Here I Go

Because, you know, all the cool geeks are bloggin'.

No, not really.  I'm actually starting this because I have a little old-school project I'm working on and I thought this might be an interesting way to approach it.  My usual method is to hole up behind my computer for months on end and never let anything see the light of day until it's perfect.  Which, of course, is pretty much never.  So, I thought maybe I'd try something a little different this time.

Ostensibly, the focus of this blog is work on a Psychic Science-Fantasy setting for old-school gaming.  I suspect that the subject might well expand a bit if this proves to be enjoyable for me to write and anyone else to read.  But, for now, I'll try to stick to the setting.

And what is that setting I don't hear you ask?  Glad you asked.  Instead of answering, allow me to digress.  Within 24 hours of each other, I was involved in two discussions--one on rpg.net and the second on James  Maliszkewski's always worthwhile Grognardia blog--about psionics in Ye Old Game (both the original Eldritch Wizardry and that in the Dungeon Master's Guide). In both cases, I said that, while I really never cared for psionics in a game with Vancian magic, the system itself was always kind of intriguing and I had idly pondered a setting where psionics was the magic system.  In a bit of brinkmanship, I said that if James finished his Swords & Wizardry hack of the rules, I'd write up the setting.

Well, I got a bit carried away and started thinking about it already.  I got this powerful image of the far future. Mankind's civilizations have all risen and fallen and the the last is quickly declining into barbarism and savagery.  This is a world where the term "mankind" has been radically redefined, as our descendants alternately cooperate and compete with Pseudomen, Ultramen, Undermen, Transmen, and New Men.  A world where the sorcery of the mind is no less fabulous than the eldritch technologies of the past.  A world where the Last Men live amid the heaps and ruins of a thousand previous cultures, looting them to stay alive for one more day.

Immediately, I recalled a wonderful map I had seen.  It was a projection of Antarctica one thousand years into the future if global climate change keeps on pace.   Green and temperate. The bottom of the world at the end of the world. That seemed like the place.  I'm imagining this setting as the love child of Kamandi, Clark Ashton Smith's Hyperborea, Thundarr the Barbarian, the Book of the New Sun, Last & First Men, and Gamma World.  

That's the plan anyway.  I don't know how often I'll be posting.  But the point of doing so is to get feedback about the thing.

What's that, you say?  What is this wonderful thing called?  Oh, good question. I've played around with a few names.  I thought about being gritty and calling it Terminus.  I've thought about being cute and calling it Acitcratna.  But right now, I'm rather favouring calling it Hypernotus, "the Land Beyond the South Wind".