My Campaign World -- Sevrea

[Blackberry]

I'm starting a fantasy campaign this Saturday using the Burning Wheel system and my own homebrewed world.

Here are my world notes so far. The notes in each section are a bit incomplete, but it's supposed to be enough to give my players a feeling and sense of everything.

http://www.anthrobunny.com/games/sevrea/sevrea.html

Obviously, there's still one map missing on the Maps page, and I'm working on the Making a Character page, which is where the world will tie in with the system. The hardest part is coming up with Settings and Lifepaths for all of the races and cultures.

[Kublai]

Wow! You go, Blackberry! :D

Creating unique Settings and Lifepaths is certainly a great untertaking, though. I did a race for the upcoming Monster Burner and the process seemed to have no end! Very satisfying, but very demanding.

Is there no way to adapt the current settings and LPs to your world?

[Blackberry]

Is there no way to adapt the current settings and LPs to your world?

Many of the Human and Elf lifepaths will come right over without modification. I just have to modify the Settings a bit and figure out which Settings go with which cultures.

But for the other races, they're pretty much from scratch.

Anyone want to take a stab? :)

[Thor Olavsrud]

Many of the Human and Elf lifepaths will come right over without modification. I just have to modify the Settings a bit and figure out which Settings go with which cultures.

But for the other races, they're pretty much from scratch.

Anyone want to take a stab? :)

You may want to wait until the Monster Burner comes out before going whole hog on the non-human races (it should be out for GenCon). It will have a bunch of Traits and other goodness for building non-humans.

If you don't want to wait, my recommendation (which I'm sure you won't need since I know you're familiar with Glorantha), is to start a game in a very small corner of the world and just use the stuff you won't need to build from scratch (assuming your world supports that). Then expand as you build stuff. That will almost certainly buy you time to get your hands on the Monster Burner.

[Blackberry]

Yeah, I haven't decided yet where in the world to kick things off, but I know I will only have character creation guidelines for a few of the more popular races done.

[Manicrack]

how long do you plan on making this campaign?
I mean, you're creating an entire world here.
Just as a comparison, my forst idea for a campaign was Sactuary, from 'Thieves' World' just one city, where people could do tons of stuff.

Maybe you should make several campaigns in the same world, always with different characters, then you also won't have the problem(like i slways did) that the characters are getting too overpowerd.
Anyway, tell us how it goes.

-Crack

[Thor Olavsrud]

Well, here are a couple suggestions to get you started:

Take a look at the Black Barbarian, Lost Atlantean and Slave Raider lifepaths Luke has available for download. They're pretty tailored to creating characters from the Conan The Barbarian movie, but you should be able to draw some ideas and inspiration from them.

In addition to the Black Barbarian, there's another place you might look for inspiration for Nomadic lifepaths (and this one will seem pretty wierd). Check out the Survival of the Fittest lifepaths for the Under a Serpent Sun setting Luke (and Dro) put up on the Web site. Under a Serpent Sun is a post-apocalyptic setting, so everything won't be appropriate. But some of it should translate fairly well with a bit of work.

The Mount Burner download should provide most of the Traits you need for your centaur races. Once you have your list of Common Traits, you should more or less be able to make use of a cut-down version of men's lifepaths for them. Or possibly use the Elven Wilderness lifepaths and Protector sub-setting, making Time adjustments and some other judicious tweaking.

I would also recommend taking a look at The Way of the Great Wolf chapter on the Web site. The final version will appear in the Monster Burner, but there's some good stuff you could use there, especially from the Spirit Hunter and Ghost of the Deeping Wood lifepath settings. You'd have to adjust some of the Times and whatnot because these are designed for wolves, but that shouldn't be too hard using Luke's Lifepath Creation Guidelines.

Also, since Spirits seem to play a heavy role in the setting, you should definitely download the Summoning chapter from the Magic Burner beta on the site. You'll likely have to tailor them to suit your setting, but that's better than starting from scratch.

On the whole, my suggestion is to always try to use the existing stuff when you can, even if you have to adjust them a bit. It's definitely easier to tweak the existing stuff than to create your own whole-cloth.

[Thor Olavsrud]

Oh, one more thing. It sounds like Automata might play a heavy role in this setting, which is very cool. Unfortunately, we don't have any rules for it yet, aside from the Automata skill in the Burner. Make sure to post any ideas you have for it!