setting – Jeremiah Robert McCoy

Setting Project: The world of Ballad

Published by Jeremiah McCoy on January 8, 2020

So, I have had a stressful life of late. I distracted myself by coming up with a new campaign world. Some people drink, I apparently come up with fictional worlds.

Ballad is a high fantasy setting. It is leaning into a lot of mysterious magic rather than the notion of magic like technology that you find in Eberron or Ravnica for instance. I also started with the premise that humans were rare. The assumption in most settings is that humans are the “us” stand-in and not innately magical. They are the neutral default and all other races are alterations on the human base. This is problematic and should be discussed, but I will save that for a different post.

I started thinking about a world where that was not the case. Where all the sentient races were actually magical and the humans were the distrusted rare species. Sort of like how Tieflings and Drow are presented in several other settings.

Once I had that decided, I chose to go ahead and write some world rules. This would help me come up with a vision of what the world would look like. I had a vague notion but I need to define the edges of it.

The Many Settings of Dungeons and Dragons part 5: the Licensed and not so Licensed

The Many Settings of Dungeons and Dragons part 5: the Licensed and not so Licensed

Published by Jeremiah McCoy on March 9, 2019

I am sorry it took so long to get this last but together. I was sick for the better part of a month and it pretty much ate my brain. Who knew you needed to be able to breath to write?

Anyways, in this case, we are wrapping up our look at official D&D settings (The first post found here) by looking at the licensed setting. These are officially published settings based on previously published works and presented as D&D versions. Before I get too into that, I should talk about Deities and Demigods and other early products which kind of involved improper use of settings they didn’t have permission for or the permission was murky.

The Many Settings of Dungeons and Dragons part 4: Micro-settings

The Many Settings of Dungeons and Dragons part 4: Micro-settings

Published by Jeremiah McCoy on January 26, 2019

And we are here again. When I started talking about the many D&D settings it was a simple Twitter thread. I was trying to list all the official D&D published D&D settings. I was trying to figure out what Wizards of the Coast might release next as a setting in 5e. They had already released a large amount for Forgotten Realms and had just announced Ravnica and Eberron books. I thought I could list them all off as I had been around for most of them.

I managed to get most of the big ones. The ones I missed were the sub-settings (subsets of the larger settings), meta-settings(settings that crossover to other settings) and the micro settings. Micro settings are small tightly contained campaign settings with little thought given to a larger world.

The Many Settings of Dungeons and Dragons part 2

The Many Settings of Dungeons and Dragons part 2

Published by Jeremiah McCoy on December 9, 2018

Alright, this is part two of my review of the official settings of D&D. The first one I covered Greyhawk, Mystara Forgotten Realms, and Dragonlance. The first three were developed as home campaign settings that were elaborated on to become settings. The fourth was made as adventures and was revealed over time. All of these were published when D&D was produced by TSR. Greyhawk was the only one directly influenced by Gygax and, arguably, could be his vision of what D&D settings should be. The rest were mostly developed by other people and sort of reflected range of what you could do with the game.

That said, all of the ones in the 70’s and 80’s at least started with certain commonalities. They all carried a flavor based on western European fantasy. You had Merlin-like wizards, knights, kings, peasents, elves, dwarves, halflings and all the other tropes one associates with western fantasy. While the sword and sorcery genre was what Gygax pointed to as his influences, it is hard to ignore how many of these tropes were influenced by the works of Tolkien. Any proper Tolkienian will tell you the elves and wizards in D&D don’t really resemble the Middle Earth versions. Their presence are elemental to the conception of the fantasy world. Simply put, Tolkien is the gold standard of world building up to that point, so anyone following him will have some similarities.

In the 90’s, and the post-Gygax era, TSR began to experiment more with their settings. They didn’t completely lose those elements and they continue today, but the willingness to experiment away from the classic western fantasy/Tolkien model is certainly there.

The Many Settings of Dungeons and Dragons part 1

Published by Jeremiah McCoy on November 28, 2018

This idea started as a twitter thread. I started listing the various settings of D&D. That was both useful and a reminder of the limits of Twitter. What I ran into was the limited character count of twitter. This made me abbreviate the list in places where I shouldn’t have. I also failed to list a couple of major items. This post is part of my attempt to be more thorough.

The Machine for Modern Age

The Machine for Modern Age

Published by Jeremiah McCoy on August 13, 2018

Let me tell you about my love for Persons of Interest. The show was on the air between 2011 and 2016 and dealt with a range of complex notions in the framework of the shows premise, which is described in the opening narration.

You are being watched. The government has a secret system: a machine that spies on you every hour of every day. I know because I built it. I designed the machine to detect acts of terror, but it sees everything. Violent crimes involving ordinary people, people like you. Crimes the government considered irrelevant. They wouldn’t act, so I decided I would. But I needed a partner, someone with the skills to intervene. Hunted by the authorities, we work in secret. You’ll never find us, but victim or perpetrator, if your number’s up…we’ll find you.

Fiction: When the Gods Came Pt 1

Published by Jeremiah McCoy on February 20, 2018

This is the first part in a novel I have been working on. I am sure it will go through rewrites and revisions but I am posting some of it here. This is the story of how my post apocalyptic setting came to be. I am trying to be more comfortable about sharing my fiction. That is easier said than done.

The story is told in an epistolary version. It just seemed to be the right way to go. I am comfortable writing that way. That may have to do with writing a bunch of game text. I will post the second part next month.

Rules For Spell Books (Or how I learned to relax and hang out in libraries)

Rules For Spell Books (Or how I learned to relax and hang out in libraries)

Published by Jeremiah McCoy on January 20, 2017

I think I have established I love spell books. The spell book is an integral part of the wizardry motif. The book, the object, is a needed part of what wizards do in D&D. The current rules do require you to record your spells, but I do think it could be even more emphasized.

Why I love Eberron

Published by Jeremiah McCoy on February 24, 2013

I love Eberron. I have been reading some Eberron novels of late, and it has reminded me of this fact. With the exception of Spelljammer, Eberron has been my favorite D&D setting. Before you get to the question, I love a lot of D&D settings, but I will put a pin in Eberron, and say it is my favorite for a number of reasons.

Tag: setting