EFX on OneNote

I went to a game store to meet up with some potential gamers that I might play with. While I don't think that they're really quite up my alley in terms of gaming, they might be close enough. Their take on a darker, grittier system than D&D really just means a few darker themes... but using D&D concepts. Their idea of character concepts was little more than a race and class combination, and in one case, a mechanical flourish of sorts that he thinks sounds interesting. This isn't terrible, nor even unexpected, but assuming that I end up running for them long-term, I won't be doing DFX or EFX either one. I don't really want to see my "babies" bastardized by people who don't really completely buy into the concept. Although maybe I'm selling them short based on our fairly quick conversation. But I doubt it. The whole meme of "my players don't want to play anything except D&D" exists for a reason, after all. I actually think Eberron with an emphasis on the noir-side might work well for them, and well enough for that matter, for me too.

Now, I have to figure out if it's worth it to me to try and learn how to run 5e or not... At a minimum, it'll mean reading the PHB and DMG. Or at least skimming it. Sigh.

I also bought the first Michael Ghelfi RPG ambience collection on Bandcamp. All of the tracks are an even 30 minutes each, and I'm playing them in the background while I type. They're not actually music, of course, they're sound effects and ambient sounds, but some of them can be combined with music, or layered with it more accurately, to give you exactly the effect that you want. And some of them don't need even that. While they're not really that expensive, I still decided that I'd keep it to one album per month, just to give me time to acclimate to what I've got and to not drop $80+ on a bunch of ambient tracks, most of which I could just play on YouTube, all at once. I'm kind of a cheapskate at heart, and while that's certainly within the budgetary constraints, I just can't justify throwing that kind of money all at once on something that I'm not even sure how much I'll use. One album a month, for $10 a pop (there are nine available, unless I also diversify into sci-fi or horror or modern or whatever) is more my speed. Plus, if I lose interest in buying them after a month or two, I'm not out very much money.

Anyway, I've also been developing EFX quite a bit on the side. I'm kind of interested in that a lot right now, and I also started using OneNote as a development tool, which is pretty handy. I might draw the map for that, or at least a draft version thereof, before I do my new DFX map. In fact, I'll probably do so today, in fact. Although even if I do, I won't scan it anytime too soon. I'll also cross-post some of the content here from my OneNote, just for the heckuvit. Here's the write-ups respectively for the Lanstall Sea and the Protectorate of Rodach in the geography section. These are pretty light, but after I draw the map, I might yet put a bit more detail into them. Probably not until I get closer to figuring out how exactly to use them, though.

Lanstall Sea

The continent of the EFX setting is roughly the size of Australia, Brazil or the Lower 48; all of which measure about 3 million square miles in area, give or take a couple hundred thousand square miles. However, the Lower 48 is its closest analog geographically. The main differences are that without the greater mass of the rest of North America in the form of Canada and Alaska attached to its north (and Mexico to it's south), the jet stream and prevailing winds and rains sweep across the country further south. Because every point in the continent is closer to the ocean, the climate is considerably milder than the Lower 48 as well; even in the north the winters are not as long and cold as they are in Montana, Minnesota or Maine, for instance, and the south is not as hot as Florida or Louisiana or southern Arizona. This also causes the continent to be kind of reversed east to west from the Lower 48; the wettest parts are in the farthest west; the kind of rain that Alaska and the Pacific Northwest gets extends to the southern border of the continent, causing the farthest southwest to be the swampiest and largest wetlands. Old mountains like the Urals or Appalachians cause the first rain shadow as you go further east. However, here is where we find another major discrepancy from the geography of the Lower 48; the Lanstall Sea is a large interior sea that keeps the middle of the continent temperate and causes localized rain to form even in the rain shadow of the mountains to the west.

Much like a super-sized Caspian Sea, the Landstall Sea is fairly temperate most of the time, except in the far north and where it borders high elevation. The lands around it are fertile and get enough rain to be very arable, but not so much as to be a hindrance to development or travel. The waters are (relatively) calm, and storms are not often too dangerous or frequent. As such, it is a highway of shipping and trade. It is also sometimes a magnet for piracy, which is the greatest danger most voyages could potentially face… most of the time. 

The nations that border the sea do have navies that patrol for piracy, but they are reluctant to venture too far beyond the shores of their sovereign nations lest they be seen as a provocation against their neighbors.  

The Protectorate of Rodach

The Protectorate of Rodach is often seen, whether fairly or not as the most cosmopolitan of the modern nations. Forged in the wake of multiple past calamities, Rodach was always a center for trade. While not the only nation to have a shoreline on the Lanstall Sea of the interior as well as the relatively clement waters of the oceans to the south, it's the most stable of them, and has never had one of the magical incursions take place within its borders. Because of this, it has built itself up as the premier place for trade. Its wealth, relative stability and pleasant climate have also made it a popular destination for emigration, which the people of Rodach, lacking a strong king who cares for the long-term prospects of his people, have encouraged due to its ability to bring short-term wealth gains, albeit often at the expense of the common people who are not sufficiently connected to profit from the comings and goings, but rather find their own employment prospects limited by the influx of other races and peoples willing to do the same jobs for less.

The center of all of this is the city of Cliffgate, perched on and around a massive mountain that overlooks a deep fjord on the shores of the Lanstall Sea. Renowned for the beauty of its architecture, it is a massively wealthy city, but with a seedy underside; the disparity between the haves and the have-nots is more stark here than almost anywhere else in all of EFX. Because of this, class, race, nationality--all are grist for factionalism and tribalism unlike anywhere else as well. Unbeknownst to the feckless leadership of Rodach and Cliffgate alike, the place is a powder keg of tensions, intrigue, skullduggery, sedition and worse, masked by the short term profits that some are able to make and the ambitions and greed of those who want to join the ranks of the prosperous, who are starting to realize slowly that the deck is stacked against them ever rising above their current station.

Although outwardly beautiful, Cliffgate is an almost noir-like city in terms of its attitude, its mood and tone, and the themes that games or stories set in Cliffgate would be likely to have. In spite of its cosmopolitanism, it is a hotbed of crime, espionage, ethnic and class-based pressure. It's reputation, whether truly justified or not, as a libertarian Mecca has many arriving believing that if they are a bit discrete and careful, they can do anything that they want here. Smuggling, black-marketeering, human trafficking, and vile cults--to say nothing of the occasional monstrous predators--haunt much of the poorer neighborhoods, where people are often angry, bitter, beaten-down or cynical. Not that the obvious upper classes know this, because they have little to no interaction with most of them, and see their lives as beneath their notice anyway.