What I Want In A Game Pt. 1: BRUTAL MAGIC DESERT CAMPAIGN

When I was in undergrad I read some bullshit article in WSJ or BI or FT or some other Wall Street circlejerk publication about how to pick a job that was right for you. They interviewed some president or C-Suite guy about how he came to pick the job he had (lol, I know). The advice? List what you want in a job, or features or aspects you liked in jobs past, and find a position that checks as many of those boxes.

 

Shit advice if you’re a teenager who has only ever worked in fast food, but the idea (and the utter hubris the article represented) stuck with me. I have been thinking about spinning up a new campaign and have a couple setting ideas. By applying the shit WSJ job search advice to RPGs, I hope to come to a decision point on what I want this new campaign to be.

 

I wrote a little in the previous post about how I haven’t run a traditional D&D game before and am sorta looking to do that now. Let’s see if by the end of this process, it will be a setting in which to run an already-written ruleset or a setting + rules hack. Historically everything I’ve done has been the latter. Can I exercise some restraint this time around? Time will tell, but without further ado:

John Hunnicutt II

BRUTAL MAGIC DESERT CAMPAIGN

 

Precis

Blood-red sun hanging low over the horizon of a rocky desert. City-states ruled by brutal magi-kings wage war along the riverbanks; hill tribes launch cattle raids from cliff dwellings; inscrutable nomad caravans travel age-old circuits as the seasons dictate. A map loosely based off the geography of southern Arizona, embiggened and fantastical. Arms and armor made of stone, bone/chitin, flint/obsidian; metal-as-magic.

 

Influences

• Arizona

• Dune

• Dark Sun

• Ancient Egypt/Mesopotamia

• Precolumbian American Southwest

• Caves of Qud

• Banner Saga

• King of Dragon Pass/Six Ages: Ride Like the Wind

 

What I Want From This Game

• Cultural background of characters to matter

• Weapon/armor quality based off material

• Metal scarcity

• Different magic systems
• arcane/clerical magic of magi-kings?
• elemental magic of hill tribes?
• some third thing for nomads?

• Hex Crawl or Point Crawl

• Survival Mechanics

• Currency = XP
• Ceramic Standard – Clay coins instead of copper/silver/gold
• Barter – items have base $ value for XP/trade purposes
• Water – gallons as money would make looting logistics interesting
• Renown – wealth measured in words/deeds/relationships
• All the above: different systems for different cultures?

 

System Considerations

2E + Dark Sun

I think all the above could technically be done with the original 2E and Dark Sun books. However, player buy-in for that would be tough. Those are long, wordy, poorly laid out tomes and neither I nor the players have any table experience with that system. That being said, I would be able to focus solely on prepping for the actual campaign rather than alongside crafting a bespoke setting and hacked-together rules.

 

OSR

Lighter rules, generally better formatting, a vast breadth of content to steal from, etc. make choosing an OSR ruleset very attractive. The question becomes: which one? That’s almost a whole post in and of itself. I don’t feel like writing that post. GLOG, OSE, Knave, and WWN are the ones I am most familiar with. Would likely require some houseruling, especially if I am pulling rules together from different sources but using one as a base and then having a house rules document ain’t no thang. I will need to come up with my own setting for sure.

 

Runequest/Mythras

An outside choice, for sure, but one that mechanically fits some of the goals better than the D&D family of rulesets. Different cultural backgrounds and magic systems are well-represented. As with the 2E, these are lengthy books and I’m worried about player buy-in. However, some of the prospective players (and I) have experience with the 40k RPGs which are D100 systems so this is dependent on who actually joins the game. This is fundamentally not D&D, though, so kind of defeats the purpose of me coming up with the campaign as a means to play D&D; does that actually matter? Will have to draft own-setting.

 

H E A R T B R E A K E R

The thing I am trying to avoid doing. Pros? It is exactly the game I want, the rules I want, with the setting baked into the mechanics, all wrapped up into one neat little package with my name on the front. Cons? It is time consuming, frustrating, and unnecessary beyond the ego-stroke of saying, “Yeah, I wrote this.” Requires basically live playtesting and I would still have to come up with the damn setting. 

 

Conclusion

Rereading all I’ve written so far makes me wonder: what is this game going to be about? Is it the traditional game of dungeoncrawling, murderhobo D&D, or surviving and exploring the desert and its cultures? Is it a little of A, little of B?

 

What bullet points did I leave out that should be included? What system do I pick to check as many of the boxes as I can?