more campaign setting ideas ... Airships "Poisoned Sky"
between the basic hulls I've been slapping together (just "above the waterline" mockups for LOTHS)
and remembering the old Spelljammer stuff (which I should have in my boxes... something to look for after this writeup...)
and then seeing Swift's rather impressive start on a large sized airship hull...
I started thinking... where could one take setting like that...
I don't remember the full walkout of Swift/Lycan's world... tho I remember them latching onto the idea of a "Ship Spirit" PC.... which using a Spelljammer idea would be a mystic type who has an affinity for the ship's capabilities... basically a "Pilot" for the vessel who exerts their will on the ship to get the effects when the crew is too busy or can't manage the small details...
ok.. game engine aside (again, I think "Savage Worlds is a loose/fast enough seeming system to bend to this... but really I can beat any system into this idea...)
start with the basics...
Why / How Airships...
which I'm thinking, to keep the PC's ahead of the curve, long-range Airships should be uncommon at best...
how do they work... I like the swift/lycan idea that there's multiple methods... some levistones, some Lighter-than-air, small heavier-than-air stuff (biplanes at best)
but why?....
this is where I start stealing ideas from current moods, and running gags...
Zombies (again)... i seem to fixate on it...
but this could be another part of the Chrononaut campeign setting... an age where it's realized "something is horribly wrong" thus the mis-matched age of technologies...
rather than running the setting as a modern appocolypse, we now have a standing point,
the 20th century should have happened....
but it didn't...
instead, somewhere in the 1XXX's the Plague began and got out of hand...
we're pre-nuclear, so there's no nuke appocolypse... (Perhaps the Manhattan project was re-envisioned to create a safety system that lifted the island of it's namesake into the sky as a safe harbor for the Americans...)
now the world struggles on...
the old farms still produce to some level,
zombies don't seem to go after plantlife... so well-paid farmers make daring raids to the surface to not only harvest, but plow and seed fields (images of spitfires strafing fields with seed-guns pops into my head)
the "evacuation" wasn't exactly planned, so everyone dealt with it differently,
some highly fortified cities remain, but the zombies (and other infected critters) make land-transport impossible, creating sky-skraper docking ports for whatever air ships can be salvaged...
with the wilderness, new monsters have been reborn as the Plague jumped species
and in the midst of this, humanity and the like try to survive (could work well as an Urban Arcana style setting, with 'half-blood' races as a result of Plague and time tampering...)
notable bits would be stuff like,
metal isn't as common as it once was,
which is why guns aren't so popular (expensive ammo you don't get back)...
which means alternate tech guns (flame throwers, steam guns, lightning weapons....)
fuel and water would also be hard to come by, as things like that need refinement and purification... (again, more steam engines that double as distillers... they'd prolly run off wood burners as the forests would regrow...)
this means the level of society would be rough, harsh...
it'd also give the PC's a solid mode of transport...
start with the basics,
the world knows that Time Travel's possible,
but trying to re-develop it is outlawed as it's thought Chrononaughts are what caused the plague...
thus the players could easily start out by trying to recover tech from an old Chrono-lab to rig their vessel for time travel...
the ship would give the players a "safe" place to fall back to while they plot out in timelines where air travel is undeveloped,
but since all airships are basically junkers, and dangerously unreliable, "I aim the engines at it" would not be a solution... (Particularly if the Ship's Spirit and Engineers were notably defensive of the well-being of the vessel...)
not to mention, in underdeveloped areas, busting out with an airship is something notable, and Temporal Enforcement might have something to say about that.... (A single, nationless entity, all myth and legend, could somehow manage to watch the time streams and deploy enforcers to destroy anachronistic devices...)
setting it in a similar-yet-dissimilar universe would mean alot of composing historical events (creating places for the players to visit with a "why" as well as a timeline of "when" that'll happen according to the player's history records...)
but would also mean there's no "but Hitler wasn't at the battle of Reichenbac Falls" comments by the more historically astute players...
with a dodgey chronometer, the adventures could run the Dr Who / Sliders methodolgy of "once you're part of the timeline, you're stuck there until events play out..." so Adventures could be complete arcs in a single timeframe / location ... letting the gm somewhat guide the story without hardcore railroading...
and then there are the numerous airship fights/chases that could happen as the crew tries to avoid the authorities in their home time, acquire new parts (as airship components would wear out over time), and resources (as they'd have to get new historical texts... and who knows perhaps rare personal diaries of madmen and prophets which might hold some clue for their future...)
sigh...
i can see alot of fun in a campaign like this,
but still get stuck at the "what to do about running NPCs..." part...
i miss the witty banter..
i miss Nick sitting down with Max Wolfe and chatting about the spy business like any other professionals would about their job without trying specifically to kill the man at the end of the encounter...
i miss the drawn out (in-character) debates between party members on the ethics / viability of their actions because not everyone is a soldier / engineer at heart...
i miss players having to play "translator" for eachother...
but then, a campaign like this could have sections of sneak-and-peek... where the PC's didn't want to interact with the locals (for fear of contaminating them) and would just be there for the dungeon crawl...
it's the "home time" sections where the Role-Play would have to kick in... any point where they're dealing with people on their tech-level to get the data for the next mission...
unless they specifically designed a party to blend in with locals to move freely and gather info on the spot in various potential timezones...
party construction would have to be something done together, and they'd have to decide at the get go what kind of group they were going to be...
while a mix would be amusing (agian, that party dynamic)
for whichever side lost the argument that session, it'd be very boring...
on the "fun" side.... the players could have a good say in the world building... once they got past the idea of setting themselves akin to gods (as enforcers would cure that)... they might actually start interacting with the timeline, suggesting events/actions that would change their future more than just the big picture to perhaps ease their tasks... (small secret deliveries, elimination of specific members of a bloodline, planting ideas of government earlier than expected or with different people...)
so that when they step forward again, they can see the results (perhaps a "Temporal Karma" power they can check against to see if the change happened how they wanted...)
I see indiana jones in ancient forrests and temples...
solid snake slipping into enemy airships to steal data....
max sterling using a snub fighter to clear an escape route through a blockade...
jake cutter fighting his way out of a seedy bar to save a vital piece of information...
and poor george buried alive for the good of the universe... (again...)
not to mention a million other scenes that could pan out in this setting...
think I might actually start throwing together "module" arcs for this setting as well as world-specific rules...
thinking a little like 1920s "tech" level...