[Campaign Idea] "Colonizing" a savage world

I was thinking about the following scenario for a new campaign:

In a typical medieval fantasy world, a giant portal suddenly opens. The portal lead to another, unexplored world where the last civilized beings died/disappeared a millenia ago. Wizards, sages and erudites flock to the portal, to study it. After a few months (maybe) adventurers pass through the portal to explore the world (the passage isn't instantaneous, but explorers do not remember the journey).

The world is not too different from their own, only more savage. Of course, animals, beasts and monsters can be different, but, overall, it is not too unusual. After a few more months of exploration, the adventurers come upon the natives: xenophobic, violent snakemen. The snakemen refuse any parlay attempt, and try to kill the "invaders" on sight.

About a year after the portal has opened, it closes in a gigantic explosion, killing everyone in the homeworld in a 500m radius. Sages didn't have the time to gather enough information to open a gate back to the new world. The adventurers are thus stranded, and must fend for themselves in the new world.

A village is founded, but soon after the first leader is elected, there is a violent schism, and half the village goes off to build their own town. Much bitterness still exists between the two villages.

Months pass. The adventurers establish themselves, and start exploring their new homeworld, and discover ancient, gigantic constructions, traces of the now-extinct civilization.

many more years pass (20? 30?). The characters are the first generation of children native of the new world.

My questions about such a setting:

- Anyone ever done something similar? How?
- How would you see the adventuring potential?
- How big should the two settlements be? How many inhabitants?

Any other commentaries are welcome.

AR

I had the PCs be the forward scouts exploring a new island because there own was sinking. Then once they had recovered a lost artifact that gave them ownership of the island the larger contingent from their home arrived to settle.

The PCs were thus leading members of a newly established community and had to give attention to how to feed and house all these people. The natives happened to be gnomes and goblins and the PCs had to set up diplomatic relations with them (which became especially hard when the villagers tresspassed on a gnome burial ground).

There was also the usualy hunt dangerous monsters and explore mysterious ruins adventures, but most of the fun was the politics of life in a new developing settlement - "M'Lord Mare stole my share of coconuts!" - "No I didn't" "Yes you did" "liar" *BANG - WHACK* - "Oh not again!"

(I created a set of rules for management of the 'village' as a character too)

Here are my initial thoughts:

- how are you going to do religion? Do the gods of the old world still exist? How do clerics get their power?

- how many adventurers came across, and how many support people? How will they be able to obtain things like new spells? I know you asked how many people should be in each village, and I'm not sure of the answer to that. It needs to be enough to account for some adventurer (and natural death) while not collapsing on itself for not enough hands (ie need to be enough people for carpenter, tanner, smiths, farmers, etc).

- is this a grim and gritty, or something else?

- it seems like magic items are going to be very scarce here unless you come up with some other reason. That means either no magic items for the most part, and also magic items are worth a lot more than they would be in the DMG.


There is the potential for good adventuring here, but a lot of things which might seem normal in other campaigns are going to be different here, and you need to remember to keep that in mind so it's all consistent. For example, there is a good chance no one at all knows about ancient history, or even something like construct a major castle (it's a very different thing to construct a home versus a big castle)... basically anything that is fringe has a good chance that no one will know about it.

- how does currency work? Currency pre-supposes that there is some way to back up the value of that currency. Given only one or two villages, there is a good chance the economics reverts back to a barter system.

- also are the PC's going to be literate? How much schooling are they going to get? One or two villages struggling to keep themselves alive probably doesn't leave a lot of time for learning things that won't help keep you alive.

There are just some initial thoughts. I think that it can be a fun campaign setting, but I do think it's a fair amount of work. I would also make sure the player's buy in to such a campaign before running them in it. I can see how some people wouldnt' like it at all. (For example, a negotiator/high diplomacy build isn't going to be useful at all if there isn't a lot of different governments and societies to deal with.)

Grab bag of assumtions and ramifications.

The villages should be between 80 (size for a smal but vialble tribe)
and 600 (more than this would require more infrastructure than avalible)
Each home would probably have its own garden and provide most of its own food. In a closed society like this all the major NPC's would be well known. and will need detailing. I would suggest having a highly defensible site for the villages, as random attacks could wipe out the non-combat population quickly.
Assuming there is much of a non-combat pop. The first generation would be very potent, being mostly adventures. Since in most games female adventures are out numbered 4 to 1 at least the womans lot would not be a happy one.
Barter system would mostly replace money and it would be difficult to convert expences like item creation. NPC spell casters would not be able to charge cash for magic, but a chicken might be worth a lesser restoration. Nessary spells would be free, as a single disease could be deadly. Raise and Res. would be out of the question of course. Gems would be rare and limited and spells that required specific gems would either be altered or forgotten.
perhaps it would just be a quest to make any item. You can forget a wide selection of disposable magics like potions & scrolls.
Permanent magics would be plentiful, but owned by families - and non replaceable. Hmm a world where normal treasure ment nothing, and non-magical metal armor was all melted for tools. Arrows would be converted to stone or bone. Harvesting useful parts of creatures would be more important than coins.

I played a in closed society once. It had existed for 4-10? generations and had a mixed population of humans, 1/2 elves, halflings and a few (mostly older) pure elves. There were only about 10 surnames in the village, and we knew all the families by reputaion, as well as the town elders. We went from 1st-3rd before the game broke up. We had mostly town/family adventures and were just starting to find traces of a world outside the valley that we lived in.
we never found out the real reason it had been cut off.

Your idea is intersting but would be a lot of work to convert to a logical society.

See... I would try having the PC's discover a portal, and end up trapped in the Savage World, having to use what they have to scrape out a living. Suddenly their gold is worthless, and they have to do other things to survive...

Hm....

Altamont, it's funny you mention this, among my other campaigns, I'm currently DMing a solo adventure with that very same concept !

I created a plane that had a civilisation thousands of years ago, but is now a savage land that was discovered and then colonized by Greyhawk settlers. The plane had many adamantium mines so it was deemed colonization worthy.

The PC and his cohorts were asked to come to give fighting support against the many savage critters and beasts.

The colony is called New Greyhawk, and the outpost is called Farlanghn (after the temple in that very outpost).

I've included the maps to that post.

Man, we REALLY should get together to game sometime !

Trainz said:

Altamont, it's funny you mention this, among my other campaigns, I'm currently DMing a solo adventure with that very same concept !

Click to expand...

Must be the weather!

Thanks for the input, all.

AR

Altamont Ravenard said:

Must be the weather!

Click to expand...

Indeed !

Been raining all day (as you know), and it's going to keep up for at least 2 more days...

Dang...

Well, at least we have an excuse to stay inside and play !

I played in a game where the party was part of a group of refugees escaping from a rampaging horde of orcs, giants, and demons. They managed to escape through a portal to an island world, and most of the early adventures involved exploring the new world. By exploring long-lost dwarven ruins, we managed to find an artifact which allowed another portal to be opened to yet another continent, and escaped through *that* portal with the demons on our heels. Quite a lot of portal-hopping in that game.

Altamont Ravenard said:

- Anyone ever done something similar? How?

Click to expand...

Yup. It was called "Pisces" and described a world where a number of people fled to when it became apparent that their old world was going to die. It was quite fun, and for a while me and a number of people were pretty fired up about this. Unfortunately, it didn't go anywhere - the last post was more than a year ago...

You can see what we made of it here:

http://juergen.the-huberts.net/pisces/index.html

Pretty much all of the information is on the messageboards, so it might take some time reading through it. You will probably find lots of inspiration there...