Riffing some more on Chris's post about
a sense of place in your role-playing game settings, my recent trip out to far West Texas brought to mind the Broken Lands from
B/X D&D's Known World setting.
For those of you not familiar with that milieu, when the
D&D Expert Set came out, it included, along with the Expert rulebook, the adventure
X1 Isle of Dread. That module contained a short gazeteer with descriptions of various areas in the game setting (called the Known World), including the Broken Lands, "an area of rocky badlands and old volcanic lava beds ... inhabited mainly by outcasts and monsters."
I wonder if the writer had this part of West Texas in mind when he came up with the Broken Lands. Looks like monster territory to me.
I went camping and rafting with my dad and brother a lot in the time when I was really into D&D bitd. One of the more memorable trips was spent in the Big Bend area--and you better believe that I imagined all kinds of monsters haunting that broken land.
ReplyDeleteGood call and post.