The question for the day is: Evocative environments?
My answer for this is (amusingly for those who know) Broken Rooms.
But first, a quick shout out to the ‘realms’ creation section of Kevin Crawford’s Silent Legions RPG.
Silent Legions is a Cthulhu Mythos-esque game, run using old school D20 rules, with the twist being that you get to create your very own mythos and an entire pantheon of godlike things to trouble mankind. Part of the process offers the opportunity to create sub-worlds or realms called ‘kelipah’ – ranging in size from a single room to an ‘entire world…though it may not respect the geographic laws of mundane reality’. There’s various tables for random generation of features, peoples, technology level etc. It’s fun stuff.
Using just the first six rows of the relevant table, I came up with the following:
A blasted waste, with vast blocks of earth and rock floating above the plains, where the vegetation is at certain times of day intangible, and what creatures you can see appear dead and yet continue to move…
Broken Rooms, the RPG previously known as The Nearside Project, features variations of Earth, variations where Something Bad Has Happened. There’s one with an alien invasion, one where an asteroid hit, a freezing one, a burning one, the one with nanotech zombies…
As the player characters will most likely be travelling from variation to variation in the course of the game, it’s important for the GM to set the proper vibe, and the rules offer suggestions on how to do this by way of lighting, musical cues etc, and how best to emphasise what is different from place to place. Are there corner shops and newspapers say, or burning cars and half eaten corpses in the streets?
The rules also feature explanations of each variation in the form of what purport to be actual documents/reports from the relevant Earth. An example of a bit of one is given below, and rest assured the fact I wrote this particular one is purely coincidental…
