Dream Settings

“If you could make any game you wanted, and were guaranteed not only enough money to build it to your precise specifications but even that it would be a success (in other words, setting aside all financial considerations), what would you make?”
Found on Voyages in Eternity 2007 posts starting here, partly paraphrased

This post has been in my draft folder for about five years, but I’ve never actually gone further than copying the quote above over.
I should probably actually write it!

This is basically a ‘kill your darlings’ idea. I know the intent from the posts quoted above was to kick out new ideas and explore stuff. I could quite happily say I wanted to use the rules for Space 1889 to make a Princess of Mars roleplaying game or GURPs to make (or remake I suppose) a Malazan Book of the Fallen rpg.
But I already have too many ideas on the go, so I wanted to focus a bit more instead.

So, hands down, the main setting I’d pick – the Old Crown.
I have plenty of information for it, but most of it exists only in my head. It would be great to get an editor and layout and all that and outsource it all, and focus squarely on writing stuff and getting it out there.

Of course, running a game and expanding the setting that way, naturally, would be nice too. I haven’t managed to make that happen though, and I don’t know when I would.

So what do I have that makes the Old Crown stand out from all the other fantasy settings anyway?
An abundance of locations, and ideas to expand them – I have Queenstown pretty much nailed down at this point, but Raethmoor, The City of Festivals, the Imperials to the south, they’re all a lot more hand-wavey at this stage.
An abundance of fantastical heroes to build – I ditched Elves and Dwarves early on, and replaced them with Wildfolk, Beastkin, Gargants; I came up with a myriad of competing factions that make adventures possible from several different angles, or allow different types of play easily, with the Broken Circle working away both as a guild of thieves and apolitical entity, and the Festivalian and Imperial agents either pressing the flesh or exploring the local goings on for their distant masters.
A detailed history, but with scope in the gaps – I wrote out a nice series of events that starts tens of thousands of years before the founding of Queenstown, but with most significant events in the last few hundreds of years. There’s also a lot of gaps between events, so that stuff could be played in them – if you really want to live through the Fall of Istan or the wars at the founding of the Old Crown, or when the Fiend usurped the Unsung and rallied an army of the dead and beings of chaos to attack the living.

Basically, there’s plenty of scope to build up material, and at least have it sit somewhere that isn’t in the dark recesses at the back of my mind.

Maybe I should do another series on the Old Crown, but not stick to an A-Z like last time.
There’s a thought…