... now with 35% more arrogance!

Monday, April 8, 2019

9 and 30 Kingdoms Campaign: Player Handout

You may remember the world-building handouts posts (Part I, Part II, Part III) that I did a while back to illustrate some things I was saying about keeping campaign background information to a minimum, so that players don't have to memorize massive amounts of information just to play. I promised to do a sample handout showing which bits of world-building background would be available to players.

It's done, and you can down load it here: 9and30handout1.pdf.

It's two pages, but only one page is written information. The first page is a local map, just a quick reference for what is nearby and the names of a select few distant places. There's actually another tiny map showing the entire Great Fettered Sea on the actual handout page. It took a little bit of time to do the main map, but not as long as I was expecting. The hard part, really, was including it in the PDF with the proper resolution and placement.

For reference, here is a phone pic of the original map I used about ... five years ago, I think? It's pretty crude and beat up. And really, that was the only handout I used at the time. I did give a quick run-down at the time of a couple bits of information that are in the new handout, but I really didn't take that long to explain the setting. It's a pretty simple setting.

5 comments:

  1. I love it! The name is evocative. I know I'm going to have to "borrow" The X and X Kingdoms in some form.

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    1. There was an expression like it in some fairy tales (I'm thinking Russian fairy tales, but I can't find a reference now.) The kingdoms are never named, it's a just a cliché. I came up with The Nine and Thirty Kingdoms both to evoke the sound of that original phrase and to suggest the idea of a whole bunch of unnamed small kingdoms, possibly not 39 of them, but at one time long ago someone counted at least 39 and the phrase stuck.

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  2. Very cool! I'm intrigued enough to see if I can find the reference.

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    1. I tracked it down!

      It's an expression from Russian fairy tales, as I thought. Many of them begin with "across thrice-nine lands, in a thrice-ninth kingdom, in a thrice-tenth country".

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  3. Enchanting what’s to spy what sundry men make wrought upon their founding scripts.

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