Tell me about your hodge-podge setting?

[der_kluge]

I've been toying with the idea of "creating" a campaign world. Traditionally one might start with a blank sheet of paper, draw a map, and create a mythos from the ground up. But I am lazy, and I have a life, so I will steal pieces from everywhere to form the world I want, tweaking it along the way. I may, in fact, never run it, but that's not really the point is it.

So, what I might end up with could look something like this:

The Wilderlands boxed set with a modified history.
The Gods from the Forgotten Realms, but not all of them, specifically from 2nd edition.
HARP as the ruleset, with heavy modifications for a more D&D like combat system.
An adaptation of my own Artificer's Handbook for magic item creation, adapted to HARP.
I want to use Central Casting's Heroes of Legend to assist with character creation, if I can ever get my hands on a copy.
Other things as needed - Tome of Horrors for extra monsters, "a dozen" pdfs for extra flavor and ideas, Dungeons of Doom for dungeon maps as needed. You get the idea.
A place to stick Freeport, Bluffside, Fish Side, and other cities. I might replace City State of the Invincible Overlord with Freeport.

There, that's sufficiently hodge-podgy.

Tell me about your hodge-podge setting.

 

[Crothian]

Mine is less hodge podge. The setting has been around for many years that I use but I do plac ein things when they fit. For instance freeport is part of the setting under a different name since I had a city that basically served the same purpose and had the sdame feel. City State is also there, but that is becasue I wanted a beloved city to turn into something darker and more sinister so I changed it to that. But most of the hodge podge comes from the modules I run. THe giants from the giant trilogy modules from first edition all havea place in my world as does White Plum Mountain, Tomb of Horrors, Keep on the Border lands, etc.

 

[Immak Antunel]

I don't have much in the way of campaign settings to plunder directly from, so this is all less concrete than the above examples...

My starting point is the standard DnD (greyhawk?) cosmology, the great wheel, and specifically the Archdevils (who have a little wager amongst themselves indirectly concerning the PCs). Then, take the Drow pantheon from Plot and Poison, impose it on a fairly standard drow culture in a transparent rip-off of the Forgotten Realms underdark. Then, decide that the drow don't get no respect, so the PCs home city (they're Drow, if that's not yet clear) is the only real Drow city remaining (The ex-capitol of the Drow empire is currently dominated by Mind Flayers). For good-aligned antagonists, throw on a human kingdom remniscent of Warhammer's Brettonia, and Warhammer-esque dwarves (5th-edition-ish, gunpowder included). Oh, also, there's a jungle where a degenerate offshoot of the drow worship a Lovecraftian entity known only as the Centipede. For a surface map, take Asia's arctic coast and turn it sideways. Potential side-quests include several Necromancer Games Modules, scattered about the world.

Ruleswise, the Core books and Plot and Poison are givens for the player characters, while the antagonists come from/make use of The Book of Vile Darkness, Fiend Folio, Tome of Horrors, Book of Exalted Deeds (but not too much), and the Enworld conversion boards (I like Linnorms!). Book of Vile Darkness stuff will also be available to PCs, but must be earned (found in the treasure hoards of particularly tough foes, or learnt after completing a quest for a powerful demonic librarian). Also, Manual of the Planes will be taken just about "as is" for the cosmology.

That should cover it.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I'm currently going off of what I know so far about Praemal (the world of Ptolus) and carving out places for Redhurst, Freeport, the DCC modules and probably Barakus in the less-defined regions furthest from Ptolus.

I get a pro-designed framework without having the areas I'm interested in so defined that I have to erase before I can write. Best of both worlds for a working guy.

 

[Turjan]

Hodgepodge? Sure .

Originally based on the map of Ultima IV.
Quite a bit of rules material from Arcana Unearthed.
Some variation of Gloranthan trolls.
Some variation of Tolkien's wood elves from the "Hobbit".
The underground canals - and the traits of their inhabitants - from Vance's "Planet of Adventure".
Some variant of the wind railships from Vance's "Durdane" in the flat southern half-desert.
Some orc traits from the "Sovereign Stone" setting.
Some mix of Praxian tribes and Heortlings in the boreal steppes.
Snow-covered volcanoes with their native smiths in the NE (wherever I got this from ).
Migratory patterns of peoples like in Greyhawk.
A large city state (though de jure part of a different country).
Pirates and Freeport.

And lots more. This may sound like a funny mix, but it actually makes sense as a whole .

 

[Teflon Billy]

An adaptation of my own Artificer's Handbook for magic item creation, adapted to HARP.

You wrote Artificer's Handbook?

Nice work man

 

[genshou]

You want hodge-podge?

Pledge of Tyranny uses the Forgotten Realms setting and 3E as a base, but adds many 3.5 rules (I call it 3.2157 ), vitality/wounds from Star Wars, a hit locations table, E.N. Publishing's Elements of Magic in place of D&D magic, variant weapon rules from the Fire Emblem series of video games, and a cockatrice in a (pear) treant.

Edit: Oh, and a wealth of optional rules which come from my fellow Enworlders, and somewhat reserved use of E.N. Armoury - Chainmail Bikini. Mostly the feats.

 

[trancejeremy]

I got the map of my world years ago from a program that supposedly generated realistic worlds. But at any rate, it put out a pretty decent bitmap, including elevation and various other maps with regions like trees/desert/etc.

But for the premise, the idea was in part from an apparent hallucination I once had, combined with the console game "Star Ocean" (the one for the PS1), the Timothy Zahn novel Triplet, and the Freeport trilogy.

Ages ago, I could sworn I read an ad for a Call of Cthluhu product that had a scenario where in the future, the crew of a starship discovered the library at Celaeno (sp?). But that apparently didn't exist, because when I bought the product I thought had it, it was missing. And going thrugh all the ads for CoC products, I couldn't find it.

So anyway, near when 3.0 came out, I got the Freeport trilogy. As you may know, it has Hastur, the King in Yellow in it (more or less). So when I started designing my world, I though, hmmm, what if Freeport happened to be on the world that Hastur lived in. That is, around Aldeberan.

But of course, that wouldn't work, because Alderberan is a Red Giant. Which makes earth like planets tricky. So I remembered the novel "Triplet". Basically in that, in a fairly standard science fiction setting, a planet is discovered that is sort of a gateway to a fantasy world. Sort of a tunnel. You walk through it, and boom, you are transported into a fantasy world version of that planet. Sort of a parallel universe. But only if you walk through it naked. You can't bring things in or out. But it turns out it's really a prison to keep something in. And so my world is set in a parallel universe around a version of Alderberan that isn't yet a Red Giant, and is the prison of Hastur (or close to it, the world between Hastur's Prison and our own universe.)

But instead of just straight fantasy with something of a SF story background, then I thought, hmm, I like mixing SF and fantasy, so maybe it will be like Star Ocean, where some poeple accidently transpose themselves, complete with gear, but can't get any more.

So anyway, that gave me the basis for the premise.

But then I had all these Avalanche Press adventures that I wanted to use. So I came up with another portal, like the one on the episode of Star Trek with Joan Collins, that would let the PCs go back to earth in the past. (And also from Star Trek, one of the Harry Mudd episodes) the guardian of the portal is a shrewish ex wife of one of the PCs.

Rules wise, it's pretty much normal D&D (3.0, but with some 3.5 stuff), but with lots of future books - Blood &Space and Fading Suns d20, mostly, though now some stuff from Bulldogs!. And the Witch book from Mongoose.


Location wise, I have Freeport (the one from the Trilogy, before it got silly), most the villages and dungeons from modules from Necromancer Games, the small ones from 7 Cites, a few magical colleges (the one from Unhallowed Halls and Redhurst Academy and a few I've made up), the villages from Ed Cha's Whitethorn books, some of the cities from the Scarred Lands.

I've also borrowed some stuff from the Zork novels (The concept of a great underground road), Ethshar (an area with lots of tiny kingdoms), and James Blaylock's The Elfin Ship (basically Elves with skyships)

 

[Henry]

An idea I've been toying with is using the Black Company rules from Green Ronin in an Alternate Earth-Europe setting. It would technically be a "Plain of Glittering Stone" campaign, as one of the alternate worlds hooked to the cosmos, but two things stop me:

1) My players dislike the lethality of the Black Company rules (which, to me, is one of its strengths).
2) I'm indecisive on how the Black Company style classes and Magic would have altered Earth's history, yet still maintain enough flavor to identify it as Late Medieval-Early Renaissance Europe. Religion, Politics, ALL of it would be severely altered.

My serious homebrew from years past is a world that's part Forgotten Realms/Part Greyhawk, with alien magitech visitors and Dragonlance-flavored gods thrown into the mix.

 

[Psion]

I find it funny that you based your world map on Ultima IV Turjan. My "classic" campaign world does the same.

Anyways, I have two levels of "hodgepodge" worlds, depenidng on where you want to draw the line.

I conceived my "designed to be made from third party supplements/settings" world, Baelish, a while back. Here's the thread where I bring up some of the related ideas:
http://www.enworld.org/showthread.php?t=32667

I picked out a bunch of supplements and settings I was interested in and picked out a Fractal Terrains map I thought would fit them, in addition to some campaign backstory stuff I was interested in (both a "fallen yuan ti empire" thing and a "Celtic giants/oni" thing). I picked out spots for:

• AEG's Mercenaries races
• Freeport
• Bluffside and Burning Sands
• Necropolis (and later, Hamunaptra)
• Naranjan/Mindshadows

Though I did some of this stuff, this world never took flight as a game world, but it later became a hub world for my much more expansive River of Worlds game.

With river of worlds, I kitbashed a bunch of stuff and pictured NPC wayfarers from dozens of lands, all somewhere off the edge of the map. My random NPC populator included planar races as well as my prior campaign worlds (including Baelish), and products I had yet to use, such as Spartes and Fauns from Relics & Rituals: Olympus. Of course, planar products figured prominently, and I included planes, organizations, creatures, and races from Portals & Planes, Book of the Planes, Beyond Countless Doorways, DMs Directory of Demiplanes, Fiend Folio, ToH I&II, CCII, and others.


Finally, my old Second World Game (which implicitly used d20 modern) was a great product to plug in other products. Eastern Second World north america was a natural spot for various NG modules (particularly Tomb of Abysthor and Rappan Athuk) and other necromancy related books like Lords of the Night Vampires and Liches. Other spots in the world had other flavors. Western North America was host to various AEG mini modules. East Asia of course used elements from Beyond Monks, OA, as well as technomagic resources Arsenal and Factory. Europe I had slated for the Steampunk feel the book described for it, so I used Monsternomicon and Steam and Steel for parts of it, and pictured Streets of Silver as my fantasy Venice. And, of course, Nyambe was my fantasy Africa.