A Triumvirate of Wonder, or The Three Realms of Eternal Inspiration

So, this post will outline the three settings I feel that I can most claim as "original", to one degree or another. They are presented in summery, and in order of appearance. Due credit, most of these are far from solo endeavors, with the first particularly influenced by close friends and wise minds. Over the next whenever, I hope to talk about and expand these little worlds, making them better and more usable.

Spirebrook, the Highschool of the Damned.  Ah, Spirebrook. Many ages of the world ago, my gaming group got their hands on Big Eyes, Small Mouth, in one of its early editions. Among various other things, the book had a large genre chart for showing how much certain skills should cost in differing environments (driving cost less in a game about hotrodders than it did in post-apocalyptic, for example). Going across the genre list, only two popped out as unusable to my young mind: Horror, because everybody knows scary games are impossible, and Teenage Romance, because ick. However, a joking comment was made that while they sucked separately, they would rock together (it should be noted that this was pre-Buffy, at least originally). One madcap writing session later, and out jumped Spirebrook, all dark and spooky and bloodsoaked and crazy. This has undergone the most revision over its life, and is also the most collaborative effort: Zak has made as much for it as I have, and has run it more than me. His input has shaped the setting as much as mine has, and I will get him to chat about it when posts relating to it's dark halls come 'round.

Farthest Star, Because I Never Came Up With A Better Name. This sucker has been bouncing around in my head for ages. Early highschool, at least. It's a sci-fi setting, ostensibly a serious one, and one that has had at least two abortive attempts to see actual use. Involving a spaceship packed full of prisoners on its way to harvest a world full of inestimably valuable FTL-producing resource, only to run afoul of massive grody psychic space squid, Star has a huge and detailed world and backstory in my brain, and a surprising amount of that on paper. Posts will involve discussions of setting, and perhaps even some fiction, since I have a whole setting related but standalone arc bouncing around in my brain. Stay tuned.

Point of Light, or The Reign Omnisetting. When I first read Reign, I had two major reactions: Fuck this kicks ass, and man is it's setting too fucked up to use. Don't get me wrong, its really fun to read, but actually play in? I wasn't convinced. So I set about creating a world where any size of organization, from ten man thieves guild or adventuring company to vast noble houses and religions could be playable and make sense, and most of all interact reliably. I did that by declaring that there was one point of light left, a huge fantasy metropolis that was basically built into and around a mountain. A single safe place where all the shattered groups of humanity had clustered after a divine apocalypse brought on by folks being dumb and selfish. This is the setting I want to write about the most, since A) I want to use it some day, and B) I haven't had much success putting the world into words, or summarizing it, which I really want to get better at. Also it has vast hordes of cannibal beastmen, and who doesn't like cannibal beastmen?

And there they are. I will talk about them, and other stuff, and try to build, refine, and awesometize each of them. It's also remotely possible other stuff will end up here, like random, unrelated fiction, studies of NPC's, whole other settings...the possibilitys are as vast as yo momma.