Share your settings for TFT

[larsdangly]

All the excitement about TFT has me thinking about fun settings for the system - deadly dungeons, grungy cities, mysterious towers... This has always been a game where most such things are DIY rather than commercial products. So let's get a thread going where we can share some of the favorite items from your old folders!

[ak_aramis]

Almost all my T&T play has been solos - either played totally solitaire, or as one PC going through with the other player playing the opponents.

The exception was in 1987, where I drew an overaland map. and the adventure was to cross hostile terrain to carry diplomatic papers.

[larsdangly]

It will take a bit of writing to dig very deeply into my TFT setting materials, and I don't want to kick off the thread by hogging it with a bunch of 1000 word posts. But this is an overview of the setting I've put the most work into:

A set of five closely related environments:
1: Bok Sehir, a large, shambolic, polyglot city that serves as a crossroads between several surrounding lands. This city started as my take on Zamora for my campaign set in the Hyborian age. I cooked up a thieves' quarter, a couple of temples and a sewer for this, as well as some ruins to be explored in the surrounding desert. I then ported this over to Cidri for a more generic TFT campaign. It is kind of a never ending work in progress and most of the notes are sorts of scraps of paper rather than digital files. But I'm slowly getting it into electronic format whenever I pull it out and add something to it. The feel of the city is sort of 16th century Contantinople meets Zamora meets Lhankmar. The format is an urban sand box like CSIO.

2. Dag Kuhl, the fortress of the city’s mysterious ruler. This is based on the enormous indian fortress of Mehrangarh and looms over the city on a big mesa. It is also where I run Death Test and Death Test II (in this setting these are used as initiation tests to join the 'Cuirassiers' - a kind of elite unit more or less equivalent to Thorz's guard.

3. The Ruins, a literal and metaphorical rat’s nest of sewers, basements, tunnels and still-accessible parts of the city that formerly sat on Bok Sehir’s site but was buried in volcanic ash several hundred years ago

4. The City of Dust, a complex of cyclopean ruins of long-forgotten temples, castles and cities that filled these lands thousands of years past, and now reach layer beneath layer under Bok Sehir and stretch beneath miles of the surrounding dunes and scrub. The concept is based on The Big Rubble for original Runequest (though the maps and stuff are all new).

5. The region surrounding Bok Sehir is detailed, to a distance of approximately 1 week’s travel by foot or horse. It is basically a sandbox with a couple dozen adventure sites or recurring NPC's. The major features are the badlands that sit atop the City of Dust, the surrounding deep desert, and a craggy mountain range that separates Bok Sehir from european-style nations on its borders; the mountains and the marshes at their feet are a teeming miasma of chaos monsters, more or less inspired by Dorastor from Glorantha.

[JLV]

As I've said before, I'm not terribly original in this matter, instead mostly "converting" other folks stuff to TFT for my players. The one I've been working on most recently is Dolmenwood -- which has just the right "feel" for me in terms of setting, and is a nice, small sandbox with a lot going on and a lot of NPCs to interact with.

Posting it here, of course, would be highly illegal (I would think), but you can order a copy (and get parts of it for free) over on OneBookShelf's various rpg pages (go here to look at it). It's nicely thought out and even ties into things like Ed Gillespie's Barrowmaze (they have a place where you could put that, if you wanted to) for those needing a megadungeon to liven up play...

Others that I've done something similar with were Wilderlands of High Fantasy, Forgotten Realms (mostly for the complex setting, not necessarily for the details in the adventures -- the Red Wizards make a wonderful villain group, though), and, to a much lesser extent, the area around Rappan Athuk. (Can you tell that I like sandboxes and megadungeons? ;-) )

Oh, and of course, Keep on the Borderlands!

(Edited to add link for Dolmenwood material...)

[Steve Jackson]

Yes, posting the material here would be a nono, but posting a link to where it can be purchased is a public service. Thanks!

[DeDiceManCometh]

What would be the list of Cidri canon? Or (if this is even a separate question) what would be the list of publications SJG would want to move forward with as canon?

[larsdangly]

That's an interesting question. I have most everything that can be found in publications by Metagaming, including Interplay, and I still feel like I can describe the mood of Cidri without being able to describe any of its details...and I kind of like that. It means everything I've made for the setting is 'right', regardless of what anyone else has done.

[larsdangly]

o.k.; what I was imagining could happen in this thread is we would share fun, inspirational snippets to encourage one another to gin up fun setting materials (as opposed to debating rules or IP law or whatever). So, in that spirit, here is a block of text from some of my old notes on my largest TFT city, explaining one of my very favorite minor NPC's tucked away in a filthy back alley...The Oracle:

"The Oracle: A mad wizard who turned himself into a gelatinous cube that telepathically communicates with those who come into his presence. Many come to him for guidance and magical influence, and he uses various spells of prognostication and mentalism to answer their questions. But his gifts come at a terrible cost: He eats only bound live creatures, and must be fed to give service. When a prospective supplicant comes to his lair and presents a question or begs some magical service, his handlers communicate with him telepathically and relay the cost he demands. This might be as simple as a dove bound in string or an insect in a small cage of woven grass, or as terrible as a perfectly formed youth or well known citizen of the city."

A block of stats, spells and talents follows, but those are mere details. I have never settled my mind about exactly why or how The Oracle transformed himself into a large blob of jelly. But he did, and that's the important point.

[Chris Nicole]

My Loran campaign ran from the early 80's into the 90's as an occasional face-to-face RPG using TFT rules. We went for our own setting 'The Land' rather than use Cidri.

http://www.loran.karoo.net/tft/index.html

This also expanded into a wargame campaign using Hordes of the Things armies:

http://www.loran.karoo.net/campaign/index.html

Later it became a PBM RPG on Yahoo.

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/LoranRPG

Information is still online but activity has been lacking for a while.


Regards,

Chris Nicole

[pyratejohn]

Sadly, I can't. While I have a ton of old Melee/Wizard character sheets, and a TFT adventure that I wrote for my group, when SJ left Metagaming I "jumped ship" too, so all of my TFT ideas became Man-to-Man ideas and then GURPS settings.