Friday, December 09, 2005

Introductions

Since as far back as 1995, another world has been writing, rewriting, and living its life within my head. The whole situation, however, has been a lonely one with less than a dozen people in that time getting any sort of minimal access to it, so in an effort to perhaps grow this world out of its traditional grounding, I'm starting this blog as a place for ideas, nuances, and other data that I think is pretty neat. Call it an egomaniacal persuit. I sure do.

Ae'rinus is a RPG campaign setting originally created for the D&D ruleset, but as I've matured as a GM over the years, I've come to the decision that D&D itself cannot sustain the richness of experiences that potentially could be happening on Ae'rinus. Since the release of D&D 3rd ed., which shattered my long standing love affair with D&D, I've been passively looking for new platforms/looking for ways to create my own system that would allow for the type of heavy roleplaying with minimal dice rolls and high levels of excitement that I've come to envision as a requirement for my game sessions.

I've been playing, and GMing D&D now since about 1992, and in that time, I've come to realize that my style of play doesn't really fit with the standard dungeon crawl vision of D&D fame; my players, too, have often praised the lack of twisting tunnels, prolonged fights, and video game style play.

So with this blog, I'm hoping to make it as a resource for folks interested in running Ae'rinus as a campaing world, as well as provide a forum of sorts for discussion relating to developing working methodologies towards running successful, ongoing storylines that focus upon roleplaying and dealing with difficult moral decisions rather than just hack n slash.

A large portion of this blog will probably be narrative descriptions of various small nuances of Ae'rinus as I try to begin fleshing out the lesser bits. Currently, the setting is in the year 1643 (general play started in 1454, so there's a lot of PC created history around to draw from), and the world is in a relative state of peace for once. It's a world of growing technical knowledge (much of it would be considered Early Renaissance, though Medieval Era areas are still common) and more importantly growing political and national influence. There are two pantheons of gods, both of which aren't particularly fond of the other as well as a second layer continent, Terrasond, existing beneath Ae'rinus. Ae'rinus itself is a relatively new continent having only 1600 years or so of recent history as a result of considerable cataclysmic activity, as well as much recent turmoil including a gods' war and semi-permanent disruption of wizardly magic. It's a world chock full of ideologies and beliefs; and as such, nearly all conflict results around belief structures being undermined, attacked, or destroyed.

There's a fair amount of information regarding Ae'rinus over on my website: http://aerinus.houseofspears.net but I don't have a lot of time to keep that data up to date.

If anyone is interested in more information than what is currently available, I would be happy to divulge. However, please keep in mind that, ultimately, it is my gameworld and none of the Ae'rinus material may be reprinted without my permission.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Hey I just saw your blog, looks really interesting. I just set up a blog for the same purpose tonight and started searching blogger to see if anyone else had thought to create a campaign setting on a blog. Just thought I would say I look forward to reading about your campaign setting. Lataz.

Unknown said...

Thanks for the suggestion, I will make sure to give GURPS 4th Ed a read. And all help is welcome, Im going to be using comments from people to help build my world.
:)