I've always been far too lazy and self-critical to actually try to write fiction longer than, say, 5 sentences, and I'm at peace with that - I'm not much of a frustrated novelist DM. Nonetheless I do get ideas for novels from time to time. (Don't worry: this isn't a jump-the-shark post where I start posting my fiction - none of these ideas ever comes remotely close to fruition.)
When I was a teenager I had this idea for a story in which a group of explorers were travelling up a river of infinite length. I never thought about it in much more depth than that. I just liked the quixotic, "because fuck you, that's why" nature of exploring something which by definition could never be fully explored.
It makes me want to resurrect the idea, especially since I think wilderness exploration is sort of in the blogging zeitgeist at the moment (at least in the circles I frequent), and the tools for random wilderness creation are growing in sophistication and usefulness. (See e.g. Welsh Piper's stuff from a few years back, and Talysman's last minute hexcrawl.)
A randomly generated, forever-flowing river which never reaches the sea. With new sections added as and when the players explore beyond the border of the current set of hexes. Banks lined with strange civilizations and outlandish monsters. Horrible rumours about what lies downstream. Careful management of resources - gifts/bribes for the natives, food, messenger pigeons to send back home. And the prospect of ultimately giving up on the quest when Eden is found?
GURPS has a riverworld book.
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Or are you planning to revive Source of the Nile, the avalon hill game?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source_of_the_Nile_(board_game)
Sometimes everything seems like it's been done.
Yeah. The really annoying thing is that even the idea that there's nothing new under the sun was known by Solomon about 4000 years ago.
DeleteI ran a brief Riverworld campaign last year with some friends online. The GURPS Riverworld book is definitely worth a look, but it would have greatly benefitted from a better system for running endless river exploration of the sort you're thinking of. There are some nice hex maps of sample sections of the river valley, but the focus of the book was more on either engaging in pan-historical nation-building and technology development or else engaging in the metaplot of the novels.
Delete(Of course, since there are no animals or monsters on Riverworld other than your fellow man, things necessarily shake out in that direction anyway.)
That's always the problem with game settings based on novels. My idea is that people could get involved in the politics of the places they encounter and what have you, but the core of thing is the endlessly regenerating landscape.
DeleteIt would be cool if you came up with some sort of circumstance that precluded going back up the river, like a strong current that the campaign's technology can't overcome or something.
ReplyDeleteMaybe that's forcing things too much, but I find it interesting that "stay put, or move on to the unknown" becomes part of the party's logistical calculations. The boat becomes the home base/center, but the surrounding zones are never allowed to become familiar or safe.
Neat idea.
Yes - I like that. Maybe you can travel across the river and upstream for a short distance but basically all the motion is downstream. That means that whatever civilizations grew up along the banks, they would mostly involve themselves with their immediate neighbours and not know a great deal about what was upstream and effectively nothing about what was downstream.
DeleteConsider that aside from travelers with out-of-date tales, the only source of information about farther upstream would be whatever flotsam and jetsam is floating down river.
DeleteFor example, a village may be hunkered down for some kind of unknown trouble approaching because a whole bunch of foreign corpses floated by one day. Did a city upriver get attacked, did a boat sink? PC's better have a good story if they want to dock.
It might become a kind of hell. If you can go downstream but not up, then you can do horrible things to people and sail away. If you escape down the river, the only way to get you is to send people after you who might not come back.
ReplyDeleteYou could run an entire empire like that, just going downstream on ships, looting and killing, then when you are done, just carry on. They can send peope after you or try to rebuild if they want.
Becasue the river is infinate, you could just go on and on and on with no consequence for your actions. People going downstream might not be trusted very much becasue they tend to be irresponisble.
Reminds me of this: http://lotfp.blogspot.com/2010/06/making-your-campaign-metal.html
DeleteLetting the players become the monsters in a game like this would be amazing.
Yes, I guess that's right. Basically, pirates. Not what I had in mind particularly but there's no reason it couldn't work, either for the PCs or major NPCs.
DeleteWhat if you added a physical goad? Some sort of relentless death/stasis/power which is advancing in an inexorable manner? So there is a drive to move on, to conquer new areas, before the creeping death, mutant hordes, or zombies arrive. Ahead you have entrenched, stable city states attempting to marshal their forces, behind only successive waves of howling chaos, far worse than you.
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