Scarred Lands! Burning Wheel! Numenera! It's a Big Name Kickstarter Bonanza!

It's a New Year Big Name Kickstarter Bonanza! For fans of the Scarred Lands, Numenera, or Burning Wheel, or an unholy mix of the three (The Scarred, Burning Lands of Numenera?), these three new Kickstarters are all set for some fairly epic success from the starting gate. All three are produced by veteran publishers already known for their high quality work, and based on existing well-loved settings and games. It looks like 2016 is starting off with a bang!

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We open play with the Scarred Lands setting, being Kickstarted by White Wolf founder Stewart Wieck. For D&D 5th Edition and Pathfinder, this setting was originally created about 15 years ago for D&D 3E. It was one of the first, and most successful, 3rd Edition campaign settings. Now, Wieck and friends are Kickstarting a 320-page full-colour hardcover book. For $45 you get a hardcover, or for $18 you get the PDF. There's an interesting note on the page about a free adventure, Gauntlet of Spiragos, which you can download for Pathfinder now, or "a 5th Edition version is forthcoming — we’re just hoping for an official announcement regarding 5th Edition games before we apply the finishing touches".

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Next on the menu is a Numenera card game called The Ninth World. Numenera is, of course, the flagship RPG from Monte Cook Games, and this card game is being produced by Lone Shark Games and designed by Mike Selinker. You may have heard of him from previous games such as the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game. This game is, in his own words, "one part deckbuilder, one part Eurogame, and one part RPG" and is a competitive card game for 2-5 players. A pledge of $50 gets you the game.

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And last in our little trilogy of epic Kickstarters is Luke Crane's Burning Wheel Codex. This is a supplement for Burning Wheel Gold, and includes life paths, magic, and rules commentary. "We shall create a tome of similar dimension and density to the urtext, Burning Wheel Gold. Its cover shall shimmer cerulean and gold. Its pages shall have the hue of gossamer and bone. Its ink shall be black. And it shall contain: the paths and ways of the Roden, Trolls and Great Wolves; an encyclopedia of traits and skills; an arcane library of magical ways; a libram of magic artifacts; and detailed commentary on nearly every aspect of the urtext itself." This one is steaming ahead already. For $25 you get a copy of the hardcover book.

 

[Dark Sun Gnome]

When I hear "sword and sorcery" classic tropes, I think bronze age, magic is evil/bad and rare. Is this the case with Scarred lands? Did they have to modify the 3e ruleset to accommodate this? (e.g. change spell-casting classes, modify weapons, etc)

With Arcane spellcasting, they had rules that stated that casters produced a lot of body heat (As a result of one of the titans trying and failing to put himself back together) when they cast spells, so wearing armour as a mage was a really dumb idea. You could cook yourself alive.

And its not just Sword and Sorcery - there is a lot of High Fantasy in there as well, and all the classic races are in there, but there are a lot of twists.

 

[timbannock]

With Arcane spellcasting, they had rules that stated that casters produced a lot of body heat (As a result of one of the titans trying and failing to put himself back together) when they cast spells, so wearing armour as a mage was a really dumb idea. You could cook yourself alive.

And its not just Sword and Sorcery - there is a lot of High Fantasy in there as well, and all the classic races are in there, but there are a lot of twists.

Yeah, pretty much this.

It's not sword-and-sorcery in the true sense, it's thoroughly D&D. But it makes a lot of pretty overt nods to sword-and-sorcery through a D&D lens, and the post-apocalyptic nature of the world is very powerfully written into the setting in every way. Thus, while there's still plenty of D&D's core high-fantasy points and tropes, the world as a whole feels considerably more dangerous and "barren" (not empty, but more unmapped and dangerously wild) than so many other kitchen sink style D&D settings.

Although not necessarily true of lots of places within the setting, there's also the fact that several places have a decidedly horror style to them, as well. Hallowfaust is filled with necromancers and undead (though they are not *all* evil mwuahahaha villainy types), and the Blood Bayou area is absolutely oozing with horror tropes.

The Titan/God war is also extremely epic and it touches on nearly every setting element in an immediate sense, so you don't have long stretches of history that don't really matter to the world's inhabitants, because they can literally walk outside and look at the corpse of some deity or monstrosity from the war.

 

[Stouthart]

Excited for the Scarred Lands Kickstarterd. Backed for both PF and 5e.

 

[Von Ether]

Scarred Lands, for me, was a D&D setting that had set a bar.

It trod a find line between "causal reskin of setting that wasn't really D&D trope friendly" (lots of D&D 3rd party projects) and "yet another D&D faux-medieval world" (FR and DL) and managed to deliver a fun, deadly setting that required no major rule tweaks (Dark Sun/Planscape ) to play or run in.

It pulled this off by having lots of really twisted critters and some awesome set pieces. With 5e going back to "Monsters don't have to follow PC rules," this version should shine even more. It's a pity that it faded away in the first place.

Blood Bayou is a solid horror piece. If it had been a TSR/WotC property, BB would have had it's own dread realm in Ravenloft. In fact, if you loved Ravenloft, you should put BB on your reading list.

 

[LostandDamned]

yeah, the Scarred Lands was a great setting, still got several of the books (including the very first printing run of the Creature Collection) in my collection, and I often browse through them for ideas, some of the undead was really creepy, such as CC1's Alley Reaper or the Butcher Spirits, Denev's misguided attempt at letting sacrificed animals get revenge on the hungry Titan Gaurak who they were sacrificed to, which promptly decided to then hate and attack all humaniods in the long term, it's stuff in the fluff like that which really brought the setting to life

 

[Nytmare]

For someone who had played in the older version of Scarred Lands; how did that setting differ from any other high-fantasy setting? (E.g. Forgotten Realms)
All I got from the Kickstarter intro was that the world was formed by gods and titans...which doesn't sound much different than any other setting or ancient mythology.
What sets this world apart?

When I hear "sword and sorcery" classic tropes, I think bronze age, magic is evil/bad and rare. Is this the case with Scarred lands? Did they have to modify the 3e ruleset to accommodate this? (e.g. change spell-casting classes, modify weapons, etc)

Adding on to what others have already said: The Scarred Lands is a very noticeable reimagining of Greek Mythology, but I personally think that it stands head and shoulders above pretty much any other published fantasy setting.

I think that the biggest thing that stuck out to me, straight out of the gate when I first heard about it, was that the world was this mishmash of magical battlefield-wastelands where the Gods and Titans had beat the crap out of each other barely two centuries earlier. On top of that was the fact that the Titans couldn't be killed, so the best that the gods could hope for was to tear them apart and hide the (still incredibly powerful and dangerous) pieces to try to thwart the Titans' followers from ever managing to put them back together again.

So you've got things like Kadum (effectively the most charming aspects of Cthulhu and Godzilla), who had his heart torn out, got chained to a rock, and was sunk to the bottom of an ocean where he has, over the last 200 years still managed to taint an entire ocean turning it blood red and turning all the happy creatures that used to swim around in it into mutant, soul murdering, murder-fish. Or Gaurak who had to have all of his teeth smashed out by the gods before they could hope to bury him in a prison that he couldn't just eat his way out of, and where the smashed teeth fell to the earth they built a giant mountain range of Titan fangs.

I also really liked the idea of the gods being more than just another list of bonuses and effects in the PHB. They were full blown characters with motivations and goals who took an active part in the world. And people in the world worshiped the heck out of them, not only because they actively listened for prayers for crops and requests for blessings over meals, but you had people all over the place who had either fought side by side with them in the wars, or who had a great grandparent who did.

It was also neat because the first glance of the world was done with all of these stark black and white, good and evil brush strokes, but the further involved you got with things, the more you realized that everything was all different shades of dark grey with a nice coat of pain on top.

Regarding magic it pretty much depended on where you were, which set of "good guys" you were rooting for, and how deep you were willing to delve into the Scarred Lands pre-history. At the shallowest end of the pool, if you were casting a magic spell, it came from one of three places: it was a gift granted to you from the gods (divine), it was leeched from the remaining power of the Titans that still infused the planet (primal), or you were tapping into an (un)natural energy source invented by the Titan Mesos (arcane).

For the most part druids and clerics were opposite sides of the same coin, and the "goodness" of the spellcaster depended on your own moral compass and the moral compass of your current opposing team. Paladins existed, but in addition to the sea of faith based PRCs that existed, each of the gods kinda had their own character class that was almost as good a fit as a paladin for them as the paladin was for the LG god Corean.

The arcane classes were kind of a mixed bag, and a lot of it probably depended on how far away you were from one of the big cities.

For existing classes things might need a little bit of work, but I can't think of any huge problems. Warlocks might need to be rethought a little bit. I think that Scarred Lands monks mostly tended more towards the European monks end of the spectrum over the Kung Fu monks end of things, but that shouldn't be too much of a problem.

For PC races, you had pretty much the standard 3.5 array. Except for gnomes who were (I swear to god) banished to an entirely different continent in a fit of pre 4th Edition prescience. Additions (for at least the divine races) included an extra armful of pretty awesome variant elves and dwarves. For conversion to 5th, Dragonborn pose a little bit of a problem; at least on the surface of things, dragons don't really exist in the Scarred Lands. There are race of Titan worshiping snakemen called the Assathi that the dragonborn might be able to get morphed into but you'd probably be better off just dropping them. Warforged would make a great addition taking the place of a race known as the Hollow Knights who are a bunch of basically sentient suit-of-armor golem veterans trying to figure out how they fit into a world not at war. Tieflings could easily be the chosen race of one or more of the evil gods.

 

[Matrix Sorcica]

Uhmm... that Scarred Lands kickstarter sucks! No stretch goals unless you order hardcopy? So no stretch goals for pdf backers? Not nice. Especially since you can't get an estimate of international shipping from the KS page

 

[Nightfall]

Matrix, I'm pretty sure there are stretch goal...

 

[Nightfall]

Also should add YAY!!!!

 

[TerraDave]

Call it out, and he appears.