Gaming has been a bit light on the ground recently due to social commitments, Alison’s crop growing work on our allotment, and we have the European Championship on the horizon so it will be hard to fit games in for a little while yet. However, Alison hopes to have another 1920s spy game ready for next weekend, and I’ve got another Victorian monster hunters game half written.
 
But what then? I’m thinking it’s time for more sword and sorcery. (At least I should have some time to write between football games on tv.)
 
I’m just finishing Eric Cline’s ‘After 1177 B.C. : The Survival of Civilizations’ – the sequel to his ‘1177 B.C. : The Year Civilization Collapsed’. Both are great books. The first looks to explain the collapse of various Mediterranean civilizations during the Late Bronze Age, while the one I’m reading now shows what happened next, which ones rebuilt, which faded, and which disappeared at the start of the Early Iron Age.
 
As I’m always influenced by what I watch or read, my S&S itch is likely to be scratched by something along the above lines.
 
So, I could resurrect my Two River Land campaign. This is based on the geography and social set up of Finn Cullen’s Chaha Ris setting, but I spun it my way with an explicit Bronze Age society based loosely on Babylon, with a political set-up based on the succession issues of late 17th century England of the Later Stuarts. It ended up with a focus on espionage and demon killing.
 
My other option is using the setting of Paul Elliott’s Warlords of Atlantis, which he wrote for the ‘Barbaric’ rpg but which I obviously ran with BoL. I didn’t alter the setting details much, but it’s a lightly sketched in setting (Like Simon’s Lemuria) so there was plenty of scope for me to add things I was interested in. It’s clearly an early Iron Age setting, aside from the Atlantean’s themselves who come across as more Classical Greece. I used the styles of Ray Harryhausen’s films to flavour every aspect of the setting. The focus here was basically a treasure hunt that took the protagonist all over the pseudo-Mediterranean world. If I brought this back, I’d need to change the focus to political manoeuvrings before a (probable) civil war – so more espionage!
 
But knowing me, I’ll probably run something else!