#3 - Campaign Creation (Part 1)
I've received a few questions from listeners about how and where the world for the Die As Cast’s first season came from. I thought it might be useful for people to hear about my experience in terms of creating (technically adapting or enhancing) our setting.
When I first set out to create a campaign setting, I was drawn to the idea of a quasi-post-apocalyptic world where there would be a bit more struggle with regards to finding basic things to survive and grow. Not that I wanted the players to have to roleplay every single day, struggling to get food and water. Simply that some of the D&D conventions they were used to would be a little more challenging. I also wanted to step out of the conventional generic European fantasy mediaeval setting.
For the podcast, I decided to find an existing published world that I could customize, enhance, detail and twist to make my own. Now, I fully understand and embrace the appeal (and the raw creative satisfaction) around creating a Homebrew World completely from scratch. However, I knew in practical terms I would not be able to create, design and more or less fully flesh out a world in the (pre-production) time I had available. Certainly not one that would provide as rich a background and history as one of the existing published worlds.
Related, since I intentionally run games with the minimum amount of outlines to facilitate a lot of improvised creations and additions, I was going to (I quickly learned) have my hands full in terms of continuity, like having to remember what God of War I had created last week on the spur of the moment when the players asked for more details. I mean, I struggled enough with remembering the voice, name and attitude of the vampire bartender when the players decided three sessions later to go back for another blood cocktail.
However, it was a bit of a trilemma because I also wanted to find a world where there had been lots of development, but that wasn't SO well-known that if I placed my campaign there I would have had to spend several months catching up on what had gone on, been developed, revised, updated, etc. Thus, I was specifically not interested in the Forgotten Realms though, from my past experience playing 1st & 2nd edition, reading all the great old novels etc, it was the continent that I knew the best.
I had a basic awareness of Midgard from Kobold Press and the name Wolfgang Baur. Then what prompted me to explore that more deeply was the blog on their website talking about the Wasted West when it popped up during my Googling ‘5e Waste land’ etc. Moreover, even though the wars had been over officially for 300 years the ongoing presence of the unique Ancient Ones was GREAT! This was a land that had somewhat recovered and settled from the mage wars BUT had this ever-present threat looming consistently over all recovery and resettlement attempts. This still destructive force felt to me to be a very rich background in which to develop alternative cultures that would spring up, adapt to the new reality and be functional but unknown to most of the outside civilized world. What twisted but more or less functional economies and cultures and societies would grow and adapt around the danger of the Ancient Ones?
Also of course because of my past playing of Dungeons and Dragons, I had a huge treasure trove of old campaign notes, antique adventures ‘modules’ and a near complete collection of both Dragon and Dungeon magazine from the pre-digital age. Being able to incorporate some of my personal material in combination with the collection of all the random material on the Kobold Press Blog -which I still highly recommend to anyone looking for some unusual ideas- felt like the perfect solution. A way for me to personalize, expand and enhance the established campaign world meshing it with my own concepts and warping it lightly with cherry-picked ancient TSR hardcopy.
Separately, I had also stumbled over and fallen in love with the concepts of harvesting monster parts when I found the Monster Loot series and the Hamund series on DMsGuild. This to me seemed the perfect addition to the Wasted West setting because it showed how people were adapting to this harsh world AND giving people a reason to explore the Waste. Both series are also effectively collections of brand new magic items which could be fun, gross and unique for the player performers to find, prep and use.
So, armed with a distinctive setting and having an unusual quality to the economics and therefore the culture of the adventure lands, I was ready to settle on a starting place and trigger event.
