Starting Concept

This is the concept for an RPG system and campaign setting that I came up with a few months ago on Somethingawful.com.  While I'm not committed to all the details (such as basing it on d20), I am using this as the basis for future designs.

Special thanks to SA poster Error 404 for his input.

Yggdrasil is a heavily modified d20 SRD game that's been swimming around in my head. It vaguely resembles the basic rules, but heavily alters a lot of the mechanics. Yggdrasil has two underlying themes.

-The First Heroes: In a lot of settings, there's background lore that typically goes "There were these guys way back who were awesome." In Yggdrasil, there aren't any such legends. The PCs are literally among the first individuals in this setting of Heroic Caliber. Many of the alterations that I make to the SRD are based on this theme. 'Civilization' is comparable to the Dark Ages, but even moreso-there's no group that has preserved the lost knowledge of a prior age, because there was no prior age. There are no troves of treasure, because there's been no one to mint coin or make magic items. And if a player wants to be a spellcaster, he or she has to literally invent magic theory from scratch. So one of the major themes is nation building.

-Celebrating Powergaming: For all the criticism that 3rd Edition D&D gets for being horribly unbalanced, I have to admit that there is a certain primal joy in taking a game and breaking it over my knees. Yggdrasil is designed to make sure everyone is allowed to get in on this fun.

The world itself takes inspiration from Niven's Ringworld and Norse Mythology. The game begins with the players on a "landberg" floating freely in the sky. A series of branch-like structures connect this landberg with several other landbergs that can be seen clearly with the naked eye. There is one large branch that stretches out into open space, and there is good reason to suspect that the stars at night are actually distant landbergs, and that the large branch links up to them.  The overall structure is the titular Yggdrasil, and exploring it will become a major component of the campaign.

 Publish Post