As a start of that process, I am going to be doing the The Gygax 75 Challenge.
The basic aim is to put together a campaign setting in 5 weeks.
Week 1: The Concept
The aim here is to articulate the big ideas and gather sources that will shape the campaign.The challenge limits you to 3-7 core concepts for the campaign, which should be expressed as a concise paragraph/bullet point.
It also limits you to 7 works of fiction/reference to draw from.
Core Concepts:
- Brothers kills brother.-
The Crown and Parliament are at war. For the first time, the nations has felt the sting of cannon and musket on its own people, it towns and it's cities. The civil war is a new kind of war, and one that is killing on a scale not seen before. It is also changing the way that people see institutions of power. Groups of commoners are binding together to fight for a better future. - The land is bleeding...Enclosure has been pushing the commoners of the land for generations. They have been replacing them with sheep. The countryside is abandoned, and famine is increasing in frequency.
- ...it's wounds fester. The death and destruction of the civil war has drawn life and death closer together. That death has brought magic back into the world, though most have not realised yet. But with it, creatures of the underworld flow back into the world also.
- The merging Folk Horror and Cosmic Horror
The soil of england is old and strange. Their is horror in that unknowable age, both related to our connection to it, and its unfathomable nature.
Sources:
Caliban and the Witch: Women, the body and Primitive Accumulation
This book by Silvia Federici describes the way in which capitalism was imposed on the working people of europe through brutalisation, especially of woman, and the role that witch trials played in that.
The Witch
The witch is a work of dramatic art, it attention to detail in costuming and set dressing, it cinematography and its performances are all beautifully affecting. It is also a great piece of feminist folk horror.
While it depicts the new england, it captures the bleakness found in places like the he lincolnshire fens or the ssex and suffolk coast.
While it depicts the new england, it captures the bleakness found in places like the he lincolnshire fens or the ssex and suffolk coast.
A Field in England
This film represents the psychedelic and eerie elements of cosmic horror, and the way the feed into the setting
This film represents the psychedelic and eerie elements of cosmic horror, and the way the feed into the setting
The Levellers: Radical Political Thought in the English Revolution
This setting is unashamedly leftwing, groups like the levellers and diggers were fighting for better conditions for the common folk and the reversal of many of the changes that had been force on to the working class by the emergence of proto-capitalism.
This setting is unashamedly leftwing, groups like the levellers and diggers were fighting for better conditions for the common folk and the reversal of many of the changes that had been force on to the working class by the emergence of proto-capitalism.
