Get Your Kicks On Route..er...70...

If I ever do this commercially, I will have to do a Route 66 supplement. For now, however, this is a "sketch" of Route 70, specifically the part from Indiana to Pennsylvania. Why? Because the PCs are crossing it in "downtime", and I want the players to make up some Cool Stuff that happens en route. There's a lot of points here I want to detail in the future; I could drill down to do a dozen pages on a single city-ruin if I need to, but for now, this general 'sense of the place' will have to do.

And of course, in so doing, I realized I needed to do a history of Mantaros, the kingdom which occupied the Northeast region on Arith. Since I included a throwaway reference to a floating sky-palace, I then leap to the conclusion that Mantaros, already established as the oldest kingdom of the Alliance, was one of those very magic-heavy kingdoms, with cities filled with magical wonders of all sorts -- which naturally self-destructed dramatically when the Crush came. Look for some more essays soon, and sorry about the long gap.

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For those traveling across the northern part of the former United States, the best and safest road -- and this is using very qualified definitions of 'best' and 'safest' -- is the former Route 70, which was also a series of wide, Roman-style paved roads on Arith. Today, of course, it is a cracked and broken ruin -- impassable in many parts -- but still the closest thing to a direct east-west route in the area.

It passes through many dead and ruined cities, which creates a need for long detours for those not brave or foolish enough to enter the monster haunted ruins. Indianapolis is a swirling madhouse due to the Worldhole created during the Day of Fire; Columbus escaped the nukes but remains a deadly jumble of fallen buildings and lethal lairs; the outskirts of Pittsburgh hold strange and twisted creatres which spawn from its own reality-twisting center.

Monsters native to the area include roaming bands of gnolls and orcs, as well as bullettes, ankhegs, and wild wyverns (often confused with dragons by the Earthborn; Arithians laugh at such childish errors). There are bands of hill giants in many parts of western Ohio, as well as their ogre cousins. Ragedrakes are known to dwell in the Pittsburgh region. Rogue golems, freed from the spells which bound them and filled with rage at their enslavement, are common near the old Ohio border, where an academy of magic specializing in the art of soulless constructs (all mages learned well the lesson of Skallidane!) once stood in the kingdom of Marridon. Countless dozens of other monstrosities exist in lesser numbers.

The Pittsburgh worldhole is a partial gateway to a part of the Elemental Plane of Earth, one made of every kind of hard metal. As a consequence, creatures surrounding it have become things of living metal, of lead and iron and even adamantine, though they are not constructs nor golems, but creatures of metal flesh.

Columbus is a wild zone, a tangled mess of ruined skyscrapers mixed with the remnants of high magic, as it was an old city, called Jaliath, in Mantaros. Its most spectacular feature was the Emerald Minaret, the flying palace of the Baron of Jaliath. During the crush, the Minaret shattered, the lower half falling to earth, the upper half remaining afloat. The Baron and his family are presumed dead, but the remnant of the twisted spire still defends itself, firing green beams of arcane energy at any fliers foolish enough to approach. Not a few rogues of Arith idly dream of a plot to enter the place, as the treasures of the old Baron are said to be of incaculable worth...

Once the mountains of middle Pennsylvania (or the Kraz Kar Haj) are reached, the threat of orcs and goblins becomes more dire, as these species have laid claim to much of this area, and while they are not well organized, they are numerous, and regularly raid for food and slaves. There are a few dozen faltering Dwarvish fortresses scattered along the range, most deeply paranoid and mistrustful, and so cunningly hidden an army could march over their front door and never know it. The mountains also hold dire beasts.

Mai Wurld. Let me share it with u.

I've been running a D20 Modern game for almost two years now, in which I mostly ripped off Buffy and a few other sources. I had planned for my next game to be Star Wars, a campaign I was calling "Saga Of The Rogue Jedi", where the PCs would be new Padawans who had just gotten their goofy little braids an hour before Palpatine issued General Order 66. They would struggle to survive without their masters, go from honored heroes to hunted fugitives, and, ideally, become some of the founders of the Rebel Alliance.

However, my prospective players were all ga-ga for D&D. My problem was, I wasn't really excited about a D&D game. My friend Tony does games where the entire campaign takes place in some small country, or even a single city, and we end up all knowing about Fred the Shoeshine Boy's unrequited love affair with Milly the Flower Girl, except Milly is probably a shapeshifting creature from the lower planes and Fred will turn out to be the secret ninja guildmaster or something. They're deep, complex, emotional, and infinitely memorable.

Lizard don't do that.

He's Francis Ford Coppola; I'm George Lucas on an off day. (Insert joke here). I want spectacle, cool settings, wild rides, amazing scenes. I need a huge canvas to draw on, an epic backdrop, and if the scenery falls down if you breathe on it too hard or the NPCs are invisible if you look at them from the side, well, that's how I roll. The D20Modern game was the most 'rooted' I've done in a while, and even then I had a cross country trip with the last angel from an alternate world, as well as an epic struggle against a vampire prince in LA (ending with the most annoying perfect roll I've ever seen...thanks, C.)

If I was not going to do Star Wars, what I was going to do was Rifts -- except, you know, without the sucky rules or setting. I like huge kitchen sink worlds. (If I ever scrape together enough money, I will resurrenct, and publish, the Sea Of Worlds, which can be artfully described as 'Planescape meets Spelljammer meets Nexus, on a Gygax/Hargrave bender'.) I'd be using Hero or GURPS for this sort of world, though, and those systems are also a hard sell to the current gaming group.

Then I had an inspiration. I could use D&D -- 99% bog-standard Third Edition rules -- to do the sort of game I wanted. High magic, semi-high tech, serious high weirdness. I love post-holocaust games, but a fantasy post-holocaust game doesn't work. The players have no emotional investment in the fact Cl'ich'e City is now in ruins. Besides, if a world is already in the Dark Ages technologically, how far can it fall? Let's face it, the real Dark Ages were post holocaust.

But what if our 21st century world fell, and the cause of the fall was a sudden eruption of magic? OK, cool, but a bit too close to my current D20M game -- magic enters the modern world, yippee skippy hurray, been there, done that, bought the +5 t-shirt...

Ah, but what if it wasn't just magic entering our world...but a whole world? Two worlds -- one a typical high fantasy world filled with far too many sentient races and magic items out the wazoo, the other a near-future version of Earth (near future so that I could add in some nifty new tech, change some features of cities, create some new buildings, play with politics a little) -- collide across dimensional boundaries. In the process, the civilizations of both worlds are destroyed, and even the fabric of magic is subtly altered. Even if the characters come from the 'fantasy' world, the players have an emotional investment in this world, and so, will react appropriately to battling lizardmen in the ruins of Disneyworld or seeing giant dwarf heads appearing on Mount Rushmore. Bingo.

And so it began. I started writing essays and histories, filling in the gaps, and then (today, a few weeks into the process), I decided to take it public. The first flood of posts here will be the stuff I've already done on the world. When those are exhausted (in far too short a time), you'll get the new stuff, which will keep coming even when the campaign is in swing -- worldbuilding never stops. Along with the actual world data, I plan to discuss the whys -- what inspired me to create this, what it means, why it's needed, etc. Why? Because I think the creative process is interesting in itself. I am not quite so egotistical as to imagine I have much to teach my fellow creators, but I am interested in telling them how my mind works, and hoping they will share with me the processes by which their minds work.

So, let it begin!