In which MetalJim starts to design a new world for a 4th edition campaign game…

Hopefully this will be the first in an occasional series of articles as I gear up for 4^th edition D&D.

I don’t yet know exactly what sort of D&D game I will be running by the end of the summer.  If I can get a physical tabletop game up and running in the Nashville area, that would be great.  If not, I would happily settle for some version of an online campaign in order to test drive the DDI tabletop toolset.  Invites for that might well be offered through this very space.  Hmmm.  Keep an eye on that.

Anyway, without having any actual rulebooks in hand, here’s what we know about the “default” setting for the world of 4^th edition D&D:

The rulebooks will ship with a new campaign world called the “Points of Light” setting.  A lot of the specifics in this world will be left intentionally vague.  For example, there will be no specific world map.  Various bits of lore will be held in common to all such campaigns.  There’s a place called the Temple of Elemental Evil.  We expect to meet most of the inhabitants of the Monster Manual somewhere in the world.  The gods of this world include Bahamut and Pelor and other recognizable D&D deities.  Both the Tieflings and the Dragonborn (new races in 4^th) used to have empires which have now fallen into ruin.

In the “default” point of light setting, only a few civilized villages stand at the edge of a vast wilderness.  There is no “cavalry”, no overpowering emperor to deal with the major threats faced by this world.  This is a world that needs the player characters to step up and be heroes.  There’s lot of wilderness for those PCs to explore, and dungeons to delve.  It is the PCs, after all, who are themselves the “points of light” which this world so desperately needs.

In short, this new world has been engineered to be a fun place for PCs to adventure in without having to worry too much about campaign background or local politics.  The DM should be able to make up a map of a starting village, and then define some encounter areas (ruins, caves) nearby as sites for the first few adventures.  Let the world grow organically from there…

Of course, being the consummate world designer that I am, I want to add a few wrinkles of my own while keeping the desired feel of the “points of light” design philosophy.  With that in mind, here is the rough outline…

Let’s start with a continent.  Let’s call it Avoterra.  It’s like I took the words “Avatar” and “Terra” and jammed them together.  Try it yourself.  You’ll be designing new pharmaceuticals, er, fantasy worlds in no time flat. 

I will be building and designing up a strip of coastline about 30 or 40 miles north to south and maybe 10 miles wide.  To the west is a vast ocean.  To the east are hills and mountains leading into a vast wilderness.  The climate used to be a lot like the climate of Portugal is today.

As I said, the climate USED to be nice.  About 12 years ago, during the wintertime, a fairly sizable comet slammed into this particular planet.  There’s a whole continent far to the west that really bore the brunt of the impact.  That land is now a hellish rocky moonscape inhabited by demons and fire spirits.  The players won’t have to worry about that until they are 12th or 13th level.  Notice how I am building some future design space into my world outline…

The first 2 or 3 years after the comet were the hardest, but things got better only gradually.  Basically, the skies were dark and cloudy for many years.  It was like nine months of winter and three months of fall, with virtually no spring or summer to speak of.  It became very difficult to grow any crops at all.  Livestock virtually disappeared.  Inland cities and civilizations were hit (in many cases) much harder than coastal areas with temperate ocean currents nearby.  Obviously, competition for scarce resources led in turn to many years of warfare, plague, and starvation.

The population of the planet is now less than one third of what it was before the comet hit.  Systems of transportation and communication were disrupted.  Entire cities were wiped out.  Lines of haggard refugees either froze to death or fought their way to some kind of survival.

Anyone who has lived more than five miles from the coastline knows a recipe for tree bark soup.  The lands where the PC have been living were able to squeak by on a dwindling fish supply, along with some scraggly crops.  Mushrooms are an important part of a subsistence diet.  Fat people are extremely rare.

The PCs are old enough to remember what the sun was like before the days of darkness.  They have also grown up under harsh and difficult conditions.  In these times of troubles, slavery is not uncommon, as many people traded their own liberty to escape starvation.  In several areas, the worship of dark and evil gods arose as it seemed to many that the older “good” gods had been overthrown by some distant war in heaven.

The good news is that this year the spring thaw came much earlier than expected.  Many elders think that this is a sign that the weather has almost returned to normal.  A hazy sun is frequently seen peeking through the clouds.

Opportunities abound.  Lines of communication need to be re-opened.  Abandoned cities need to be explored.  Useful magic items might very well be lying around, just waiting to be acquired.  Of course, the monsters and minions of the world are looking to expand the limits of their own fragile territories as well.  It’s a lawless world, and danger lurks around every corner.  Anything which survived twelve years of hardship is a force to be reckoned with.

Coming soon, in the second installment, I break down how I see some of the iconic D&D races fitting into my starting campaign area.  Where do the Tieflings live?  What about the Eladrin?  Stay tuned to find out.