Happy new year to my fellow fans of all things epic! I certainly hope we all have a better year in 2021. It's been a quiet holiday for me, as can be expected with COVID lockdowns and whatnot. But I've managed to keep things epic with a rewatch of the Lord of the Rings movie trilogy. (I've always felt those movies are particularly Xmas holiday-themed.) I've also been running an online Burning Wheel campaign for the past couple months. One of the players, my good friend Tom, recently came up with a great idea which inspired me to write this blog post. I'll just go ahead and quote him below: "I want to make an epic continent-spanning campaign where the players are from a society that doesn't have the tech for maps and they have to navigate via peripli and itinerania — I guess these are basically just real world node maps." -- Tom  OK, so chances are you're having the same initial reaction as I did to this and are wondering what peripli and itineraria ...

High steampunk. Massive dirigibles and flying trains. Biplanes! Pirates, privateers, ninjas, and mobsters. Victorian gentlemen, nobles, political intrigue. Gaslamp gutter rats, degenerates, criminal underground. Gadgets! Airborne swashbuckling action. Welcome to Thame's End. In today’s post, I’ll introduce a steampunk campaign setting I created some years ago called “Starcatchers”. It’s about bi-plane flying mercenaries who chase and snag falling meteorites mid-air (among other things). It’s bloody epic. The Dragonforce song ‘Heroes of Our Time’ always reminds me of my good old Starcatchers campaigns. So, go ahead and blast this while I dig up my notes: Welcome to Thame's End Far, far away through space, on the other side of the Milky Way, a small blue planet revolves around a bright orange star. It is a warmish planet, with vast oceans and tropical islands, deserts and rainforests, and not much in the way of ice or snow. There are people on this planet – an ...

Guest post by Joseph Brady This Kickstarter is harkening back to the hallucinogenic tie-dye, post-apocalyptic, mind-warping era of  Heavy Metal ,  Fantastic Planet , and, well, substance abuse. Labeling itself as one part  Oregon Trail  and one part  Dying Earth , players know from the outset that that’s exactly what they’re getting into. What is It All About? This is set up as a sandbox campaign with ample interesting locales, which has really lived up to, even embraced, its theme. This is a world where powerful cats rule a nation, elves are diseased humans being gradually mentally unraveled and called into the mists of the forest never to return, insects may rewrite an organism’s basic purpose or perhaps even their soul, and those who are many are yet one collective. Also: werepug. You want an absolutely over-the-top campaign setting? UVG has you covered in spades. And remember: Oregon Trail. Throughout this entire bizarro landscape, the PCs reall...