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Message: <blockquote data-quote="kenjib" data-source="post: 343561" data-attributes="member: 530">Wow - thanks for the comments!  That's very kind of you.  The proposal was a bit of a modification of a setting I've been working on to spice it up.  It was largely inspired by the Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner, Clark Ashton Smith's world of Zothique/Hyperborea, Robert Howard's Hyborea, and HPL's dream world fantasy (prosaicly horrid though this last influence may be).  By deciding how far from the Old Kingdoms you want to have the campaign focus, the world can run the range of style from traditional gritty, political, low fantasy to Dali surrealist stream of subconscious madness high fantasy.I would see ships in a similar manner to the way in which the world works.  The ships of the Old Kingdoms would be traditional faire, however I was thinking of a bit of anachronism.  I don't want gunpowder, but ships are more fun when they get more towards the age of exploration.  Hence, you would have galleon era ships, but they would be mounted with ballistae and catapults.  There may be a rare magical armament as well.  For example, the legendary flagship of the imperial navy has a massive iron reinforced ram and the ship shoots massive spouts of deadly fire.  Magic like this is not very common in the Old Kingdoms though, and the mere mention of this ship brings dread to the hearts of even the toughest pirates and privateers.Now, ships get more strange when one starts getting further from the Old Kingdoms, but such ships are rarely seen in the more civilized regions and quite a spectacle when they are.  The basic idea behind the setting is that the inner core is a more traditional medieval fantasy world, somewhat low  magic, but as you get further out really anything goes since the world becomes more and more dreamlike toward the edges:  A great white ship with billowing sails that cut through the water with no wake and always seems to follow it's own wind, a ghost ship that returns to port once every 6 years on the anniversary of the day it left for a travel to explore beyond the furthest reaches of the dream seas, the arcane imbued ship of a master wizard, and the like.  However these are all mythic experiences that only extraordinary people will ever experience.It's a world where there are many things that are completely one-of-a-kind, as at the edges of the world, sheer force of will can shape reality into the strangest shapes, all tied to the ego of their creators -- and every ego is unique, after all.  It's a literary metaphor as well.  As a person travels to these outlands, he essentially redefines his ego by realizing the power of will (this is what I really meant by what magic is like), thus when he returns to the Old Kingdoms he has gained the vision to attain true heroism beyond the myopic view of those caught up in the petty mundane affairs of the world.  It is a transcendant voyage.  Leave a lowly sailor, come back a king in the making.Did you ever see the Gumby episode where gumby goes into outer space and there's this boy playing piano on a lonely asteroid?  Gumby greets him in a friendly manner and then suddenly the boys totally freaks out, turns into a nightmarish freak "Large Marge moment" wolf beast and says something like, "This is MY planet.  Get off of MY PLANET!!!"  Gumby goes totally apesh*t and runs away as fast as he can.All of this weirdness, however, is set to the backdrop of a very typical fantasy world, the Old Kingdoms, where people live their squalid, grey, lives, and the stories of the dream seas are just distant legends and bedtime tales.I probably didn't go far enough explaining it in my submission I'm afraid.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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