Veins of the Earth

 I recently picked up a copy of Veins of the Earth by Patrick Stuart and Scrap Princess. It's an amazing work, like an RPG setting explained by your genius artist uncle with schizophrenia and a meth habit. It whipsaws between brilliance, incoherence, inspired mechanics, inscrutable ramblings, evocative descriptions, and gonzo monsters. It presents an alien underground world vastly different than WoTC's Underdark or even traditional dungeons, a place filled with creatures and environments so foreign to even experienced players that they will be truly exploring as if for the first time. In short, Veins presents a thousand prompts to stir the imagination.

To that end, while I am enjoying being a player in a friend's homebrew D&D 5e campaign, I am working on a couple of setting ideas for the next campaign I will run, which will surely incorporate ideas from Veins of the Earth. I will be bouncing back and forth between two main setting concepts, and after the current game ends, I'll ask my players to choose which idea piques their interest more and which will we ultimately develop fully through play.

IDEA #1: THE LOST CLAN

Thumbnail: The PCs are all dwarves and members of an expedition to contact (and then possibly find and rescue) a clan of dwarves that have been incommunicado for a while.

Six Truths About This Campaign (an idea from Michael Shea of Sly Flourish):

• All the PCs are members of a dwarven expedition to learn why a distant clan did not send a delegation to the Century Moot, the vitally important council of all five clans assembled to elect a new king.
• There will be political maneuvering and social intrigue within the members of the expedition and its leadership, since the delegates represent multiple factions of the kingdom and not all of them are working toward the same goals.
• The characters are passionate about their cause, each working for the good of all dwarvenkind as they see it, even when they disagree on the methods.
• This will be a campaign of careful resource management and attrition, as the PCs will often be far from resupply or friendly bases.
• Most of the time will be spent far underground in the Veins of the Earth, meaning this is also a game of survival and resource management.
• The world does not conform to your level of power. Much will be less powerful than you, some will be more powerful than you. Heed this warning.

IDEA #2: TITAN'S VEINS

Thumbnail: It's a grimdark world in a sprawling city of the frozen north, cradled in an ancient titan's hand. The PCs are from the lowest tiers of society, dregs lost among ten thousand others that share their mean birth. The seemingly endless caverns below the city, known as the Titan's Veins, hold the promise of riches and status, but also dangers beyond imagining.

Six Truths About This Campaign:

• The "normal" world is centered around Cradle, a dark, sprawling, and half-abandoned mining and manufacturing city-state set in a harsh subpolar environment. The PCs hail from the lower echelon of society and begin as "just a number" in the faceless masses of the working poor and downtrodden...can their ambition overcome their lot in life?
• Much of play will be a "journey to the Underdark" game, but not a WotC Underdark. In the Titan's Veins, light is life and the dark is a like a living thing. It follows you, tries to suffocate you, seeks make you lost. It doesn't want you to ever see the sun again. You will mostly be in natural caverns rather than excavated dungeons, and Nature doesn't care that you prefer level floors, enough space to walk upright, or passages that exit through a wall rather than the ceiling. The Veins didn't ask you to come.
• This isn't a game of world-saving quests and championing the helpless. You will gain experience by stealing loot and magic in the deep and bringing It back to the surface. Exploration is at least as important—and as dangerous—as combat. It's abt survival and carrying out treasure, so gritty details like light, food, and encumbrance become critical. It's also much more realistic in terms of caving: climbing and tight squeezes and swims and scrambling over boulders is the norm rather than the exception. Are you sure you want to bring a longbow and plate armor?
• You've never seen the kinds of monsters you'll be facing and they have powers and abilities you can't predict. You'll think they were dreamed up by your crazy uncle during his meth addiction. Seriously awful things can happen to your character. Not just losing hit points, we're talking things that pull organs out of your body, leave you unable to ingest normal food, or make you vomit up your soul. Is treasure really worth this, or what drives you toward it?
• Magic is rare...and dangerous...it is grand in scale, horrific in effect, and dangerous in execution. Spells are bizarre, situational, and reflective of an unkind, fractured, deadly universe. It's especially risky to cast in combat when someone is trying to split your skull open with an axe. It works differently than standard Vancian magic, and the spells tend to be much more powerful, even at low levels...but if you miscast, it could change your day in a hurry.
• The larger world will be corporately designed. Beyond one other trade city and a few villages, the world is a blank slate that we will create together. Players will help call organizations, locations, political factions, and NPCs into existence at the table.

So, that's the intro. Much more to come...