With a group of players who haven't had gaming take over their lives for long stretches of time, I needed a way to introduce the elements slowly, but not so slowly as to be utterly boring. (To be fair, one of the players had played before, but using one of the later editions....)
I decided to use the edition that I was most familiar with - 1E - as the basis for the game, liberally seasoned with some stuff from Labyrinth Lord, various blogs like Land of Nod, Daddy Grognard, and Hill Cantons, and even some 2E stuff. Frankly, I've never been enamored of the later versions and the first edition demands engagement of the imagination, something that my particular players crave.
I picked a free fractal terrain generator (I forget which, at the moment) and worked up a planetary biosphere. I found a series of tables for generating a large-scale history somewhere on the interwebs, and proceeded to mold my world. The randomness of both types really plays to my taste for Jungian synchronicity: I just generate the random elements and trust my imagination and improv skills to provide the links. Love it...
Anyway, I worked up a basic cosmology founded on principals of fundamental elements gradually becoming more fractured and complex, and voila!... It not exactly the Silmarillion, but it'll do. I'm pretty proud of it, actually.
For specific cities and sandbox elements I'm heavily indebted to Matt Stater over at Land of Nod, one of the smartest and cleanest blogs out there. (My players are advised to ignore this paragraph, upon pain of... um... pain.)
Throughout this whole process, I've only had one major concern: over-thinking everything. I'm sorely tempted to stuff all kinds of details into the plans of a session, and then beat myself up for leaving something out or not anticipating something. I've seen it written elsewhere, and I now consider it to be the cardinal rule of GM-ing: Just Have Fun. Do your prep work, but remember to enjoy the game. You're playing, too...
I picked a free fractal terrain generator (I forget which, at the moment) and worked up a planetary biosphere. I found a series of tables for generating a large-scale history somewhere on the interwebs, and proceeded to mold my world. The randomness of both types really plays to my taste for Jungian synchronicity: I just generate the random elements and trust my imagination and improv skills to provide the links. Love it...
Anyway, I worked up a basic cosmology founded on principals of fundamental elements gradually becoming more fractured and complex, and voila!... It not exactly the Silmarillion, but it'll do. I'm pretty proud of it, actually.
For specific cities and sandbox elements I'm heavily indebted to Matt Stater over at Land of Nod, one of the smartest and cleanest blogs out there. (My players are advised to ignore this paragraph, upon pain of... um... pain.)
Throughout this whole process, I've only had one major concern: over-thinking everything. I'm sorely tempted to stuff all kinds of details into the plans of a session, and then beat myself up for leaving something out or not anticipating something. I've seen it written elsewhere, and I now consider it to be the cardinal rule of GM-ing: Just Have Fun. Do your prep work, but remember to enjoy the game. You're playing, too...
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