Where did you get that from?
Felltower unabashedly has bits taken from other places. I make little claim to have created all of this ex nihilio, even when I use "a diety did it!" as an explanation.
- Baron Sterick's name and origin story is cribbed from a story from Doug Cole.
- Felltower came as a name suggested by Doug Cole, too. And then my players went and felled a tower in their first session of the megadungeon. You can't make this up.
- Leaving Stericksburg, you cross the Old Stone Bridge across the polluted Silver River. I made that up . . . as far as I know. But as a kid, then twice as an adult, I read (and really liked) Elfstones of Shannara by Terry Brooks.* In it, I found this passage:
Late that afternoon, they arrived at the legendary Silver River and came upon a company of Dwarf Sappers engaged in the construction of a footbridge at a heavily forested narrows.
- Terry Brooks, Elfstones of Shannara, p. 97 (mass market paperback)
Well, okay then. Dwarf-made bridge across the Silver River. Damn, nothing is unique, is it?
I still think I just thought of this. It's a throwaway reference. But it stopped me when I ran into it when I was reading the book.
- The surface is a map from the Judge's Guild Castles II book.
- The need for a megadungeon owes a great deal to this post, and stories of the really old days. I didn't run a megadungeon back then - we didn't run them back in my day - but here we are.
- The Jester Gate was a very, very early add. One of the first things I wanted to add was a gate like the ones in Greyhawk that led places like Dungeonland.
- Not really a little note, but man, this campaign should have had a dead pool!**
* The only Terry Brooks book I actually like. I think Elfstones is an excellent book. It benefits from having a backstory in Sword of Shannara, which I gather is very, very derivative. I've tried to read later ones but wasn't drawn in. This one is just good, in my opinion. It's worth a read even without the book before and after it in the series. I may have to go back and read Sword at some point, and re-try Song, but maybe not.
** A captain dead pool! Nah, maybe not.
"... Sword of Shannara, which I gather is very, very derivative..."
ReplyDeleteIt's so derivative you can see Tolkien's serial numbers still on the frame. All he did was sand her down, repaint her, and then try to pass it off as his own work.
Elfstones however, is really good. Just start there, maybe even stop there, and you never need to see all the cracks in the kitchen sink world he tried to pretend wasn't heavily post-post-apoc Middle Earth.
That's pretty much what I've been told. I only ever tried one other Shannara book, and couldn't get into it. It wasn't "song" but I don't know what it was now. It's too bad, because I felt like Elfstones was very good except for two bits (both pretty minor), and I really liked one of the characters. It's too bad he couldn't sustain it, but like a one-hit-wonder band, it's one more hit than most bands get.
DeleteIt's not a bad series, just pretty derivative. It was the first fantasy series I can remember that was actually post-post-apocalyptic Earth, which at the time made it somewhat novel.
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