A Beginning

I've started this blog as an effort to contain my various rambles, fleeting thoughts, and other RPG-related things that run through my brain from time to time. Mostly this will equate to me posting half-baked, vague and wholly unoriginal ideas about a new setting that I'm designing (and hopefully, at some point, running) for my group.

For the first time since stepping into the GM's seat, I've written up a campaign primer for my players. At first I thought it was far too long but my players seem happy with it, particularly as an aid to choosing their starting position in the world and coming up with a few character ideas. Readers will probably notice that I've inserted pre-written settings in there wholesale, such as Noisms' excellent Yoon-Suin and both Fever Dreaming Marlinko and Slumbering Ursine Dunes from Hydra Cooperative, because why rely on my own anaemic imagination when some of the finest minds in the OSR movement are churning excellent stuff out at a rate of knots?

Anyhow, I've formed a reasonably solid idea of the world's backstory and cosmology and mostly finished a grand-scale map of two reasonably large continents using Cecil Howe's Hex-Kit (which is a must if you want wonderfully vibrant and detailed hex maps). I'll expand on these in future posts. A copy of the northern part of the map (with important/interesting parts highlighted) can be seen below:

City icons are settlements with populations ≥10,000

I've also come up with a name for the setting - Egradus - which sounds oddly fitting for a world set against a backdrop of apocalyptic interstellar warfare, otherworldly influences and a lost, terrible heritage.

I'll be posting more about the various regions and areas of interest in later posts.