Gygax 75 Challenge - Make A Campaign Setting in 5 Weeks!

So, it's been... a while since I have posted here. Things have been up and down, lots going on, but here's hoping I can make this time stick. I have been pushing myself to be a little more creative, as I feel that a lack of any creative output has really caused some issues in my life.

To help with that, I am going to give the Gygax 75 Challenge a go - see if I can use it to make a campaign setting in 5 weeks. Specifically, I am going to work up a setting for a long-in-the-tooth back burner project; an OSR Wavecrawl/Saltbox Pirates game.

Each week, I will post up what I have managed, and by the end of it, we will see what I have managed to make. Hopefully, this will end with a wonderfully weird and interesting place to run a few games.

You can even follow along at home - visit Ray Otus' itch.io store and download the workbook!

For some background, we start a literal decade ago (Jesus Christ I feel old), with Pathfinder's Skulls & Shackles Adventure Path.

Skulls & Shackles was something fairly different; after a few city-based adventures, some larger save-the-world type stories, Paizo had a lot of success with Kingmaker, a sandbox-story hybrid. So, they started working on another mix of standard story progression and sandbox elements, this time with a pirate theme! 

Swashbuckling, derring-do and adventure on the high seas! At least, that was what was promised.

Anyone who has read through any of the Pathfinder APs knows that they tend to have some issues. Skulls & Shackles' come out very quickly. The opening has your characters doing nothing but making skill checks for 30 in-game days, with some breaks for roleplaying getting to know your shipmates. And you'd better get to know all two dozen of them, 'cause there's a test at the end!

Once you get past that, the game's "sandbox" elements come to the fore - you have a pirate ship, so go be pirates! Have two whole levels worth of non-plot related random encounters, I guess? But don't go to any of the exciting places on the map, those become important in the next book.

And the worst of the worst, despite being a pirate-themed adventure, it doesn't assume people will be using guns? Despite having rules for them (which were new and shiny when this came out)?

I guess it does have sidebars about how to add guns to each book, but it might as well just say "reskin a few enemies" and be done with it. But, come on - a pirate game without braces of pistols? Without cannons!? Fuck me.

I will go into my other issues with the AP as we go, but yeah - I realised I wanted a D&D-ish pirate game, and Skulls & Shackles didn't scratch the itch, so much as give me hives. So, I decided to look at making the whole thing into a proper sandbox. However, there is a lot of content there (six books!), so it might be better to see about splitting it up into easy to make chunks.

Tune in over the next 5 weeks to see how things pan out!