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... Personally, I think what's needed is no so much your fully formed plots (since we all know we're going to chew them up and reconstitute them anyway), but fragments that make your brain go "tick!" Things that you would have never thought of yourself, but as soon as you see it, it makes a...

... The Woodwyrm Leaning ramshackle against the thick landward wall of the Shipwrights' Hall, the Woodwyrm looks like nothing quite so much as the remains of a great ship fallen to the ground from a great height. Every part of the tavern is built of driftwood, old planking, keels and beams...

... You keep it round long enough and the data just accumulates...I have hundreds of yellowing pages and megs of text files from my various settings, but it never seems like that much work when you're only adding a few pages a week. Reason Principia Infecta

... The Wayward Visitor The Wayward Visitor stands at the outskirts of Port, where the Road of Stones meets the Coast Road and travelers pause to take in the view of the city, bay and cliffs. It is a rough but sizable inn and stables, an unusual structure built of worn stones taken from the...

... The Festering Pustule A squalid, horrible place in the midst of the worst slum imaginable - even the poor only come here because they have no choice; nowhere else will trade what passes for food and drink for meager possessions and refuse. The barkeep is a nameless, lewd, diseased...

I was recommending a blog format as something to think about, plus a re-examination of *why* you are relaunching and what you hope to achieve - otherwise you'll just be doing exactly the same thing in a year or three from now with a different vision of the setting; it seemed fairly clear from...

... Spirits of Rock and Sky : an examination of what happens to future society and religion when almost all resources and knowledge are inaccessible. Artilect Earth: down and out in the 2300s, an era of wonders and technology in which posthumanity finds itself increasingly irrelevant in the...

... My Principia Infecta is in essence the result of a hard look at what I could do with the piles and piles of setting material I have accumulated over my unnaturally long life. If you start from the assumption that you aren't going to get past the point you are at now in any...

Share your unique and interesting taverns - there's no such thing as too many drinking establishments in a campaign ... and shameless resource sharing makes us all better people :) The Silvered Horn The Silvered Horn is a worn, comfortable tavern nestled against the old city wall on the low...

... You don't have to develop a whole language to sneakily make it look like your world/game has distinct languages. The trick is to think up and apply a few rules to names early on. e.g. Datarii: - use latin plurals - names are short, heavy on "a" and "u" as vowels - tal, mura, dar Neth -...

... In the Enclave, I've tried to make the Powers a little more interesting than the standard godly archetypes-by-job-description. I think there's something to be said for this approach. For example: -------- The Fisher in Darkness The Fisher in Darkness is the kindly old stranger who offers...

it's in the head Alien is not whether you know what goes on in their society or not - alien is what goes on inside their heads. In order to make Drow more alien, you need a good rationale for them to not think (and thus not act) the same way we do. Think about it: what makes being in the same...

no going to the books! No, no going to the books! That defeats the very object of a mysterious, horrifying sea monster. Well, one very object anyway. Sir Thorncrest's example is exactly the sort of thing I was after - if a little unorthodox, crocodile as sea monster and all that - strange sea...

Nothing like a good sea monster to make (some) players think twice about tactics. So share! Here's one from Principia Infecta to get the ball rolling (and as you can see, I'm incapable of writing anything without putting a sage in there somewhere...): Year of the Great Eel Strange things...

The consequences of a lack of soul integrity are, to my mind, one of the more interesting results of transhumanist magic/technology worth exploring. What does it mean to merge or separate souls [or collections of processing functions + data in the technological side of things]? All sorts of...

... I agree that you have to have many more than one main idea to make a setting interesting. Look at the number of ideas crammed into any of the great books - like Neverness, to pick an extreme example containing transhumanist themes. Transhumanist fantasy (or scifi masquerading as fantasy -...

another couple... I like sages: The Expected Smile on the Datarii The Expected Smile - that most unusual of characters, an anonymous yet prolific sage - lived and wrote before the Vanishing, when Ammander folk still arrived in Port aboard Magi tradeships and Three Stones was but a village...

Funny, almost an inversion of what I enjoyed of the PS setting. I like the feel of a different but more or less normal place where the strange intruded through every crack and crevice. It's like having the Godtime right on top of the world to the point at which supernatural beings showing up one...

from the Principia... Some from Principia Infecta: The Denier The Emerald Company rode forth for the last time from the great weathered gate of Three Stones, under the unfriendly stares of the Watch and - so it is said - Black Tower sages. The Company traveled to Lorn as guardians and guides...

More than just a little - there's no way I could find the time to build Principia Infecta without something like MovableType, and I'm a technologist who has written content management systems in the past. The whole underlying rationale of blog software is that it makes this process of...