Finding Carcosa just across the mountains from Aragorn's homeland might make some folks' head a splode, but it pretty much sums up how I like my D&D.
Friday, March 06, 2009
Carcosa Valley, a.k.a. the Frankenstein Sandbox
I like to pat myself on the back that my World of Cinder is pretty dang expansive, but lately I've been wondering if maybe a Traveller subsector map is less than totally ideal for a mostly-D&D setting. Crazy, I know. From the point of view of the average PC locating the Wilderlands (for instance) on another planet isn't that different from placing it in another dimension. A more practical arrangement might be something along these lines:
Finding Carcosa just across the mountains from Aragorn's homeland might make some folks' head a splode, but it pretty much sums up how I like my D&D.
Finding Carcosa just across the mountains from Aragorn's homeland might make some folks' head a splode, but it pretty much sums up how I like my D&D.
You should look at some of the mapping sites for MMORPGs particularly City of Heroes and the original Everquest. What you posted looked very similar to that. Basically you have a zone and then zones are linked together. Sometimes in crazy non-intuitive ways.
ReplyDeleteI like it. And Rob's comment is very observant. It's like crazy non-intuitive zones. The fact that the zones are slammed together makes the idea awesome.
ReplyDeleteYou could also have the areas still be on different planets, but connected by Stargate-like portals.
ReplyDeleteOr perhaps the underworld is the connection.
In my play-by-email game I was going to have a city be the place where Labyrinth Lord, Mutant Future and Carcosa met. Alas, the game didn't get that far.
ReplyDeleteI was working along similar lines for my setting ("The Realm"), with the immediate area with which the PC's are familiar being nothing more than a pocket dimension that had been created by a sorcerer so that he and his followers could escape from another world.
ReplyDelete(The fact that it is an entirely magical, unnatural creation allows a lot of latitude for jam-packing it full of weirdness. Thus no need to explain where the gods, elves, dwarves, etc. came from, or why extradimensional beings and space aliens could be found in the same dungeon as goblins and kobolds. The only element that has any basis in reality is the race of man, who migrated to the world.)
Exiting the dimension (across The Endless Ocean) would return one to the sorcerer's home world - a slightly tweaked Carcosa. Delving into the underworld dungeons there, one would discover the ruins of another civilization, thereby explaining how humans came to be there: at the center of the world is a destroyed city by the name of Arkham. Therein one would discover the means of traveling to the humans' homeworld, Earth - at least as it's rendered in Gamma World.
It's not quite as expansive as Cinder, but I figure it'll give me (and therefore my players) plenty of room to play around. I finally get to include high fantasy, pulp fantasy, Lovecraft, and science fiction into one setting; all the while feeding my need for plausible relationships between all of the disparate elements of the campaign.
Now if I just had some interested players... /sigh
I envision Encounter Critical's Vanth as a planet whose orbit is so cluttered with moons, planetoids, space wrecks, etc that those who venture into orbit can find pretty much anything up there.
ReplyDeleteAwesome stuff, everybody. I love to see people doing stuff with Carcosa that I never would have thought of. Thumbs up! :D
ReplyDelete