What?!? Yeah, I know, the last time I posted about what our next fantasy campaign might be, we were voting between Caladon Falls, Hellfrost, and Shaintar. Hellfrost got the cold shoulder from the players in our next round of voting…not because they don’t like it but because they want to try something different. So Caladon Falls and Shaintar were the finalists in our Setting Survivor spoof. The final round of voting resulted in…
…a tie!!!
So I thought about it a bit and I decided to see if I could take the various features of each that the voters enjoyed and make something of a hybrid. Back in the day, I did some setting creation that I certainly enjoyed. However, the more that I thought about it, the more I realized that this just wasn’t going to work timewise and otherwise.
I then got the idea that it would be better to just stick with a pretty well established setting. I wanted something that would largely fit the criteria we had decided upon for the campaign: one that is epic and high magic (i.e., where magic is fairly common) with many options for races and fantastical elements and where the “plot” hasn’t been scripted ahead of time and can be influenced by the actions of the player characters with the spotlight on exactly those actions. I’ve run campaigns that meet this in a number of settings, including Forgotten Realms and Greyhawk. So I decided that it could be an interesting experiment to use one of these settings with Savage Worlds as the ruleset.
So now we’re (I’m) trying to decide between Forgotten Realms and Greyhawk. Forgotten Realms would definitely be pre-Time of Troubles and largely the 1st edition stuff since that’s mostly what I own from back in the day. Not sure if I’d stick with older edition stuff for Greyhawk or just go with the more recent stuff (e.g., Living Greyhawk Gazetteer).
I guess that both have their pros and cons…not sure that I know all of them…but the choice will largely depend on what all I’ve already got for each setting and some plot opportunities I’ve got knocking around in my head. I’m just looking for a setting to run some nice adventures and build a campaign without having to worry too much about canon or the setting getting in the way.
We’ve settled on Greyhawk! Like many gamers of my, um, generation, Greyhawk has a soft spot in my heart as it was the first campaign setting that I read…the 1980 folio edition. Greyhawk never really took root with my old gaming group back then. The main DM, Jim, had his own homebrew campaign setting that we played in. By the time I got around to primarily being the DM/GM in the late 80s, Forgotten Realms was the new and shiny thing on the block and my first couple of real campaigns (i.e., ones that lasted for more than a couple of months) were set in it. I then got caught up with Glorantha and then caught the world-building bug myself throughout most of the 90s. It wasn’t until five or six years ago that I ran a Greyhawk campaign…blending the Red Hand of Doom with the Village of Hommlet and elements of the Temple of Elemental Evil…the Company H Campaign.
Now I just need to decide which “era” of Greyhawk I want to use. The more or less original pre-Greyhawk Wars stuff (the folio and the 1983 boxed set), the post-Greyhawk Wars stuff (2nd Edition stuff like From the Ashes), or the Living Greyhawk stuff for 3rd edition. I guess I’ll just “have” to dig out the old stuff, dust it off, and take a read before deciding. Regardless, we’ll be using Savage Worlds as our game system.