Dungeon Mastery: build a setting from three pieces of art

Art will always be a significant contributor to roleplay games (fantasy and scifi).

  


Three interesting pieces of art I have had floating around for a while now.

INDISMAR, THE CITY-STATE OF

Population: 1184 (96% Dwarf, 2% Human, 1% Elf, 1% Other).
Area: 500 square miles
Symbol: A green pennant with a black web

History: Indismar began as a small trading post extracting iron from the mountains. This continued for four hundred and seventy three years, the dwarf population eventually finding themselves owned by merchants thanks to crippling debts.
In the calender year ten twenty-three a dwarf prophet foresaw destruction. While those in the mines would be safe, those shackled to the oars of their owner's galley ships were forced to revolt and flee to the safety of the mines. The tidal wave claimed the rulers of Indismar and the population of the city perished leaving the dwarves in the mines. When the waters retreated the dwarves emerged to claim their prize only to discover an elder horror now levitate above the grand plaza in the ruined city. While the Wood-beast appeared dormant the dwarves avoided the ruins and reclaimed the port. They work around their unwanted house guest.
Indismar has since become the economic centre of a mercantile network. The previously quiet dwarves have proven to be skilled Merchants.

The Ruins: adventurers explore the ruins for the wealth and secrets of the dead. Great wealth is to be had plundering the ruins, but there are reports that some adventurers are gathering beneath the Wood-beast at the heart of the ruins.

The Wood-beast: since the coming of the Wood-beast wizards have found magic to be unemployable in Indismar. Some think this is tied to the presence of the Wood-beast, others think it also the cause of the tidal wave that liberated the dwarves and a major influence on the rise of dwarves mercantile ambitions. Just what the Wood-beast is and what will happen when it awakens has many concerned.

Free stuff: a thought on an interstellar probe

Three dee print the space craft in a super zeppelin (32 billion cubic feet of hydrogen can lift a million tons - part of which would be the super zeppelin and three dee printer) on the edge of the atmosphere and drop launch. Sounds like a plan.

Dark Sciences: bead cores, lightning in a volcanic eruption, and an intergalactic web

You have likely seen lightning in the cloud of a volcanic eruption. It's because magnetic fields pass through metals in the cloud and are as a consequence not straight fields. They break and weave through particles creating small potentials of reverse magnetic polarisation and these allow electric potentials in the spaces...

Now I'm going to suggest that the odd Web of interconnectivity between galaxies are magnetic field condensate. How we would use that for intergalactic travel if I'm some how right is anyone's guess.

Black Appendix: turning thirty years of dungeon mastering into a tome

This year I will begin getting down as much of my dungeon master notes as possible. They are currently scattered across a dozen notebooks.

Board games: space industries-age of discovery

 

 

 

 

What didn't make it in the game

There are two cards that won't be included in this game.

• Huracan is an interstellar survey probe created by the Dyson sphere makers. 
• Valiant is an interstellar transport.

Basically interstellar colonization involved following a line of Sunmakers to the next star system providing artificial suns where interstellar colony ships could find warmth along the way.



 

Dungeon Mastery: building on a geographic dictionary

 I like to suggest that when groups of words share a phonetic, they originate from a factual subgroup that can be used to map the past.


We find the Domain of Tanah...located on a Cape so it's part of something larger. A human clan occupies unforested highlands and shares the Cape with Halfling Primitives.
The Indonesian word for clock is djam so these Halfling Primitives are connected to the sphere of time.

The djam clock: An artefact of time.
At Any time, anywhere in the domain of Tanah a Halfling can stick a stick in the ground and draw on the djam clock to make use of any spell of the sphere of time. There is a price. The Halfling ages one year for every spell level used. A Halfling could burn through their life...drawing on the djam clock. The humans know nothing of the djam clock thinking the temporal powers of the Halflings a primitive magic that ages them.

The forested Highlands were Neanderthal Territory but they have vanished.

Here we have a regional setting with Halflings (Barbarians) and humans (Barbarians). It can of course be built on...

Education tools: toph flash cards

A slight variation from my usual game stuff, but here is toph as a set of flashcards so you can teach the kids at the finger painting level.