Beset By Inspiration

I didn’t set out to be inspired. Inspiration set out to strike me.

(Caveats per usual: Maybe not even a complete post. Sue me. This is free and you’re getting what you pay for, plus or minus a couple shillings.)

BTW this and other map graphics were
automatically generated by this free generator

I'm going to make up a new setting for my play group and call it 

Fallen Empire. 

It's not a source book or anything. It's just for fun at home.

Matthew Colville, an excellent new-school creator and author who does a lot of his work live on Twitch and YouTube, has given me a kernel of an idea: 

a city-sandbox campaign based in a high-politics port city where the Prince is dead. 

His version has inspired me to riff off it and throw in my own stuff to make a campaign setting much different from the Welsh Marches setting. Over the next few days I’ll lay out what I got from him and his brainstorming session and what I’m doing.

On a macro level my setting will look like a straight lift of his, including the map and some major background elements. But the details will be different enough that I am confident I can call it my own.

Major Features

Mechanical Elements:

• Ideal number of players: 3-6 per group, but several groups running simultaneously possible.
• Basic Adventuring Rules to be my own Mythical Journeys.
• Using a lot of Chris Tamm’s great d100 charts including a number of elements of his Shadelport.
• Pendragon style familial generation and dynastic advancement.
• Using only d6 and d20 for resolutions.
• Simultaneous initiative but serial resolution
• Brendan’s Hazard System for time and resource keeping.
• NO THIEVES! But includes Simon’s Ratcatcher class.
• Skerples' Medieval Stalemate Generator Here and Here. Also some of my thoughts here.

Setting Elements: 

• Topologically-equivalent circular Diplomacy game map for the city map
• Seven major powers and many minor powers competing for primacy in the city
• A megadungeon castle in the center where the Prince lays in the throes of death - tomb robbers are already picking it clean.
• A large city set in the footprint of a major metropolis whose glory days are hundreds of years in the past, with the attendant undead and lycan infestations.
• Humanocentric culture and society, but other races somewhat tolerated in small numbers.
• Extensive presentation of the personalities of the guilds and noble houses - if the players choose to go that way. Otherwise mentioned in passing.
• Byzantine politics with many checks and balances meant to keep any one group from dominating the city.
• Binary religious order - law and chaos - plus druids who are outlaws

Campaign Elements:

Several campaign ideas possible within the setting with varying levels of politics, strategy and tactics and high and low adventure.

• Military campaigning
• Megadungeon - castle Triskelion
• Dungeons and Ruins - all around the city and the megadungeon catacombs beneath
• Political - intra-guild or inter-guild; dynastic inside your noble house
• Helping the poor and solving mysteries/Town hijinks 
• Mercantile campaigns at sea
• Mercantile campaigns overland
• NOT piracy since my son is running a pirates game