After a couple years of really embracing the free-associative nature of Savage Worlds, writing settings across a wide-range of genres, I started to feel the urge for some home cooking. What I mean by that is that I was starting to miss the taste of “Home”. Home for me, in a gaming sense, has always been D&D. It’s a game I’ve been playing more or less consistently from my grade school years all the way up until now, with brief interruptions here and there for major life events. It’s the thing I always end up coming back to; the original place.
So, it shouldn’t be too shocking that I wanted to try and bottle some “D&D-ness” in a Savage Worlds game setting. Joel Sparks had already written the excellent Advanced Dungeons & Savages, which was a huge inspiration, but I wanted to go with something a little bit more Forgotten Realms and a little bit less 1st Edition. The main thing I wanted to try and do was to re-introduce the concept of a Class System to the Savage Worlds framework. While I like the open nature of character creation in SW, there were times where I felt like the sense of progression was weak. The guy you roll up at the beginning is really not all that much different from the guy you have at Seasoned or Veteran rank. Sure, they can pop out a couple of extra moves and have some higher dice, but they aren’t shaking the world. With a traditional class-based RPG, there is a clear power curve that intensifies as you layer on each level of advancement. This can be enormously satisfying not only because of the cool abilities you eventually get to unlock, but because you feel like your character grows over time, matching the growth of your interest in the character as things happen to them. I spent an awful lot of time designing and building out classes, crafting a world and coming up with all the little Appendices of Flavor that make big world RPGs fun to play. It was a lot of fun to write.
I did eventually manage to write a campaign and a couple of adventures for this setting as well. I’ll include the Campaign start guide below (I probably owe the creators of Highlander a couple of bucks) and my next publication will probably be the “Super Dungeon” I wrote for Fatemaster. My regular gaming group ran through about 4-5 sessions of this before we moved on to the “new shiny” but I was fairly pleased with where things were going. Enjoy it!
Fatemaster Setting: Fatemaster Campaign:
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