The World After: Substance to the Random List

Last week, as I was abandoning my idea of running a 4e game (I like playing it but just couldn't bring myself to read the books enough to prep) and thinking about giving something akin to a mega-dungeon centered campaign I came up with a random list of inspirational materials and created items I'd want to have.

Having decided to return to at least the ideas that initially sparked City States of the Apocalypse I started to make that list more concrete.

Old School Rules Set:Back to the drawing boards on this one...

Random Comics: I have one (of ten) selected and it could be very influential. Warriors of the Shadow Realm is set in Marvel's Weird World. Weird World has a very 70s take on both elves and dwarves. The elves remind me a lot of Elfquest (an issue of which might join the 10 pre-1980s comics). Interesting, based on both the illustration and text of the LBB I suspect a Weird World elf is much closer to Gygax's vision than all the Tolkien influenced elves that now over-run the hobby. Expect more on this topic next week.

80s "Metal" fantasy novel: The Lady of the Snowmist by Offut, which I just brought back from El Paso last month. The last of his War of the Gods on Earth books and the reason I bought the first two back in the 80s it's the one I never got around to reading back then. The tone is very different from what people think of for T&T and the Weird World comics. I like that. It's a random element, but I'll read it red notebook (and maybe blue notebook as well) in hand.

Notebooks: I wrote about a gaming table notebook with letter index tabs for keeping track of creation in play. I still intend to do that but from the same huge box of notebooks I've pulled two others fro megadungeon notes (blue) and campaign world notes (red) to keep next to me while reading source material. The blue notebook already has two entries: an outline of levels 1-3 in terms of shape and my first inhabitants, the Green Tunics.

This is the best I've felt about campaign prep in a long time. Much better than my last two clone games.