Monday, January 05, 2009

Bullet Points of Light

So I've decided to insert Wildland, the first map & key from Points of Light, into my World of Cinder setting. I'm a huge fan of author Rob Conley's stuff and I kinda like the challenge of trying to make this shiny nugget of sandbox fit into my larger milieu. Upon rereading the Wildland entry, here are some of my ill-focused thoughts on making the setting my own.
  • The Bright Empire becomes another name for the Kelno Empire, my invading Space Romans adopted from the Wilderlands of High Fantasy.
  • The religious strife between the Goddess of Honor and the God of War will be recast as a conflict between the Church of the Great Gold Dragon and the Frog Gods of Chaos.
  • The Crandor Moors are marked on the map as being full of 'escarpments'. Forunately those things have a wikipedia entry so I can learn myself up. I come from Illinois. You know how flat Illinois is? Any bump in the road that interrupts line of site is called a hill.
  • The NPCs need full write-ups, and generally I'm going to demote them by several levels. In my world a fourth level fighter dude isn't just called a Hero, he's the kind of guy bards write songs about and kings seek out to lead armies.
  • All the paladins will be converted to Fighters and/or Clerics.
  • I'm not sure yet what to do with the druids. I like druids in principle, especially as NPCs, but I'm not sure how to stat them up. The Supplement I: Greyhawk method of using cleric/magic-users has some appeal, as does adapting the Mentzer version of the class.
  • The map needs more lava. There's a lone mountain in hex 1311 that would make a decent volcano. And a couple hexes of the Grey Sea could be set aside as Boil Zones, which would be known as navigational hazards to the local pirates.
  • At least a couple nameless horrors diced up from the Random Esoteric Creature Generator need to be added to the map.
  • The ruins and lairs need to be mapped out and stocked for adventure. Or maps and keys stolen from elsewhere and dropped onto the board.
  • On the 'nice but not required' side of things custom price lists for each community would be cool.

11 comments:

  1. Looks good. Points of Light is one of those books I just want to buy to read through and would probably never use. I figure it's good for a bit of inspiration though... I shall ponder this at length.

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  2. (thumbs up) Making it your own. Exactly how I intended it.

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  3. -SuperSooga
    Every referee I met is pressed for time. The lands are small enough find a home in most referees campaign. The backgrounds I use rely on standard fantasy tropes and depict common situations. Plus they are easily modified to depict a similar yet different situation.

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  4. As for druids, I would just make them clerics and have them follow a religion based on druidic practices.

    Because you are using the original rules I would say just borrow a handful of druid spells from AD&D and put them on the list for these druidic clerics. That should be more enough rule mechanics to flavor them.

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  5. SuperSooga, that's exactly what I thought. But the more I browse through it, the more I think I'll actually USE Points of Light for my own game (which I'll only be running at conventions, granted), but I like the idea of being able to sell the players a map of that quality.

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  6. When I say "sell the players", I mean "have an NPC sell (for gold) to the player characters"; I'm not making a profit off of Points of Light.

    Just wanted to clear that up.

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  7. Good point regarding Illinois and hills- I find it funny how many Chicago suburbs have names suggesting altitudinal variations (Mount Prospect, Arlington Heights, etc.) when they're all as flat as Nebraska.

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  8. Anonymous9:22 AM

    Hey Jeff I hope you continue to post your progress. I will be interested to hear how you develop PoL, carve it into your own campaign.

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  9. I have been using the Wildlands as part of the larger World of Broadsword setting for my Castles & Crusades campaign. In a way it is unfortunate that C&C has a druid class because I love the mysterious druid from the Monsters & Treasure from the Greyhawk Supplement. That is the way I would go if I was running B/X or LL.

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  10. Hi Jeff,

    This has nothing to do with your post. Over on my blog you encouraged me to submit my dying dreams chart to Fight On! One problem... How the heck do you submit to Fight On!? I have looked all over the web site and on the Forums, but there is no clear indicator of what format our submission needs to be in or where to send it. I suspect I email C but I want to make sure it goes to the right place.

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  11. Steamtunnel: send it to iggyumlaut at gmail dot com.

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