[I originally posted this on the BoL page of MeWe - earlier today. It suggests a possible campaign resource for the Everywhen/BoL Sword & Sorcery Codex, which should be available soon.]

If you are excited about the soon to arrive Sword & Sorcery Codex, you might be wondering what you will use it for. So if you have no firm ideas the following may be of interest.There is a post on Big Purple where someone asks if anyone has any opinions on a pdf available on DriveThru – ‘UR: Sword & Sorcery, Apocalyptic Bronze-Age, Campaign Primer’.

This is right up my street, so I looked at the generous sample on DriveThru. Ummm…

Ladygolem replied to the OP with a negative impression.

One thing they said I both agreed and disagreed with:“The setting isn't terrible in and of itself but is terribly generic - it suffers from a big information density problem. Why waste page space describing the civilisation of Akamati if you're just gonna tall me they live by a big river in the desert, build pyramids, are ruled by death priests, etc etc? The world chapter doesn't tell you anything you're not already picturing in your head from reading "There's fantasy Egypt at war with fantasy Babylon. Fantasy Phoenicia, fantasy Minoan Crete and fantasy Sparta are caught in the middle". To me, that's a waste of page space.”

Ladygolem has a point. This pdf is over 200 pages long, and a lot of it is stating the bleedin’ obvious. I agree that if Howard’s Stygia can be summed up as Egypt with BFSnakes (and I think it can – at least before players start actually playing) then going into great detail about your fantasy Egypt where most of it is exactly the same as Ancient Egypt but with different names? And why 200 pages? Is that what people think is the only acceptable way to write?

Where I disagreed was where Ladygolem said, “The setting isn't terrible in and of itself but is terribly generic…” - err, so what?

A poster called Balbinus once said something very true, to the effect that it didn’t matter if a scenario was something you’ve seen before, because if you and your friends are in the middle of it and struggling to survive, then it will seem fresh and new to you. In my experience as both player and GM, that is spot on.

And doesn’t "There's fantasy Egypt at war with fantasy Babylon. Fantasy Phoenicia, fantasy Minoan Crete and fantasy Sparta are caught in the middle" sound like a good set up for adventure to you?

I’ve run something similar with my Two River Land campaign and my Warlords of Atlantis campaign – and it was a blast in both cases. So I can see using ‘Ur’ as the basis for a BoL or Everywhen game using the forthcoming Codex might be a good idea.

Ur is a pdf selling for $11.77 on DriveThru, and seems to consist of silly padding and then a lot tables to roll on to generate the campaign. I’ve not bought it yet, but I may do. Why not have a look at the sample and see if it might fit your Codex needs?

UR: Sword & Sorcery, Apocalyptic Bronze-Age, Campaign Primer - Red Ram Studios | DriveThruRPG.com

Last edited by Gruntfuttock (8/04/2023 8:55 am)