Notes on Cold Shard Mountains

Yesterday saw the publication of my latest GURPS thing, a setting/location/framework for dungeon crawling campaigns (buy it here early and often). The idea behind it is to ignore the dungeon fantasy mission statement.

Do what, now? Well, let's review the introduction of GURPS Dungeon Fantasy 1: Adventurers, which sets out what DF is about:

Fantasy is an engaging genre, bursting with wonder and mystery. It offers worlds full of fascinating lands, dotted with great cities and populated by exotic cultures. All of this has a powerful resonance with any gamer familiar with myth, fairytales, and the fantasy epics of literature and film. For that, get GURPS Fantasy.

But something else resonates with nearly every gamer. That’s the thrill of taking a powerful, faux-medieval adventurer down into a cave – or a haunted forest, or a sinister stronghold – and seeing lots of monsters, killing them, and taking their treasure. For that, there’s GURPS Dungeon Fantasy.

So what does Cold Shard Mountains do? Well, not quite that. On the other hand, it doesn't quite reject dungeon fantasy, either. The approach I take to world building these days is largely driven by my long involvement with history and archaeology. Those cultures? Cities? All that kind of thing? It's mostly about that. There are layers upon layers of history, with influences of varying strength and duration. Cultures rise and fade away. Outsiders come and go. All of this leaves its various residues from political structures to cultural patterns. For example, there is in this volume a box which describes common decorative motifs and design styles associated with various past and present societies as well as architectural descriptions of the kinds of underground structures various societies have constructed.

But, of course, the point of it is that it's in the service of dungeon-crawling adventure. There's a convoluted history of dwarven societies including a large empire which used to rule the region but now has an uneasy relationship with the local dwarven population. That means, of course, old dwarven tunnels and lost treasures. There are rebel and stick-it-to-the-man bandit groups who and kill things and take their stuff in the name of liberation. There are noble knights with helpless peasats to protect. There's a vigorous tradition of participants in a really, really complicated theological disput stealing artifacts from one another. Those stylistic attributes are clues to delvers about the kinds of places they're exploring and the kinds of artifacts they're recovering. So it's still killing things and taking their stuff, but it's doing so in a vastly richer context. It's not just generic caves and sacks of treasure; it's places and things with some kind of resonance and nuance to them.

And there are even hooks lurking there quietly for those GMs who want to expand beyond just killing things and taking stuff, but they're by no means obligatory.

Oh, and I should mention that it's located in the world of the "Wellsprings of Creation" article in the Pyramid Dungeon Collection, so this setting is a place which is part of an even larger setting.