Samurai barbarians fight paranormal entities that re-animate the dead, mutate the living, and twist reality--among the ruins of an advanced civilization on a planet that orbits a dying star.How we got there:
So last summer the incomparable Jeff Rients (not worthy! not worthy!) came up with a neat formula for creating campaign settings. I'll let you read up. Done? Okay, so this was my proposal. And it's been stewing in my brain for a while. Actually, I've written quite a bit of the material, and I'm using this blog to begin fleshing it out. Anyway, the original idea is listed here, but now I can explain myself a bit:
1. System: Ruins and Ronins version of S&W Whitebox (technically cheating I guess)
I wanted something decidedly Asian and the R&R version of Whitebox was enough of a departure from the regular rules and added enough flavor that it was an easy choice.
2. Supplements: Oriental Adventures and Expanded Psionics Handbook
I'm not sure exactly how much I'll need from OA, and technically I should have varied it a bit more from the rules I chose, but I figured it would bolster my Asian-inspired setting. I wanted this to be very science fantasy, in the sense that the magic is really based on sci-fi conceits. For that reason, and also because I planned to include a strong psionic element from the beginning, I went with the EPH. To be honest, any solid psionics material will work, this one was cheap and easy to obtain. I've also had my eye on the next revision of X-plorers which might possibly include psionics.
3. Fluff: A Princess of Mars, A non-fiction book on exo-planets; and Ghostbusters, the movie
So the John Carter and Exoplanets material is to help broaden the scope from a mere "realm" I wanted a very solid planetary feel with strange beasts exotic locales, plus some more basic sci-fi tech (hover skiffs and ray guns). The people on Keturo are also a near-barbarian equivalent. They're re-discovering their ancestors' more civilized, bushido-like ways, but they have to make do with the ruins and remnants around them. I liked how the Tharks and Red Men of Mars lived among the ruins of much more advanced society, I envision the Keturo living the same way. The exoplanets book helped inform that the world was an old one--that came with all the problems of a world orbiting a dying star (like Jack Vance's Dying Earth series) but this helped mitigate all of the source material which seemed like baggage to me at the time. As soon as you say "Dying Earth" that leads into a whole setting already well established, and while I like it, I needed to push away from it.
Ghostbusters is the key to the whole thing. I wanted the people on this planet to be outnumbered by the dead, simply because the world was so old. The dearly departed have remained so, but a strange otherworldly anomaly has awoken them--and worse yet begun mutating them and the living. The result is a waking nightmare. To stem the tide of ghostly and re-animated weirdness, teams of demon hunters have been formed to exterminate. Ghostbusters made the grade. Within the ghost-busting teams (just like in the film) we have a mix of warriors and investigators. It was important that they try to learn as much as they can about the phenomenon behind the weirdness so they can be more effective at routing it.
But after doing this exercise, I realized I would need to break Jeff's cardinal rules (keeping the supplements limited) because I had an over-arching story developing. So I need to add to more to the fluff list:
- 2001: A Space Odyssey
- Akira
- Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke
- Cthulhu, minus the tentacles
- Smallville, minus the emo teenagers
So how's that for genre-bending!
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