Death Was Pleased - Concept, Goals, and Notes

Paul Chadeisson

I'm excited to be getting one of my gaming groups back together. We're going to be putting together a weekly campaign using the Whitehack by Christian Mehrstam. I was in the mood for some classic old school play using 0e, but this wonderful little game entered my radar and I'm really liking what I'm seeing. It's definitely a neat take on one of my favorite rule sets.

That said, it's also a perfect toolkit to tackle some really weird and neat setting ideas!

Death Was Pleased

Looking at the major touchstones I had in mind making this will help me flesh this out:

• This is basically a remix/take on Gus' wonderful Fallen Empire setting
• Jake Wyatt's Necropolis comic (Go read it!)
• Kill 6 Billion Demons (Go read it!)
• Skerple's Alexandrian/Dark Souls-esque Iron Gates setting; while it has a different focus, the tone and process are really what inspired me here

So what do I want? I want this to be a point crawl with lots of faction play. I want to use some of the less-generic ideas on fantasy that I have come across. I want this to be a setting that can take full advantage of the Whitehack's ability to flesh our a setting together. 

Design & Theme Goals

• Make a pointcrawl in a decaying world, with a mythical, massive, ruined city as the focus
• Use environmental storytelling 
• Aesthetics of ruin are a must of course. We are fully rocking the pathetic aesthetic.
• Utilize Whitehack's rules on groups to make a faction rich environment where players can change the things that interest them
• Portray an apocalypse that isn't sudden and destructive, but slow, ruinous, and barbaric
• A sort of inverse colonialism with this decrepit ruins of this once all powerful civilization being flooded by it's former subjects who want its wealth, tech, and land
• Magic is technology. The usual spell slinging is a shallow fumbling of the marvels of old high magic and arcane manufacturing (this also lets me tap into Castle Blackmoor and OD&D leanings towards hints of items of high technology like ruined automatons, swords as prisons for higher dimensional beings, power armor, etc.)
• Human only - although subspecies, offshoots, and more exist because of magical tampering
• Pathetic and sad, not evil. Even the foulest horrors walking the world exist because of the mistakes and misguided desires of the past