literary campaign settings you'd like to see

[rackabello]

i thought i'd share a few favorite literary worlds that i'd love to see adapted to gaming. i'm curious whether any on the boards know whether any of these have been adapted as official or homebrew campaign settings. if there are other literary worlds you'd like to see or have already drawn on in your campaigns, let's hear 'em.

my favorites include:

• Piers Anthony's Xanth: only for those with a high pun threshold, of course, and the books have certainly IMO suffered ever diminishing returns after the first few. still and all i dig Xanth's basic wackiness, and the notion of each person having a single magical talent has a lot of roleplaying potential [though it could be anathema to game balance: player 1 can stop time. player 2 can change the color of his eyes...].
  
• Greg Bear, Songs of Earth & Power: superb and spooky source for a fey campaign.
  
• Ursula K. LeGuin's Earthsea: interesting possibilities for a campaign to blend high and low or 'subtle' magic. mages can scale to immense heights of power but do so slowly and are loath to use it.

a couple others that have been adapted before, though not as far as i know to d20:

• Roger Zelazny's Amber: how's the Diceless adaptation?
  
• Fritz Lieber's Lankhmar: singularly unimpressed with the modules i've seen from the 1e version.

your thoughts?

 

[starwolf]

Blackgod,Waterborn, and the Fool Wolf stories...

 

[Khorod]

Lankhmar is definitely underused and under-known.

Remember that Xanth had classes of power, from basic on up through archmage. I'd go with ECL modifiers or feats to up the power from level 2 or 3 on the scale, or perhaps link powers to ability scores. Regular people could just spin out the eye-changing, but it took Prince Dolph a whole book to grasp wholly the shapechanging things.

RA Salvatore's Corona

Black Company

David Eddings, both Sparhawk and Belgarion

I'm sure there are a half-dozen more, but I can't think of them.

 

[Ruavel]

I may be getting a little obscure here, but I'd love to see a campaign based on Celia Dart-Thornton's 'Bitterbynde' setting...

Gaiman-esque elves... windships using a gravity-defying metal to stay aloft... and monsters based very closely to creatures from a variety of European mythologies...

for those interested, the first book of the Bitterbynde is called The Ill-made Mute... good story...

 

[mirzabah]

• Ursula K. LeGuin's Earthsea: interesting possibilities for a campaign to blend high and low or 'subtle' magic. mages can scale to immense heights of power but do so slowly and are loath to use it.

Ditto. In spades. For what it's worth, DragonQuest's magic system was in part inspired by this wonderful book.

I'd also like to see adaptations of

• Jack Vance's Lyonesse.
• Glen Cook's Black Company.

 

[Reno]

Robert L. Aspirin's Myth series
Guardians of the Flame Author's name escapes me at the moment.
Roger Zelazny's Amber series, yes I know about Amber Diceless, but have heard it is really not all that good.
Anne McCaffrey's Pern series
Brian Jacques Redwall

Most of my suggestions probably stem from them being geat books, rather than my wish to see game rukes. Though I do think hopping between multiple dimensions each session, most of them very kooky, would be tons of fun.

 

[Limper]

Black Company

Dune d20: Man I wanted this soooooo bad and they played me!

Donaldsons "The Land" Lore masters and Ur viles!

I'll second the vote on Keyes world (Waterborn).


I didn't think anyone else knew about Dragonquest! Loved that system... also a big fan of AH Runequest as well.

 

[jhanzur]

Beyond all imaginings, Sanctuary and Thieves' World.

 

[Limper]

For the record....

Lankhmar: Has been done by TSR back in the 2e days.


Theives World (aka Sanctuary) was done by Chaosium back in the 1e era (they had stats for a whole bunch of systems).

 

[rackabello]

Robert L. Aspirin's Myth series

i knew i'd forgotten something. the bazaar plane visited from time to time in these books would be a great setting for an anything goes, "always wanted to play an otyugh monk" campaign.