lol only ten of these posts to go
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last post was a little too long for casual reading i guess so iāll take a break from gods and talk about setting structure
regions of the world are broken down by season (remember that each season only lasts a week). there will probably be around four regions per season. how these regions appearāwhether at random, or on a loop, or by player vote, or whether a given region appears at allāis entirely up to the GM and what suits their campaign or personal style best.
each region has a few things that are unique to it:
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its biome. one summer region is a swampland with dense thickets and little navigable land while another is a chaparral with wide expanses, far-out horizons, deep canyons and high craggy mountains. each region will be meaningfully visually distinct (and go beyond basic biome archetypes into fantasy stuff like open-air coral reefs etc), and different tribes do better or worse depending on how well-suited they are to the biome theyāre in.
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different relations to the mists. the swampland will carry a couple feet of mist across shallow pools of still water like a fog machine in a horror movie, the chaparral carries the mist within its frequent and violent dust storms, thereāll be a high steppe region that the mist drifts below like wanderer above a sea of fog, etc.
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thereās already a navigation system in place where players have to choose between a certain number of problems depending on how accustomed the party navigator is with that biome-type and how well they rolled: encounters with locals, environmental hazards (disease, temperature effects, etc.), going off-course, and an optional non-problem that players can choose to avoid in place of another problem in order to stumble on a random treasure. there will be a table of these for each of the regions. one thing i want to make sure of is that no random encounter is just stat blocks; each one will have something interesting going on, playing off of the environment, allowing roleplay solutions, providing objectives beyond just killing all the Things, etc.
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its dungeon. i donāt know if i actually want to write any dungeons for this book but i like the idea of dungeons being purely optional, with a limited number of days to investigate each one before the mists catch up, potentially even returning to the same dungeon every season and delving a little deeper each time. iām not especially interested in tabletop dungeons but if someone wanted to run a campaign with four megadungeons in this system then the setting provides a cool way to do that instead of just letting players loot each of them in turn, getting gradually more burnt out each time.
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cultural significance. regions have mythologies attached to them that vary between the different tribes. the tribes will have their own approaches to navigating and surviving different regions and there may end up being a couple sample quests tied to each region based on this, to give GMs an idea of how to use them effectively. the kind of GM whoās interested in using a hexmap could do some pretty cool stuff with moving tribes, outcasts etc. on secret intersecting routes across it and potentially crossing paths with players.
itāll be cool i promise
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maybe if i make these shorter i wonāt be posting alone ;-;
#ā·: 
anansi, story-spinstress
the historians of anansi practice a very particular form of ancestor worship: so long as a historian survives, they literally keep their ancestorsā memories alive.
invocations to anansi allow historians to see into their past lives, seeking out particular knowledge each time. when a historian finds themselves in a new place, they search for the memory of a safe passage. when a historian is threatened by a creature from the mists, they search for an ancestor who fought it before for knowledge of their strengths and weaknesses. when a historian meets you for the first time, theyāll quiz you on your family tree until they find someone they met in a past life, and treat you based on how they felt about your ancestor. this creeps most people out.
some historians experience ancestral knowledge directly, as flashbacks, or ājust knowā things that they shouldnāt; others speak to their ancestors as ghosts, summoned from circles of wax candles lined with ritual paper scrawled with prayers; others still are possessed by ancestral warriors and magi when in need, temporarily becoming master swordsmen or casting spells far beyond their normal abilities. there are likely as many ways to call upon ancestors as there are historians.
historians gain the favor necessary for invocations by discovering knowledge new to their bloodline. some become inventors, or philosophers searching for fundamental truths. some become natural historians searching for new creatures or adventurers uncovering ruins, or use their knowledge of other tribes to infiltrate them as spies and gain favor from their secrets. especially privileged historians pay the church of aubadeās hefty fees to request knowledge from their library instead of searching for new knowledge themselves.
few tribes are friendlier than the historians to āchildren of the mists,ā people born with properties of monsters for unknown reasons and who usually kill their mothers in childbirth. most tribes regard them as cursed and want nothing to do with them, usually leaving newborns by the wayside for the mists to āreclaim,ā but historians see them as uniquely blessed, for in addition to their normal ancestral memories, āmistoriansā can draw upon the memories of monsters. in the historian tribe, where social status is based on the extent of your knowledge and the accomplishments of your ancestors, mist children are a privileged class.
mistorians have monster traits related to spiders because anansi is a spider goddess and theming is important and stuff and definitely not because i think spider girls are cute thatd be ridiculous i
would never
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itās a good thing spider girls are cute though, youād have a real problem otherwise
If you think young kids play D&D correctly, I suspect that you didnāt actually play D&D as a young kid.
We did weird ass stuff like rolling on the ranger follower table for our characters or using books from different games.
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I remember making a friend because we both played D&D, going to his house and realizing that he only ever played 1-on-1 with his pal running fight pits; no dungeons, no party, just a dude and a monster.
But if you picked up those books without anyone to demonstrate, well, shared storytelling is so loose and magic itās not easy to teach on paper.
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authors have definitely gotten better at it with time
though next to nothing in d&d lends itself to good storytelling tbh
Itās a stepping stone; mediating that much in rules can be comforting for tactile little kids, still on the grip of childish encyclopedism.
I went from 12-year-old D&D games to 14-year-old Vampire: The Masquerade LARPing (with a cool college friend on summer break) and though it felt natural at the time I now realize that was a huge shift towards barely-mediated storytelling that I could never go back
Of course as an adult I could never go back to a game whose sole playing consisted of conspiring to backstab other players for 6 hours every Saturday, which somehow never got oldā¦
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I only have two appreciable sets of real D&D experiences.
One is where my much older cousin DMed me 1 on 1. He was the coolest guy in the world in my 11 year old eyes and he was an āalternativeā Gen X dude into comics and Army of Darkness and Jonny the Homicidal Maniac and so he spent his time indulging a bunch of power fantasies for my erstwhile characters.
The second is playing in a group with some high school friends/mostly my band which involved us doing everything for maximum hilarity like: making a pro wrestling Fighter who specialized in cesti and took huge hit penalties to moonsault werewolves off of outhouse roofs; or playing an 18/00 Str, 3 Cha Fighter named The Gimp; or running a national drug cartel that mostly ended when a prominent ambassador ODād and we got run out on a rail. During all these things I was playing a True Neutral Druid.
So I never really got a ārealā DnD experience except through videogames. The closest Iāve ever come to playing a normal roleplaying game was that Basic Fantasy game Tulpa ran, in which I still played the dumbest and most gimmicky character. I just canāt help myself.
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gimmicks are pretty good, though the '90s system of choice for such was GURPs.
remembering a throwaway League of Extraordinary Gentlemen game we played where I rolled secret-lair 1950ās FDR with all my points in robot legs. I had 4 turns of one-hit-kill kicks before I had to sit back and delegate.
Alex was Little Orphan Annie all grown up as a communist and on a vengeance quest against Daddy Warbucks
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My favorite early teen gaming memory was a Shadowrun adventure where we pooled our money from the previous adventure and bought the exotic male dancing club that used to advertise on local TV, then defended it from vampires. Years before from Dusk til Dawn too.
As a grown ass man, I was in a D20 Modern Campaign where The Situation owed us a favor and showed up in a helicopter to help us escape wendigos. Not much has changed.
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due to a combination of circumstances (small town + poor parents) I never actually had more than DND, and even still most of the people I know that play Shadowrun and things like that are super huge nerds I donāt wanna be around
so as kids my early involvement in roleplaying was using an AD&D book and watching my older brothers friends play - it was years later that online roleplaying actually brought me into the fold
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I dunno what it is about small towns / cities and comic shops, but the few tables Iāve sat it on at game places up here are ran by the most consistently unfriendly to new people DMās or are noticeably trying to seduce the one woman at the table with them
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āā"āseduceā"""
Game tables at stores are all terrible.
This is a Truth of the Universe.
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the first paper and pen RPG i ever played was in my late high school/early college years. some one-off campaign printed out by our only D&D-experienced friend (who DMād) and (with like 8 drunk people playing) everyoneās character was just based on everyone who was playing (but we couldnāt play as ourselves, and we had to guess what the friend we were playing as might do). our poor DM had to basically herd us all like a bunch of cats, two of my friends were playing as two other friends (who were dating at the time) and kept rolling to see if they could bone each other. it wasā¦a huge mess.
then, many years later, i got really deep into listening to The Adventure Zone and wanted to play, so a friend of mine set up an actual 5th edition campaign and weāve played like 4 games in it already and itās a fun time, now that i know what the hell iām doing (somewhat). itās still like herding cats but at least i can calculate whatās actually happening easier.
iām very tempted to buy this and DM it myself, but i have no idea what iām doing and i mostly just want people to make the wildest characters possible
i guess what iām saying is all my favorite DnD memories were based on playing the game totally wrong and not really caring?
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special shoutout to the guy I know who runs a bad shadowrun table at game on
I was in a weekly RPG group for 3 years do I win?
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I actually just got off of a giant, ridiculous like four year DND adventure with a semi rotating cast that had canon that went through different campaign settings and was kind of ridiculous - Iād be interested in writing up a post mortem on that!
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Iām going on 6 years with a semi-steady group, though people do cycle in and out as lifeās demands intrude. Weāve rebooted the campaign like 4 times though.
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