant mainland or confined to overgrown ruins lost in the jungle interior.

Bringing it Together

Once I had the five points listed above, it only took a bit of brainstorming to draft a short paragraph fleshing them out into a very high-level setting summary. This summary combined some of the ideas that have appeared in my previous campaigns (e.g., exiled populations, exploited outsiders) with new thoughts suggested by the particulars of the setting (slave rebellions, colonization, imperial expansion):

Main Idea for Campaign

Centuries ago, colonists from a distant land settled on a chain of islands in the tropics. Using their empire’s might, they enslaved the native peoples and exploited the area’s natural resources. Over time, the empire also began using the islands as a penal work colony. Eventually, these prisoners formed an alliance with some native groups and a disaffected imperial naval commander. They declared independence, drove out the imperial loyalists, and defeated the armada sent to quell the rebellion in a legendary sea battle.

This was by no means an exhaustive description, notably leaving out any mention of the ancient ruins of a technologically advanced dwarven empire or current tensions between colonists and native islanders that would end up playing a major role in the campaign, but it did help me decide that imperialism and slavery should be the key influences on the development of the setting going forward.

Photo of Curabel campaign setting notebook

My notebook for the Curabel campaign setting.

My decision to get back into role-playing games was made gradually over the course of two years. This process began with my backing of the Tabletop Forge Kickstarter virtual tabletop (VTT) project in July of 2012, the funding of which was transferred to the Roll20 VTT project shortly thereafter. Around the same time, I discovered the entirety of my first edition AD&D collection while clearing out the attic of my childhood home. The combination of seeing the possibilities inherent in the Roll20 platform and rereading the core 1E rule-books was extremely inspiring and I went to work programming various random generators and drafting a new campaign setting.

Without a gaming group for whom I needed to deliver adventuring content by a set date, though, I worked at a rather leisurely pace on these endeavors. While a couple of months late-night coding led to automated scripts for generating weather, random encounters, and NPCs, the campaign setting that these tools would help bring to life came together much more slowly. In fact, it would be March of 2014 before I felt prepared enough to advertise my new campaign publicly via Roll20 and various G+ RPG/OSR communities.

What I developed over the course of those two years was a sandbox style home-brewed sword-and-sorcery campaign (with a dash of science fantasy) set on a tropical archipelago named Curabel (pronounced Kur’-a-bell). The initial campaign materials included the following:

  • A ‘bible’ document detailing the general features of the setting with some more specific information about the starting area (a major city located near the center of the archipelago)
  • A world map showing the entirety of the archipelago, first drawn by hand on graph paper and then transferred to a hex map using Inkwell Ideas’ Hexographer program.
  • A detailed hex map of the central island of the archipelago where the campaign would begin
  • A key to the detailed hex map with high-level details and adventure hooks for all 80 12-mile hexes
  • A rumor document for use in the starting city referencing adventures both in that location and elsewhere on the archipelago’s central island
  • A general map of the beginning city (Midmark) along with detailed maps of a couple of key neighborhoods
  • Lists of NPCs for the key neighborhoods and the city generally
  • Maps of key locations in the city, including two possible adventure sites (a wizard’s tower and bathhouse/tomb complex hidden beneath the sewers)
  • Randomly generated weather information for the first three months (in-game time) of the campaign
  • A house-rule document based on my reading of various OSR blogs and previous experiences as a DM
  • A document to advertise the campaign and recruit players

My intention is to post these materials here under a Creative Commons license for others to use, providing commentary on each that will clarify my creative process, inspirations, and intentions. My next post will begin this exegetical process with the campaign ‘bible’ document.