Gygax 75

There's a worldbuilding challenge called Gygax 75 that's been making the rounds on the blogosphere. I decided to try to look its origins and follow the people who undertook it, as is my way.

 

 

The earliest origin of the Gygax 75 challenge is an article written by Gary Gygax in the April 1975 issue of the Europa fanzine. Gary lays out a 5 step process for building a new fantasy campaign. I think it's fair to say that this 45 year old piece of ephemera isn't the immediate source of most blogger's participation in the challenge, though.

 

 

 

 
Initial credit goes to Charles Akins from Dragons Never Forget. Charles is the one who found the long-forgotten Gygax article on the Internet Archive and shared the link with the blogosphere. Charles is also the one who called this worldbuilding method "Gygax 75" and threw down the gauntlet to make it into a blogging challenge.

 

The Gygax 75 challenge is a 5 step process that's supposed to take place over 5 weeks. Dragons Never Forget describes these in much better detail than me, laying out the parameters of the challenge, but permit me to at least briefly outline them.

Week 1 - decide on the thematic basis of your campaign and pick out some inspirational materials that you can refer to whenever you need help populating your campaign with details

Week 2 - draw a region map of the wilderness adventuring sites that will surround the dungeon that will form the heart of your campaign.

Week 3 - draw your dungeon! in one week! Gary recommends starting with some overview planning to pick themes, monsters, and architectural oddities for each dungeon level, and then setting out to draw and key the first few levels. in a week! I would argue this should be an 8 week challenge, with week 3 devoted to planning and perhaps mapping, and weeks 4-6 given to keying levels 1, 2, and 3.

Week 4 - design a "home base" for your players, replete with factions, NPCs, and rumors so your players can engage in social intrigue in between trips to the dungeon.

Week 5 - design the larger world around the starting region. you don't need a detailed map of the whole world, but you should know the other regions that can be reached from the current one (either by overland or magical travel) so that you can start writing rumors to entice your players to travel to them.

  

0 The Gygax 75 Challenge Introduction - Charles links us to the original Europa article and provides links to his other posts in this series.

1 The Setting of the Campaign - summarizes Gygax's worldbuilding advice and lays out his own campaign inspirations, setting the stage for post-apocalyptic science-fantasy.

2 The Map Around the Dungeon - Charles creates his starting region, the Valley of the Three Forks.

3 How to Build the Gygax 75 Dungeon - summarizes Gygax's dungeon-creation advice. pick your themes, place your setpiece treasures and encounters, then write or borrow random tables and procedurally generate the rest.

3 Dungeon Level 1 - the top dungeon level is a ruined, abandoned temple

3 Dungeon Level 2 - the next level features a hall of statues and a giant chamber full of pools

3 Dungeon Level 3 - a prison level, with an exit leading down to allow for further expansion

4 The Local Town and All the Trouble - Charles goes over Gygax's town-building advice and comes up with a list of neighborhoods and the most important shopkeepers in each one.

5 The World Plan - describes three important factions that will be encountered outside the Valley

0 Conclusion and Links to Other Challengers - Charles once again encourages us to take up the Gygax 75 challenge, and points us to Viridian Scroll and Beyond the Gates of Cygnus.

 

 

 

 

As is often the case in these kinds of situations, the person who created the challenge and the one who popularized it are not the same person. Credit for successfully spreading the word goes to Ray Otus of Viridian Scroll. If you've seen another blogger taking on the Gygax 75 challenge, they've likely been directly inspired by Ray. If you've seen a single-link version of the challenge, it's probably been to Ray's free pdf version on itch.io. Ray fully credits Charles, but Charles inspired a couple bloggers, while Ray inspired at least a dozen. I should note that Ray's pdf contains both more detailed instructions and a workbook to follow along in, so the work he put into the presentation might explain his greater success in popularizing the challenge.

As we'll see in a minute, Ray and JJ from Beyond the Gates of Cygnus did the challenge at the same time and recorded several episodes of the Plundergrounds podcast about their experiences.

0 The Gygax 75 Challenge - Ray describes the premise of the challenge and links back to Dragons Never Forget and Europa.

1 The Gygax 75 Challenge Week 1 - gathering together inspiration, Ray envisions a world where Iron Age humans in city-states reside uneasily alongside communities of monstrous humanoids.

2 The Gygax 75 Challenge Week 2 - Ray sketches and then finalizes a vibrantly-colored map of a desert region, Timuria, the Land between Two Rivers.

3 The Gygax 75 Challenge Week 3 - more iterative sketching results in a single dungeon level based loosely on a Hindu temple. 

4 The Gygax 75 Challenge Week 4 - released more retrospectively than the others, this one covers setting up the town of Addak, which matches the vaguely Babylonian naming scheme of the other cities.

 

 

 

 

Over at Beyond the Gates of Cygnus, Cinderella Man JJ used the Gygax 75 challenge to create a setting for a Delving Deeper campaign.

0 Creating a Delving Deeper Campaign in 5 Easy Steps - JJ announces the start of the challenge, which he's completing simultaneously with Ray Otus from Viridian Scroll.

1 The Overall Setting - in addition to using the Delving Deeper rules, this setting will be inspired by the band Rush.

2 The Starting Area - a town called Willow Dale, a Necromancer's tower in the heart of dead forest, and the River Dell leading to the Down Mountains.

3 The Dungeon - JJ creates the most important details for the Necromancer's tower dungeon.

4 The Home Base - the basic features of the town of Willow Dale.

5 The World - more Rush albums are brought in to help define nearby regions of the gameworld.

 

 
 

 

The Plundergrounds podcast is a collaboration between Ray Otus and JJ. In addition to taking the challenge at the same time, Ray and JJ met once a week to compare notes and talk about their worldbuilding progress.

1 The Gygax 75 Challenge Week 1 - introducing the challenge and comparing sources of inspiration.

2 The Gygax 75 Challenge Week 2 - drawing the starting area maps.

3 The Gygax 75 Challenge Week 3 - starting dungeons that will continue being updated over the next couple weeks.

4 The Gygax 75 Challenge Week 4 - working on the starting villages.

5 The Gygax 75 Challenge Week 5 - thinking about the wider worlds, and looking back on the challenge.

 

 

 

 

Not everyone who starts the Gygax 75 challenge decides to finish it. Most people, in fact, seem to stop after a couple weeks. The next person I found who started the challenge was Italian blogger Omnia Incommoda Certitudo Nulla. They were apparently inspired by a post by Shane Ward on a message board called OSR Pit. 

1 Gygax 75 Challenge Week One - the starting pitch here is for a campaign world inspired by The Hobbit, but also by Dracula and The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

2 Gygax 75 Challenge Week Two - a starting map, largely without features, and a wandering encounter table emphasizing human antagonists like duelists, cultists, and bounty hunters.

 

 

 

 

Shane Ward from 3 Toadstools Publishing was the first person I saw who took up the challenge because of finding Ray Otus's itch.io. He got scooped from being the first person to start it without a personal connection to Ray because he managed to inspire OICN to try the challenge before starting it up himself.

0 The Gygax 75 Challenge - Shane announces the challenge and starts brainstorming, drawing on ideas from Piers Anthony and fantasy botany.

1 The Gygax 75 Challenge Week 1 - a more developed start to the setting, inspired by Xanth, Shanara, and Disney's Robin Hood.

2 The Gygax 75 Challenge Week 2? Sorta - Shane begins drawing a region map, listing possible encounters, and thinking about character classes

 

 

 

 

Verbum Ex Nihilo also briefly attempted the challenge.

0 The Gygax 75 Challenge - about the potential benefits of structure and deadlines in worldbuilding, with the challenge as one way to impose them.

1 The Gygax 75 Challenge Week 1 - about the process of selecting a notebook, creating a mood board, and attempting to conquer writer's block by looking for structures to build one idea off another.

 

 

 

 

Dave from Blood of Prokopius was the next to complete the challenge. Dave comes in with his own ideas and methods for creating sandboxes, keying dungeons, etc, so an interesting part of his commentary is about trying to set his own approach aside to try it Gary's way (as interpreted by Charles and Ray).

1 The Gygax 75 Challenge - introduces Dave's inspirations, science fantasy pitting the forces of Heat & Light against the forces of Cold & Dark.

1 Laser Guns and Plasma Swords - defends adding scifi weapons to this particular fantasy setting.

2 The Gygax 75 Challenge Part 2 - Dave draws a fantasy map loosely inspired by Kyrgyzstan, starts stocking his sandbox, and creates a very Lost World random encounter table full of dinosaurs and cavemen.

3 The Gygax 75 Challenge Part 3 - a general plan for a dungeon of caves atop a glacier atop a crashed alien spaceship.

3 The Gygax 75 Challenge Part 4 - keying the dungeon with monsters and treasures, and writing a wandering monster table.  

4 The Gygax 75 Challenge Part 5 - Dave names his starting city Darkport.

4 The Gygax 75 Challenge Part 6 - Dave creates a random name generator to name two shops, and observes some differences in the equipment lists of Basic and B/X.

4 The Gygax 75 Challenge Part 7 - human and elven factions for Darkport.

5 The Gygax 75 Challenge Part 8 - Dave builds out his world by adding three more factions and developing a key NPC for each.

 

 
 

 

King Brackish actually attempted the challenge twice, first starting it on Tomb of the Wandering Millennial (apparently inspired by Verbum Ex Nihilo), and then restarting and finishing it on Brinehouse.

1 Gygax 75 Challenge Week 1 - Brackish proposes a setting inspired by Berserk and Dorohedoro, among others.

2 Gygax 75 Challenge Week 2 - the city-state of Evangelos, surrounded by the Blackmange Forest and the Sancana Steppe, and a random encounter table full of megafauna, necromancers, and skeletons.

1 Gygax 75 Challenge Redux Week 1 - Brackish restarts the challenge with a similar, though not identical list of inspirations.

2 Gygax 75 Challenge Redux Week 2 - a new region map with the port city of Dis on the coast of an ocean, surrounded by three distinct forests. the new random encounter table emphasizes boars, wolves, dragons.

3 Gygax 75 Challenge Redux Week 3 - Brackish outlines the three-level Temple of the Swine God.

4 Gygax 75 Challenge Redux Week 4 - the village of Mun, along with 10 shops and 5 NPCs.

5 Gygax 75 Challenge Redux Week 5 - more worldbuilding, including a sun god, rumors of dragons and falling stars, and religious-themed magic treasures.

 

 
 

 

Andrew Sawyer from Seven Deadly Dungeons is the last person on my list to finish the challenge. 

1 Gygax 75 Challenge Week 1 - Andrew's plan involves creating a fantasy postapocalyptic Meso America.

2 Gygax 75 Challenge Week 2 - the region contains an active volcano, a ruined city, and several places where ghosts are on the haunt.

3 Gygax 75 Challenge Week 3 - Andrew has a pretty cool dungeon concept here. the whole complex is a superweapon meant to kill angels. the top level is filled with ghosts, the middle is a star chart that functions as the weapon's targeting system, and the bottom level is a site for the blood sacrifices needed to power the weapon.

4 Gygax 75 Challenge Week 4 - NPCs from the character's home base, all of whom have terrible injuries, which is presumably meant to communicate something about the danger of this place.

5 Gygax 74 Challenge Week 5 - encounter tables for three terrain types.

 

 

 

 
I've noticed religious themes, and especially postapocalyptic settings have come up in several of these challenges. Justin Hamilton from Aboleth Overlords picks a decidedly Biblical apocalypse to set his game in the aftermath of.

1 Gygax 75 Challenge Week 1 - human civilization has returned to a late bronze age in the aftermath of a Deluge that drowned the world.

2 Gygax 75 Challenge Week 2 - the setting gets a name, Umbroea, along with a list of villages, geographic features, possible dungeons, and encounters. 
 
 

 

 

I'll admit that Liche's Libram's Tlon setting is the one that excites me the most out of all of these. It's one that they were working on before, and seemed to use the Gygax 75 challenge as a way to continue building out their setting. Tlon reminds me of Dying Earth fiction, but transplanted from Earth to a Dying Mars.

1 Tlon Week 1 Gygax 75 Challenge - an overview of the setting's themes. everything is old, civilization is crumbling, water is the most important treasure.

2 Tlon Week 2 Surrounding Area - a visually compelling map, accompanied by descriptions of two cities, a couple geographic features, and a necropolis.

 

 
 

Rob Magus from Penny Ventures decided to make a setting in the aftermath of a cyberpunk apocalypse. I like the image he conjures of whole forests of solar-panel trees.

1 Technoccult Gygax 75 Challenge Week 1 - the opening setting pitch. images of demon-haunted computers and ghost towns of still-functional neon lights.

2 2d6 Electric Devil Skeletons Gygax 75 Challege Week 2 - locations for the Technoccult setting and a random encounter table with a number of undead cybernetic monsters.

 

 
 

Like Liche's Libram, The Eternal Slog was already working on their Zorn setting when they discovered the Gygax 75 challenge, and started it as a way to do a bit more worldbuilding on an ongoing project.

1 G75 Challenge Week 1 Zorn - the setting here is a previously undiscovered island that rises out of the ocean in 1936 on the even of WWII. various countries send explorers to the island to plunder its ancient occult treasures to use in their war effort. a pretty solid pitch!

 

 

 

 

Jim from d66 Classless Kobolds is an interesting case to me. He published his Weird North game in August 2020, then started the challenge in October to start making a campaign setting for the game.

1 The Conceptual Beasts of the Weird North - human Vikings on an alien planet that resembles Earth's arctic north, full of ancient tech and extradimensional visitors.

2 The Dank Morass A Swampcrawl for the Weird North - a rather nice-looking pointcrawl map and a random encounter table full of dinosaurs and robots.

 

 

 

 

Mihau from Fractal Meadows of Reality started the challenge to work on a far-future alien world setting. One interesting thing about going through these challenges is getting a chance to see where the current campaign setting zeitgeist is at. Science fantasy, post apocalypses, aliens instead of demihumans, and magitech meets stone-age all seem to be en vogue right now.

1 Attempting the Gygax 75 Challenge Week 1 - inspiration from videogames and an online art book that looks very cool to me. humans and aliens on a distant world ruled by satellite gods.

2 Gygax 75 Week 2 Plains of Eyes and Hands - the Ascendancy of Teal arcology sits aside the Plains of Salt, and an encounter table full of megafauna and cavemen.

 

 

 

 

Phoe of Magic Trash is the most recent person I've spotted to start the challenge. His proposed setting is inspired by extremophile biology and vernacular architecture - a winning combination as far as I'm concerned!

1 Gygax 75 Week 1 - no humans, no humanoids, only talking animals and extremophile aliens, each building unique cities.

2 Gygax 75 Week 2 The Legend of Gygax's Gold - a few points of light in the wilderness, with attention given to the architectural style of each place.

My Earliest Childhood Fantasy Inspirations

The other day, I was talking with some friends about our childhood fantasy inspirations. It occurred to me that everyone's knowledge of fantasy (or any other genre) is very limited at first, and grows over time.

But if I cast my mind backward, I can still kind of recapture what the fantasy genre looked like to me as a child. If I'd been called on to run a D&D campaign at age 10 or 12, these are the images and plots I would have drawn on to provide the inspiration for my game.

For me, let's mark the end of "childhood" and the start of my teen years with the roughly simultaneous discoveries of Magic: The Gathering and The Duelist magazine, JRPG games I could read about in Nintendo Power magazine even if I didn't own them, and my family's first subscription to 1990s dial-up internet. Those three discoveries gave me windows outside my parents house and shaped my view of fantasy in my teen years, and they probably established the type of fantasy world I'd imagine today. But what I'm writing about here comes earlier, before that, when my world was still small.

What were your earliest childhood fantasy inspirations? What did your fantasy world look like back then?

 

 

The Sword in the Stone - The origin-story prequel of the saga of King Arthur, Sword in the Stone tells the story of an unloved young squire nicknamed "Wart" who meets the wizard Merlin and his familiar, Archimedes the owl. Merlin and Archimedes tutor Arthur by showing him the world from the perspective of two different prey species, one a fish, and one a bird, both times defending him from predators, and eventually from the shapechanging witch Mad Madam Mim. The film ends when Arthur pulls the sword Excalibur from the stone, almost by accident, while trying to fulfill his duties as a squire.

As a child, I was small, skinny, and had few friends. I found Arthur's life as "Wart" easy to relate to. One thing that stands out in this movie is just how tiny Arthur is, and how giant all the adults seem by comparison. The magicians' duel between Merlin and Mim, with all its creative shapeshifting, including her ending up as a dragon, is a real delight to watch - as are the scenes of Merlin magically packing up his study and cleaning the kitchen.

 

 

 

 

 

Robin Hood - The familiar story of Robin Hood of Sherwood Forest, who robs from the rich, gives to the poor, does battle with Prince Jon and the Sheriff of Nottingham, and comes to the rescue of his girlfriend, Maid Marian. Oh yeah, and everyone's an animal. Robin is depicted a hero of the people, beloved by the townspeople, and a group of small children who - in an almost metafictional gesture - play pretend at being Robin Hood themselves.

The Disney films on this list weren't just three of my favorite fantasy movies, they were also three of my favorite Disney films, and three of my favorite movies period, growing up. The music is especially good in this one, and the costumes are easy to imagine transposed onto human characters, and Robin in particular is a master of disguise. (Although his fortune teller disguise seems to be based on, and to perpetuate, stereotypes about the Roma people.)

 

 

 

 

Sleeping Beauty - A fairly standard telling of the story of Sleeping Beauty that's elevated by its details. The evil fairy Maleficent is frightening even before she turns into a dragon, the good fairies are fun to watch when they're fighting over what color Aurora's dress should be, and if the instrumentals sound good enough to dance to, it's because Tchaikovsky wrote them for the ballet.

All the verve and personality in this movie is reserved for the supporting cast, but they have it in spades. Maleficent is one of the all-time great villains, she turns into a giant black dragon, and I love her little army of mismatched goblins. She says "hell" once, you guys, which seemed like a big deal at the time. And even if most of what is does is stand there and look vaguely handsome, I also liked Phillip's brief turn as a dragonslaying knight on horseback.

  

  

 

LEGO Castle - Although I've often lamented that LEGO got much cooler right after I stopped playing with them, what I probably mean is that that's around the time they started making licensed sets with recognizable characters from other intellectual properties. I had a few sets of knights, bandits, and the "forest men" who are clearly modeled on Robin Hood. I used them to act out Robin Hood and Ivanhoe, and to make up my own fantasy stories. If I had been running a game of D&D as a kid, I would definitely have used these LEGO minifigures to represent each character.

 

  

  

 

The Princess Bride - The classic story of True Love TM , Westley and Buttercup fall in love when they're younger, and separated by circumstance, she gets unwillingly forced into an engagement to a prince, and Westley returns bristling with talent and dressed in all black to rescue her. There are some really excellent sword fights, and various extremely silly supporting cast members.

As a child, I really don't think I understood that this is intended to be a comedy. I read the book too, with its fake editor's notes and summaries of the expurgated materials, and failed to understand that the supposed "good parts edition" was the only edition, there was no actual unabridged original that I couldn't locate. For all that, I really enjoyed this movie, perhaps especially Westley's sword fight with Inigo, wrestling match with Fezzik, and battle of wits with Vizzini.

 

 

 

 

 

He-Man and the Masters of the Universe - Prince Adam of Eternia transforms into the indomitable He-Man, defending his kingdom from invasion by the evil sorcerer Skeletor and his army of colorful minions. The characters on He-Man are essentially fantasy superheroes and supervillains, but they'd probably make good additions to any cast of NPCs.

I've heard from people who've rewatched this cartoon that He-Man never actually uses his sword as a weapon, that he always wins his fights with other feats of unarmed strength, but as a kid I never noticed that. He-Man is one of the earliest cartoons I can remember watching, and I was kind of obsessed with it at the time. I had some of the action figures and played with them constantly, I played at pretend sword-fighting, on a few occasions I even wore across my chest so I could carry a toy sword on my back. While this was on the air, I never got tired of it.

 

 

  

 

Circle of Magic - Randal, a young squire, abandons the path to knighthood to learn magic. After seeing a demonstration by Master Maddoc, Randal follows him to the city where he wins admission to a wizard college. He meets Lys, a girl his own age who starts out homeless, orphaned, and dressed as a boy, stealing food to stay alive. Given an instrument and a chance, she develops into a successful traveling minstrel. Randal travels too as a journeyman wizard, and is joined by his cousin Walter, who has become a knight errant. Their adventures frequently culminate in an attempt to banish a demon from the world.

I think I probably bought these books off the Scholastic book carts on one of the occasions they took over the lunchroom at my elementary school. I remember sneaking out of bed to lie on the floor so I could read them beneath my nightlight. As a kid, to a certain extent, almost all my fantasy inspirations felt personal. Maybe all my classmates knew the Disney films, but none of my friends had seen Labyrinth or the Dark Crystal. But even today, the Circle of Magic books still feel personal. Unlike the other items on this list, there are no rewatches or reviews online, no shared generational nostalgia. 

I didn't understand why at the time, but I felt especially interested in Lys's story. These days, with the fantasy books I seem to read, I'd almost be surprised to find a girl character who doesn't disguise herself as a boy for safety, but at the time, Lys wasn't an example of an archetype to me, she was a unique and surprising individual. I liked that she and Walter were shown to be as skilled at their careers as Randal was at magic. 

There was also some subtle commentary in these books. Wizards don't tell lies because their magic will betray them if they do. Wizards don't use swords because they promise not to, and so using one would mean breaking a promise, and thus telling a lie. And in their travels, the group comes to a town where the upper class all wear fancy dueling swords, which they observe are quite different from the heavy killing blades Randal and Walter grew up with.

 

 

  

Return of the Jedi - Luke Skywalker helps rescue his friends from the alien gangster, Jabba the Hutt. They discover the location of a new, incomplete Death Star. The Rebel fleet will attack the space station while Luke and his friends turn off the shield generator that protects the station. The generator is on a forested moon, and they're aided in their attack by the alien Ewoks. Luke also goes to the Death Star to convince Darth Vader to quite the Empire.

In general, as a kid, I drew thick boundary lines between the genres, but the last Star Wars movie slipped through my firewall to inform my vision of fantasy far more than it did scifi. I was thrilled by the raid on Jabba's palace and the climactic sword-fights between Luke, Darth Vader, and the Evil Emperor (who shoots lightning out of his fingers!), and the Gamorrean guards joined the ranks of the goblin army in my mind.

 

 

 

  

 

The Neverending Story - Bastian skips school to sneak into an attic and read a new fantasy novel, also called The Neverending Story. In the book, the world is being dissolved by the encroaching Nothing. Heroic Atreyu travels across the shrinking countryside to find the Childlike Empress and try to save both her and the world, risking death several times along the way. He eventually gets help from Falcor the luck-dragon, and Bastian begins to understand that he has a role to play too - the fantasy world can't survive without the imagination of its readers.

This was another one I read. I found a luscious hardback copy of the book on my parents' shelves, printed with green and red ink to designate Bastian's and Atreyu's stories. It blew my mind when I discovered that there was a whole second half to the book that continued after the endpoint of the movie. I know everyone feels sad when they watch Atreyu's horse drown in the swamp, but the scene that always made me saddest is when we meet the rock giant for the second time. The first time, in the beginning, he's happy and confident, certain he can outrace the peril that's chasing him. When we see him again, he's wracked with guilt over being unable to save his friends from the Nothing, disappointed in himself because there's no one else left to be disappointed in him. For whatever reason, the way he was haunted by his failure really resonated with me, even when I was too young to have failed at much in life yet.

 

  

  

 

Labyrinth - Teenage Sarah wishes the goblins would come take her screaming, crying baby brother away ... so they do. To rescue him, Sarah has to navigate a maze with a shifting layout to try to reach the castle of the Goblin King. She helped by a handful of the labyrinth's inhabitants, and obstructed by the majority of those she encounters. She learns both self-confidence and a willingness to trust deserving friends, and eventually rescues her little brother, but retains a connection to the goblin kingdom.

This was one of the few fantasy stories I was aware of where a girl hero saves a boy damsel, and I really liked Sarah as a character. She's smart, but more importantly, aside from acting impulsively on her feelings at the beginning, she finds her way through the maze by being emotionally intelligent. I also felt there was something interesting about the Goblin King insisting that he only acted like a villain because humans like Sarah wanted him to, which makes him a bit like the Lucifer character from the Sandman comics - although I wouldn't read those until like a decade after I first saw Labyrinth. The visuals in this film are really good, the MC Escher inspired staircase room remains part of my idea of what dungeons should look like.

 

 

 

 

 

The Dark Crystal - Two elf-like Gelflings, Jen and Kira, meet on a quest to find a crystal shard and return it to the great Crystal. They're pursued by the horrible vulture-like Skeksis, who rule the world, and have bred monsters to protect the Crystal from being repaired and made whole. When the Crystal is repaired, the Skeksis merge with the ancient Mystics, each pair fusing to become a single body. These restored beings abdicate their rule and leave the world to the Gelflings.

I'm certain I didn't understand this movie as a kid, although I loved the visuals. The plot isn't necessarily that complex, but I found it disorienting. It doesn't just tell a new story, it tells it using unfamiliar characters. There are no humans or recognizable animals in Dark Crystal, it's got its own complete ecology. Like Neverending Story, it tells the story of a world that's practically disintegrating from some sort of overuse and exhaustion, a world that is reborn like the first day of spring after a final victory that's less about defeating an enemy than fixing something that was broken.

 

 

 

 

  

The Secret of NIMH - Field mouse Mrs Brisby knows that she needs to move her family out of their cinderblock home before the farmer ploughs the field, but her youngest son is too sick to move. She seeks help from the mysterious rats of NIMH. She meets a friendly crow, a terrifying giant owl, puts sleeping powder in cat named Dragon's food dish, and eventually uses a magic amulet she got from the rats to levitate her house to safety. The rats are having their own internal disputes, which they settle with a lot of sword-fighting.

I thought this was the coolest animated movie as a kid. One of the rats says a swear word - "damn!" When the rats sword-fight, they get cut, their swords get bloody. Nicodemus and the Owl both have scary glowing eyes, and the amulet lets Mrs Brisby use what amounts to telekinesis, but animated with absolutely gorgeous glowing fire light. Between Mrs Brisby's dead husband, her deathly ill son, and the Lab Animal style revelation of the source of the rats' intelligence and powers made this a pretty dark movie. Although as I write this, actually several of the films on this list have some pretty mature themes for children's entertainment.

 

  

 

Looking across the different stories, it becomes possible to draw out common themes, to see the key features of a campaign world inspired by these movies begin to take shape.

Your friends are small and weak - When the heroes in these stories have allies - friends who support them even if they don't join in their adventures - those allies tend to be marginal and vulnerable. They're children, the elderly, people who have been disabled by sickness, or people who spend most of their time helping the above. Think of Robin Hood's many supporters among the poor, and Friar Tuck, whose obligations to his ministry limit how much he can help his criminal friend.

When the heroes receive supernatural help, its often from allies we might think of as gnomes. They might not be called gnomes in-fiction, but I'm thinking of the podlings from Dark Crystal, the observatory keepers at the Southern Oracle in Neverending Story, perhaps even Yoda. These allies can provide information, medical attention, a place to sleep, but there's a reason they aren't adventurers themselves.

Heroes wear black - And not just literally, like Luke in Return of the Jedi and Westley in Princess Bride, (and Zorro!), but also figuratively, many of these heroes are criminals and outlaws, and many of the villains are kings and princes, people with the law, the government, and an army on their side and at their command. Jabba the Hutt might be referred to as a gangster, for example, but he's the one with the palace, the courtiers, the guards, the multiple sites where he executes people for spectacle. Even the heroes who used to be royal themselves have been thrown out of power. If they retain anything at all from that time, it's a bit of status and respect from the common people. These are adventures where the bad guys have won before the story even starts, and the quest is an attempt to repair a situation that has been broken for quite some time.

Villains lead goblins - The villainous rulers of these stories wear quite a bit of black themselves, and they're often quite frightening and imposing. Think of Skeletor's skinless face, Maleficent's horned headdress, the Skeksis' terrible bird-like features, or Darth Vader's whole costume.

The villains also frequently have their own private armies of goblins, who look quite distinctive compared to the goblins that I saw later in Magic and Pathfinder illustrations. These goblins are typically short, pale brown or sickly yellow skinned (not human skin tones, more like colors you might associate with disease), and with diverse bestial features. Some have pig's noses, or animal maws, or horns, some mostly look like kids, and their individual uniqueness gives them a distinctive look when they're grouped together. Goblins are cunning and dangerous, but also cowardly and undisciplined. They're like a cruel reflection of kids and gnomes as allies.

Dragons are deadly - Mad Madam Mim and Maleficent turn themselves into dragons, the LEGO knights fight dragons, and the Rats of NIMH live in fear of Dragon the cat, who killed Mrs Brisby's husband and broke Mr Ages' leg. While many of the fights in these stories are fought until one side can knock out or capture the other, a fight with a dragon stands out because it's a fight to the death.

Knights should be a character type - I still remember how surprised I was learning about D&D and realizing that knights weren't really a viable character class. There are fighters who wear plate armor, there are self-righteous paladins, and occasionally there's some sort of cavalier as an optional addition to the core rules, but despite how often they appear in the fantasy media (and LEGO sets!) I was familiar with as a kid, knights just don't really have a place in standard D&D. They certainly would if my kid self ran a campaign, though!

The protagonists of these stories are more likely to be former squires than active knights, but there are plenty of knights in armor among the supporting casts. Knights errant should probably also be a possible NPC ally, someone you could recruit to accompany you and fight on your behalf. I would probably let the players take turns controlling their mounted champion in combat though, so it doesn't feel like fights are decided by contests between a GM-controlled protector and some GM-controlled monsters. Speaking of combat...

Fighting means sword-fighting - I think the most common sort of fight in these stories is a one-on-one duel with swords. As others have noted in detail, this is not a type of combat that standard D&D models particularly well, although I think it probably requires a change in the common practices of description more than it requires a change in the rules. These sword fights are rarely to the death. They typically end with someone surrendering, being taken captive, or knocked unconscious.

Swamps are scary - Princess Bride has the Fire Swamp, Neverending Story has the Swamp of Sadness, Labyrinth the Bog of Eternal Stench, and Return of the Jedi has Dagobah, plus poor Mrs Brisby's house sinking into the mud in Secret of NIMH. Swamps are a place where heroes are at their emotional low point and villains have the upper hand. If you're in a swamp, something has already gone wrong to get you there, and things are about to get worse. If a friend is going to die or get captured, it's very likely to happen in a swamp.

Magic is giant - Besides the dragons, these stories have other giant magical creatures. Think of Morla the Ancient in Neverending Story the Owl in Secret of NIMH. Places of magical power are ancient and oversized. Magical creatures are giant and terrifying, even when they're not overtly hostile. They might offer some help, but they're not allies - they must be convinced to intervene, and might demand a price for their assistance.

 

 

 

The worlds these stories describe are troubled places. The rulers of the land are typically evil, and things might be in actively in the process of getting worse. These rulers are magical and frightening. They're powerful fighters in their own right, and they command things like dragons and armies of goblins that strengthen them more.

Any benevolent leaders have been cast out of power or co-opted. They either retain just enough royal status to make useful hostages, or they're so busy trying to care for the government's victims that they have no time for adventuring. And their aid to the poor limits their ability to oppose the government - they can't openly defy the rulers without endangering the people they're working to help.

The heroes and their allies are both figuratively and, often, literally small and vulnerable. They are taking a terrible risk to their lives by trying to free the land from the evil of misrule. They're outnumbered, out-equipped, and overmatched. They rely on stealth, magic, and a tactic of surgically striking at their enemy's weakest point to have any chance of victory, or even survival. This is why our heroes travel overland, to avoid the enemy's power centers and guard posts. This is why the fate of the world is decided by swordfights and appeals to the conscience of the main villain's lieutenants - because that's the only scale on which the heroes can fight and possibly have a chance to win.

The heroes' weakness is contrasted against both the villains' strength and the hugeness and indifference of most magical places and creatures. In addition to an villain who wants to kill them, the heroes also face a world filled with oversized and overpowering magical creatures who simply don't care about them or their problems.

If I were to add any more stories to this list, I might pick Alice in Wonderland or David the Gnome or Bedknobs and Broomsticks or Pirates of Dark Water - but for the most part, I don't think the themes I pulled out would change very much. A list like this is partly generational, partly idiosyncratic. I know you would have been inspired by different stories, would have taken different lessons from them.

What would be on your list of inspirations when you were little? What kind of fantasy world would you have built out of them?

Down in the Chthonic Depths' Secret Jackalope Present to Me - Cafe Prost

There's a springtime prompt-trading blogathon going on right now called Secret Jackalope, and I'm participating this year! I'll be posting my submission here soon. But in the meantime, I wanted to shine a spotlight on Down in the Chthonic Depths, who answered my prompt.

I asked for "A small coffee-house dungeon, either - daytime (filled with factions) or nighttime (ready to heist), your choice!"

Molly J and Nick S went above and beyond with their submission - Cafe Prost and the Little Red Notebook

Secret police! The resistance! A criminal gang! A little red notebook that everyone wants to get their hands on! Plus 36 more café patrons with agendas of their own, looking for a place to read or a a chance to meet a lover, who you can try to inveigle in your schemes.

Urzya Powder Keg 2 - Boltinka Nakogard

Boltinka Nakogard is a city in the heart of the Northern Devastation Zone, far from the Capital, beyond the frontier of the Borderlands, a city of perpetual winter huddling alone in Urzya's frozen wastes.

The city is home to two great households, both alike in dignity, both ancestors of the Dragon. The great houses were once vassals to a vampire queen, but the Noble is aged and ailing, and her authority has failed. Now the two houses' enmity flirts with open warfare, and each house dreams of a new era, and a new heir to the Dragon to rule over all.

Boltinka Nakogard is a city of migrants. Miners come to dig for prism-stones. Treasure seekers search for crystals that can imprison the living magic of the wastes. The work is dangerous and the workers desperate, and the wind at night howls in mourning for the dead.

This is a city, too, of missing children. At first few, now many. At first only orphans, now more and more migrant children have disappeared.

Boltinka Nakogard is a city about to explode.


The Forbidden Lovers and the Lost Child

Tension between the two great houses has been high for sometime, but the current state of open vendetta began with the elopement of a pair of young lovers, one from each house. The two youths hid in the slums while their families went to war over the disappearance. Each side blamed the other, alleging abduction, seduction, and worse. When the pair were finally found, each spouse was executed by their own household for their treason, but the war between the houses hasn't dimmed, it's flames fan ever brighter.

Rumor has it that the lovers bore a child who was spirited away by an accomplice right before the pair were captured. Due to complicated legal and genealogical reasoning, most people believe that the child, if found, would be the rightful ruler of both houses. The public assumes each house wants to raise the child so that she will grow up loyal to them and bring their rivals to heel. If this story is true, the lost child was the first of Boltinka Nakogard's child disappearances. (I've intentionally left the timeframe a little vague here. If the child is an infant, she has no real agency of her own; if she's a teenager she becomes more of a full-fledged NPC.)


Imprisoning Spells

The reason for Boltinka Nakogard's existence is the presence of living spells howling amid the winds of the northern wastes. These spells can be imprisoned, and gemstones containing a bound spell at their hearts are a valuable treasure and invaluable tool of war for the vampire Nobles.

In generations past, the czarina and her army ruled the city absolutely. Her dragonborn vassals harvested the perfect prism-stones from the mine; her dragonmarked servants cut these stones into the ideal gem-prisons for trapping living spells. As she's weakened, her grip has loosened, and with the two houses unwilling to cooperate, the industry has all but ceased. The dragonmarked have no reliable source for stones; the dragonborn no especial skill for cutting them.

The price of even a single bound spell is enough to attract migrant workers. They forage for uncut stones along the edges of dragonborn territory, they make the simplest of cuts by copying the dragonmarked's discards. They scour the wastes looking for gems left by previous migrants and pray to find one already imprisoning a spell. But try searching a snowblind field for buried stones! Try distinguishing a prism-stone from a simple rock or shard of ice! Migrants have lost limbs from the frost and their lives to exposure. And the cold is less deadly than the living spells.

Leave an uncut gem with the correct prismatic dimensions to sit in the snow of the northern wastes, and rarely, so very rarely, a living spell will crawl inside to make its lair there. You can increase your chances with a properly cut gem-prison. You can increase your chances more by fighting the spell until it is defeated, until it is at the brink of disappearing. Then it might retreat inside the stone. Or it might slip away on the wind. Teams and pairs used to work the snow fields together, the dragonborn fighting the spells with their magic breath, the dragonmarked using their skill to bind the spells to the stones. The migrants almost always work alone, each seeking their own fortune, few willing to share the ultimate prize with their neighbors.

The railway company brings the migrants in to work. The railway company traps them in Boltinka Nakogard with exit tickets too expensive to afford.

If any one faction in town could assert authority or control over the others, production could resume, and great fortunes could be made. Increasingly, the thought is heard, once whispered, now sometimes spoken or shouted aloud, that if the rivals cannot be quelled then they should simply be killed, and let control go to the survivors. This is a thought that would drown the city in blood.


The Child Disappearances

No one but the criminals themselves knows who is behind the child disappearances. At first it was orphans who vanished. Then migrant children with living parents. Recently, Boltinka natives have gone to their children's rooms in the morning and found them missing. Recently even the children of the great houses and the railway company aren't safe.

Why are the children disappearing? The rumors are many, and seem to conflict. 
Some say the czarina is searching for an heir to take over her throne.
Some say the dragonborn and dragonmarked are looking for the lost child.
Some say a cult within the church is looking for a dragon goddess reborn.
Some say the railway company is simply sending the children away on night trains - but back to safety or onward to greater servitude?
Some say desperate gangs are working the children on the snow fields at night, using them to attract living spells.
Some say ruthless traffickers are serving any or all of the above, kidnapping children to sell to whoever actually wants them.

Any or all of these seem possible. Opinions about the fate of the children are a popular topic of argument. To be partisan in defense of one's chosen rumor has become a way to cope with one's inability to prevent the disappearances.


The Districts

Grand Hotel Vanna - An opulent palace, the crown jewel of an earlier era. The vampire czarina's estate. She hold court in the building and her knights still control the grounds. Her authority outside this district is limited.

Government District - City hall, courthouse, aldermens' house, home to the czarina's disinherited dhampirs. Ostensibly the seat of city government, but largely ignored.

Spa District - Bathhouses, clinics, and resorts, all controlled by the dragonborn house. Bred for warmer climes, they love petroleum spas.

Industrial Quarter - The gem-prison mine, several petroleum wells, abandoned manufacturies. Nominally controlled by the dragonborn but mostly fallow. Migrants sometimes sneak onsite to search for prism-stones.

Financial District - Banks, jewelry stores, the mercantile exchange, home to the dragonmarked house. They're more ambitious than the dragonborn, not content with the Nakogard's current decadent state, and seek allies among the dhampirs and the railway executives.

City Center - Home to most Boltinka natives. Members of the great houses who choose to live here have only tenuous relationship with their family's seat of power.

Slums - Home to most migrants, especially the widows and orphans of slain treasure seekers. Overcrowded, vulnerable to disease, and the site of most child disappearances. The migrants, formerly disorganized, increasingly look to each other for assistance and support.

Propiska Railway Station - Company headquarters the railway. The upstairs of old railway hotel is home to the executives, the downstairs has been converted into barracks to house their security guards. The best organized and most efficient business in Boltinka.

Orthodox Cathedral - The seat of ancestral Dragon worship, segregated internally between the dragonborn and dragonmarked seating areas. Recognized as sanctuary and neutral territory, the elders of the great houses conduct sensitive business here.

Research Hospital - An abandoned university campus, centered around the hospital, fenced off and quarantined from the city. Regarded as poisonous and unclean, home to a small population of mutants and other exiles, each living in near solitude. Recently taken over by the Daughters of Tiamat, a cult determined to resurrect the Dragon Goddess, they could unleash toxic horror by accident. The townfolk have barely begun to notice that something is amiss.



Adventurers in Boltinka Nakogard

My instinct is to say that the role for player characters at the start of the campaign should be to arrive in town as vagabond spell-hunters, then become increasingly entangled in affairs and intrigue. Every native they talk to will want to gossip about the Lost Child, the child disappearances, the faction conflicts, etc. One side or another could try to hire them to commit plausibly-deniable odd jobs. There are plenty of mysteries and perils to get inveigled in.

And as they make their fortune, they'll begin to realize, for individual miners, there's good money to be made selling imprisoned living spells to various faction elders to add to their stockpile of munitions ... but for the city as a whole, there's much better money to be made restarting the mass export of the gem-prisons to the Vampire Nobles in the far off Capital.

If the players want their characters to be natives, they could play more-or-less the same game by creating a mixed-faction coalition of townspeople, representing the Nakogard's middle class, rather than the migrant underclass like the original scenario. Being embedded in the town's factions and conflicts from the very start might give this game a greater sense of urgency. Start the game with the discovery of the Lost Child, and you're off the races from the moment the starting gun fires.

A final option would be for the players to agree to all belong to the same faction, and to mercenarily advance their faction's agenda at the expense of all the others.

Urzya Powderkeg 1 - Dreaming of Urzya

One of the first fantasy worlds to really make an imprint on my imagination was Magic: the Gathering's Ice Age setting. I love the frozen landscape, the taiga and tundra and glaciers and ice. I love the image of medieval redoubts holding on to the last vestiges of civilization against the unceasing winter night. That's probably why B/X Blackrazor's Land of Ice is one of my all-time favorite unpublished campaign settings.

I remember playing out in the snow with my sister, imagining a world so cold that magic sometimes froze when you cast it, and the land was littered with ice crystals containing frozen spells. (In retrospect, that part sounds a bit like unexploded ordinance leftover on a battlefield, which is actually consistent with Ice Age's status as a kind of nuclear winter following an apocalyptic mages' war.)

I remember dreaming once of a frozen land, where the royal court was ruled by psychic vampires, who could read minds and drink souls, where among the outcasts dwelt warmth vampires, who craved the heat of another's touch and could never, never drink in enough. (The lords in my dream wore armor like Babylon 5's Vorlons. The outcasts went naked in the wastes, but wrapped shivering in furs within any settlement; it was only HUMAN warmth they longed for.)

source: Zero Wing

So when Jack from Tales of the Grotesque and Dungeonesque published Dirge of Urazya, detailing a postapocalyptic fantasy Eurasia ruled over by a decadent and collapsing feudal hierarchy of vampires, the setting he described managed to touch on a very formative bit of my own personal fantasy mythos.

Jack also manages something that Eberron tries, and, in my opinion, fails at, which is to make historical conflicts between monster factions matter to the present day of his setting. Eberron has something like 40 thousand years of recorded history that takes place before the player characters show up and get to interact with anything. All the events of that history are really samey and easy to conflate, and they're also all just backstory with no particular relevance to the gameworld the players are interacting with. You could maybe argue that all that long history is intended to help gamemasters pick appropriate set dressing and treasures for the ancient ruins the player characters might explore, but it's presented in a way that does nothing to facilitate that goal.

In contrast, in Jack's campaign set-up for Saltmire, the waning vampire lords have two groups of unruly vassals who are jockeying for ascendance, and both are derived or descended from dragons. This in turn implies some prior conflict between vampires and dragons that the vampires won, but the war itself is never even mentioned, the focus is entirely on the present-day conflict. (Jack Vance did something similar in The Dragon Masters, with humans and aliens each breeding captured members of the other species to create fantasy monsters. Unfortunately it's one of Vance's weaker books; the idea is much better than his execution of it.)

Trey of From the Sorcerer's Skull has some really good advice for making setting history matter in your game. One of the key points for our purposes here is that history is useful when it helps define the parameters and scope of the present-day adventure.

Dirge of Urazya itself is much less a setting than an invitation to the reader to create their own setting, within certain parameters, and Jack's recent post about making a powder keg is another invitation, with Saltmire as an example "powder keg" campaign set-up along an unnamed piece of Urazyan coastline. (I don't know why, but I assume either the Black Sea or Caspian Sea.)

To make a grotesque and/or dungeonesque powder keg you need six ingredients:

• two ambitious noble houses with a bitter rivalry
• a fading imperial power that nominally holds the nobles in check
• a trading company or corporation wants to expand from economic to political power
• a religious sect whose members are more loyal to it than to any other authority
• a foreign barbarians who exist outside the society the other factions belong to 
• and finally, some scarce resource that all five factions are competing to control

Ideally, the scarce resource should be something the players want for their characters as well. That gives them maximum incentive to get their hands dirty and join the competition. As Brendan from Necropraxis advises, let the players decide who their enemies are. (Although they could, I suppose, like Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon, simply play each against all with the goal of creating maximum chaos.)

source: Babylon 5

Jack has successfully inspired me to make a powder keg campaign start of my own. I'll create an outline here, and add details in future posts. For now, I'll focus on the key elements. Names for things are a detail to be added later. (Also, since this is my own little thought experiment, and since I initially misread the title of Jack's zine, I'm going to be spelling it as "Ur-zya" rather than as "Ur-a-zya".)

Location: An isolated town in the far north of Urzya, possibly in what used to be Siberia. Based on details from the factions, it looks like the town was once some sort of vacation or resort spot, that it houses either a biological weapons laboratory or a biological waste dump site, and that it has a railroad running through it.

Imperial Power: An ailing vampire tsarina. She has a loyal court of aging suitors and their household knights, and the town has a sizable population of disinherited dhampirs. The tsarina holds court in a former grand hotel. She badly wants an heir, ie, a young person she can perform either brain transplant surgery or a psychic personality transfer on.

Noble House: The first noble house are dragonborns. Sorry Jack, I'm shamelessly stealing your idea here. The dragonborn were bred by the vampires either to fight their war against the dragons or as some kind of symbol of victory after the war ended. These days they're the more established noble house. I bet they love the petroleum spas in the town's old resorts. I'm not sure what they want besides knocking off the competition, but that's another detail that can come later.

Noble House: Stealing from Jack again, my second noble house is made up of dragonmarked humans. Their dark and gritty origin story also involves being bred as enslaved soldiers by the vampire elites long ago, and let's suppose that they're the more up-and-coming of the two houses. I'll need to look up what the different dragonmarks do to pick out the right one for these nobles. I do remember that dragonmarks come in different sizes, and the larger ones are more powerful.

So one thing they want is to find a child with the correct aberrant dragonmark to become their new leader. Probably the current leader wants to kill the kid, someone else wants her on the throne so they can be regent for a decade or so, and, I don't know, maybe there are revolutionaries who want her as a figurehead atop a democratic government. Three sects within the same faction feels like too many, so ideally I'll narrow that list down to two going forward.

Trading Company: I think that something like the Trans-Siberian Railroad ought to run through this town. Probably no one controls its entire length anymore, or at best there's a very fragile syndicate made up of dozens of local franchises who control the tracks in their turf. (Or maybe there IS a single company that runs the whole thing, and THAT level of control and ownership makes them one of the most politically powerful forces in Urzya?)

Anyway, there's a local company operating out of the old railroad station, and they control passage into and out of town on the only mode of transportation that will reliably get you to another bastion of civilization alive. In addition to controlling the food supply, they're probably also arms dealers selling to both the noble houses, amplifying the risk of conflict. I bet the foreign barbarians have been causing them trouble lately. What do they want that they don't already have? Good question! It'll have to wait until a future post for the answer though.

Religious Sect: My favorite Urzyan religion so far is Our Lady of the Drowned, but I don't think she's the right fit for this town. Instead, I want to use the followers of the Five Headed Empress. Tiamat was a literal weapon of mass destruction in Urzya's past. Let's say that she was defeated at the end of the war and her cult was outlawed.

There's presumably a mainstream dragon-worshiping religion that manages to fill the churches in a town with two different dragon-descended noble houses. In that case, the cultists are like followers of the left-hand path of dragon religion, hoarding banned books and forbidden scriptures, meeting in secret to worship a figure who acknowledged but despised by the dragon church's orthodoxy.

Tiamat was a biological weapon, so let's suppose the cultists are either searching for samples and research notes from her original creation or remnants of her that were buried as waste. They're probably risking touching off a plague by accident. Let's also suppose that they really want to find either a human vessel who can reincarnate Tiamat's spirit, or some way to raise her up in her entirety as an undead (or reborn) dragon goddess.

Foreign Barbarians: What kind of creatures live in the frozen wastes outside of town? Well let's start with some sort of feral life-drinking vampire type. The name "breath-stealer" has a nice ring to it. Let's also have some living spells out prowling amid the snowdrifts. These aren't a coherent faction yet so maybe some sort of winter elves would fit in here? I'm also not sure what they want, other than to raze the city and kill everyone in it. They sound scary though!

Scarce Resource: My first instinct is to say "enough food to last the winter," but that seems really depressing, even for a grimdark crapsack like Urzya.

A thought occurs to me that each faction might be searching for a specific young person - a vampiric heir, the bearer of an aberrant dragonmark, Tiamat Reborn. Perhaps, like in Dune, each faction's messiah is the same person? Each faction might racing the others to find the girl before anyone else, and place her on their preferred throne. The town's other children could probably also use a champion to protect them from being kidnapped by the various factions. (Wait, IS this actually any less depressing than the grain idea? I guess "town where children are disappearing" is time-honored plot element, often in stories intended for children, although it seems awfully creepy. But would this work for a game, or is this the kind of idea that works for book, but wouldn't be any fun to play?)

This part might require more consideration. If there's not any one single thing all the factions want, then there should at least be a couple desired objects with overlapping interest groups.

source: me