Here's one I've been meaning to post for a while, now.
Twenty years ago TSR was looking for a new campaign setting. I proposed one called Storm Front (also called Stormfront) which involved ships sailing on clouds. These days every anime seems to have ships sailing on clouds, and I will point back to Peter Pan for an earlier incarnation, but here were looking for a new concept (a "gizmo") to hang the game on.
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| Inspirational Illustration from Winsor McCay. |
I had lost the original two-page proposal, but Steve Winter (who had mentioned it in a podcast) did not, and dropped me off a copy, which I am presenting below. The other sources referred to in the first paragraph were other concepts that were bouncing around at that time, which were either naval-style campaigns or monster-dominated "reverse dungeons" where the bulk of the world was hostile. So this is the last of a series of similar proposals, and reflects the input of others on the TSR team.
I am leaving the text as it was originally written, with corrections in [red brackets] and footnotes.
The story of how Stormfront came to be, and what happened to it, can be found here. I wanted to get this out there before an entire year had passed since my last mentioning it. Some fans have responded to the stories about it with interest, and now you know as much as our management did at the time about the product.
Storm front1
A Campaign Setting Proposal by
Jeff Grubb
5 January 1994
Note:
This proposal combines elements of a number of previous proposals from other
sources, including the Under Siege collection of monster-dominated worlds, the
Water Worlds, including Sea of Shadows, The Illythids, and the Earth-Sky
proposal[s], and I hope it to be a synthesis of those ideas, dealing with the
objections raised for each.
The
Nugget: Man shall live on Mountain-Tops, and the world beneath is wrapped in
clouds, storms, and shadow.
The
Images: A world of eternal cloud cover and storms, where the forces of good and
law can only survive on the few mountain-tops which pierce these clouds. The
cloud layer is at a set altitude and is regular, and cloud-traders sail its
surface in magical ships. Beneath the surface of the clouds the land is ruled by
evil and chaos, by huge ever-changing nations and gangs controlled by beastly
monstrosities known as the Abominations.
The
Back Story: Long ago, Stormfront’s world was much like the Realms, perhaps a
little further advanced in the magical department. A human dared to challenge
the power of the sea gods, and best [bent] them
to her will. The harnessing of the sea gods brought a golden age of power to
the land, but in the end the powerful sea-deities revolted. The gods could not
deluge the land without wiping out followers or causing other gods to step in,
so they instead pumped much of their water vapor into the air, enchanting it as
they did so. The result was a continual cloud cover which wrapped the cloud [world] save for its highest mountain chains. The land
beneath the clouds changed, and its people changed with it. Lush vegetation in
riotous colors broke out everywhere, deserts flooded, cities were inundated,
fields became swamps, and civilization collapsed. The good and lawful races
retreated upwards in the face of this onslaught. Those which remained were
twisted by the magical rains in warped forms, and the most warped of these
developed great powers – they became the Abominations.
Life
Above the Clouds: The Nations of Light survive among the peaks of what were
Stormfront’s highest mountains, and the largest of these is the Spine, a ragged
archipelago with a main island a thousand miles long and a few hundred miles
across at its widest. Spine is heavily populated and its population is
clustered into huge cities, the bulk of its land needed for farming to feed its
people. Where the mountain-nation descends to the cloud level is the Fogwall, a
continually-guarded fortified wall which keeps those creatures which climb the
mountains at bay.
In addition to the Nations of Light,
there is a polyracial alliance known as the cloud-skimmers. When the clouds
first overlook [overtook] the world, their
founding wizards found a method to travel on their tops. They are the
transportation and communication guild, and are as powerful as any nation. They
also may be dealing with the Abominations, but this is merely rumor.
The other races live with the
humans, but a few have their own settlements. Dwarves tunnel beneath the peaks,
seeking to extend their domains downward, eventually linking up with their
original homelands beneath the cloud level. Some elves have abandoned the world
entirely, forming great floating orbs hovering over the surface of the
cloud-ocean. Halflings live as pirates in stolen cloud-skimmers, providing an
alternative (and a threat) to the power of the cloud-skimmers2. The
gnomes dominate the cloud-skimmers, particularly in the higher reaches of
power, and are a more solemn, threatening people.
Life
Beneath the Clouds: The land beneath the clouds is one of continual shadow and
darkness, at its brightest the color of an overcast day. Storms move a random
across its surface, and rains of blood, dead animals, snow, and insects are
common. Those humans which remain beneath the layers are worn, beaten, and
very, very depressed, such that most have abandoned hope of the light and
follow dark masters.
With the transformation of the
oceans, new life appeared beneath the cloud cover – sea creatures and their
twisted spawn now could live in the wet, thick air, and air-sharks, orcas,
flying squid, and coin-bright swarms of piranhas are common. Locathah and
sahaguin live on the surface (though they cannot live on the mountain tops of
light, and hate the inhabitants there for that reason).
The most powerful creatures of the
darkness are the Abominations – creatures that once may have been mortal, or
even human, but now are a combination of life and living natural force. These
are the most evil and chaotic, and each seeks to establish itself as the
dominant Abomination on the planet, slaying or enslaving everything else (This
permits a variety of powerful bad guys, one of which may succeed the next over
time).
In the shadow of the Abominations
are the Mind Flayers – non-psionic traditional types who interact among the
Abominations much as the Cloud Skimmers3 do among the Nations of
Light. They have their own secret societies and hidden agendas, and seek to
gather enough power that they may control the Abominations, and with it the
rest of the world.
The land is wet and dark, the ground
generally marshy and uneven. Areas are regularly flooded, and even recent mays
may be altered at will. The level of the true oceans has dropped as a result of
the god’s [gods’] manipulation, and the swollen rivers now wind far out from
the original coasts, pitching finally over the edge of the continental shelf in
huge waterfalls. In these extremely salty oceans lay the domains of the sea
gods, still angry regarding their once-enslavement.
The land beneath the clouds also
holds the remains of the human nations and cities, and the knowledge within.
The Nations of Light must continually send brave adventurers down into this
rain-darkened land to recover now-long [now-lost] magical
knowledge to keep the Abominations and the forces of darkness from completely
taking over the planet. That’s here the adventurers come in. A typical “dungeon
crawl” may be taking a Cloud Skimmer out to the location of an Ancient City,
parachuting down (a difficult, but not impossible task), raiding, and the (the
tough part) walking back.
If we need an epic (after the first
year or so) here goes – the level of the clouds is rising, and threatens to
finally consume the Nations of Light. The heroes must seek out the most
powerful Abomination to destroy his holy McGuffin and return the world to
stability (in [if] not to the time before the
floods).
Benefits
of this world:
·
Takes
advantage of the water-worlds (new monsters, sea travel, swashbuckling,
pirates) without the disadvantages (drowning rules, 3-D movement on a regular
basis, fire and spell modifications).
·
Gives
us a large number of bad guys in the form of the Abominations (similar to the
various evil organizations in Faerun or the Lords of Ravenloft).
·
Gives
us a “gizmo world” (a physically different world from standard AD&D) which
uses standard AD&D rules.
·
Gives
us a world with one big problem (the gizmo – in this case the continual cloud
cover) which cannot be cured – that is the status quo. A lot of little problems
(abominations, other nations, the cloud skimmers, pirates) become problems the
player characters can deal with.
·
Creates
the “surrounded citadel” approach of good besieged by evil, without making that
citadel dark itself. (the nations are in light, not in a dungeon, but still
surrounded).
·
New
monsters as the marine creatures have “thick-air” variants.
What do
you think, sirs4?
Notes
1 – I would like to say the “Storm front” name, with its odd capitalization, was a pretentious affectation
intended to make the name look artier, but it looks more like a globby typo
after I went back and forth between two words and one.
2 – This is probably the most unclear sentence in the presentation –
It should read – “Halflings live as pirates in stolen cloud-ships, providing an
alternative (and a threat) to the power of the cloud-skimmers.” The gnomes
would be a dominant force in the magical/merchant version Cloud Skimmers
3 – The cloud-skimmers became the Cloud Skimmers (as an official
organization) over the course of writing the proposal, and the word was used to
refer to both the organization and the ships they sailed. The legal department
once got mad at me for Spelljammer, which I used as a noun, a proper noun, a verb,
and would have been an adjective if I could have gotten away with it. I did that sort of thing again here.
4 – Yes, that is a MST3K reference.
More later,
