Warp Riders

When I said in my last post that the idea I had for a campaign was metal, I meant it. It was actually inspired by The Sword’s album Warp Riders. I had been listening to the album a bit and listening to the lyrics and reading up on the concept of the album. It struck me that the basic concept of the album would make a pretty neat game setting.
Thinking further on this I came up with the idea of combining several different existing campaign settings and ideas into one over the top mega-setting.

The planet around which the album is based has become tidally locked, meaning that one side of the planet is always facing the sun, and the other is always in night. My first thought was that a slightly adjusted Dark Sun would probably work pretty well for the day-side of the planet. Harsh, and hot, with the sun as much of an antagonist as anything else. Thinking about the night side of the planet it occured to me that the Shadowfell from the D&D Fourth Edition default cosmology could stand in pretty well for a half of a planet that’s eternally enshrouded in darkness and cold. There’s a song called Night City which describes a city on the Night Side of the planet full of scoundrels and space pirates (the Warp Riders of the title for example). Thinking about that I liked the idea of adding in some elements of Spelljammer into the setting. Perhaps Gloomwrought (a city in the Shadowfell) is also a space-port filled with pirates and other lowlifes from all around the universe. I like the Dark Sun idea that the Gods are absent, (though may have existed at some time in the past) so I turned the Raven Queen into a particularly successful Sorcerer Queen who rules the nightside of the planet, presumably much to the dismay of the other Sorcerer Kings and Queens who have to share the Day Side.

The game could start on the Day Side, which is cut off from the Night Side both by the magical machinations of the Raven Queen and the Sorcerer Kings and Queens, and by a zone of intense elemental storms that exists along the border between the two sides. (Apparently on actual tidally locked planets it’s theorized that there would be intense storms and such where the heat and cold met one another, so I figure we can just add some magic to the mix and turn it into a sort of ring of Elemental Chaos). The players would either be natives to that side of the planet (who may not even know there is a Night Side, or even what night is!), or perhaps as characters from elsewhere in the universe who had the misfortune to crash land on this planet. Eventually, if their wanderings brought them to it they would find a way to the other side of the planet, where they might have further adventures or might be able to hitch a ride off the planet.

So that’s the basic idea, an insane mashup of Dark Sun, The Shadowfell, and Spelljammer, all with twists from a metal album.

I’ll go into more detail in another entry soon on some of my thoughts on how all of these things might fit together and what sort of history a world like this might have, some twists and changes, and other details I’ve been thinking about. Hopefully it’ll be interesting you readers, and it’ll give me a chance to solidify some of them into writing.

So what do you think? Does this sound like a fun setting? Does it inspire any ideas in you? Let me know!

Good gaming!
-The Duke of Brandonshire

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