Prismatic Planet

Okay, I'm giving this a try. 

I've wanted to write this setting for a long time, and now I've finally found a name I really like.

I'd prefer to have a full product to offer you, but instead I'll start a series of posts under the Prismatic Planet tag. Maybe one day I'll compile the whole thing and publish it. 

For now, I hope you enjoy these posts!

This is a sword and planet setting, inspired by my love of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Barsoom and its spiritual successors like Dark Sun and Carcosa. It also draws from Lovecraft, H.G. Wells, other pulp and weird fiction, traditional D&D, and various other works.

The planet itself is roughly the size of Mars and inhabited by savage humans of different colors—chalk white, obsidian, red, blue, green, and yellow, at least for now. Water scarce but there are a few huge lakes, forests and frozen regions.

The world is populated with strange creatures, including dinosaurs, banths, morlocks, and nightgaunts, and a few ideas discussed in my Teratogenicon. 

There is no centralized government or kingdoms, only a few large cities that rule over nearby villages. While there are no lizard or snake people for now, a few insect colonies do exist. Religion is present but remains materialistic, with no active demons or deities introduced yet.

Psionics are common across all creatures. Advanced technology exists, but few understand or know how to use it. The beings who created it—the progenitors—might be Rykors, Mahars, brains in vats, or something else entirely. They won’t appear soon.

I do not have an specific system for that, but if one is needed I'll certainly use some flavor of OSR. But hopefully it can be used across several systems.

Leave any questions in the comments and I'll answer them to the best of my ability!

Random stopwatch encounters

This is a small improvement over an old idea.

The DM rolls 1d100 in secret. Then sets a stopwatch for that many minutes.

When the time is over—there IS an encounter.

This will keep players on their toes! And it has several advantages over checking for encounters every 30 or 60 minutes:

- No more useless rolls where nothing happens.
- Encounters can happen almost simultaneously—roll a 1 or 2, and one side might get reinforcements during the fight!
- Or the newcomers might wait to see who wins… and jump in after.

It would work well for dungeon exploration. On average, you get an encounter every 50 minutes of actual play, on average. Sounds good to me, but you can adjust to your liking.

For wilderness exploration, I'm not sure - maybe you could roll 1d100 and count hours, but that would defeat the purpose of using a stopwatch...

On a similar topic...

In Pellucidar, Chapter 2, Edgar Rice Burroughs describes a series of random encounters—but most are hand-waved until a meaningful one (with a cave bear) actually happens.

Maybe D&D deserves a mechanic like that to make wilderness encounters more meaningful. Day one you circumvent some snakes, day 3, you scare wolves with arrows, day 5 you see pterodactyls in the distance, and day 7... BAM! Roll initiative.

But this deserves further reflection. 

For now, you can check my small app (explanation here) and my latest book to make your wilderness encounters easier to generate.