The Broken World - a campaign to end all campaigns.

The Broken World - a campaign to end all campaigns.  

I've been playing D&D for nearly 30 years now.  I mostly run games as the Dungeon Master, or DM, and so I've had exposure to many published campaign settings and I've played around with creating my own.  Each time it has fallen short of my expectations, but I feel that I've learned something from each attempt.  In the last year I've tried to start several campaigns, but due to various scheduling issues with my gaming group, they have all fallen flat, which is actually good as I wasn't really happy with any of them.  They all had good ideas, but they just didn't come together for me like I wanted them to.  The problem is that each campaign world was too restrictive.  I need a campaign world that allows my imagination to go crazy.

The Broken World is designed to allow me the flexibility to do whatever I want in my campaign.

The premise is that there was once a fantasy world that was destroyed over a thousand years ago by some terrible cosmic threat.  The gods of the world saved the pieces of the world that remained, and all of the life upon them, but in dealing with the cosmic threat, the gods disappeared.  Now the world is made up of islands floating in the aether around the sun like an asteroid belt, or as they refer to it in the campaign, an archipelago.

So, what does this set up allow me to do?  Pretty much anything I want!  There are thousands of islands, each separated from the others, which means that each island can be it's own campaign setting if I want it to be.  If I want to do a series of adventures in a Dark Sun-like setting, all I have to do is make one of the islands a desert ruled by dragon kings.  If I want to do a Ravenloft-like game, an island can be customized to work like Barovia.  There is really no end to what I can do.  And the best part for me is that I get to incorporate one of my favorite campaign ideas from 2nd Edition AD&D, which was Spelljammer.  I use the concept of spelljamming to allow the people of the world to travel from island to island. It's perfect and makes so much more sense to me than the original Spelljammer concept of flying to different planets or even to different universes.  I don't want that much sci-fi in my fantasy.

I'm pretty happy with the concept.  On my next blog, I'll discuss some of the details behind the campaign world.