Pseudo-Australasian campaign settings?

[Hairfoot]

Real-world analogues are a common standby for campaign settings, but I haven't seen any that take place in a fantasy Australasia.

Has anyone got a homebrew they'd like to share, or a published setting I've overlooked?

 

[Drowbane]

Xen'drik?

 

[DrunkonDuty]

I'm an Australian. I've been a gamer for 25 years. I love creating my own Home Brew.
And I'm ashamed to say I've never created a campaign with an Australasian feel. I think it's my large amount of ignorance of Aboriginal culture that makes me hesitate. Unless doing a modern setting Aboriginal culture is the only culture that can claim Australian-ness.

I have done modern Australian settings for supers games but in these cases I just use the real world. With super-powers.

SOrry Hairfoot, I know this helps not at all. But I would also be interested to see/hear about anyone's Australasian campaign settings too.

 

[Aus_Snow]

Rifts apparently has a book for this. Like they have a book for everything, or so they say.

Other than that, I have occasionally been thinking about making a d20-based setting like this. On and off since last year, anyway. Having done a bit of study in this field, it doesn't seem too daunting.

If there was a lot of interest, and if I had the time. . .

Yeah. :\

 

[Brennin Magalus]

I insist on playing Hong in your game.

 

[humble minion]

I insist on playing Hong in your game.

Jeez, this happens with every new campaign setting. Some Munchkin always wants to play the Gods...

(Still, at least you didn't tell me about how your character beat him up and took his +5 cricket bat of smiting...)

 

[Hairfoot]

Rifts apparently has a book for this. Like they have a book for everything, or so they say.

It does. In it, the Red Centre has been filled with an enormous inland sea. I haven't checked it out in detail, but I'd prefer the deserts to play a part in an Australian setting.

I'm also trying to nut out a post-apocalyptic Oz setting. The one hassle is that it won't have a feature which US-based PAs assume as default - guns, guns, guns. It all seems a bit primitive to have the heroes marching around with cricket bats!

 

[exile]

I was kind mulling over a campaign sitting not too unlike this just a few months ago. I started with a map of Australia. Next I created a history wherein dwarves had traditionally ruled the island-continent from their mountainous home at the center of the landmass. The dwarves had been constantly besieged by humanoids, so were quite thankful when a powerful human wizard arrived with plans for a doomsday machine. The dwarves in their desperation, built the machine and activated it. The machine had the desired effect of killing a great many humanoids, but it also killed dwarves and leveled their homeland to desert. The dwarves, all save the royal clans, fled east where they built up a new civilization along the east coast- cities, railways, and even a great wall to keep out any surviving humanoids. The dwarves aligned themselves in great guilds not unlike the clans from Legend of the Five Rings. The former royal clans fled west where they built their own city (and degenerated into duergar and derro). The human wizard who sold the dwarves on the doomsday machine used the power that it generated with the consumption of all of those lives to ascend to lichdom.

At the start of the campaign, the dwarves, now resettled on the east coast, are starting to again be plagued by humanoids, so they have put out an open call for mercenaries from other lands to aid in the fight. They're also importing indentured servants (humans and halflings) in large numbers to help with public works.

In the age before the dwarves ruled the island-continent, the elves were the dominant race there. They now cling to islands (maybe flying islands) just off the coast where they live tribal lives and have close ties to the elements of air and water (whereas teh dwarves have close ties to earth and fire). Gnomes have been like a sister race to the dwarves, always living in close association with them, as they still do. The gnomes have sort of a tinker-light feel, more professorial if you will.

Chad

 

[Hairfoot]

Thanks for the primer, exile.

I guess what I'd like to do with an Australian setting is use the native mythos to build an antipodean fantasy setting, just as most settings are built on European myths and folklore. So, marauding bunyips, spirit-serpents (nagas & couatls?), and man-eating megafauna wombats.

And dry, dusty heat, of course.

 

[Voadam]

There is also Mutants Down Under, the TMNT After the Bomb supplement for mutant animals in post apoc Australia.

There is one d20 set of monster books that has some Australian myth monsters in it, but I forget the name of the books and the publisher. It is a small pdf publisher.