Pike & Shotte: First Steps

I've been seized by a madness. A madness that only strikes when I'm running a campaign using another set of house rules. A madness to kludge together a system that uses the GLOG as its core (including some of Skerples' refinements) with various parts of Lamentations of the Flame Princess bolted on, presented in a weird fantasy, Early Modern-inspired setting. Adventurers scrabbling for scraps of treasure in the midst of mercenary armies plundering and looting, internecine religious conflict, the slow decline of the old order, the dethroning of kings, things and places from ages unknown by human memory, sorcery from beyond the veil of madness, gunpowder, steel and chaos. That sort of thing. It could be glorious. It will probably be crap, but to quote Arnold K.:

But no one is interested in your fantasy heartbreaker.  This is because everyone is up to their ascending colon in retroclones and besides, they're busy writing their own.
It's like trying to tell other people about your dreams.  No one cares.  Give them content, not another retroclone.
I know these things, and yet here I am.

Above all I want to ensure that the end result is still as fun, simple and OSR-compatible as the components used in its creation. With the above in mind, I'm going to be making a few posts with steps that can be be used to build up a world full of chaos and opportunity for enterprising PCs. Namely:

- The War and why it started (or why it's about to start), how long it has been going, and what the armies are doing (potentially including mass combat);
- PC Classes;
- Religion and schism;
- Magical, monstrous & fantastical elements.

There will be others, but I'll get to those as and when the ideas strike.*

Credit, Filip Štorch

*All of the above will not abide by any rational or logical notions of timekeeping.