Homebrew Settings

[Nobby-W]

Yed has a lot of arrangement tools for nodes that gets you most of the way there. But it is still a fair amount of work.

yEd Graph Editor

yEd is a free desktop application to quickly create, import, edit, and automatically arrange diagrams. It runs on Windows, macOS, and Unix/Linux.

www.yworks.com

Visio is not bad for this sort of thing but not great either. I still keep Visio 2010 around as MS completely bastardised the database diagramming features in 2013 for some reason, and 2010 is the last version that's still fit for purpose. Sadly, it does a much better job of diagramming than any of the dedicated modelling tools out there; the rendering is much more space efficient with respect to the legibility of the type. Most of the time I can stuff legible diagrams onto A3 with Visio but I've had to resort to using large format printers with Enterprise Architect or other modelling tools on a few occasions now.

Unfortunately it's gone out of LTS now, so I'm starting to run into gigs where the IT departments no longer have the ability to install it. I've had to resort to doing diagrams and specs on my own computer and emailing them to myself on a few occasions.

 

[AsenRG]

The one consideration I am dithering on is system. A B/X hack with reskinned Mythos-style spells is (relatively) easy-peasy and I have already done a great deal of the work. On the other hand the OSR field is glutted with excellent material. 5e could really use a solid S&S treatment but it would be a lot of extra work and need more rigorous playtesting.

I'd say "do it in a D100 system instead"...but on second thought, do it in whatever system you like, as long as 1) the system doesn't impose changes to your ideas (say by the class structure), and 2) the statblocks aren't too big.
Why? Because many of us are going to adapt it to something else anyway (like Mythras, if you don't go for it in the first place)! So less statblocks, more setting material would be a winner in my book.
Hmm...Savage Worlds, anyone?

 

[AsenRG]

More on topic, I'm using one-shots with my currently split group to playtest ideas for my Sword and Planets setting. (I've finally decided to focus on the genre, yes).

What are the main points?
There was once a planet ruled by the Caste Of Those Amoral Bastards Of Scientists (COTABOS). Until the people who were fighting their wars for them rose up, killed them, and took their stuff. (Never separate the learned man from the fighting man...they'd forgotten that lesson).
Then they kept fighting wars between themselves. Until they militarized the whole society to the point where every man (and quite a few women) being a warrior in addition to everything else is basically the default.
But then the people who were fighting got tired of it, and refused to fight, influenced by a new religion that was spreading, and which had, among others, strong prohibitions against the use of firearms and other distance weapons against sentient beings.
So they started trading instead...resulting in a happy society where people lived forever unless killed in a duel, by a monster (a huge amount of which are gengineered as weapons, and others were naturally occurring), or during work. As a legacy of the COTABOS, it only required taking a dose of a certain pill once a year to prolong your life (or one pill per month, if you'd missed the yearly dose or can't gather 8 pills at once), and keep you disease-free to boot...oh, and they help with recovering from wounds, too!
But the pills were only found in a monster-infected areas where some giant spiders lived. Because it's most likely the spiders that created them as part of their lifecycle (there are suspicions that those were created by the earlier, quite amoral, rulers of the planet, as bioengineered pr).
All went well, until some people, less than a century ago, protested that earning the pills was too hard and dangerous, so why couldn't their scientists, in-between fighting duels, replicate it.
The scientists responded by the most disastrous evasive answer in history: "We'd need test specimens, and those are even harder to obtain, what with the spideys being 10-15 feet tall!"
They'd also forgotten you should never underestimate people's greed and laziness...
Less than a decade later, a lot of spider-nest-areas were destroyed in the fight to obtain live spideys. But those tended to wither and die in captivity! And no success on the artificial production.
At the end, the big nations imposed a Pact forbidding the practice, in order to preserve the spider population. But the prices had already gone really high...
So now the pills are used as a kind of currency, like spices in Europe of a certain period. People store and treasure them for obvious reasons - especially since those are kinda easy to store. They have been known to be efficient after being stored for over a century!
Of course, they're also the equivalent of "big denominations", like silver pounds. So it's a big investment to be young and healthy...meaning not everybody gets to be so, at least not indefinitely. But they could. So now societal success comes with longer life...some aristocrats have been alive for centuries.
(And yes, you can literally use money to keep yourself vital and healthy, or as "potions of speeding up recovery - to a certain point, at least". Also, a PC party raiding a spider-infested ruin might cause inflation with their loot).

I'm sure you can see where I was going with all of this, right?

 

[xanther]

I use Astrosynthesis as a starting point not my main data management tool

....

Even if interstellar have ranges you can still take a 3D Map and make a node map of the locations important to the campaign. For example this one showing only those start with potentially inhabitable exoplanets.

My "wish list" would be to be able to manually enter star positions and info as a base set and then have the program fill in the blanks. That is can take my existing 2D star map for my Traveller/Sci Fi campaign and turn it into 3D. Can it do something like that?

It's not that I haven't come to accept and work with 2D ala ffilz. Nor do I have a "realism" problem as have no issues with explaining that the relevant "map" for FTL travel is a 2D projection, akin to the ides of the holographic principle.

I just love the geekness of getting 3D to work, the differing tactical and strategic possibilities, i.e. your "borders" are very different in 3D vs 2D, and nostalgia for Stella Crusade.

 

[xanther]

True, but are PC's main characters? I usually assume so.

Sure they are main characters, but more Walking Dead ones which seem to have no plot protection no matter how loved or well played they are

 

[AsenRG]

Sure they are main characters, but more Walking Dead ones which seem to have no plot protection no matter how loved or well played they are

GReat CompaRison, Man!

 

[Nobby-W]

My "wish list" would be to be able to manually enter star positions and info as a base set and then have the program fill in the blanks. That is can take my existing 2D star map for my Traveller/Sci Fi campaign and turn it into 3D. Can it do something like that?

It's not that I haven't come to accept and work with 2D ala ffilz. Nor do I have a "realism" problem as have no issues with explaining that the relevant "map" for FTL travel is a 2D projection, akin to the ides of the holographic principle.

I just love the geekness of getting 3D to work, the differing tactical and strategic possibilities, i.e. your "borders" are very different in 3D vs 2D, and nostalgia for Stella Crusade.

I've done this sort of thing before. At the moment the application I did last year reads from a csv of near star data, but I've done similar things that worked with Traveller data sets (although just for rendering standard subsector maps). You can build something that can randomly generate the listings, edit them by hand or some combination thereof.

The application I did is not production ready - it's really just a prototype bodged together in the evenings over the course of a week or so. There's no UI, just command line options and some hardcoded paths in a constants file. It's not really supportable or in a condition to release. It achieved what I needed, which was just a proof-of-concept to see how the maps would come out if rendered in a certain way. There are some issues with the final product in that while the notation is somewhat readable the maps themselves get cluttered very quickly so it's not tolerant of complex structures. They can be tidied up by hand somewhat.

The best suggestion I got was to produce a WebGL app that let you pan and zoom interactively; that could run on a mobile device or a PC, although it would require an internet connection to work. One could also do a rich client version based on a portable app framework like QT or Unity, although that puts you into the pain of dealing with app stores. Either option puts you in the business of 'write once, test everywhere' so building an app to do this that's usable at the table is a significant undertaking.

 

[Dammit Victor]

So I assume I've already bored everyone half to death about Shroompunk, and the only thing anyone wants to hear anymore is that it's done. But my design philosophy has always been that failing to work on many projects is more impressive than failing to work on a single project, so:

Untitled Space Opera

I don't have a name for this one yet. Names are the hardest part. It's basically a Heavy Metal, Humanity Fuck Yeah, space opera fantasy. Major inspirations are Jupiter Hell (go buy it now, Steam or GOG), the DooM franchise, Mass Effect, Star Wars (those movies are pretty good, too), with a dash of 2000 AD and Dresden Files. The gist of it is, any sane species would have discovered how to use the Stygian Drive to use Hell as a "shortcut" between two points in Realspace; humanity attempted to use Hell itself as a power source. When humanity's foolishness allowed the forces of Hell a foothold on their homeworlds, any sane species would have slammed the gates shut and buried them forever; humanity built settlements in Hell itself. When a coalition of the galaxy's most technologically advanced warlocks, cultists, and recording artists answered Hell's entreaties for aid, any sane species would have surrendered and begged for mercy; humanity taught them unimaginable new ways of waging war. And when an exhausted and humiliated alien fleet shattered the human homeworld and scattered its remains across the surfaces of a thousand Hells, any sane species would have laid down and died; instead, the Martians and the Venusians and the Jovians poured out of the Sol System and burned down half of the civilized galaxy in retribution.

That was centuries ago, however we reckon time after the Last Day, 27 MAR 2389. The divided nations of humankind-- the Venusian, Martian, Jovian, and the lost Terrans, found once again-- have made great strides towards integrating themselves peacefully into the remains of galactic society, but still their species and their lost homeworld are spoken of in hushed tones and euphemisms. Forever cursed are the names of the fools that struck open the Cradle of Nightmares and unleashed such horrors upon an innocent galaxy.

Basically, yeah, it's space opera taking a detour through occult horror and coming back out again. Psionic powers are common in most sentient species, and individual sentients with any degree of psychic sensitivity can be trained in the magical arts. Humanity is a psionically unremarkable species, a little below average in psychic potential overall, with surprisingly gifted outliers; witchbreeds-- think mutant tieflings-- are almost all psionically active, but aren't much more powerful than gifted humans.

Of course, you can't have space fantasy without space wizard bitchcraft. There are all kinds of magical traditions and secret societies in civilized space, though they can generally be categorized in familiar terms: (un)holy knights, white mages, warmages, warlocks. Of course, about the one thing they all have in common is the mageblade. It comes free with every magic skill, though knights have the most options for making use of it.

Main thing I need for it is aliens. I'm thinking of some kind of annunaki/grey thing for my space elves, the Number One species in the galaxy that's afraid they've been Number Two since the Last Day. Bit taller than humans on average, skinnier, skull slopes back to a point, got some real elf waifu handlebars going on.

Gotta have at least one lizard race. Probably a couple. Big scary bug people, and little adorable bug people. Big furry proud warrior race, but I don't want to get too far into furry stuff. Sinister octopus-head psychics, who are actually the most consistent good guys in the setting.

System-wise... what I want to do here is take old Alternity's resolution mechanic... and wrap d00 Lite's broad skills/skill perks around it. I am actually "working" on this tonight, or at least thinking about it while doing anything else.

Cascade City

You know, Kumite: the Eternal Championship needs a default setting. And it turns out, if you take urban fantasy and you take all of the paranormal romance out of it, and replace it with wuxia and xianxia tropes, planetary romance and cyberpunk, conspiracy and supernatural thrillers? You get something that looks a lot like either Street Fighter: the Storytelling Game or the canon of the actual Street Fighter franchise since 1995.

The setup is that we're a few years in the future-- it's the mid-22nd century-- and Cascade City is the nexus of the martial arts, organized crime, occult, and extraterrestrial underworlds: it's Hollywood, Las Vegas, and Hong Kong all rolled up into one sprawling playground, built on the flooded ruins of San Diego and Tijuana. It's a free economic zone, quasi-independent from the American and Mexican governments, and many of its corporate benefactors enjoy some measure of extraterritoriality. A small community of extraterrestrials lives in the undercity, nicknamed Squidtown, including a runaway White Martian duchess-- she's long since given up trying to get people to stop calling her "princess"-- who's a bad fishing accident away from being crowned the Empress.

Most universities in the 22nd century host occult "secret" societies-- often quite openly-- on campus, but only a dozen or so, worldwide, offer degree programs in the thaumaturgical arts. Of those, Cascade City's Kaplan Memorial Metagnostic University-- "the Miskatonic of the West"-- is widely regarded as the most cutting-edge (and cutthroat) wizard academy on the planet; soon, their faculty joke, Miskatonic will be known as the "Kaplan of the East". Only a handful of wizards in history are rumored to have unlocked the secret of opening the rainbow bridge to travel between worlds... but Kaplan Metagnostic's partnership with Eriksson Aerospace is on the verge of developing a propulsion system fueled by the psychic potential of a powerful martial artist.

The American government is stretched thin trying to fight two separate wars-- and Cascade City has front row seats to both of them. While the Pacific Northwest receives the most refugees from the conflict with Russia, Cascade City's ports and shipyards are a hotbed of sabotage and espionage, and its streets are an infrequent-- but bloody-- battleground between masked insurgents and the allied Mexican and American forces. Government forces are fighting a futile battle, to seize and secure the masks of fighters they've captured or killed; the masks are not just symbols of a luchadore's power, they are conduits for that power, and any complete nobody can put that mask on and become almost as powerful as the original. Destroying the masks just allows anyone to sew up an imitation.

 

[Umbraldragon]

Wow, that should've been an attachment, but I think it's very cool. You keep mentioning "any sane species" but what does that really mean? Given that we as humans produced a plethora of tyrants and homicidal leaders, I'd say they were being "practical", all things considered. And, just to be mindful of using anything Cthulhu mythos related - just rename stuff - cuz if you publish (I think, even free stuff) you could get a cease and desist, just saying. Don't want folks to get into needless trouble over that stuff. Cool background material!

 

[Hugh]

Shree are a sort of cthulhoid thing with too many tentacles. How might such a critter function in a society where the ergonomics are totally mismatched to their anatomy?

"too many tentacles" is a description I fully intend to use! Most excellent.

 

[Hugh]

Every few years, I'll get it in my head to make a new D&D setting. Lately, I prefer post apocalyptic settings, mainly because I'm lazy; fewer people makes for fewer things to detail. But smaller populations also means it easier for a band of heroes to have a decisive effect. Plus, it's easy to make a points of light setting with lots of blank space.

The one I've been using for the past few years assumes that a giant curse gone wrong during a war resulted in all land being covered in a poisonous fog. The fog extends up to 5000 feet elevation and cannot cross water. So imagine if Africa/Asia/Europe was wiped out but for islands in lakes and high elevations and the new world was unknown. Much of the current action has been on the ocean but there's a ton to loot in the fog, which has it's own developing ecology.

Fog of World. Much more potent than fog of war.

 

[Hugh]

Homebrew is the whole point of the TTRPG! The homebrew I read about here were all wonders of creative expression and fun. I was introduced to DandD on those little disorganized booklets before the 80's. There only was homebrew. Modules were odd things. Why do that? This was during an age (literal and figurative) of unbridled creative and derivative idea vomit. So much fun.

Favourite DandD homebrew was creating a dungeon where the players were monsters in the dungeon (1981ish). They could level up improving their monsterly powers. There were many "parties" of monsters: orcs, red Dragons, vampires, balrogs, and unicorns. They all started as babies and ate their way up levels. There was even a go find the parts puzzle, back before find the parts quests weren't canon.

The homebrew world exploded with Metamorphosis Alpha and Gamma World. This included pre apocalyptic spaceship worlds built on previous apocalyptae. This homebrew was about rules and technology and not story. Eventually it morphed (see that trick?) so far from alpha we gave it a new name.

You can see the rule sets (soon to be tool sets) at exp.sciencyfiction.com

To me homebrew is TTRPG.

 

[Moonglum]

Homebrew is the whole point of the TTRPG! The homebrew I read about here were all wonders of creative expression and fun. I was introduced to DandD on those little disorganized booklets before the 80's. There only was homebrew. Modules were odd things. Why do that? This was during an age (literal and figurative) of unbridled creative and derivative idea vomit. So much fun.

Favourite DandD homebrew was creating a dungeon where the players were monsters in the dungeon (1981ish). They could level up improving their monsterly powers. There were many "parties" of monsters: orcs, red Dragons, vampires, balrogs, and unicorns. They all started as babies and ate their way up levels. There was even a go find the parts puzzle, back before find the parts quests weren't canon.

The homebrew world exploded with Metamorphosis Alpha and Gamma World. This included pre apocalyptic spaceship worlds built on previous apocalyptae. This homebrew was about rules and technology and not story. Eventually it morphed (see that trick?) so far from alpha we gave it a new name.

You can see the rule sets (soon to be tool sets) at exp.sciencyfiction.com

To me homebrew is TTRPG.

Exactly. I don't think you've ever experienced roleplaying as a hobby if you haven't thrown all your modules and setting books and maps and all that crap into cold storage, pulled out a core rulebook and some blank paper, and just started cooking up ideas. There is miles of difference between that and anything based on material someone else wrote. it's like improv vs. karaoke

 

[xanther]

Homebrew is the whole point of the TTRPG! The homebrew I read about here were all wonders of creative expression and fun. I was introduced to DandD on those little disorganized booklets before the 80's. There only was homebrew. Modules were odd things. Why do that? This was during an age (literal and figurative) of unbridled creative and derivative idea vomit. So much fun.
....

To me homebrew is TTRPG.

Same.

Welcome to the Pub!

 

[AsenRG]

Favourite DandD homebrew was creating a dungeon where the players were monsters in the dungeon (1981ish). They could level up improving their monsterly powers. There were many "parties" of monsters: orcs, red Dragons, vampires, balrogs, and unicorns. They all started as babies and ate their way up levels. There was even a go find the parts puzzle, back before find the parts quests weren't canon.

So, Dungeon Keeper: the campaign?

Exactly. I don't think you've ever experienced roleplaying as a hobby if you haven't thrown all your modules and setting books and maps and all that crap into cold storage, pulled out a core rulebook and some blank paper, and just started cooking up ideas.

Do I count if I did that before I even had any modules?

There is miles of difference between that and anything based on material someone else wrote. it's like improv vs. karaoke

...Even I wouldn't say that, honestly. After all, what if you set your game in the real world, does it mean it can't be creative?

 

[ScytheSong]

I've done several homebrew settings in my day, But the one I've worked on the longest was called Tethsha, a fantasy setting originally concieved for D&D, but eventually actually run in GURPS.

The base idea was a Barony on the east side of a Holy Roman Empire-equivalent where the P-L commonwealth was all goblinoids. The Russian Urals held dwarves, and the Elves were in the Balkans. A large river running north to the Baltic Sea equivalent was the eastern border, but the Baron (a retired adventurer with teen children) wants to expand across the river, which is where the PCs come in. The polity on the east bank had been a restive but loose coalition of tribes, but with the expansion of the city (Teth) across to try to control/protect shipping on the river, they have united under the banner of a "Koboldic Sorcerer" (Kobolds having a history much like the Mongols), and attacked trading caravans from the Dwarves. East Teth is behind a hastily erected wood-and-earth pallisade, and the Baron is trying to replace it with stone as quickly as possible.

I had the rest of the previous generation's adventuring party outlined and located in and near the city: Their cleric was now the Bishop, their theif was now the proprietor of a very successful inn and owned warehouses in the docks district (that *didn't* house the Theive's Guild, honest!), and their wizard was the Court Wizard for the Barony. The other martial-type was a ranger who had disappeared just before game started, trying to scout out what the goblins were doing.

The game as played completely ignored the four castles and their castellans that were under the Baron's rule and only looked at the bigger political situation once or twice. So much for all the loving details I put into those parts of the setting (Most of the local Marks, Grafs, and Herzogs were named after friends of mine from High School).

On the behest of the players (one wanted to play a Rabbi, another wanted to play a Church Knight), I added a Jewish-equivalent ghetto to East Teth, and a chapter of a Teutonic Knights-equivalent order to the south of the city. More later, if you want...

 

[AsenRG]

The base idea was a Barony on the east side of a Holy Roman Empire-equivalent where the P-L commonwealth was all goblinoids. The Russian Urals held dwarves,

They all like to drink and fight, so kinda OK...

and the Elves were in the Balkans.

Does...not...compute...

The game as played completely ignored the four castles and their castellans that were under the Baron's rule and only looked at the bigger political situation once or twice. So much for all the loving details I put into those parts of the setting (Most of the local Marks, Grafs, and Herzogs were named after friends of mine from High School).

So typical of some players!

 

[ScytheSong]

Does...not...compute...

The elves dwelt in rolling forested hills and low mountains on a peninsula south of Tethsha (the Barony the city Teth was the capitol of), with the Old Empire (Greece-area, more Rome-equivalent) further south. Think the Carpathians as their north border, the Adriatic to the east and Macedonia to their south and east.

Would it help or hurt to know that I was considering making this setiing's Janissaries-equivalent all Elves?

Wait. You're in Bulgaria, aren't you? That would explain the boggle.

 

[AsenRG]

The elves dwelt in rolling forested hills and low mountains on a peninsula south of Tethsha (the Barony the city Teth was the capitol of), with the Old Empire (Greece-area, more Rome-equivalent) further south. Think the Carpathians as their north border, the Adriatic to the east and Macedonia to their south and east.

Would it help or hurt to know that I was considering making this setiing's Janissaries-equivalent all Elves?

Wait. You're in Bulgaria, aren't you? That would explain the boggle.

I'm from Bulgaria, both ethnically and in practice, and neither Greeks nor Janissaries ring any bell that's associated with elves in my book.
Janissaries could count as orks, if anything, in a Tolkien-inspired twist, if we accept the Balkan area is full of elves..

Of course, there's no reason why you should stick to the real-world notions. If it's fun to play, just play it! Nothing prevents history of your world from being different, right?
After all, both the differences and the similarities are part of the point of having a homebrewed setting. So the previous post was mostly intended as a joke (as the note about us being the best-looking ones was meant to show).

 

[Nobby-W]

The game as played completely ignored the four castles and their castellans that were under the Baron's rule and only looked at the bigger political situation once or twice. So much for all the loving details I put into those parts of the setting (Most of the local Marks, Grafs, and Herzogs were named after friends of mine from High School).

I think that overdoing mid-level canon in isolation tends to lead to this sort of situation. More often than not it tends not to be very useful and players often don't really care as it's a couple of degrees removed from the stuff that they're interacting with. Unless the castellans have something the players want, or are in some way important to the adventure they often may as well not exist.

While you need a big picture to hang everything together, this will get into diminishing returns pretty quickly. Even if you have some head canon, it's better to focus world building off what's needed for the game - it's going to be less sterile as you're thinking about it in detail, and it's more likely to be used as you're building it for a reason. Probably, you could have mapped out the barony, placed castles in the appropriate spots as needed and left it at that.

 

[Silverlion]

Sure they are main characters, but more Walking Dead ones which seem to have no plot protection no matter how loved or well played they are

A lot depends on the game, really, and sometimes genre and theme or tone. Walking Dead is a gritty, not-quite horror, post-apocalypse soap opera story, and because of the genre and gritty theme, we end up without plot protections to drive home how bad things are supposed to be in terms of dramatic weight. Compared to say Atomic Highway which is a post-apocalyptic, high cinematic action movie in feel. That doesn't prevent the game from being potentially lethal, just they have better chances to avoid it.

 

[xanther]

A lot depends on the game, really, and sometimes genre and theme or tone. Walking Dead is a gritty, not-quite horror, post-apocalypse soap opera story, and because of the genre and gritty theme, we end up without plot protections to drive home how bad things are supposed to be in terms of dramatic weight. Compared to say Atomic Highway which is a post-apocalyptic, high cinematic action movie in feel. That doesn't prevent the game from being potentially lethal, just they have better chances to avoid it.

Oh certainly, not that I run a Walking Dead game with plot protection for only the most despicable of characters. More a joke.

I know Atomic Highway has Fate points (I think, that is the name because I always rename them Luck points as have been using Luck for decades). In my view a limited resource like Fate/Luck is a good way to not hold back on lethality but give players an out (truth is stranger than fiction so very good at providing a consistent in genre rationale for getting out of a tight spot).

Another "protection" I provide is I provide the player with every thing the PC would know, no need to ask 20 questions if the PC (skills etc. taken into account) would obviously recognize when the birds stop singing, know how bears react, etc. So plenty of "warning," but of course one blindly rushes in, antagonizes the powers that be, etc....not going to hold back...enemies are not going to refrain from flanking you, and if you are foolish enough to ignore your rear....

---and now for your public dis-service rant ---
I just mention it as the last D&D 5e game played in the DM pulled punches, even with the overpowered PCs for the adventure, the height of "tactics" was run into range and attack...2 out of 3 of the encounters we had should have ended in TPK. It was at times almost like ;playing a computer RPG, enemies stood there until "triggered" it seemed, just rush to the front, ignoring many ways to pull us, in cut us off, encircle us (all intelligent and organized enemies with leaders even, on their home turf which we did not know). There was no scouting or posting rear guards before I joined, then it became pretty clear none of that mattered. Your rear was always magically safe.

Now that all would have been fine with me if we were more about role playing, But nope, one "cool" (bland) combat encounter to another, NPCs barely had 1 dimension...did hove some good in role banter with another player who was on the same page. Another just seemed concerned with the gear could by, and yet another was all enthralled by feat synergy mastery (but not good at it). On the latter, I'm all for that...did it with my character.

 

[Picaroon Jack]

I have a home brew for my Warbirds campaign which is based more on Crimson Skies instead of the islands in the air setting of Warbirds.

Warbirds: “Last Flight of the Narwhal”

A Different World
This story takes place in a world just like ours up until 1925, then things turn in a different direction. The world’s oceans gradually start rising and by 1927 the levels had increased almost 200 ft. changing the world’s coastlines drastically. No one knows where this massive amount of water came from, but one theory is there was a subterranean sea that flooded the oceans above it. One thing for certain it that it was not a melting of ice caps, on the contrary, the ice caps became bigger and the overall planet cooled. The world was in crisis for almost 8 years as the League of Nations struggled to deal with the flooding. It is now 1940 and since most of Western Europe was destroyed, World War II never happened and fascism did not take hold as the world focused on adapting and surviving.

Air Superiority
During the flooding, fighter pilots from the Great War were celebrated search and rescue pilots. Their daring and around the clock missions to rescue 1000s of people stranded by flooding made them heroes around the world. The destroyed coastal infrastructure and the rapid advances in aeronautical technology due to rescue operations coupled with mysterious technological advances from Great Britain and Japan has aircraft the #1 form of transportation around the world.

Behind the Scenes
Unknown to the players, here is what is what has really happened and is happening:
There has been three Time Travel disasters and this reality is now a divergent timeline.
1.(1925) The Flood. The plan was to create a portal to transfer water to modify the water level on earth. It was an (unethical) experiment in terraforming in the past for the future. It was in Alaska, but the ancient water pressure was too great and the portal and installation were both flooded and the Time Travelers were unable to close it, and it resulted in one time line’s Earth losing massive amounts of water and this one gaining massive amounts. They were able to close it with a massive explosion, but this time-line was closed off and the time travel scientists and marked as a failure. Through the portal a variety of animals from the Pleistocene were able to cross over. The most notable being a. Steller’s Sea Cow, b. a large black/white dolphin (Australodelphis), and c. alpha predator, megalodon.

2. (1928) Oldest Invasive Species. Since this time line housed a major experiment that was already deemed a failure, time travel scientists decided to use it to investigate riskier endeavors. Primarily working with going back millions of years versus 1000s. In a base in the Pacific, a portal was opened to the Cretaceous period. While scientists attempted to bring in larger dinosaurs such as brachiosaurus, smaller, intelligent predators slipped in and killed the researchers and a variety of dinosaurs, insects, and even plants migrated across the portal unchecked, much like the rising water of 1925. A damaged android was able to survive and eventually close the portal.

3. (1933) The Stowaway. With the unethical researchers from the future conducting other smaller experiments, a criminal mastermind infiltrated their team crossed over bringing with them mind boggling anti-gravity technology and the "Liberator" artificial intelligence. A lesser form of this tech was sold to the British and the Japanese while the best was used to set up two secret bases: one in Antarctica (finished by 1936) and the later on the moon (1939).

The Players
Characters could be: Mercenary Pilots (“warbirds), Mechanic/gunners, Researchers: Oceanographer, Marine Biologist, Zoologist, etc., Journalists, or
Explorers

“Last Flight of the Narwhal”
A player or NPC has been researching creatures that were once thought to be extinct. Known examples are a large black/white dolphin (Australodelphis), Steller’s Sea Cow, and the small whale Herpetocetus (nicknamed “Long nose orca”, from the Pleistocene with fossils discovered in 1890s ). These seemingly extinct marine animals, have been spotted in the early 1930s and killed and captured in the 1935-36. Where are they coming from? Most recently a small bird-like creature with razor sharp teeth, nicknamed the "Needled Beak Swallow" was found in Hawaii (it is Iberomesornis a variety of Archaeopteryx) and so the game starts with characters flying in the re-fitted British Drop-Carrier, the Narwhal, as researchers, mercenaries, and salvage team exploring the dangerous Pacific looking for the source of the bird-like creature. The Pacific is dangerous because ships and planes have been vanishing, and there has been increased Japanese activity and pirates are growing bolder with new advanced planes.

 

[Picaroon Jack]

I may end up converting it to Airship Daedalus after it was listed in another thread. I'm checking it out, it at least has dinosaurs. LOL