Early Thoughts on New Campaign

I have to start with an apology. I started out the year full of ambition - full of gaming plans, ideas, hopes - both for playing and for writing. Instead? well - tell the truth, I haven't been all that far off in the real world. We have managed to play - not as steadily as we'd like, but close to what we managed at the end of last year. I've run - the fire giant lair, anyway. Ive been plugging away at developing other campaigns, and developing the world. A lot of that can end up in stories, instead of games - but that's fine. So the beginning of the list has gone all right. But the bottom - blogging? audio-visual? no nothing like that; the opposite of it. And that tends to undermine some of the things I have done - it is fine to work on building adventures and writing stories, but if I never get them even finished enough to put on blog, where does that leave me?

So - sorry about all that. And now, let's start trying to fix it. Let's start by thinking about a new campaign.

With Tomb of Annihilation coming in the fall, with its lost world setting - it is tempting to start setting up a new campaign, that can get us there. The book/adventure path is set in Chult, the jungle island south of the Forgotten Realms usual settings - which for once is almost perfectly congruent with our home brewed world. And perfectly congruent with the ideas I have had for adventures. I have been jonesing for pirates for a while - in the past, I tended to set those stories in the north, up with Lenay and Bayport and such. Thats good, but you want buried treasure and shipwrecks and pirate towns and maroons, and that stuff tends to work better when people don't freeze to death after 15 minutes in the water. So tropics, you know. I'd never worked much on the southern parts of my world in the past - the last couple years, I have. Last fall I used the south seas as setting for another stab at Nanowrimo - hitting my marks even! (though not coming close to the end of a story). It's been in my mind for a while, and an official adventurer path is perfect.

So what now? We've started the process, putting together ideas for what to play, for characters - I have been working over the setting, filling it in, trying to make the whole Southern Ocean feel real. So what I am going to try to do here, now, is start putting these things up, where we can use them as resources.

(Though doing so points out the fact that I have never actually put together any kind of document on the rest of the world, that any other person could use. I've been building this world for 35 years - I should share some of it.)

Anyway. Start here - the general idea of the campaign is this: Characters go south, into the islands south of the mainland, west of the southern ocean. These islands are tropical - running roughly 30˚N to 10˚N (there is a vast continent, full of jungles and mountains south of the islands) - most volcanic, some of them still active. In the middle of this - extending north from the southern continent - is a big island that is almost identical to Chult - jungles, volcanos, lost and mysterious interior, etc. The idea is, the Characters come into this area, for whatever their reasons. Whatever their purposes, they are somehow washed up in an archipelago west of this Chult-like island. Maybe they are shipwrecked - maybe they have been shanghaied, who knows - they have to work their way across these islands, then over to "Chult" in time to start the official adventure path.

I'll come back to this. Thoughts on who the characters are, details about the setting, and so on. But I want to get it started and I want to start writing about it as we go.