A World-Building Experiment: Heroes & Homelands (pt. 3)

 Over the past two weeks I have created a simple D&D retro-clone called Heroes & Homelands that is intended to be easily copy/pasted and edited to make new bespoke games as I need them. You can get the current version of it in .PDF here, or in .PDF, .html, .odt, and .docx formats in a PWYW bundle on itch.io.

Then I sat down and brainstormed a campaign I called "Into the Mistlands", a surreal magical adventure into something like a weird psychocosm. Here is the pich:

Into the Mistlands

A Mystical and Psychedelic Saga Through a World Warped by Magic for Heroes & Homelands.

200 years ago the Great Assembly, an academy of magicians in the East of the continent of Eraskas were on the cusp of bringing Man into a new golden age. Their experiments in magic had held back a terrible plague, and cleared the Eastern Marches of many of the monsters that lurked in the hinterlands. And then some grand experiment went wrong. All of the lowlands of Eraskas were covered in swirling, brightly colored mists that brought with them strange phenomena, fey creatures, and warped everything it touched. Only a few Northern kingdoms, protected by the Raski Mountian range and the Great Shelf were spared. They are called the Homelands. They have survived in an uneasy peace, ruled over by an emerging group of Plutocrats who work hard to control every aspect of life in the Homelands.

You are a villager of Tollun, a small silver-mining town on cliffs that overlook the mists. With the vein exhausted and trouble on the roads, the town is starting to become desperate for new ways to support itself. The temptation of plunder form the ruined cities of the mists is strong. And somewhere far off on the Eastern Horizon, a voice is calling those blessed with the ears to hear...

Inspired By

Movies: The Winds of Change, Oblivion, Jack the Giant Killer, Stardust, Mirrormask, Fantastic Planet Video Games: Legend of Mana, Final Fantasy IX, Elden Ring, Divinity: Original Sin II, Starbound, MajestyMusic: Vol IV - Black Sabbath, Solar Hits - Glitter Wizard, Le Roi est Mort, Vive le Roi - EnigmaFor this game, I will be customizing Heroes & Homelands.Books: Eyes of the Overworld by Jack Vance, The Hand of Oberon by Roger Zelazny, Magic's Price by Mercedes Lackey, A Spell for Chameleon by Piers Anthony, Stealing Magic by Tanya Huff, The Light Fantastic by Terry PratchettOther Role-Playing Games: Numenera, Lamentations of the Flame Princess, Ultraviolet Grasslands and the Black City, The Hill Cantons, Overlight, Cha'alt

 Working from this campaign pitch, I sat down and made a list of things I would need in the setting and mechanically in the game in order to make it work, which was the meat of my previous article.

Using my notes as a checklist, I sat down and began hammering out a new game based on my campaign needs starting with a duplicate of Heroes & Homelands. This flowed very quickly: the world had specific needs and so the act of writing them out into the manual was straightforward.

Travis over at Grumpy Wizard has a pretty timely series on Writer's Block that relates to this. Writer's block, he suggests is a stall that may occur when you have to engage in creative problem solving for which you have no schema. When writing something like the rules for firearms and illusions, I am basically taking rules from AD&D or LotFP and adapting them. This required very little problem solving beyond "How do I change the ammo price and damage to reflect the currency here" or "how do I rephrase this illusion so it fits on my compact spell tables."

It became more challenging and taxing when I needed to make an idea I had for how the world works... like the idea that illusions sometimes go wild, and there is a form of mist that spontaneously manifests illusions from the subconscious of the people nearby. This was where the work was slow and hard, and had a strong chance of being blocked. Honestly, deciding what to put in the encounter tables took more time than the rest of the changes I made put together for that very reason. I needed to take a long break mid-week before I could tackle it.

It is also the place where I can genuinely say I am creating my own game.

Here is what that process looked like in detail based on the lists I made in the last article.

• I wrote an Illusionist class and spells (which I integrated with heroes and homelands.)

• I created a unique phantasmagoia mechanic to determine what happens when illusions go wrong. 

• I cut out the Barbarian and Druid, as they didn't fit the setting.

• I made several new races:

• The part-human-part-plant and deeply spiritual Creak.
• The transparent Istlings
• The Niven immortal hunters
• The looming and eerie Swif, who wage a ware on evil where darkness is strongest.

• I added guns into the game adapted from Lamentations of the Flame Princess.

• I changed the armour class formula in the game to represent a world where armour is rare and Early Modern Weaponry and warfare are emerging.
  

• I created a section on the Homelands that talked about politics, calendar, currency, recent history, and an important historical figure.

• The section also details the religion of one portion of the Homelands section, although it relies heavily on having a partial understanding of the Prose Edda section on the Death of Baldr and the quest of Hermod. I will confess that my own background as a Norse Pagan has figured heavily into this section and I am integrating a lot of discussion on the myth by Bryan Wilton, for whom I have done a few audiobooks (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7)

• I created a section on travelling the Mistlands. ultimately, I inted for their to be eight colour-coded regional types of region in the Mistlands, Cerulan, Viridian, Dead-Grey, Pink, Octarine, White, and Chartreuse. I created the overview, random encounter tables, and special mechanical rules for regional supernatural events for two of those regions. (This is a WIP, after,all)

• I crated a bestiary of 23 monsters that fit my psychedelic and magical theme in ways that the ones in my collection just didn't.

What I have now is a (mostly) completed OSR retroclone tuned specifically for the experience I want to share with my home group. I've included some AI gen images to create flavour. If you want to see how that looks at this stage in the process, you can download it here.

(I have also played the first two sessions of the campaign as well.)

I will share some insights on what this process did to help me shape the world in my next article.