Homebrew Settings

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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.


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.
 
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:grin:)! So less statblocks, more setting material would be a winner in my book.
Hmm...Savage Worlds, anyone?
 
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:devil:).

I'm sure you can see where I was going with all of this, right:tongue:?
 
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 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.
 
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 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.
 
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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.
 
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!
 
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.
 
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. ♥️
 
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
 
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!
 
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:thumbsup:?

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:tongue:?

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:grin:?
 
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...
 
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...:shock:


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:grin:!
 
Does...not...compute...:shock:
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.
 
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:thumbsup:.
Janissaries could count as orks, if anything, in a Tolkien-inspired twist, if we accept the Balkan area is full of elves.:shade:.

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:tongue:).
 
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.
 
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 :smile:
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.
 
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 :smile: ---
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.
 
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.


animals.jpeg

flight of narwhal.jpeg
Into_the_jungle.jpg
rat_bird_by_christianpearce.jpg
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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
 
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I hope you don't mind me reviving this thread to drop some ideas that have been living rent-free in my head:

Supr
Being a mutant sucks. When puberty hits, you suffer unbearable pain as your mitochondria try to break every law of physics and kill you in the process. The Byrne-Claremont protocol can alleviate the suffering and offer a 95% chance of patient survival, but there's a catch: It costs a million dollars, and through an act of Congress, these medical expenses cannot be discharged through bankruptcy.
Small wonder then that the super-for-hire business is flourishing. You are at the bottom of this business: A million in debt, and a fresh account on Supr, the gig economy answer to the mutant problem. 90% of you earnings will be automatically garnished to pay your mounting debt while you try to handle the worst, most irascible customers and raise your score. Good luck!

Mech Guerrilla
Back in the fifties, Americans and Soviets realized that a nuclear arms race would be an awful idea and actually managed to ban their development and construction. That didn't mean arms races stopped entirely. Their efforts turned to small thorium reactors to power bipedal war machines, and these frames proved invaluable in counter-insurgency operations in the coming decades, combining the maneuverability of infantry and the firepower of armored vehicles.
We are in the eighties, and large reserves of rare earths, crucial in mech construction, have been discovered in your country; it only takes a few months for a coup backed by a foreign power to squash your fragile democracy and send brand-new mechs to subjugate the population. You only have a handful of relic frames from the sixties, but they will do if you fight smart, scrap those shiny toys of the junta for parts, and turn their guns against them.
An obvious influence here is Tales From the Loop. Your high tech gear has flickering CRT monitors and cassette tapes as storage. Weaponry is what you would see on a tank or helicopter, with a sprinkling of experimental weapons like railguns and chainsaws.
 
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Settings. I like Settings. I like traveling in them. I like building them.
(I almost like links that much. Follow the links really, they are useful. It also makes this a much smaller post. )

You people thought I was crazy about character building? Nope, that is just a side hobby.

So until this is published, The Neo Frontiers is a Homebrew (I do hate that word, but you used it so...)

Neo Frontiers: Series 1 intro is Here and some basics for the chronicle
There is a Neo Frontiers Summary Here.
NF:S1 Characters were done in the January thread.

Neo Frontiers: The OVA - The First System War.
NF:FSW characters were done in this thread.

Neo Frontiers: Series 2 is here. It has a full summary of the key points (which is types of paranormals).
the Series 2 Core Example Characters entries are Here.

Tales of the Neo Frontiers is starting Here
There are no Tales Characters Yet.

Neo Frontiers: Red Planet aka Blackbird. Here is the Pub Native Thread.
character links and info (plus links) here.

The characters are important. I use them as examples of the characters for the chronicle and each one is important to some key aspect (called a mode) of the setting. So if you read all the character, you will get a feeling for the setting and the example meta plot.
The Character Corral has all the Neo Frontier Example Character
 
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While I am thinking of it. Convergence Point (v1.9 is the version you have seen all those characters made from) is a Balanced, Cinematic, Universal, Roleplaying Game. Unlike most any genre games, this one comes with a core setting (a meta setting really) that allows you to use all those various genres. This core setting is called:

Waunderer's Way
Waunderers are temporally or dimensionally displaced people, beings who travel (sometimes involuntarily) between worlds (the spheres). Possessing an alien artifact they do not understand and can not really control, Waunderers stumble through the multiverse (The *Verse). Some Waunderers are only looking for their home; while others look for adventure or knowledge. While bouncing through the *Verse, Waunderers experience all it has to offer: the joys, the sorrows, the various painful deaths. If a Waunderer can survive all of this, it will find his, her, or its, place in the *Verse.

The major part of a Waunderers campaign is traveling between spheres. The characters can experience a near infinite number of peoples and places. Every new sphere is a new challenge. Not only must the troop survive any direct hazards, it must quickly learn about the sphere, do what it can to fit in long enough for the troop to do its business. This can be easy with spheres based on familiar places. Not every sphere will be familiar or friendly.

There is a lots more. (It is not perfectly organized, but you will see the way it goes.)
 
Okay, last set... they are all not huge multi thread things. Some are single threads (and a few are not massive)

The Darkhold Chronicle
https://forum.rpg.net/showthread.ph...c-Mecha-Pilots-vs-Magic-Monsters-and-Cultists

Buki Tournament of the Key
https://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?737681-Setting-Riff-Buki-Tournament-of-the-Key

People of Wind and Plains
https://forum.rpg.net/showthread.ph...ople-of-the-Wind-and-Plains&highlight=Setting

Shadow in The Dark This needs to be done...
https://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?783880-Setting-Riff-Shadows-in-The-Dark

The Sojourn of the Starship Argon
https://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?424444-Setting-riff-Metamophasis-Alpha-The-Argon

and the unfortunately named .... (seemed like a good idea at the time as it there were several of these)
[Pimp the Setting] The Mansion
http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?439750-Pimp-the-Setting-The-Mansion

oh, there is a huge number of settings in this tread. HERE
While my numbering says 1034, that includes a few hundred from other threads. You can search each page for "guru" and you will catch all my posts without reading all of it.
 
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This is one I ran a one-shot heist in:

The Symphony of the Planes

This mile-long ship cruises the Astral Sea in a multi-year route. An entire, self-sufficient city, it is highly stratified in its many levels. The spacious cabins of the upper decks are where its first-class guests throw some of the most extravagant parties of the multiverse. Below that, two decks are taken by restaurants, casinos, and all sort of entertainment. The largest deck is occupied by the botanical garden and the magically grown crops of the farm. Under that comes the second-class cabins and facilities, and then, occupying three decks, an enormous market where one can find practically anything - a perpetual cacophony fills the packed corridors lined by shops large and small. The lower decks aren't visited willingly by many, but some have no option but to make their shelters among the machinery. As long as they don't break anything, they are tolerated by the kobolds that zealously maintain the engines and worship them as their eldritch deity. Considering some of the weirdness that happens down in those levels, their beliefs may have some seed of truth.
 
Great thread, and I'm happy that it got revived! I'm currently in the midst of remodeling my fantasy setting. It's been with me for about sixteen or seventeen years, before I even really knew what RPGs were. It originally started as a story I wrote in fifth grade which was mostly a bad pastiche of a bunch of fantasy tropes and has steadily evolved since. The biggest changes came after I was foisted into the role of DM for a really bad attempt at running D&D 5e in late 2014 or early 2015.

It was a bit how I imagine Empire of the Petal Throne came about - except I had really been focusing on the technological development and so filling in the rather bland countries with D&D races was a natural way of adding depth. To make things align a bit better with 5e I turned the clock back from the roughly late 19th century tech to something closer to 16th or 17th century including primitive firearms at the behest of a friend. Along with the races came their standard lore, and with that came the typical planes and beings associated with them. However, other than the technology my other big focus was on cosmology. I had been enraptured by The Chronicles of Narnia as a child and the way that Lewis described the greater cosmos in The Magician's Nephew really stuck with me. So I wanted to have a world with many of the same properties - such as being able to sail to its edge - and set about essentially doing a study in outdated physics.

I explored concepts such as a firmament, placing my universe within a sphere (rather than a dome) which contained a disc upon which all mortal beings lived. Beneath was the "Spirit World" which acted as the afterlife for less than saintly people who went to be with God on the outer shell of the universe. Very Christian, I know.

Then when it came time to sandwich in the bazillion planes of D&D I had to sit and really conceptualize how such a thing could be and what I settled on was a series of concentric spheres, with Heaven (D&D's Seven Heavens, more specifically) acting as a barrier between the material planes and the more nefarious outer planes. Again, very Christian. But as I ran games in the setting I felt as if I had lost some of the original purpose of the spherical design. The feeling grew within me as my last campaign wrapped up, and with the events of the past few years kicking me out of my old, more fundamentalist worldview I decided to separate the setting from the myriad D&D planes (though there are still lots of other worlds to go to) as well as the more traditionally Christian stuff like YHWH being the supreme cosmic being and the idea of a Heaven and Hell. Now it's a mishmash of sword and sorcery, my love of the geographical areas I've spent my life in, political drama, and comparative religion. I'm still reworking a lot of things, less so now that I'm focused on science fiction, but I'll still peck away at it every once in awhile. My end goal is to have something that is playable above all, but distinct and interesting to explore. As of now my major influences are Elder Scrolls for its diverse wells of inspiration in world religions and Moorcock's Eternal Champion multiverse for his dynamic and sometimes very weird worldbuilding.

Sometimes I debate whether or not my SF setting (which does include several invocations of Clarke's Third Law) being the distant forgotten past of my fantasy setting but for now I'll maintain the playful references and air of plausible deniability.
 
I recently started making a world for my Fantasy Mythras one-shots.
I had three cities, some ideas about using the Ancient World* and cosmology...then I noticed that I can drop virtually all of it into Thennla:thumbsup:.

So I did, and a new setting simply wasn't born:shade:!

*With more banks, because those are nifty and provide for fun developments:tongue:!
 
Whilst not a complete homebrew setting per see, I'm currently running 13th Age and it's default setting of The Dragon Empire is quite good, but it's covered in broad brushstrokes with the aim for every group's version of the setting to be quite different. So there's a reasonable amount of homebrewing going on in my sessions, with the setting scaffolding provided by the core book and a few products. I'm really enjoying this, it kind of feels like how I used to run games in my teens when I only had inconsistent access to trpg rules and setting material, and I filled in the gaps the best I could. So yeah, it's sort of homebrewing.

I find I quite like getting a well loved setting and homebrewing it my own way.

For example, I love Middle Earth, I have all of Tolkien's works. I have played in Tolkien's setting with MERP, Decipher CODA, but then BRP home brewed them. Later on I tried TOR/AiME, I really loved the flavour of them, but didn't dig the TOR core mechanic (one of the few improvements with AiME), and this was ripe for hacking myself, which we did with Fate Core.

I used alot of the Cubicle 7 material as resources, and the mmo LOTRO was invaluable as well.

This went realy well, it's probably the only way we will play Middle Earth and Fate Core now, it seemed a perfect fit. We retrapped Fate Points as 'Hope' Points, and we tried to install a Tolkiensque flavour to Aspects and tone, so adding that to homebrewed character sheets was really good:

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I've posted those characters before, but there's little chance we would of come up with those concepts if it wasn't for the freedom of the Fate Core system, and also for it's versality to balance characters which would be very different power levels in most trpg systems.
Fate Core doesn't fit everything, but I find it really did well for Middle Earth (and it also does with rollicking pulp adventure and swashbuckling genres).

I'm also thinking of bringing the Elder Scrolls setting to my trpg table, which I would love to do with BRP, in particular Mythras. That project could be quite straightforward, or it could go on forever and see me out to the end of my days.

On the other hand, I'm also thinking of running Thennla with Mythras and adding a fair bit of my own stuff to it (because it feels like TDM isn't doing anything of their own with it anymore).

Then there's my Hyborian Age Adventures homebrew that I never got off the ground, using Mongoose and Modiphius resources to run Mythras...

I really need to spend less time gainfully employed if I ever want to complete the trpg projects I embark upon!
 
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I ran Thirteen Colonies which was D&D 4E using Lovecraft Country and Stephen King short stories. It was surprisingly scary and fun and we only ran a few adventures at low level so no grind. I had zero success with D&D 4E otherwise.
 
I don't know if it counts as homebrewed per se, but when I picked up the fifth edition of Werewolf: The Apocalypse, I read the whole thing, digested the setting it presented, and said, "Nah, I'm going to throw most of that out."

For my first WtA game, I decided to dispense with the modern setting and roll the calendar back to the 1780s in the Hudson's Bay region (now part of Ontario). There are no other trappings of the World of Darkness, just Garou dealing with the environmental despoliation brought on by the European fur trade.

This necessitated a fair amount of reading, much of which has been laid into the setting. Period- and region-specific NPCs and locales had to be created or adapted. So... homebrewed? I guess, kind of? Hard to say.
 
I don't know if it counts as homebrewed per se, but when I picked up the fifth edition of Werewolf: The Apocalypse, I read the whole thing, digested the setting it presented, and said, "Nah, I'm going to throw most of that out."

For my first WtA game, I decided to dispense with the modern setting and roll the calendar back to the 1780s in the Hudson's Bay region (now part of Ontario). There are no other trappings of the World of Darkness, just Garou dealing with the environmental despoliation brought on by the European fur trade.

This necessitated a fair amount of reading, much of which has been laid into the setting. Period- and region-specific NPCs and locales had to be created or adapted. So... homebrewed? I guess, kind of? Hard to say.

Love this idea. Reminds me for some reason of Jason Momoa's tv series, Frontier. You've got me thinking of what else would be fun to do with North America circa 1600-1700's.
 
Frontier is definitely an influence (I'm listening to the score as I type this), and I'm recommending to players that they watch it. It's easier to do that than to hand them a whopping big text on the Hudson's Bay Company or what have you.

It doesn't hurt that Jason Momoa looks like a werewolf half the time anyway, and twice as much when he's dressed as Declan Harp.
 

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All homebrews that are created with genuine affection from the DM are good homebrews. Even if the nominal creator doesn't have the sharpest skill set at this sort of thing, the whole idea of TTRPG's, particularly for the homebrew settings they were originally intended to be played in, is that the PLAYERS are mostly responsible for making up the hardest thing to get right in a setting - vibe, engaging story lines and relationships, granular detailed locations. So, even if it is kind of dopey to begin with, it will get good over time.
 
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