Setting Challenge 2023

(blows off dust, messes with interface)

“…seven years? Tell me you’re not a blogger by nature without telling me you’re not a blogger by nature…”

Okay!

It’s January 2023 and a lot of people are looking at creative challenges: getting that structure in place to do something you might not have done anyway. There’s one for creating a character a day for every RPG system you own, through January at least; there’s one for building a megadungeon by creating one room a day.

Now, my January started off with the task of dogsitting a cur with an injured paw who will whip the sock off and start licking the surgery area at the slightest notice, so pretty much all of my ideas for New Year’s resolutions or creative challenges were severely curtailed. (Read in Stephen Maturin’s voice if you like.) I have not had a lot of time at the computer. But as she’s getting better, I’m starting to get tempted again.

I’m way too late to do anything that’s “a bite of new content every day”. However, the much more relaxed #setting23 challenge, posited over at the OSR blog D.R.E.A.D, requires a couple of pages of content every month. That looks doable. At first I kind of glazed over it because let’s face it, I do setting design for the fun of it all the time. But you know what? Why not formalize one of them, and to make it challenging — design a setting I wasn’t planning to design anyway. Start utterly from scratch, not from anything that has already had a page of notes in one of my numerous grid journals. Not even something like that Locked Tomb Trilogy meets Lancer idea that has like eight lines written down about it. I have to do something as a total side gig and “brain break” from my usual work.

The Plan

Here’s the way that the challenge was proposed: Up to two pages of plain text per month, publish so that it’s available for commentary. The original prompts as created by Florent “Killerklown” Didier read as follows:

You can see the OSR DNA right in a couple of those prompts. When I think of designing a setting, I sure as heck don’t think of designing a character sheet; but I’m not a self-publisher and I never had to learn graphic design. We’ll maybe cross that bridge when we come to it.

I also note that some of those prompts are going to establish themselves sooner than usual. If you’re working on the five cornerstones of your setting, you are definitely going to come away with some ideas about conflicts and factions that are integral to those cornerstones. Take something like Brinkwood, describe its five cornerstones, and see if you don’t have some idea of conflicts, factions, and adventure seeds already. Good setting design tends to be interconnected rather than modular, but hey, that’s all fine. The published monthly prompts will be about refinement at least as much as invention.

The First Decision

So I have a loose structure. Now I need to settle on what this setting is going to be about. And it has to be something I haven’t already started work on, even if that work was utterly speculative. A bit of brainstorming suggests the following list as a starting point:

• Skyfaring, skyship, sky island fantasy
• Adventures or wars in the Inferno; a reign in Hell-themed setup
• A Scion/Fate/Matt Wagner’s Mage-style game about conceptual reincarnations of mythical or historical figures; the sort of setting where a reincarnated Marduk might tangle with a reincarnated Calico Jack Rackham (and it’s actually a fair fight)
• Dueling pirate armadas
• A John Wick (movie, not designer)-styled eccentric criminal underworld with intricate rules and structures
• A bounty hunting road trip/Cowboy Bebop framework
• Phlogiston-punk supers in an art deco world
• Fantasy/occult with strong Tarot or other cartomantic themes, like Tim Powers’ Last Call
• Ancient Egypt-themed fantasy, somewhere between N.K. Jemisin’s Killing Moon books and Magic: the Gathering’s Amonkhet
• A twist on chivalric romance fantasy, undoubtedly with more Ariosto than Malory
• A specific setting designed for use with ICON; how would I customize a setting with these particular conceits (which I like)?
• Yggdrasil meets Philip Jose Farmer’s “The Dungeon” — nine worlds, nine levels or strata
• Post-apocalypse that’s literally post-Ragnarok; remains of giants on the land, etc.

Right here, right now, this is the hardest part I’m going to face all challenge: picking one particular idea to build out. Or fuse two together. Thankfully I don’t have to do it immediately; I have time to ruminate over it for January. If there’s anyone at all reading this who is interested in seeing how I’d break out one or a combo of these ideas in particular, feel free to make a suggestion! Otherwise, I’ll just figure something out, maybe roll a die, and we’ll start the challenge proper next post.