Wyrding Media

In Part One of my overview of my weird science-fantasy campaign, I highlighted some of my S&S fiction influences of the setting, but not the more pure Sci-Fi and graphic art elements that helped to shape the world.

As you can see in the Artume Campaign Guide from the previous article, the setting takes place in a hollow world created by a chaos godling and has certain features that were inspired by fiction and film.

The idea of a hollow world lit by an internal sun is certainly nothing new in science-fantasy fiction. French author Jules Verne published Journey to the Center of the Earth in English in 1871, Willis George Emerson wrote The Smoky God in 1908 and Edgar Rice Burroughs brought us the world of Pellucidar starting in 1914.

The interior of Artume is divided into different domains that are stages for me to host the sandbox RPG adventures and they each have a distinct environment and “flavor” to them. The Lunar Wastes and the Moondust Sea are influenced by the novels and films of Dune by Frank Herbert, the oddball ’70s film The Boy and His Dog (adapted from a Harlan Ellison story) as well as the anime film Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. The look and feel of the wastelands was also shaped and influenced by the artwork of Moebius, Philippe Druillet, and Wayne Barlowe.

Early this year, after re-reading some of my old favorite S&S fiction, I discovered that I really wanted to create a kind of sandboxed campaign incorporating many of my favorite science-fantasy themes straight from the pages of the classic fantasy writers of the ’60s and ’70s that I grew up with. I wanted to really focus on my favorite weird stuff from Gary Gygax’s Appendix N like Michael Moorcock’s multiverse, Jack Vance’s Dying Earth, Fred Saberhagen’s Empire of the East, H.P. Lovecraft’s Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, and various works by Roger Zelazny. Outside of the Appendix N literature, I was also heavily influenced by Clark Ashton Smith’s Zothique Cycle (as was Jack Vance, I might add).

I knew that I wanted it to combine together the elements of Science-Fiction and Fantasy that were so common in the days before every other book on the bookstore shelves was an unremarkable 800 page high-fantasy Tolkien-clone. I wanted weird chaos-warped wastelands, psionics mixed with magic, and mysterious ancient technology buried below the surface just waiting for the player characters to find and use to fight the forces of darkness.

So, I set myself to crafting Artume, my odd little post-apocalyptic hollow-world prison planet to be the sandbox where I could both host entertaining games and explore the S&S that I was interested in. I quickly decided on using the Old-School Essentials (OSE) ruleset to run the games as it allowed for the OSR flavor I was looking for with a nicely updated format that made it more appealing for me than just trying to use a vintage RPG such as AD&D 1e. OSE was also the right choice for Artume as it has expansions in the form of zines that add to the weirdness with psionics and energy weapons…just what I needed to make my science-fantasy creation come to life.

As I needed a stage, some framing structure on which to build my sandbox campaign, I created the small and self-contained world of Artume and some starting locations and factions. Here is the campaign guide that I created for my players.