I went to my drafts folder and found the prompt from my Dream Settings post still sat there waiting, which was odd because I was sure I’d edited the original post previously.
Yeah, strange. So I started rewriting the post and then realised it all felt familiar.
Here’s some stuff I didn’t cover last time though.
As a reminder, the below appeared in a Voyages in Eternity post in 2007.
“If you could make any game you wanted, and were guaranteed not only enough money to build it to your precise specs, but even guaranteed that it would be a success (in other words, setting aside all financial considerations), what would you make?”
The purpose of the Voyages series was to showcase a handful of different games/settings and present ideas to throw into them.
If you want to take a look at the whole series, the link above looked at Gamma World, part two looked at Star Frontiers, part three looked at Space: 1889, part four looked at Call of Cthulhu, and part five looked at Thieves’ World – I should really have posted those last time.
So, in Dream Settings, I focused on the Old Crown. It’s been my brainchild for about a decade, so that’s not really surprising. It probably needs some updating and revisions in places, and it certainly needs more playtesting, but we’ll get there when we get there.
Since I wrote the first post a couple of months ago, not a lot has happened – I’m still at home, working and chasing a toddler/goblin for most of my time whilst the world spins slightly out of control outside.
I’ve given more of my thinking time to writing my own adventures as more than pages of notes, and I’ve had a dive into some different roleplaying settings – Planescape, Spelljammer and Oriental Adventures have at least pushed me to think differently about some of the normal fantasy tropes out there, and how I apply them.
With thanks to everyone who has used my click-throughs, I’ve built up a little fund on DrivethruRPG to pick up a couple of things – most recently I’ve been picking up templates for Scrivener, OneNote and Scribus, and some adventure hooks and locations, but the last thing I pulled money in for was the Black Lives Matter bundles and a couple of other things I picked up at the same time.
How has this all helped with building new things?
Dark Matter and Rocket Age are good for extra twists on Spelljammer, Sig: Manual of the Planes is good for changing up Planescape, Tales of the Magical West will be fed into my Out West setting, and Dungeon Crawl Classics and Ludotronics are getting fed straight into every kind of adventure design brainstorming I’m doing.
And what does that have to do with new ideas?
Other than looking at things from a different point of view and feeding new ideas in, it helps with mashing things together that I hadn’t really thought about – my Spelljammer isn’t just boats in space since I’m also looking at Starfinder, Space: 1889 and the above mentioned Dark Matter.
Whilst I’m obviously drawing most of my inspiration for Planescape from the old books, I’ve got a lot of extra options for inspiration for my own version of the setting.
And while we’re at it with Spelljammer and Planescape, it means my Saurial series of adventures that use both settings can take on all kinds of ideas.
jot jot ïota 