Sorry for the lack of article yesterday everyone. It turns out that writing an article after my game may not be the best idea. I’ll still tell you about that campaign some time, but I think I’ll save that for a rainy day. In the meantime let’s continue our exploration of my setting elevator pitch.

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“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.”

To Provide for Their Home

The default adventure I have in mind for this setting is that the group will collaboratively create a settlement that their characters are from. One of the key steps of this process will be to identify a need that their home has which necessitates a group of them leaving the town to fulfill that need. Some good examples of such problems would be seeking the cure to a particular disease, searching for a particular magical material that the town needs to protect itself from the elements, or an expert to replace a community member who has recently passed.

Using their survival skills

I want travel to not be trivial. The reason these particular characters were chosen to take this journey, whether through a formal delegation or just fate, is because they have the knowledge to survive in the harsh world beyond their home. This doesn’t necessarily mean that they are particularly well traveled, just that they are aware of at least the general dangers and how to avoid them.

Mastery of the Magic Arts

My intention is to develop a magic system that gives players the building blocks to create tools to solve problems, rather than a simple list of prebuilt tools. The basic idea is that this worlds unique location has given it a larger than average amount of “magical” materials, which, when mixed with different mundane materials, can be used to cause specific effects on other materials. An example would be a magical material that when mixed with silver can repel metal, but when mixed with iron repels stone (not necessarily the final material compositions, but you get the idea). These alloys can be further enhanced by charging them with some form of energy; so that in our example the hotter the iron mixture is, the stronger it repels stone.

Knowledge of the Past

I want this setting to have a sense of history to it. This doesn’t necessarily mean that I expect players to have an encyclopedic knowledge of past events, but I do want them to ask big questions about the areas they are in. My suggestion would be something like what I believe I’ve seen in some PbtA games where a player rolls dice and depending on the results gets to ask the GM questions from a list about their particular area of knowledge. This world is covered in the ruins of an advanced civilization and even if the PCs haven’t traveled this way before, they should still have at least a passing knowledge of what these ruins were.

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That’s all for tonight folks. See you next week with another article.