Land of Bastards

[DannyBoy]

i.e. Talk about where you're gonna set your Bastards game when you get your geasy mitts on the full ruleset! Are you gonna:
- Go historical a la The Floating City? What time period will you be in? Are you gonna slaughter pagans for the Teutonic Order during the Baltic Crusades, fight the War of the Roses, or slime your way through the halls of power in the Holy Roman Empire?
- Alt-history? Maybe the Vikings became the model for European culture and the Danes discovered and conquered the Americas in 1492 (GURPS Alternate Earths anyone?)
- Full on fantasy? Whole new worlds of your own imagining. Maybe you're going to go full Abercrombie or GRRM, or maybe swashbuckling sky pirates?

So how about it guys? Where and when are you and your Band of Bastards going to stab people in the crotch?

[taelor]

The historical periods that I know the most about are Plantagenet England and Tokugawa Japan. Any historically-based settings I make will probably default to drawing from those. I do have sort of a hankering for a viking game, though.

[nemedeus]

Oh i was having floating cities in mind, however, more like "floating" in the sky, "swashbuckling sky pirates" as you say.
... well, maybe not the swashbuckling part, necessarily.
So yea, i frickin' love Flying Islands/Flying Continents.
I have my own setting in this vein: taking a lot of inspiration from Fullmetal Alchemist and the Kingkiller Chronicle, as well as the warfare and technology of the late 19th and early 20th century. A few powerful nations battle it out WWI-style for land and resources, with everyone else being caught in-between, while in the meantime, a supernatural threat grows in the dark corners of the world.

The thing is, i had already been writing my own system based on TRoS for that setting. When i discovered Band of Bastards, i realized how uncannily similar it was to my own designs, and the reasonings behind certain decisions were practically mirror to my own - yet i also noticed that Bastards was doing practically all these things i wanted my own game to do A LOT BETTER.
So whily i still push things around in my files every now and then, i'm kind of expecting myself to eventually
- either use (a possibly slightly modified and definitely heavily extended) Bastards
- or re-engineer my own game to be basically a Bastards Homebrew

I think my fantasy world has a lot of potential as a setting (though i may just feel that way because i bring in most any tropes in fiction that i buy into personally - but who doesn't, eh?)
That said, I would need to do more research and look into a lot more media to get it even near to a state where i would be comfortable with putting it out there as anything else than a "tech demo", however, and that is not even mentioning that creative writing is not my forte by any means.

[Korbel]

I've been thinking about a "new world - early colonization" style game. You know, guns vs bows, greed and superstitions, exploration and early settlements full of criminals. Limited black powder, some mysterious magic of the natives, and so on. But I need to do some research or create a nice setting.

[EinBein]

I'd go for the grim Old World many people know from the Warhammer Fantasy lore. The technology level in the Empire of Man is similar to default Band of Bastards but spiced with a vibe of end times and war. Traitors, mutants and other vile creatures lurking in the shadows of the streets additional to all the political infighting between Elector Counts and Emperor and all kinds of lesser nobles and commoners / merchants. As done in WFRP 2nd Edition (Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying Game), I'd skip most of the epic fantasy stuff and go for the grim muddy base level of this fatalistic world.

Sadly, I think real life history lacks a certain brooding hopless mood, because we know everything will come to turns eventually, while in the Old World, we know only of impeding doom.

[hector]

I'd probably do something similar to what appears to be the default: something akin to The Lies of Locke Lamora. Alternatively, Keep on the Borderlands would be a very interesting adventure to port over...

[DannyBoy]

Lies of Locke Lamora is a good one Hector. I finally got around to reading the first book and I'm loving it so far.

I'd really like to run something set in one of the GURPS alternate history settings. Specifically Midgard, which is a setting that assumes that the Scandinavian peoples sucsessfully sacked Constantinople and used the pilfered wealth and Greek Fire to burn Christendom to the ground and dominate Europe and North America. The players would start off in Vinland and have all sorts of adventures raiding Moslem Cuba and the Yanomami Caliphs. Throw in some traditional First Nations monsters and I think it could be fun.

[thirtythr33]

So many things!

After the magic section gets released I would really like to run a 1001 Arabian Nights inspired game set in the mythical City Of Brass. Daemons and Djinn roam the earth tormenting and tempting the hearts of men. Thieves and sailors like Sinbad, Aladdin and Ali Babaa inhabit the seas and the desert. Cults and Guilds vie for control of magic, power and wealth.

I also wonder how BoB would handle a Pendragon-esque campaign, with passions standing in for Personal Traits. A bunch of honorable knights doing their damnedest to stick to their vows and oaths, despite always being temped to take the easy way out. Arthurian Romance and all that.

The conquistadors first landing in North America and meeting the Aztecs. Drawing a lot of creepy inspiration from human sacrifices, Aztec gods, cursed gold and disappearing colonies. Maybe even throw in some North American Megafauna even though it isn't accurate to the time period. A lot like the new world early colonization idea Korbel was talking about.

As for published adventures/campaign settings... In no particular order: A Game of Thrones, Thieves World, Monster Island and Ars Magica all tempt me to some extent.

I generally like games that are "Mythic History". That is, a historic setting that includes all the mythology and superstitions of the people of the time taken to be fact. There's a good chance I'll just keep running these games on the forums here after The Floating City is done if people are still interested.

[Marras]

My first idea was to make a fantasy version of Venice, it is still a possibility but playing in 33's forum game I think I have to think of something else.

[DannyBoy]

I generally like games that are "Mythic History". That is, a historic setting that includes all the mythology and superstitions of the people of the time taken to be fact. There's a good chance I'll just keep running these games on the forums here after The Floating City is done if people are still interested.

If you do, please set it in the Holy Roman Empire. A while ago I did some light reading about the various field spirits they had in their folklore, thinking it would b something relatively tame. Stuff like imps that play tricks on farmers and whatnot. Instead I read about the Roggenmuhme, which is a crazy female demon with flaming finger tips, tar-filled brasts that hang down to her feet, and iron nipples.

[taelor]

A while back, I worked on a Burning Wheel Setting for Hellenistic Greece. That got lost along with my old notebook, though (this was back when I still used notebooks, before I switched to doing everything in Google Docs).