Spiceomancy: [Gygax 75] The Setting

like this, maybe

I'm going to write a campaign setting. I'm going to use the Gygax 75 to do it, except not really, because I'm cheating, because I've been poring over most of these ideas for the better part of a year.

Quick preamble: I ran a campaign in high school that went on permanent hiatus right at the climax of a major setting event. It wasn't the most original setting, but because of the way it half-ended it got stuck in my head, kind of like an earworm. Problem is I keep starting and stopping projects associated with this setting, and every time I burn out and circle back to the same ideas. It sucks.

When George R. R. Martin was writing for Elden Ring, it apparently went something ike this: First, he wrote the beginnings of an epic fantasy world, with myths and heroes and intrigue. Then, FromSoft took that world and put it thru the apocalypse.

So here's my pitch to myself: do the Elden Ring thing. Take the old campaign, turn it into lore, and then ruin everything to make room for new stuff.

Gygax 75

DIY & Dragons (at whose altar I pray and make semi-regular offerings of cheese and wine) has compiled a definitive guide to the challenge. Hopefully, the weekly structure will help motivate me thru this project, and I won't burn out like the last few times.
Week 1 is about themes and gathering inspiration. I also want to identify my design goals/core concepts for the setting. I already talked about one:

Idea #1: The setting is about unearthing the ruins of an old campaign setting.

So what else do have I to show for this week?
Well, I have a vague idea of what I want to run:

I want to run a megadungeon.
I want to run a boss rush.
I want to run a domain-level, base-building, keep-defending game.
I want to run a hex-crawl.
I want to run one-shots for groups that prefer dungeon crawling OR social interaction.

Thus:

Idea #2: The setting should support multiple modes of play.

I also want to capture a specific tone. The picture in my head looked kind of like this:

a seaside village, barely a dozen fisherpeople making a living; below them, the sprawling remains of an ancient civilization, full of half-remembered monsters; opening up the crypts will change this little village forever.

So the focus is on the little people first, then on the HUGE BIGGER THAN BIG SO HUGE YOU FEEL TINY BEFORE THE INFINITE EXPANSE OF HISTORY, and then back on the little people.
Idea #3: The setting should be built around a village.

Oh, and one more thing that's core:

Idea #4: Iron is anti-magic.

A lot of ideas crystallized around this premise:

All sorts of world powers rely on magic for infrastructure or warfare. Anyone who smelts iron would be immediately at odds with those factions.
Faeries/elfs fucking hate iron, so they're also a rival faction.
All those ancient ruins are probably full of iron; I doubt they would have conquered the world without it. The weight of it all must have dragged them into the earth.
From Coins&Scrolls' Iron Gates: Iron seeks iron, which calls to the iron in your blood. On some level, iron has a will of its own.

Not just one civilization: the ruins are made up of ruins from many civilizations over time, drawn together magnetically by the iron in their coffers.

Disparate ruins themed around ancient pseudo-magical metals: gold, silver, bronze, lead, etc.

Iron is diluted in blood, thus iron can only be manipulated thru blood magic. Blood mages in blood forges as a major faction: capable of some anti-magic, as well as making weapons out of blood, blood blood blood blood
The NPC village comes to rely on iron for their way of life, since it's valuable and native to an otherwise resource-poor region. They need to be careful not to piss off the faeries OR get rolled by neighboring warlords.
The NPC village is obviously Iron Town.

Anyway, that's enough type-y type-y. Here's the challenge stuff:

Get a Notebook:
Acquired from our local anarchist bookstore. I'm crazy about this bird guy.

Pitch Statements:

The world is magical. Animals speak, when they want to. Tall stones get up and walk away. In every village, a minor miracle-worker mediates between our world and the Seelie courts of River and Hill. Faeries are synonymous with birds.
The past is buried. "…and the earth swallowed their golden cities whole, and when one thousand men excavated the ground where Cath Celdaenn once stood they found naught but worms." And the Ruins of Man were lost to the world forevermore.
Magic is power. There is no authority without sorcery, no lord without their court magician. Knights are a dying breed, outmoded by militaristic magocrats. The sorcerer-kings of the East and North divvy the lands between, the shadow of empire looming over all peoples therein.
Iron is anti-magic. Faeries abhor it. It is outlawed in lands where mages hold sway. It is dangerous, rare, and expensive, and thus coveted by the White Tiger of the West. War is made with arms of bronze, blacktin, and ogretite, at least for now.

Inspirations:

Elden Ring (+ FromSoft lore in general). Worlds with layered histories. VaatiVidya and Iron Gates will be my co-pilots.
Princess Mononoke. Its factions, its themes, its aesthetics, its powderkeg setting, LADY EBOSHI!!!!!!!
Hollow Knight. The structure and map, and the town of Dirtmouth.
The Leviathan series, to flesh out the domain level magocrat-technocrat conflict.
Made in Abyss and, less problematically, Skerples' Veinscrawl
Chainsaw Man

Some loose threads/motifs I mined from the old campaign:

Nightmare snake cultists infiltrating a major world religion, rooms of archbishops communing with god thru dreams
Beautiful mountaintop city; beneath, prison-city hanging over an abyss on huge chains, shaped like a metal human heart
The role of dragons in rewriting history
Characters who know they're in a game (eldritch madness)
A dragon with a Collar of Domination that forces it not to be a megalomaniacal psychopath
A tower of undead climbing one another towards the sun
Dropping a nuclear payload into a volcano
Dragon-headed wizard who only studies magic to support her brother's get-rich-quick schemes
Displaced, vengeful, owl-faced shapeshifter forest god hive mind
Coprophagic kobolds on skateboards
Pirate bureaucracy
Cowboy shit

And finally, some one-liners to ruminate on going forward:

Corpse of a giant astronaut, around which the lichenfolk have grown a peaceful village
Centipede warlord with the arms and legs of everyone he ate on the road to empire
Dead priests in a buried city; cut their bellies, see how the gold has taken shape in their guts
Nude faeries picking scraps of meat from between the teeth of wild dogs

Check back next Friday for Week 2 (hopefully).