Brief Notes on the Atlantis Campaign

As the title indicates, these are some brief notes I have from the Atlantis Campaign I'm developing for use with Advanced Dungeons & Dragons/d20:

I'm still working on the gods and the calendar! I know these are among the first things you're supposed to finalize when developing a campaign world and I've already developed other aspects in great detail, but I am - as always - going way in-depth and these elements demand more scrutiny. Our own months and weekdays are named after gods, and Atlantis offers only a handful (p. 244), many of which are denoted as "old." Obviously, these "old" gods take precedence, as they certainly didn't wait until the Second Age to develop a calendar, but just as the new gods supplanted the old ones in worship, so would they in these regards (to a lesser extent), and I have to keep this in mind; most of the days and months will have been named in the First Age, and I've already decided the calendar survived and was handed down, though some of the elements were changed or renamed. Most of us don't know which days were named for what gods - even if we know that they were named for gods; even if we do know the gods to which the days refer, we don't necessarily know anything about them. This is the presumption I'm carrying over to Atlantis.

Furthermore, I'm working from which races are the ancient ones. Dragons are generally accepted as the first living thing, then Elves, then Giants (or vise-versa) - and then it gets murky. Right now, I'm thinking trolls, then probably another evil race or two along those lines before you get to Dwarves, but any which way it goes, Dwarves are definitely in the top five. Aside from Dragons and Elves, few inhabitants know any of this, but we DMs have to (of course). Anyway, their deities are to be accounted for; after all, Kramaal may never have had many human worshipers, but Kramaal (a deity of the dragons) is literally one of the oldest things known and though dragons don't use calendars, it isn't as if humans (generally considered the youngest of the races, barring the alchemical constructs [Andaman {Arcanum, p. 6}, et.al.]) were the first to develop a calendar, so some names will have filtered down. This information - that is, which races are the oldest and what begat what - may be in one of the books, I just haven't gotten that far yet, so I'm keeping this in mind, too.

Atlantis is written much like the first-edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons books: tons of pertinent information is packed into every paragraph and there are no indeces, so the entire book has to be read from cover to cover, otherwise you will miss key points. On the one hand, it makes for interesting reading, on the other, it's really easy to miss major points and even easier to forget where you read something; key information is literally "hidden" throughout the text and I'm having to take (fairly detailed) notes as I go, so it's slow-goings. This is another reason I haven't gotten further than I have: there's no sense developing stuff only to find out it's already been accounted for and/or major elements need to be changed - it's just time wasted.

That was one of the main arguments concerning 1st- and 2nd -Ed. AD&D: while you had to buy three 2nd-Ed. books to every one 1st-Ed. tome, you knew where everything was in 2nd-Ed.; in a very real sense, you were paying for the index, because even though the subject(s) a Handbook, or other supplement, covered was vastly expanded, it's pretty wild to re-read the 1st-Ed. books and see just how much stuff they left out!

The Castle Guide (DMGR2) is a perfect example: while a fantastic resource with a unique castle construction system (which I am actually following in the development of Fletcher's Hold - another aspect contributing to the delay), The Castle Guide is chockful of great information, but it omits the types of government presented in the 1st-Ed. DMG. Players might not realize that Hesperia is a gynocracy (DMG1, p. ##), and while there's no more information than that, the word alone gives you somewhere to start (the dictionary, in this case).

I said I would share this with you at every stage, and I'm sticking to that - at least until it becomes prohibitive. I don't know how I'm going to do this just yet, but it's most likely going to be through posts on The Wording. Of course, once completed, Fletcher's Hold will be presented in good old HTML in the Fantasy section. Unlike many sets, this one requires certain books because it is specifically written from certain books; you can strip the keyed information from most concepts and drop them into your own campaign with little to no problem, but Fletcher's Hold requires the Atlantis sourcebook from Bard Games. The Arcanum is highly recommended, but you can do without it - and given the prices I've seen for Atlantis, you probably will!

I have no idea who owns the rights to this fantastic game and setting, but I aim to find out. One of the most needed items is a large-scale map of the entire campaign world, as the book details the entire campaign world - as well as specific areas, but I don't know if the maps included in the book will enlarge successfully. I mean to try this and see, but I don't want to violate anyone's rights, and I'm pretty sure that would do it (though not positive).

More to come - soon!

[This post is still being edited, because Blogger's "Autosave failed" kept fucking me up]

© C Harris Lynn, 2009