Maqsum: The Shattered Land
So, this month has been interesting – new games arriving, lots of games being played, and some cool life events, such as becoming the manager for my local game store, Meeple Games. Technically, I am not quite yet, as I'll be starting on the 2nd of December. But, if you're in the Durham area, come down and say hello after I've started. I'll be happy to recommend some games, or just chat! But now on to the subject of this post...
Recently, I've been more and more enamoured with the OSR. Perhaps it is a nostalgia thing – I grew up in the '90s cutting my teeth on the BECMI boxed sets – or, more likely, it is because a lot of the stuff coming out of the OSR is actually really cool. Like, really, really cool. I mean, some of it is out of this world, "where the hell did you get the idea for this", amazing stuff. I'm talking about things like [Necrotic Gnome's] (https://necroticgnome.com/) Dolmenwood (which is getting a campaign book next year), Luka Rejec's Witchburner and Ultraviolet Grasslands, and Emmy Allen's The Gardens of Ynn and The Stygian Library. Necrotic Gnome deserved special mention because Gavin Norman's design ethos and reproduction of the original B/X ruleset in Old School Essentials is something to be lauded. And OSE (my hard copies of which arrive tomorrow!) is really what sparked this post because today I want to talk about the homebrew campaign I've been running. I am currently running it using D&D 5e, as the players in my FLGS group won't play much else, but originally I had been planning on designing it for B/X. It's called Maqsum: The Shattered Lands, and today I'd like to take you on a little tour...
What is Maqsum?
Maqsum is the Maltese word for divided. It is also the name of the shattered continent that makes up my homebrew setting. It developed as a loosely conceived idea for a world where a great catastrophe had occurred, shattering the land of Maqsum into a series of large island nations and smaller archipelagos. I also planned to work the theme of 'division' into the setting by having a number of factions that worked for and against each other that PCs might aid, hinder, joint or contest.
The whole setting went through several upheavals, with different catastrophes taking place, different factions being developed then cast aside and so on. It kind of sat on the back burner until I needed to run a new 5e campaign at my FLGS and I wanted to run something unique and not just another Wizards adventure. So, I dragged it kicking and screaming into the light of day... Like I say, I'd tinkered with it a whole load beforehand, but I decided to run it bare bones and let the whole thing develop from play, which has actually worked out quite well so far. Originally, I had tried to develop nations for the islands, the different factions, what the catastrophic event that had shattered the continent, yadda yadda, and so forth. Instead, I ended up not caring about any of this – instead, I'd make snap decisions while I ran the game and let the players come up with the rest. And so far I've been having a blast!
However, I did have some core principals laid out going into my first session like any good GM should. The game would take place on one of the islands within the setting, a place that is known as Jakay. And I had a few ideas for unique things too:
- The continent of Maqsum was shattered by an ancient advanced race that is now extinct.
- Ruins litter the landscape, from which all kinds of technological advanced (read magic) artefacts can be obtained.
- The island is currently being fought over by two factions competing for a specific resource.
- Magic is powerful but dangerous – in some areas spells can miscast.
- Dragons are extinct and the ruins of their corpse can be found within the world.
- The lands are plagued by nightmarish creatures.
These I developed a bit further. The ancient race became known as the Senjin, and it is their ruins that litter the landscape and form giant dungeon-like complexes below the earth. From these, all kinds of technologically advanced items, considered to be magic, are recovered and used to advance towns and cities, and of course wage conflicts. The island of Jakay became the principal source of Ironwood, a substance as hard as steel and able to be enchanted with ease. The two factions competing for this became the Ivory Empire of Vaelua (a culture based on a mix of Chinese, Incan and Middle Eastern themes, from a expanse of hot deserts located to the south) and the Protectorate of Tawg (a civilisation of orcs split into a theocratic leadership and an honour-bound, samurai influenced warrior caste, who worship the dragon that they believe saved their race during the cataclysm). To add in some additional flavour, I created the Jinsei-no-Hara, a group of ecoterrorist wood elves who fight to protect the trees they call home. And for additional threat, there is the Horological Order of Aeons, an outwardly benevolent order of tech-hunters, that is in fact ruled by a lich who wants to bring dragons back. Because, reasons...
Things have developed from there, really. Magic is now the result of nanobots that swarm in the atmosphere and magic-users call on them to do their bidding via a multitude of means – verbal code words, somatic gestures, and technological foci. The cataclysm that shattered the continent not only caused that calamity but also wrenched Maqsum into a pocket plane that lies parallel to the Prime Material Plane. The nightmarish creatures, unique randomly generated monsters known as Oni, only appear at night and originate from a dimension that lies tangential to Maqsum's – cities and towns remain safe from them by erecting forcefields retrofitted from Senjin technology that keep them at bay. And so on and so forth. As you can see, it's all a bit gonzo, but it's a hell of a lot of fun.
I hope to delve into Maqsum a bit further in future blog posts, as I would like to produce some gameable content from it that others might be interested in. I'll be doing that solely for B/X, which is what I originally had in mind in the first place. And now that OSE is due to arrive, hopefully, that will be the motivational kick in the arse I need to start spewing out blog posts dedicated to this weird world. In the meantime, here's a map of Maqsum that I drew to keep you going.
