Running through Ricasa (Ricasa Setting)
More Creator's Notes
This may surprise you, but this- all of this- sprang entirely from an offhand short story I wrote once in an attempt to make a better plot for a D&D movie than the one they gave. It didn't even manage to get completed and I think it accomplished that perfectly.
The story languished when I lost interest, then got deleted altogether when I purged my Documents folder recently. That should have been the end of it, but Ricasa refused to die. It kept nagging at the edge of my brain, "Hey! What the hell do you think you're doing! Get back here!"
So I went back. And the setting just started throwing ideas at me, none of them very serious. Laws against bad music. German-styled pacifists. A thousand years of peace bracketed by five hundred years of war. And the characters wrote themselves into it- klepto kings, evil barons, construction worker snipers. It just wouldn't let me stop, and unlike the story, it proved itself fun to write.
That's basically the whole idea. Ricasan campaigns are definitely serious power-leveling runs, true. But if it doesn't seem like fun, or make the players laugh, then the whole thing should be scrapped and retried. A Ricasan campaign is nothing if not enjoyable and comedic, and I've tried to reflect that as best I can in my manner of speech and writing style here. The whole point is to get the players (or the DM) out of there in a better mood than when they came in.
Other than that, and the countries which refused to leave, the whole campaign is an open book. I'm not writing a book that encases the place in iron. To quote some D&D literature, "I merely set the stage. You provided the script." And that's what we want to do here- give you a huge stage to run your ideas from, but let the script write itself. No two Ricasa campaigns should be the same- it ought to feel different every time around.
--The Archivist 15:52, 4 September 2007 (MDT)
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