Yesterday I wrote the following description of my Setting:

“A small party of expert heroes must travel through a collapsed world blasted by the radiation of its twin suns to provide for their home, using their survival skills, mastery of the magic arts, and knowledge of the past to survive.”

Lets explore each part of this statement in greater detail to show you what I mean.

A small party of heroes must travel

I have often found when running games, whether we’re talking about a prewritten campaign or homebrew, that the travel between the destinations is simply glossed over. At best there might be an encounter or two of note, but I often find that those sort of small set pieces fail to portray the passage of time and distance that is supposedly taking place. Often I am only provided with a random encounter table full of monsters with no real motivation for fighting the PCs other than food or a natural inclination for combat.

This isn’t to say that there aren’t modules that handle this better, just that I generally find that area of the adventure lacking. This is as much a failing of mine as it is a failing of the adventure in question, I too often find myself not interested in dealing with the mechanics of getting lost, or managing a ship, or the many other things that can happen during overland travel; therefore this is one of the challenges to myself to explore this topic and both improve my own techniques in this area.

blasted by the radiation of its twin suns

We’re going out of order here but I think the physical elements of the setting need to be established before the historical ones. One of my initial ideas for this setting was that it needed to make travel interesting by providing an unusual backdrop for those journeys. I want the journey to be important not just because of what lies at the end, but because of the danger and adventure the journey itself represents.

This planet is situated at the barycenter of two stars. This unusual arrangement has led to a planet that is particularly inhospitable to life. There is no real period of darkness in the traditional sense, just a slight dimming and brightening. The surface of the planet is constantly subject to powerful bursts of radiation from its suns, creating a much hotter and dryer surface than Earth. There really shouldn’t be living creatures on this planet, yet there are, and in the past they were even quite successful.

a collapsed world

In the Past the native inhabitants used their mastery of the unusual elements found on their world to create a vast interstellar empire. They created gates that allowed them to transport people and ideas over the mind boggling distances of space to settle on many worlds. They brought envoys from the worlds they found, or perhaps conquered, to their home world, to encourage the exchange of ideas and the creation of new technologies. At some point some cataclysmic event occurred that both cutoff the homeworld from the rest of the empire and destroyed much of the magical infrastructure they had created to make the surface of the world livable for themselves and their subjects. It has been many years since this event and only the hardiest of creatures have survived to the present day.

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That is all the time I have for today, unfortunately. I have my weekly Pathfinder campaign tomorrow so I will probably give you an overview of the session tomorrow and pick up where this article leaves off on Thursday.