Introduction to IslandLand

Introduction to IslandLand

Islandland (not a permanent title) is a homebrew setting and campaign for Savage Worlds. A group of friends and I developed the basics of it after a long day of jokingly proposing more serious ideas and seriously proposing more outrageous ideas. What we came up with was still pretty goofy, though.

The setting itself, like many individual session I’ve planned, is a bit of a pop culture mashup. We all like steampunk, but after Gaslight London trailed off on a cliffhanger, I didn’t want to return to that sort of urban/historical fantasy version of it. Instead we decided to run with an airship based steampunk universe. And, to make things more interesting and magical, we decided that the world will be made up of islands floating in the sky above some unknowable infinite sea far below. And because we were getting a touch sleep deprived at this point, someone joked that we should just do Pirates of the Caribbean in the sky. So now our airships were flying sailing ships.

Drawing of ship at sea

So how is this a mashup? I’ve long wanted to run a standard high fantasy setting (I have no go-to in Savage Worlds, but any Dungeons and Dragons setting would work) where all the races are made up of animal-people. No dwarfs, but mole-people and ant-people and beaver-people would all fill parts of that economic and social niche. Dog-people who are loyal and work together, cat-people who are more solitary, who would make excellent spies and rogues. Bird people of various sorts who all have the ability to fly. Furry-world, as a friend called it.

So we did it, we crossed Pirates of the Caribbean and Disney’s animated Robin Hood and made a weird flying island animal-person populated world where nothing seemingly makes sense, but where we do our best to take our admittedly absurd starting point and develop logically from there.

This setting makes use of bits and pieces of a number of different Savage World settings and source books. I have yet to decide on a ruleset for ships and ship combat, since I tend to like a rules-light implementation so that we can focus on role playing and character development, and all the rule sets I’ve browsed have been rather complex. To play as we are playing, Savage Worlds Core, the Fantasy and Horror Companions, Gaslight 3rd Edition(Battlefield Press) and Tricky Troll Games’ Beastfolksupplements are required.

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