Ash

[tegyrius]

I am a somewhat anomalous gamer. I did not grow up playing D&D. As a matter of fact, before 3.0 released, I'd played a total of two sessions of AD&D - both times sitting in on someone's long-running game and dying about two-thirds of the way through the evening.

When 3.0 came out, I decided I wanted to try running it. This was at the dawn of the OGL bubble, and my only available resources were the PHB, the DMG, and White Wolf's Creature Collection. I took those three things and some elements of the fiction I'd read over the preceding decade and slammed it all together to create a setting. The result was the Ashen Lands, which may have been my longest-running GMing experience.

After that campaign fell apart due to GM burnout and group dissolution, the scattered notes sat on a succession of hard drives. I didn't do much with them until a couple of years ago, when I was working on a New Year's Eve one-shot for some close friends. I was running Fantasy Craft and needed a setting to use with the FC engine, so I dusted off my notes and updated them to align with my current tastes and the FC races and alignment systems.

A forum thread I was just reading reminded me of that work, and I figured one of my three loyal readers might be briefly amused. The resulting setting "sourcebook" is available here, with an attendant Google Map of the known world here. Enjoy.

Comments

[misterandersen.livejournal.com]

It's quite interesting, that.

Wow!!!!

[benton fagan (from livejournal.com)]

Dude IO would love to introduce this realm to my gaming group. Hope all is well in your world and with your family. Keep in touch.

[tegyrius]

I'd exercise a lot more rigor (and clean up some of the obviously-stolen bits, like proper names) if I were submitting it for publication somewhere. But this was strictly a home campaign thing, and this iteration keeps a lot of the misappropriated flavor of the original.

Re: Wow!!!!

[tegyrius]

Go for it! All I ask is that you give me at least one or two reports on what you did with it. :)

The material is sufficiently generic that it should work with just about any fantasy engine - D&D, Pathfinder, Fantasy Craft, whatever. I think the only content in this version that's specific to Fantasy Craft's system is the set of deities, but those should be fairly adaptable (the first iteration used the core 3.0 deities without modification).

[misterandersen.livejournal.com]

In a number of ways it reminds me of the classic post-apocalypse telefantasies of the 80s. As well as a pseudo-Western setting I had a crack at where there Americas were populated by fantasy races (specifically, the inhabitats were massive gender dymorphic, with orcs as the males, elves as the females, and the orc/elf blood feats being used with those two origins for atypical individuals.

Re: Wow!!!!

[elalyr.livejournal.com]

The deities have always been one of my favorite parts of this setting.

Re: Wow!!!!

[tegyrius]

I'm really happy with how they turned out. They were an experiment to see if I could make a complete pantheon that used all 30 of Fantasy Craft's alignment paths with no duplication. I started throwing paths together in interesting combinations and then wrote the divine archetypes around them.

Have to admit, I'm a little smug about getting the maiden/mother/crone and patriarch archetypes aligned so that each of them covers one of the four elements. Also, I like the dualities in the paths available through The Sword (Destruction and Protection) and The Balance (Good and Evil).