Welcome to the campaign diary of what’s been codenamed Fantasy Avengers. A campaign idea of superheroes in a fantasy setting has percolated within my brain for aeons. I occasionally pretend I’m going to run it, which no doubt gets eye rolls at best or engenders much disappointment at worst when I never get around to it.
This campaign diary will work through how the campaign gets to the table and then, with hope and a prayer, morph into actual play reports.
The featured image is the city of Sharn from Eberron; maybe that’s a spoiler of a future basket of influences.
It’s not a conversion
As previously explained, there is a dim distant memory that this started as my attempt to do my version of the Exalted role-playing game. When I decide to do this, I take an inspired-by approach rather than trying to convert it directly, and I tend to use an appropriate fiction-first generic system.
I have no idea if I’m doing my version of Exalted or just taking the cool bits from the setting for something else. I suspect it doesn’t matter which.
This is what might transfer over.
A gloriously flat Creation
I could go with the unspoken acceptance that my campaign world is a planet in a solar system, but what’s the fun in that? It also adds extra work, as if the setting is a planet, you have oceans and different land masses. In this case, utilising accepted cosmology potentially creates more work and the need to ignore more.
Stability in chaos. The concept of the gloriously flat Creation in Exalted is fantastic. Stability carved out of raw elemental chaos, threatening to be consumed at all times. It raises the question of what exists in the elemental chaos that may threaten the ordered world?
It’s not our science. This I am going to keep. Creation is not based on the assumption our physics exists. In Exalted, it’s a whole spirit hierarchy. It may or may not be exactly that, but it will not be our physics.
A flat expanse. I love Creation is flat. I’m not sure how I’d incorporate that yet. There is always the option of the world being flat, but due to ‘mythical stuff’, it still looks and feels like our world. The sun rises and falls. There is a horizon curvature. I guess this does raise more questions than I thought when you think about it? I want to use the fact Creation is flat to make it look different or add colour to why it doesn’t. We shall see.
It’s a certainty that I will keep many of the basic concepts behind Creation as it adds to the fabric of the campaign.
The origin of Exaltation
Whenever I think of superhero settings, I think of two models: very few superheroes or a single origin for all superheroes. My thoughts never lead to the cornucopia of reasons people have powers that exist in the Marvel comics.
This means I will use the idea that all the superheroes in the setting are ‘Exalted’. Their souls are somehow altered, essentially Exalted, allowing them superpowers.
A history of ages
The setting will have a history organised into ages. The ages are abstractions in ‘a time before’ way. I prefer such mythical histories, which means you can focus on ideas rather than getting bogged down in details. At the moment, I’m thinking of keeping it simple with three epochs.
The long time before in which all sorts of mythical stuff happens is akin to Genesis in the bible and the more esoteric myths in our history. I probably need to think about this a bit.
The First Age is an age of glory and wonder. It’s the age that the current period is built on the ruins and relics of. This plays into a common fantasy and space opera trope of the grand period in history, and now more has been forgotten than is remembered. This is the age the Exalted defined, ending with their ‘destruction’.
The Second Age is the period the campaign is set in. It is a period dominated by a grand empire that has become decadent and old. Importantly, this age has been quite long, so for all but the few operating in particular arenas, this is all people know, and the rest is already a myth.
I realise a bit of flesh needs to be added to these bones, but that will be roughly it. It may be the case that the campaign is about the end of the Second Age and the start of the Third Age, but I have no idea what that means yet.
An idea that has always stuck is the protagonists are from the First Age, but events, an accident or a conflict, saw them miss the intervening years that saw the end of the First Age, and their arrival is essentially the spark that starts the campaign. This idea hasn’t been ditched yet, though I’ve not thought of any specifics.
And, Finally…
This idea started as my version of Exalted but became more of a Fantasy Avengers. There is stuff I’m going to keep from Exalted, but I have this feeling things will transition further away from it being inspired by Exalted to it not being that familiar at all beyond some extensive setting elements that are common setting tropes of this type of story.
How that journey looks and where we may land isn’t known at this point, and that’s part of the fun.