9/14/13

Onyx Thoughts: Medieval Urban Fantasy Campaign

I have overwhelmed with work over the course of the calendar year as the place where I am CEO is going through a merger with a larger organization. The merger itself is a good thing, with no one losing their job, and lots of new initiatives on the horizon. But there is a huge amount to do in the meantime, so that it will be a success. There are a lot of organizational synergies on paper that can only become actual synergies through getting a boatload of crap done (that the kind of CEO lingo you learn in management school and executive courses). I am moving to a COO position with the responsibility for about 400 people, so I have a lot to wrap my mind around. Not to mention the legal, financial, HR and fiddly bits that goes with a merger. I guess my point is that the embryonic medieval fantasy campaign that I was working on several months ago, Onyx, disappeared from my blog.

The merger plus me running the Montporte Dungeon campaign put Onyx on the back burner, but that doesn't mean that I haven't been thinking about it from time to time. Since some of the other Monday Night Gaming Group guys will be GMing after we are finished with the Montporte Dungeon, I will plenty of time to work on a city setting before I come up to bat again as GM.

Right now, I am thinking that:
  • I will use the cosmology from the current Montporte campaign. I like it and I can expand on it in a different setting.
  • GURPS is my likely ruleset, but I want to take a look at Savage Worlds and Fate Core (or Fate Accelerated) before I decide for sure. I was really unhappy with AD&D 1e years ago when I using it in an urban setting and I think I would be even less satisfied with a d20-based game now.
  • My campaign concept will be a mash-up of Constantinople, Thieves World, and Oceans 11. I think GURPS would really support that sort of combo. I thought about some sort of steampunky thing, but that seems to add more complication than it is worth.
Given that +Tim Shorts (Gothridge Manor) has been working on a campaign (pics of his maps here) and Dan is working on a high fantasy GURPS campaign, I have plenty of prep time ahead of me. Maybe I can engineer another merger while I wait.