Skip to main content

Rostengrad: A Minimal Setting Document

A bit tired of 5e, but loving the experience of running urban adventures, I am thinking of moving to a different ruleset, most likely Index Card RPG. As an exercise in thinking about a new campaign, I have started putting together the skeleton of a campaign setting

The setup is based on an idea from Jack Guignol of the Tales of the Grotesque and Dungeonesque blog entry on using Dune as a model for a political powder keg. My usual inspirations for cities are Planescape, Bas-Lag, Joe Abercrombie, M. John Harrison's Viriconium, Micheal Moorcock's Runestaff novels, and Tanith Lee's Books of Paradys, in creating a sort of busy, crowded, metropolitan city filled with gothic ghosts, scheming, and both romantic and political intrigue, but almost none of that has made it into the document notes.

I like to take minimal notes and try to bring out the campaign feel and style in play, as well as creating history along the way as the characters do, so I don't know how much my kind of campaign notes help at all.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Monster of the Week: Gluttony Beast

Monster of the Week, May 12, 2020 They just keep coming. Gluttony Beast When someone lives a life using others' suffering to become wealthy, becoming gat off the work of others' labor and suffering, the cries of the oppressed are sometimes heard by the gods or the spirits of the magic realm and the oppressor is punished rather than being allowed to die. Such cursed individuals lose all of their faces but their mouths; their bodies become gelatinous masses of adipose tissue their libs become a mass of soft, slithering tentacles, and their intelligence becomes subsumed by hunger to eat riches and wealth and overcome by a desire to live in their own filth. However, the gluttony beast quickly becomes a curse to the communities in which they are reborn as well. They are ravenous, foul, and spread a miasmic and dolorous stink over the land, which poisons and sickens the land. They themselves are surprisingly quick. Though blind, their sense of smell helps them find pr...

Monster of the Week: The Grey People

Monster of the Week, May 5, 2020 In honor of the Mexican victory over the French in the town of Puebla in 1862, I'm going to post a monster like I would any other Tuesday The Grey People The Grey People appear in large urban crowds as inconspicuous, bland people who blend into the masses, usually hooded and cloaked with emotionless faces and almost colorless features. Their blandness is almost supernatural, and the specifics of their faces are almost headache-inducing if anyone looks at them directly. As a result, they disappear into a crowd, and people forget seeing them. The Grey People fear being discovered. If anyone begins to investigate them, the Grey People first try to disappear. After that, they begin to work on eliminating the threat, escalating from threats to attempts to kill the threat directly. In the process, those investigating the Grey People find that people do not remember these beings, and deny their influence.

Monster of the Week: Nightmare Forester

Monster of the Week, April 7, 2020 More monstrosity this week. Nightmare Forester Creatures of the Far Realm, Nightmare Foresters travel through the Ethereal Realm next to our world until they find the nightmares of mortals. That means they seek out the traumatized and abused most of all, feeding on the energy of their fear and sorrow. Becoming semi-material over their sleeping victims, Nightmare Harvesters reach out with physical and psychic tendrils to enhance the fear and sorrow of their victims and then feed on the psychic energies. Pale, pulsing, six-eyed cephalopods, Nightmare Harvesters usually appear as translucent and immaterial apparitions when seen on our plane. They defend themselves psychically, lashing out against the egos of victims or enemies, causing fear and cluding minds to power their escape from dangerous situations.