(A) Few Campaign Settings – Plane Shifts
This is archival material from previous blog
I feel like I have to explain my thought process. I love making settings and places in existing settings to play in my games. And I rarely like how magic works in most settings. I also love having a lot of space to play within. Having listed all countries, secret societies and people and having players who know them and make a lot of assumptions is constraining to me. And my players may feel bad when their knowledge gained from official materials is falsified because I decided dragons actually care for their spawn or the supposedly honourable knights are treacherous assholes. Explaining it by some in-world reason feels sour because player is punished for being familiar with setting. So nothing detailed And no to magic in core rules! There are so many wonderful magic systems but once you get a system with wizard base class it’s hard to break off of it.
Within DnD 5e materials there is something I love but seems overlooked – Plane Shifts. I mean, we get a small region (at least in case of my favourites – Ixalan and Zendikar and partially Innistrad) with ready to go factions, conflicts and evocative world elements. When I first read Ixalan I felt someone handed me ready to go setting, just add adventure plot. And it’s really player friendly – you can give them few pages to read and they know everything they should to create characters or have basic orientation who is who and what is what. Every GM who has lazy players will know the pain XD I’d like to create then [a few] small setting books, climactic yet not too detailed, probably with different magic systems, hopefully compatible with each other on some grand scale. Each with some adventure ready to go.
In terms of designing them I think each Plane Set (Setting Shift? Setting Set?) could have three elements – GM Guide (with hooks and places and factions and rules), Player Pamphlet (with basic information of the setting and inspiration for characters) and maybe an Adventure. Do I have any plans or inspirations for any of these Shifts? Yes, indeed. I would like at first to take off my head this sword and sorcery idea of the Great North with barbarians, glaciers, evil magic and stuff. It’s mostly my weird need to port a flash game I played long, long time ago called Barbarian Onslaught: Secret of Steel. There is even idea for campaign based on the game – group of barbarians slashing their way through enemies to find the secret of steel to be able to defend their homes from enemy armies.
And there is also one idea for maybe more magical sandboxy setting akin to Terraria or Birthright in which you may rule the land and defend it against enemy forces and terrible biome dangers. Adventuring in a classic pseudo-european world with addition of domain rulership. I love certain elements of Birthright like regency, power of blood and monsters trying to duel you to strengthen their power. I also love fighting with whole biome which changes trees to bones, grass into hair and water streams into lymph or plasma with whole body-horror themes – this is too good to pass on. And for now it’s hard for me to decide how to mix it.
Third idea for now is more generic, super dungeon-crawly thing – coastal city, rebuilt by various powers in an island recently freed from the rule of very powerful dragon. Thanks to this situation adventurers and traders and various organizations too radical or desperate enough try to gain something there. Crowds of adventuring parties travel from one place to another, because under dragon rule there was a duckton of outlawed wizards making their magic towers and dungeons and experiments in this country. So yeah, you can set up a base and adventure everywhere.
These are my basic ideas for Plane Shifts starting settings for Donut RPG. Hope they’re evocative enough.