Bronze Age Worlds

Every since purchasing and reading Necromancer Games excellent product, “Ancient Kingdoms: Mesopotamia” (2004) I have thought about creating a Bronze Age campaign. The Necromancer Games product assumes a D20 Rules setting but my interests would be in other rules.

Blood & Bronze RPG

If I was going to use a pseudo-historical setting I would likely use Cyclopean Games, “Blood & Bronze” rules (2014). I am more likely to want to create my own setting. I recently received my kickstarter reward of the hardcover of Chaosium Inc’s “Runequest” Classic rules so these would be an opportunity to use them.

I started out with a simple sketch image with some notes scribbled on it to organize my thoughts on what I wanted the setting to look like (see image).  Calling the setting “Alusia” I envision a lost world island sandbox with the players coming from more civilized lands on an exploring ship.  The civilized lands are seven city-states only loosely described since none of the adventuring will occur in the civilized regions. Alusia is an island with few settlements and could be a lost world (such as the Isle of Dread) or more in keeping with Runequest’s Monster Island.

Alusia concept map

After setting this aside for a few weeks I recently came back to the concept and cleaned up the setting map (see image).

Alusia and the Seven Cities

Now the decision is on whether to use the Runequest classic rules or not. Although Runequest is frequently considered a bronze age roleplaying system it has several elements that are not bronze age.  I would have to remove longswords and plate armour and other anachronisms. I have never been a fan of the Runequest magic system.  Having every person in the world able to cast simple magic never sat right with me.  But in this setting I could have magic available to the players by default only. The simple nature of Runequest magic would not be as off-putting on such a remote sandbox setting.