Quick RPG setting: THE SUNDER
2025-01-08 ✢ rpg ✢ osr ✢ campaign pitch
Basically this is my version of a D&D fantasy setting, generic enough so I can slot in other peoples’ dungeons without much modification but weird enough to be interesting. Big sources of inspiration are the Fafhrd and Grey Mouser stories (Ziragzar is just Lankhmar), seventeenth-century India and America, and Ghibli fantasy.
THE SUNDER is a continent which holds forests as old as the world and magic from the Outer Spheres. Sellswords and adventurers explore, fight, and die in search of fortune and glory under the baleful gaze of the twin moons. (Achiel, the White Moon, is the source of all silver and its light is known to rot meat and dull sharp edges. Sielach, the Red Moon, makes firearms more dangerous and alcohol more potent.) A century ago, men from the far side of the ocean came to tame The Sunder with wheel-lock muskets. It’s been seventy-nine years since they killed the last Tyrant of Ziragzar, the Rose City. Shortly afterwards, the invaders discovered their homeland across the sea had vanished; they were forced to settle in the Sunder for good.
Potential sellswords in the Sunder would do well to know the following:
- A living world. The Sunder doesn’t revolve around your PCs. The date is tracked according to the setting calendar, and it takes days to get from one side of the map to the other. Meanwhile, other characters and factions in the world are busy advancing their own agendas. If you want to survive in the Sunder, take the world seriously. Take notes, make maps: information is leverage. (This is called a ‘West Marches’ game.)
- The remnants of a failed invasion. The attempt to conquer the Sunder by force failed; the descendants of the stranded colonists have mostly begun to assimilate with the native population. Everywhere outside of the coastal cities they are a tiny minority. In the long run, the greatest change the invasion made was the introduction of modern technology — above all, gunpowder and firearms — and the settlers’ preference for currency instead of barter.
- You are not heroes. Player characters in later editions of D&D are like superheroes: powerful enough to overcome any obstacle and unlikely to die except under exceptional circumstances. This campaign uses much simpler, more brutal rules based on earlier editions of the game: you have five hit points and a pistol and at any moment you can be killed by a goblin with a rusty dagger. (A corollary to this is you shouldn’t come into the game with a backstory in mind: you start as a nobody and play to find your story out.) There are no demihumans or character classes in the game.
- Adventurers are outsiders. In the Sunder, dungeon-raiders are a recognised phenomenon. Nobody likes you; sellswords are seen similarly to Hell’s Angels or actors in Edo-period Japan. You’re viewed as rootless, violent chancers; peasants mistrust you and local power brokers (correctly) percieve you as disruptive to the social order.
Here are some pictures to set the tone:
