The World of Hearth, Initial Thoughts
Editor's Note: I've changed the name of the campaign setting from it's working title - Hearth - to Coderra. I've left the text alone, though, as I'm not going through and changing everything.
Okay, I've started cooking some monsters, time to start cooking some Campaign Frames.
Now, I'm with Rob Donoghue that one of the major failings of the Daggerheart Campaign Frames is the one Frame per world, one Inciting Incident per Frame setup.
Aside: I think there's a real danger here that novice GMs will see Campaign Frames as being inherently 1-to-1 for worlds, when a good world concept can support dozens of "Frames". Hopefully we get another Frame in a world we've already seen. Give me some heisting in the world of the Colossus of the Drylands or some piracy in Five Banners Burning.
I don't know what I want my campaign to be about, but I think there's value in starting to discuss the world. Getting some sense of the world will inform the frame which will inform the inciting incident. Going forward and backward through that connection should allow them to take shape. A singular campaign frame will be a lens, but I'm not aiming for that yet. I want to have a sense of where I want to play first.
So let's design the world of Hearth.
I'm going to start with my Touchstones first, as "what" I'm trying to ape is important.
Touchstones
- Eberron. Not the setting, but its underlying ethos: Everything in D&D belongs in Eberron. Likewise, everything in Daggerheart belong in Hearth. I want to make sure that every supplement, every Frame, every bit of the game belongs somewhere in Hearth. Maybe not directly, literally, but if you like Beast Feast or Age of Umbra, I want you to be able to play that game in Hearth.
- The Craft Sequence by Max Gladstone. So much to unpack here.
- Magic as law
- Magic as debt
- Divinity as infrastructure
- Cyberpunk 2077. I mean, all of cyberpunk, but I really want to highlight some of the high octane stuff like Edgerunners, Bubblegum Crisis, Corvus Belli Infinity, or Hardwired Island.
- Tactical Breach Wizards. This game fucks.
With smaller doses of ...
- ICON by Tom Bloom, for its sense of a lost world below the surface.
- Horizon Zero Dawn, less for its robotic aesthetic and more for the sense of discovery I felt while playing it. I want the wilds to feel different and new and dangerous.
- The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi. I love the hyperfocused communities that exist in that world.
So What?
What does that look like when we mash it all together?
We need a world with enclosed, isolated cities. I want cramped, somewhat dystopian cities where the awfulness inside is ever so slightly better than the danger outside.
The wilderness between cities should be wild. I'm talking magical weirdness, true danger. Not merely forests with gryphins, I want places where time is unstable, or where there's no air, or where the sun never shines, or where other dimensions (hell?) bleed through. I want rampant wild (sentient?) magic, that twists and warps and is incredibly dangerous to those who leave the warded cities.
Immediately, this presents two kinds of campaign frames: those within in cities and those between. In fact, each city can be its own campaign frame.
A warped world plus a strong focus on divinity (as infrastructure) means a world where divinity is omnipresent but broken. The gods waged war (against what?) and lost, and many are dead or broken or scattered. But even a dead god is more magical power than a city can consume, and so the power of the gods is everywhere.
Whereas Max Gladstone became a writer after he was a lawyer, I became a software developer, so I want to combine the Craft Sequence (where magical contracts are huge) with a dose of cyberpunk: magic as code. Hackers are just wizards, netrunners are just wizards with breach charges. I'm not interested in going full Shadowrun; magic is still magic.
But the themes of cyberpunk: body modification, heists, oppressive corporate abuse - they're all present. But it's still high fantasy.
If we use each "city" as a campaign frame, this sets up a lot of freedom - new campaign? New city. Each city can have its own take on ancestries and communities, for example. But this gives us a start.
Next time, I'll do some general truths about communities in Hearth.