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SARMARKAND: A role-playing world.
This collection of ideas and maps and pictures is something I have been working on for some time. It is a montage of ideas that have occurred to me during my many years of role playing and game creation. I provide them to you in a more cohesive single world merely because it makes for a more attractive package. You can use all of the contents as presented, in a single world, or you can pick and chose parts of the product and meld them into your world or story. To some degree that is what I have done, more than likely a majority of my creations are at the very least derived from existing science fictional and fantasy tropes. Some of them are simply recoloured steals, just too good not to use.
Sarmarkand is a personal journey, one which most serious role players think about at some point in their gaming lives. To a lesser extent all GMs do this with every story and adventure they create. I just made mine bigger and put it down on paper, then paid for art work, then maybe get an editor and a layout person… maybe.
I started writing about Sarmarkand after buying a leather covered notebook. By random chance the notebook was the perfect size and weight for me, I am very much a stationery junkie. It was so perfect that I had to use it. The first page (pictured) was the world map as it came to me at that very instant. You can see that the original idea held pretty true throughout the project, which suggests to me that I have continued to think it was a good idea.
I cannot recall what gave me the idea of the ringworld slice or the Spike. I had read Ringworld many years ago, although I had read Hammerfall shortly before I did this sketch, so maybe I was mentally linking a bunch of Niven-ideas from the past. I do know that the Abyss Cloud was derived from the MMO game Ryzom, which used a similar look and feel to break up its various game areas.
I decided early on that the technology and historical feel of the world would be Musketeers and Steam. I had seen a few musketeer movies around that time, especially the one with the flying ships, and that imagery had stuck fast. I also consider the musketeer period (1610) to be the best cultural period ever conceived for a role playing game. It has just about everything you could ask for in an environment/culture, it is well documented and there is an abundance of pictorial and film material supporting it. It has pirates, what more can you ask for? What it lacks can be slotted in. It is, to me, a much richer and more detailed world than any of the high fantasy worlds that tend to dominate roleplaying. There are plenty of role playing games in this era already to help you along.
One of the first things I did decide on was that elves and dwarves would not be a major component of the game, they would be truly races on the decline, remnants of what they might have been. I was even pretty keen on making elves truly nasty creatures, an enemy. As the project moved along however I seem to have softened because now elves and dwarves are in there, and even an option as a player character class if you really want. They do have issues however, and they are still on the decline.
The other thing I did want in the game was Goblins. I had been (probably still) working on two other games that centred around Goblins. I really wanted goblins to play a major part of the story, and, err, I think I achieved that. Goblins are like a sonic screwdriver, they can do anything.
The most important part of Sarmarkand is The Abyss. This has provided me with the most wonderful mechanism for creation, totally freeing the mind to invent new ideas and impossible stories. Once I got started on the airships, and pirates, it just didn’t stop. Eventually I tied it into the entire overarching story of the world and how it all came about, and how it might end.
I hope that Sarmarkand works as a catalyst for you, whether you use this product as is, or you simply extract parts of it for your own game. I know I gather similar products for just that reason.
Acknowledgements:
Jeff Brown - landscape artist.
Monkeyblood - who did the cartography for me.
Eric Quigley - who did most of the character/creature art, starting with the Goblins.
The most amazing person in my world: Maree.
