The Summer Lego RPG Setting Jam has officially ended. Congratulations and thank you to everyone who participated! Nineteen people submitted entries between May 8th and July 8th, including my own entry makes an even 20! I'm so pleased and happy to see them all. Let's take a look at what everyone turned in!
Unofficially, if you still want to make an RPG setting based on Lego, there's no reason not to go ahead and do it. I received so many messages from people about how much fun they had writing theirs - you might enjoy writing one, too! And I hope, in the fall, we'll see a few play reports from people who manage to put one of these settings to use at the table.
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| Legojam Castle Hexcrawl map by Rise Up Comus |
The first entry came from Rise Up Comus, who helped get the whole project off to an exciting start! He wrote the Legojam Castle Hexcrawl, a regional sandbox based on Lego's original line of Castle sets. Playing with the idea that Legos are toys, this is a setting where all the NPCs are dressed up in costumes and forced to reenact a child's idea of a rollicking medieval adventure, complete with knights, bandits, and a dragon.
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| Azure Archipelago map by Tales of Escia |
Tales of Escia wrote the Azure Archipelago, a wavecrawl full of early modern pirates and an imperial navy ... and advanced magitech Atlanteans. The three factions are competing for control of the region and access to arcane crystals, and their conflict has the potential to determine the fate of an active volcano on the brink of eruption!
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| Lego Adventurers Dino Island map by Farmer Gadda |
Farmer Gadda gives us their take on more recent theme with Lego Adventurers Dino Island, a pointcrawl setting where freelance archaeologists compete against mustache-twirling aristocratic villains to find treasure on an island full of dinosaurs, and another active volcano.
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| Canton of Ochesbad by Tales of the Lunar Lands |
Tales of the Lunar Lands wrote Cedric the Bull and the Canton of Ochesbad. The canton is a region at war, full of siege engines and war machines. It's medieval, but a very different feel from the Castle Hexcrawl. At the heart of the chaos is Cedric the Bull, a bloody-handed warlord who wants to be an honorable nobleman, which is a nice sort of internal conflict for a villain to have with himself.
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| 6411 Sand Dollar Cafe via Brickset |
Switching genres in a couple ways, Prismatic Wasteland wrote a modern-day murder mystery at the beach in Trouble in Paradisa. He treats us to nostalgia for the Lisa Frank neons of the early 90s, and the plethora of vacation-themed prime time soap operas of the 1980s. As a bonus, the whole thing is formatted as a trifold zine! He also wrote a nice retrospective about his design process.
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| Creatown map by The Lonely Firbolg |
The Lonely Firbolg gives us another modern entry, Creatown, a neighborhood designed following the principles in Electric Bastionland, and using a dozen of Lego's multipurpose Creator sets to produce some truly quirky and memorable city encounters.
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| Challenger Crater by Xandeross |
Taking us into the future, Xandeross wrote Moon War 2199, a small setting of warring cities and factions surrounding a large crater on the moon. Xandeross used some of the same Lego Space sets I grew up with, and provides us with a couple tables of random events to help feed the escalating tensions as the situation worsens.
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| Slizer / Throwbot Planet map by Faber Files |
Arch Brick draws on a theme from Lego's Technic sets to bring us the World of Seven Slizers. This is a world divided into seven elemental realms - where two of the elements are energy and city!
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| Darth Skull, Foreman Mike, Astronaut, and two Ninjas by Benign Brown Beast |
Instead of a setting, Benign Brown Beast takes us on a nostalgic tour through The Bootleg Lego Star Wars of My Youth. It's fun getting to see the idiosyncratic way he interpreted Star Wars as a kid, misremembering and reimagining key characters and scenes, incorporating elements from other Lego sets, blending it all with kid logic. Although my own childhood fantasy world looked totally different from this, it was assembled from mismatched parts in exactly the same way; reading this really took me back!
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| Big Mouth by Save vs Worm |
Half Again as Much gives us a deep cut, with The Monster (Pod) Manual, featuring 20 different monsters, all built from one of Lego's short-lived X-Pod sets. Save vs Worm provides some nice illustrations of each of the monsters.
Seeds of Worlds gives us a delightfully thematic conflict in Dragons High. We get a world that's home to nature loving, dragon riding elves, being invaded via interdimensional portals by an unstoppable army of mechanical sea monsters!
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| Towers of Trumbagar zine by Leviathan Crossing |
Leviathan Crossing wrote a very old-school little zine with Towers of Trumbagar, which includes lists of towers, simplified vertical maps of three, as a few encounter tables to liven them up.
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| Aquanautica map by Old Grog |
Old Grog made a zine as well, and it's amazingly professional looking for a first effort! This might be someone to watch. Aquanautica is another wavecrawl, this one based on Lego's undersea Aquazone sets, which look a lot like underwater spaceships, which is to say, they look really cool.
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| Something Bricked This Way Comes by Rogue Wave Arcade |
Rogue Wave Arcade also brought the professionalism when making Something Bricked This Way Comes, a pamphlet adventure that collects some classic monsters for spooky monster-hunting action!
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| 6160 Sea Scorpion from Brickset |
VDonnut Valley actually wrote three posts to describe an underwater setting. The first post describes the general setting, Sea Scorpion. In the second post about Sea Scorpion Locations, we see a half-dozen locations, their resources, and how events unfold in each one over time. The third post, Sea Scorpion Crews, introduces us to several different undersea adventuring groups, who again change over time. The temporal component here seems interesting; I'd like to know how it works in action at the table.
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| A Legend Returns map by Noriksigma |
Noriksigma wrote an impressively detailed setting, A Legend Returns, based on the Matorans from Lego's Bionicle line. I think he wanted to write something longer, including barrens outside the city, but there is plenty to see and do here already.
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| Island of Tyn Mava map by Noise Sans Signal |
Noise sans Signal also hoped to write something longer, but still produced the Island of Tyn Mava, City of Weather Vanes, a pointcrawl with a dozen locations. A fuller setting may appear someday! One thing I find really interesting here is that this isn't based on childhood memories of playing with Legos, but rather viewing random Lego sets and using them as sparks for creativity.
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| Knights on the Borderlands map by Scriptorium Ludi |
Scriptorium Ludi put together a zine, Knights on the Borderlands, that pays tribute to Lego's Knights Kingdom series and the classic D&D adventure Keep on the Borderlands. This is the second entry that comes with a helpful companion post describing the design process!
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| Scary Monster Madness map by Knight at the Opera |
Knight at the Opera uses, I think, the same classic monsters as Rogue Wave Arcade, for the pointcrawl adventure Scary Monster Madness. Here the players take on the roles of documentarians, reporting on the way a major movie studio is exploiting a rural, monster-filled European backwater to make horror movies with no special effects. Like Rise Up Comus's hexcrawl, I think this one is playing with the toy-ness of Lego, depicting an environment where many of the NPCs are themselves acting an playing roles.
I will share my own Lego-inspired setting soon, but I wanted to share the list of other entries as soon as possible. I'm so glad that so many people participated, and felt inspired to make something of their own. I also received a lot of messages from folks asking questions, sharing their favorite Lego tips and resources, and reminiscing about their childhood favorite Lego sets. This was no Dungeon 23 or Gygax 75, but it was small, and it was fun, and I'm very happy with the outcome.
If you have the time and energy and to try want another summer project, why not join Prismatic Wasteland's Barkeep Jam, which is open until August 14th?
