If we were not to use Gatavia/Badlands again, the second option would be to use a canned setting. I basically have three choices:
#1 World of Greyhawk: Upside: beautiful, huge poster-sized hex maps. My copies are a little fragile, being 30+ years old. Ample space for adventure, plenty of opportunity for staking a wilderness claim. I only have the most basic Gazetteer, so we could create all the gods etc., we wanted. Downside: as written the world is incredibly unpopulated. I mean, the density is just about zero, so it would take a major re-cajjering of the stats. Really, it boils down to a really, really awesome map and that's it.
#2 City State of the World Emperor/Invincible Overlord/Wilderlands: another ancient map set, only it comes crammed with wilderness maps and city maps with dungeons, strange lair encounters and tons of old Judges' Guild weirdness. It gets down to naming everyone who works in every shop, and they ALL have classes and levels. It could be an incredible experience. It could be an ocean of weirdness. It might take as much effort to understand as it would to create a new setting. Huge amount of detail, but much of it would have to be adapted.
#3 The Auran Empire: this is the implied setting of ACKS. All the flavor text in the books would of course be perfect for the setting. The full setting isn't published. There is a world map, but it is just a smallish JPEG and isn't that great. We'd have to tart up our own region from scratch.
I could just as easily imagine myself working up any of these three as the Gatavia campaign. And truthfully, the "Amount of Work" for any of these first four options isn't all that different. And, double-truthfully, from now through August, any option that is MORE WORK, is actually better for me, since this is my prime RPG-output months of the year and I love digging in to stuff round about now.
Gatavia! These rules are screaming for it.
ReplyDeleteMy only suggestion is that perhaps we advance the time frame again another 100 years or so allowing us to start fresh with new characters.
I could go either way with that. I known Jason wants to resume with the old characters. I see attractive bits to either way. Of course, even if we did a resumption rather than a re-start, anyone could start a new character if he wanted.
ReplyDeleteI have so many world sets from various campaign world sets, it's almost embarressing. I have a couple of Greyhawks (including that 30yr old one Dave has), the world set for the Forgotten Realms (and various zoomed-in country/regional sets), a double fistful of gazateers from the original D&D setting they did (including Karameikos and the Thyatis vs. Alphatia boxed set), the world maps from the short-lived Hollow World boxed set, and four or five of the beautiful cloth maps from the old Ultima computer games from the 80's and 90's.
ReplyDeleteThat being said, there is an attachment to Gatavia at this point. I mean Bob has made Boscovania pretty much into the centerpiece of the campaign, and I think all of us have been looking forward to beating the ever-loving piss out of Bastardville. I'd even love to see all our retired characters fleshed out as NPCs.
My two cents. It's been a while since we've played these old characters. As much as I liked Bosco and Peaches, not sure I'd ever be able to remember where I was going with them. And though I'm not particularly excited about starting out as a level one jerkwad again, it would be nice to have another long running campaign. It might be coolif, rather than centuries in the future, it were only decades. Our old characters as NPC's and a familiar world, to us anyway.
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