For 2026 I kicked off a new campaign with my main gaming group, at least in a manner of speaking. After playing a campaign using Apocalypse World: Burned Over for 18 sessions, one of my players triggered one of the new Burned Over mechanics, the ‘game changer’. I employed my ‘game changer’ of choice, which involved switching over the entire campaign to another system. After going back and forth between a few ideas of varying quality, I decided to bring the game full-circle and bring the characters into the DIE RPG. In retrospect this was an obvious choice; what made this a “full circle” was my initial choice to borrow character creation elements from the DIE scenario ‘The Last Game Before Graduation’ back when I began the game at the beginning of 2025. With that starting point, and considering the principle ‘Persona Generation is Never Over’, having the Apocalypse World game slide into DIE actually worked quite well and even gave me more to work with than our typical shorter DIE games do (although I’ve taken some liberties to make the game a bit more meta, but I’ll talk about that later this year after my players have seen more of what I’ve planned).

One of the more important parts of this ‘second arc’ is that there is a clear objective and clear end state. As much as I enjoy DIE and what I have planned, it’s not really the sort of game that’s meant to meander too much. In some ways that’s a common thread in the campaigns my main group runs; even though the start may wander back and forth, eventually the game collapses onto “the plot” and then everything starts pointing in one direction. I don’t dislike that, per se, but it’s also not necessarily my ideal state. I’ve written in other places about my desire for an idealized fantasy sandbox, even as that tends to work against how I usually run and prep games. Still, even knowing how my group engages with games I think there’s room to make a setting feel big and expansive, and let exploration be an important part of an ongoing campaign.

For a good long while, I’ve been running games with settings that were just a matter of course. While I did outline a setting for Burning Wheel back in 2024, the details put forth by players were much more important than any ‘truths’ I put down at the beginning. In 2021 Cyberpunk Red was written with a traditionally prepared setting, but I was coloring within the lines of the game and kept things fairly small. Prepping a bigger, more detailed setting hasn’t really been something I excel at, but at the same time it always felt that a big fantasy campaign in the vein of what people envision a Dungeons and Dragons campaign looking like would require more worldbuilding and, more importantly, more prep. ‘More prep’ hasn’t really aligned with how I run my games…but I am willing to change that.

While my reading of fantasy games deserves its own post (it may get one, either here or on the other site), the important thing for me looking forward is what sorts of ideas have inspired me to write another fantasy setting and run another fantasy game. As is somewhat typical for me, a few superstructures have really drawn me in, more so than any specific world. It all starts with Electric Bastionland. Chris McDowall’s stripped-down game of a massive fantastical city sets forth a world that is both dripping with character but also establishes a simple reality: The City is the center of everything. The City has energy, chaos, anything you could possibly want hidden within multiple layers of buildings and (of course) the Underground. As you leave the city, though, and get further and further away, the technology, magic, and even people of the city get harder and harder to access.

Three things happened which led to me wanting to write a bigger game around the electric version of Bastionland. First, in prepping for an Electric Bastionland game I wrote but never ran, I had this image of a roadside inn out in what is called the ‘Deep Country’. It’s vaguely like a medieval tavern, but with an old tube TV playing news dispatches on repeat and a roadside shrine right outside. It was clear to me that there’s a fruitful void in how McDowall describes ‘Deep Country’, and I was hardly the only person to recognize that Deep Country could align with the tropes and tech level of a typical D&D game.

The second thing that happened was I played Caves of Qud. Caves of Qud isn’t the only ‘Dying Earth’ setting I investigated in the last year or so; I bought the game years ago but only really got into it after I read a few books in Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun. It became clear that this far-future science-fantasy worldbuilding was really sticking with me, and I knew that it was already a mainstay of the classic D&D ‘appendix N’ thanks to authors like Jack Vance. I looked back at Electric Bastionland and at other OSR games that claimed similar themes, like Kevin Crawford’s Worlds Without Number, and tried to figure out how I’d make everything come together.

I found the exact game to “make everything come together” when I bought a hardcopy of Mutant Crawl Classics at PAX Unplugged. Mutant Crawl Classics is based at some level on Gamma World but is much more explicitly aligned with a ‘Dying Earth’ type setting with its mix of mutant and neolithic characters and big spread of future tech to litter the world with. It is by far the closest TTRPG to ‘Caves of Qud for the tabletop’, and its close compatibility with Dungeon Crawl Classics got gears turning in my head. And to that end, the familial relationships of the entire OSR got gears turning in my head.

In some ways my idea is just an extension of Electric Bastionland. The city is the center of everything, the one beacon where technology is returning to the world after a cataclysm that buried a much more advanced society. The big difference, though, is that the center of the world, the start of the adventure, is in the Deep Country. The adventure and the perspective of the characters will be more like typical fantasy adventurers, seeing mostly their village and maybe the next villages over but possibly having heard stories of wondrous artifacts and powerful magic. And of course, not to leave Mutant Crawl Classics out of this, there’s also the possibility to venture out even further, to find hidden wonders but also terrifying monsters and mutants.

The basic outline of the setting will take the radial approach from Electric Bastionland and expand it. There’s the city in the middle, likely plotted using the ‘Bigger Bastionland’ scheme that I wrote a while ago. From there the Deep Country and Deep Water extend out beyond the city, starting with suburbs and far-flung villages along train lines and extending out into fiefdoms squabbling amongst themselves for control of rivers and trade roads. At some point, the roads disappear into the woods and things get wilder and weirder. Far enough away from the city, and the world is nothing more than a span of ruins, monsters, and places that nature has fully reclaimed. I’m thinking the way I want to organize this spatially will be a transit map; Electric Bastionland’s worldbuilding starts with the phenomenal idea of creating transit loops within a district of the city, and augmenting that with commuter lines that head out into the hinterlands could be a great way to organize the Deep Country without being too prescriptive. As to the wilds beyond…that may be a place where some good old-fashioned hex mapping is necessary.

There’s also of course the question of what players will want to do, and that highly depends on how the beginning of the game is structured. As mentioned above I want things to start in the Deep Country, in part because my idea was to adapt Dungeon Crawl Classics as the core of the game; things would shift towards Electric Bastionland if characters went into the city, and towards Mutant Crawl Classics if they ventured all the way into the wilderness. The important thing, really, is to make both of those choices seem interesting, and that is going to come down to what I provide that players in terms of information.

Thinking about how to make this gameable may be putting the cart before the horse, as I haven’t written the world yet. Running everything in Dungeon Crawl Classics would make a lot of sense and be fairly easy; it also runs afoul of how my players typically like to create characters. My thinking on this is to once again remind myself I haven’t written the world yet. When looking at other fantasy games, character choices align to the world and there’s a whole realm of possibilities to adapt other games if you do your writing and come up with those character options first instead of picking a system and trying to mold your world around that (which is still kind of what I’ve done, but that’s neither here nor there). After reading Legend in the Mist, it occurred to me that writing traits and magic systems that align with my world would be fairly easy…once I have the world. That is perhaps a bit more ambitious than what I otherwise planned but I think it’ll be an excellent compromise between my players’ desire for character creation control and my desire for an expansive world.

If I do plan out this world the way I want it’s going to be a project, it’s going to take some time. That said, I have time to do this. Our recent discussions about the next campaign for the group resulted in three different people raising their hands, and that’s an indication that I may be stepping back for a bit after I finish the current run of DIE. I often want to GM but this enforced rest may be good for me; it may encourage me to take some time to write and create something I want to play in that will make a fantasy campaign finally stick. That notion is exciting to me; several of my players have wanted to revisit campaign worlds again and again, but I’ve rarely had the same feeling. I’m looking forward to creating something that I can have some ownership of, which I’ll want to write and play again and again. For now, it may be time to draft a city and write a fictional transit system.