Spirit of 1974

Influences. That's today's topic. I've set the basic metaphysical foundations and assumptions of the world, tied them to an existing tradition and body of work I can draw on, and highlighted an area about those assumptions that needs more fleshing out. I'm following up on this development by explicitly naming the influences and inspirations I want to incorporate.  As we are dealing with a world predicated on Dharmic philosophy, I'm sure it won't be any surprise that the most dominant influences I'll want to turn to and lean on are the great Indian epics - the Ramayana and Mahabharata. There is a huge amount of material in those works that can shape and support my own creative direction, much like Norse mythology shaped and directed Tolkien or the worlds of sword and sorcery fiction influenced Gygax. In particular, I think the Mahabharata's epic war at the conclusion of an age, one in which God's intervention was not to prevent a dark age but to impa

  So tonight my 5e D&D players get high on psychedelics in game, and head toward the river to find a crocodiamond (this is a diamond-scaled crocodile born when one of my players misheard me say “crocodile” and I said “No, crocodiamond is way cooler, let’s run with that”). Their NPC Dwarf fighter friend comes with them to babysit. I decide that they meet machine elves. Machine elves, if you don’t know, are a name given to a kind of being some LSD users have reported experiencing during trips. In my game, Machine Elves are kind of like modrons who read too much Henry Ford and now seek to break into the material world and launch an industrial revolution of such scope and speed that it would give Queen Victoria whiplash. On the spot, I decided the plot my players foiled last session – a Druid sought to ferment dissent in the City of Blackwall so he could use the resulting chaos to replace the Vizier – was about preventing the Machine Elves from breaking through. When the players blabbe

 My goal is to, sometime in Q1 2025, have written (and ideally publish) a campaign setting introduction and 3 accompanying adventures. In my mind this looks a lot like the Hungarian D20 Society's Fomalhaut zines, especially the Drifting Lands campaign setting guide. The presentation of these zines is fantastic; they feel so authentically like a 1970s D&D publication while still incorporating the higher budget capacities of the 21st century.  Worldbuilding has been my passion-art for nearly my entire life. I spent my time in high school buried in the Language Construction Kit and putting together long lists of monarchs and dynasties. But unlike a lot of the world's best world builders, I don't have a single setting I've been working on for a long time. I've jumped from setting to setting, largely because I deeply tie my settings to different parts of my life, and my life hasn't been very stable or consistent for a long time. There's also a thematic diffic