The Wastes of Hellas

Once, long ago, the world was good. The Hellenes lived under the protection of the Olympian gods, and made sacrifices in their honour. Life was not always easy, but it was right. Then came the opening of Tartarus, and the terrible Titans walked the earth once more. From that day forth, a dark cloud spread over humanity that has never yet lifted.

Today, most of Hellas is a burning wasteland. The survivors of the human race dwell in a few isolated villages and walled city-states. The Olympian gods are all dead or missing, while the Titans roam the land committing random acts of destruction or extracting terrible tribute from the Hellenes. The wilderness is overrun with monsters - chimerae, cyclopes, sirens and hecatonchires. Only a few heroes, possessing the diluted bloodlines of the Olympians, can stand between these horrors and the last bastions of civilisation.

Beyond the borders of Hellas are the lands of the barbarians, similarly devastated. There dwell a few uncivilised tribes, including the ferocious Amazons and the bestial Centaurs. Across the oceans lie the lost islands of Odysseus, the ruins of Troy, and the silent sands of Egypt.

The Olympians are gone, but they left behind their ancient relics, the mysterious creations of Hephaestus and his craftsmen. Some adventurers seek to gain power and riches by excavating the works of the Olympians, while others aspire to discover Mount Olympus itself, which is rumoured to hold the secret of the Gods' destruction.

Other locations of note:

- Thebes, a city formerly ruled by the wise Oedipus. After he exiled himself, the city was struck with a plague and today is inhabited only by the shambling undead.

- Crete, a dystopian island state where slaves from the mainland are routinely sacrificed in the depths of the Cretan Labyrinth. It is rumoured that a Titan dwells in this Labyrinth, and the constant sacrifices are the only thing keeping Crete from being destroyed.

- Sparta, a fascist military city-state whose people are renowned for their discipline and bloodlust. The Spartans have survived the inhospitable conditions of the new world by making themselves into inhuman killing machines.

Latin American Adventures

He explored every inch of the region, even the riverbed, dragging the two iron ingots along and reciting Melquíades' incantation aloud. The only thing he succeeded in doing was to unearth a suit of fifteenth-century armor which had all of its pieces soldered together with rust and inside of which there was the hollow resonance of an enormous stone-filled gourd. When José Arcadio Buendía and the four men of his expedition managed to take the armor apart, they found inside it a calcified skeleton with a copper locket containing a woman's hair around its neck.

- Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

My devil makes me dream like no other mortal dreams
With a blank eyed corner
The only way to see him in the tunnel where he slept
By the longest tusk of corridors, numb below the neck
In my heart
Where he keeps them in a vault of devil daughters

- The Mars Volta, 'With Twilight As My Guide'

Like all men of the Library, I have traveled in my youth; I have wandered in search of a book, perhaps the catalogue of catalogues; now that my eyes can hardly decipher what I write, I am preparing to die just a few leagues from the hexagon in which I was born. Once I am dead, there will be no lack of pious hands to throw me over the railing; my grave will be the fathomless air; my body will sink endlessly and decay and dissolve in the wind generated by the fall, which is infinite.

- Jorge  Luis Borges, The Library of Babel

The people of Cozumel had long experience of accommodating outsiders who came in peace, as the island was sacred to the Maya goddess Ix Chel, and her shrine was a place of pilgrimage for the mainland Maya. A peculiarly treacherous current running in the narrow sea between mainland and island was a further barrier to violent invasion. Certainly Naum Pat and his people enjoyed immunity from the endemic Indian warfare which constituted normal relations between the mainland provinces, and saw themselves as outside the Maya political arena.

- Inga Clendinnen, Ambivalent Conquests: Maya and Spaniard in Yucatan  1517-1570

The one called Ah Chable they crucified and they nailed him to a great cross made for the purpose, and they put him on the cross alive and nailed his hands with two nails and tied his feet... And after he was crucified they raised the cross on high and the said boy was crying out, and so they held it on high, and then they lowered it, ... [and] they took out his heart. And the ah-kines gave a sermon telling them that it was good what they must do, and that through adoring those gods they would be saved, and that they should not believe that which the friars used to say to them.

- Testimony of Pedro Huhul of Kanchunup, 17 August 1562

Terrified, exhausted by her fate, Visitación recognised in those eyes the symptoms of the sickness whose threat had obliged her and her brother to exile themselves forever from an age-old kingdom where they had been prince and princess. It was the insomnia plague.

- One Hundred Years of Solitude

La Tunda is a myth of the Colombian Pacific region, and particularly in the afro-American community, about a vampire-like monster woman that lures people into the forests and keeps them there. Sometimes it appears in the form of a loved one, as the likeness of a child's mother, who would lure him into the forest and feed its victim with shrimps she has farted upon (camarones peídos) to keep her victims docile in some kind of trance. 

Tezcatlipoca, Smoking Mirror, We are his Slaves, He by whom we live, Enemy of Both Sides, Lord of the Near and the Nigh, Night, Wind, Two Reed, Possessor of the Sky and Earth

The light was so weak at noon that when Pelayo was coming back to the house after throwing away the crabs, it was hard for him to see what it was that was moving and groaning in the rear of the courtyard. He had to go very close to see that it was an old man, a very old man, lying face down in the mud, who, in spite of his tremendous efforts, couldn't get up, impeded by his enormous wings.

- Gabriel Garcia Marquez, A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings

Githzerai are awesome

So I feel like githzerai don't get a lot of love from D&D players, at least old school D&D players, and with some fair reason. The githyanki were originally some crazy alien race from the Fiend Folio who didn't really have much definition beyond a cool illustration and something something goblins from outer space. But they were evil. And we all know it is perfectly righteous to despise anything that takes evil D&D monsters and gives them a way to be good guys, all because some player said "I want to play as one of those!"

good art is hard to find also

However, if you try to forget the history of the gith and just look at them as they are today, they are an awesome concept for a race. I don't know when exactly the idea was conceived of them having been former slaves of the illithids, but it gives both strands of the gith a depth of history that other demihumans generally don't have. A whole race of slaves! Possibly brought from a distant world, or possibly created from scratch through unholy alchemy! Like the Jews in Egypt, but with mad psychic powers. The gith should be defined by their interactions with the illithids.

The second thing that's cool about them is the duality of the two races. Drizzt Do'Urden is kind of lame because he's just one guy who rebels against his evil society and is really obviously somebody's PC. But the githyanki and the githzerai are each a discrete race and culture, each a dark mirror of the other, which I like. The githzerai are monastic and severe because they're trying to expiate their horrible past as slaves of the mind flayers. The githyanki, on the other hand, survive by embracing that brutality. A githyanki is just a githzerai who gave up the constant struggle for discipline, and vice versa.

and of illithids, tbh. it's hard to find that sweet spot between 4E's glowing ninjas and AD&D's terrible newspaper cartoon

I don't know how much this has been explored already in official D&D materials, but I like the idea that the brutal githyanki represent what the gith were like under the control of the mind flayers. They were the illithid empire's secret weapon and shock troops, sailing out in fleets of voidships to lay waste to entire worlds (or planes, or whatever, depending on your cosmology). The githyanki are now their own masters, but other than that they haven't changed much. But the githzerai are taking up the greater existential challenge of redeeming their race. You could say that they're trying to get back to the Edenic state they were in on their homeworld before the illithids found them and shaped them into a race of war. On the other hand, I also like the idea of them being created through bio-magic because then they have an even greater void to overcome - there is no template for a good gith, they just have to make it up for themselves, piece by difficult piece. Nietzschean, man!

I love the githzerai so much that I'm getting excited about an all-githzerai campaign. Possibly you could invent different 'castes' which equate to races, so that the players wouldn't be stuck being forced to pick only one race for every PC. The thing is that, as I outlined above, the most interesting things about the githzerai only emerge when you see them from the inside. If a bald green dude just turns up and is all "look at my enormous wisdom and my psychic powers, also a long time ago my people were enslaved and it was all angsty, for real" then the players will most likely be like "whatever, just give me the quest". This probably goes for NPCs and githzerai PCs within a party of other characters from the Prime Material Plane. But if everyone is a githzerai, you have more motivation to explore their interesting traits and their relationships with the mind flayers and the githyanki.

So what would a githzerai campaign revolve around? How about the most dramatic event in all of gith history - the escape from the illithid empire. There is probably a bunch of canon about how this occurred but of course I'm going to ignore that and make up my own. Why would I be interested in something another person thought of when I can think things myself. And what I think of is an enormous voidship, with thousands upon thousands of githzerai refugees, travelling between the planes. The campaign begins with the gith overthrowing their masters and escaping aboard two vast generation ships. In one ship are those who will become the githzerai, in the other are those who will be githyanki, and they soon go their separate ways. Each ship must stay in transit, a la Battlestar Galactica, to avoid the pursuit of the still-extant illithid empire.

this is my favourite gith picture. space pirates!

After the initial setup phase, the PCs are free to do whatever they want. Will they try to find a place for the voidship to rest and found a secret colony? Will they fight against the brutality of their githyanki brethren? Will they challenge the might of the illithids themselves? Adventure!

The Dungeon Baby

Once upon a time, in a faraway land, there were a family of trolls who lived in a dungeon. There was Mama Troll, Papa Troll, little Finntroll and his sister Finnita. They stayed underground except at night, for the light of the sun would turn them to stone. There were other monsters in the dungeon besides the trolls, and they all got along quite happily (most of the time).

Among the other inhabitants of the dungeon were the Knockabout Skeletons, who in life had been naughty children who refused to grow up. They were always making mischief with each other and getting into trouble.

There were the slime family, who did not have brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers like the troll family. They had all subdivided from a single cell, so their relationships were quite different. Still they loved each other very much.

There was the Flesh Golem, created and abandoned by a mad wizard, who always seemed melancholy and only came out on special occasions. It was rumoured that he had had a wife once, and lost her, and nobody knew where she had gone.

There were the goblins, who loved treasure more than anyone else in the dungeon, and were always coming up with mad plans to get more of it. They would often go up to the surface, or down deeper into the caverns, until Mama Troll scolded them and told them to stay at home.

And last of all there were the Hattifatteners, who didn't speak and kept to themselves all the time. Nobody could tell what the Hattifatteners did with their time, but they didn't seem to be dangerous; and occasionally one of them would follow Finntroll around for a while, almost as if they had become friends.

There were other monsters that lived deeper in the caverns - ogres, demons, and perhaps even a sleeping dragon. Who could say whether they were friendly or not? Sometimes the goblins or Finntroll would go down and meet them.

Other times humans would come down from above to try and steal 'treasure' from the monsters. But what they thought was treasure were strange things like Mama Troll's old crockery, or the little sparkly stones that got caught in the slimes' bodies by accident. Sometimes the humans could be very dangerous, but they didn't come often.

All in all though there weren't many adventures and not many things happened, until one day something amazing arrived:

A human baby!

None of the monsters knew what to do with it. How would it be fed? How would it be looked after? What to do if it started crying?

And this was no ordinary baby either. Its parents had mysteriously vanished, but apparently they were very important in the human world. Soon the dungeon baby began to crawl off where it wasn't supposed to and got into all sorts of trouble. Because of the Dungeon Baby, all sorts of adventures began to happen, sometimes scary, sometimes exciting. All the monsters would have to work together to raise this baby safe and sound.

But that's not my story to tell. It's yours!

Baseballs & Basements

The year is 1972. Summer break has just begun. Your mom leaves early in the morning and tells you not to get into trouble. As soon as you're sure she's gone, you fill your rucksack with a carton of OJ and a PB&J sandwich, and then you head down to the sandlot to meet up with the other latchkey kids. All of you are at a magic age where you're not too young to make the whole neighbourhood your playground, but not yet too old to fill that space with make-believe.

Well, is it make-believe? Once you're together, each of you takes on a different persona - a brave superhero, a heroic sportsman or a beautiful princess. Together you search for buried treasure, walk down railway lines, battle monsters in the woods and escape from angry adults. Is it a dragon behind the chainlink fence or just a big Dobermann? Is it Nazi gold in the spinster's attic or just cheap forgotten jewelry? Such questions are meaningless; for the line between fantasy and reality has vanished, now that you have entered the world of Baseballs & Basements!


CHARACTER CLASSES

Superhero: You have superpowers and fight crimes even after it's past your bedtime

 Sport Star: You are a hero just like Babe Ruth & you can conk things on the head with your bat/racket/ball

Princess: You are the prettiest princess in all the land & everyone loves you. but you can kick butt as well.

 

Beastmaster: You are a pretty ordinary kid but you have an imaginary friend who is anything but ordinary & you are inseperable!

 

Gadget Kid: You can build awesome gadgets and you have a secret treehouse with secret features...

MONSTERS

Anything that's in D&D except reimagined in some way, probably less deadly/scary and more slapstick. Like maybe sahuagin live in the neighbour's swimming pool, goblins in the attic, hell hound in the abandoned house. And generally the way children would imagine them, so no Tolkien stuff, gnomes would be like the Smurfs, elves would be like the Keebler Elves (even though I don't know what those are because I am Australian).

Actually anything that appears on a cereal box is a monster in this game.

Anything from Dust

 Dogs: Dogs can be a mixed bag. Obviously if you have a dog it's a loyal companion. The dog that guards the junkyard though is a vicious fucker.

 

Cats: They are up to something let me tell you.

Bullies: The lesser sort will just take your lunch money. The older kids may even put you in hospital.

Grownups: The most dangerous enemy of all. If you get caught by grownups you are grounded mister.


RULES
Well so it's D&D, yeah? (Why would I want to create a new system for anything when D&D is already the best system there is??) But you can't really die. Fuck me that would be depressing. The perma-death equivalent is that you either get grounded (if you're caught by parents) or laid up in hospital (if you're physically injured) or you just lost your nerve (if you got damaged by imaginary monsters? NO. THE MONSTERS ARE NOT IMAGINARY. But maybe if you take fear damage or something.) The point is that you are unable to play for the rest of the summer, and this summer is the whole game. But just as there's Raise Dead there might be ways to bring a PC back.

And levelling up, I'm thinking as you level up you are growing up. When you hit some sort of level cap you must 'retire' by becoming an adult, and it gets all storygamey as you narrate what you grow up to be (i.e. a Gadget Kid might grow up to be a scientist, a Superhero could become a civil rights activist, etc.) But it is bittersweet because you leave all your friends behind. Time is strange; kids come and go from the game, they grow up and move on, but this summer remains. It's the eternal summer, where there's always more dragons to fight.

I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, does anyone? 

- The guy in Stand By Me

APPENDIX N:


this game which is adorable and sparked this idea in the first place

all the things with pictures above, especially Calvin & Hobbes and Earthbound






(haven't seen this one but what the hell)