The Latest Enemy

With my system out for  sale  I am full steam ahead on working on this new setting. The Grand Bazaar will be a pointcrawl or depthcrawl  and will involve trying to follow the byzantine rules of the mysterious Sultan who runs the whole infinite market of the Grand Bazaar. The idea is for most of the shop and cart owners to be relatively normal NPCs having been lost travelers or merchants who just decided to set up shop in the biggest and best market in the multiverse. However if you want the merchants and inhabitants to get a bit weirder, and you should, especially with how weird things can get in the Grand Bazaar, here are 1d100 weird merchants: All shadow. Speaks in a raspy whisper. Has mouths covering their body. Talks only in questions. Draped patterned, coverings over every exposed bit of flesh. Wants a way home. An engorged spider. Friendly but hungry. Spider made of spiders. Hypnotic and a hard bargainer. Person wearing a turban who is in fact a writhing mass of wor...

With my system out there I have shifted gears towards a setting I stumbled on to and am interested in: The Grand Bazaar! https://thelatestenemy.blogspot.com/2020/09/funday-sunday-grand-bazaar.html  I am going to spend the next couple of weeks expanding it out into a full point crawl ala The Gardens of Ynn  or the Stygian Library  two point crawls that are incredibly playable. "Portobello road, Portobello road Street where the riches of ages are stowed. Anything and everything a chap can unload Is sold off the barrow in Portobello road. You’ll find what you want in the Portobello road." Portobello Road, Bedknobs and Broomsticks The Grand Bazaar is a place where ANYTHING can be found for a price. Here is a 1d100 location list that I am going to be fleshing out in detail.  Tea Lanterns Carpets Furniture Book Pawn shop Oddities Potions Clockwork devices Taxidermy Statuary Masks Ships in Bottles Maps Pillows Weapons ...

 Here is the finished cover art:  This depicts the Maze Hunter stalking his prey. The beautiful art is done by the very talented John Gagne:  https://www.instagram.com/johngagneart/ I have not updated itch.io and it is available at drivethrurpg as well. https://skyorrichegg.itch.io/a-crucible-for-silver https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/329978/A-Crucible-For-Silver Super excited about how the project has progressed!

Reading science fiction and fantasy I am increasing confounded by the anthropomorphic problem. I think I was first made aware of this issue in the novel Sphere by Michael Crichton. Basically the gist of it is that we have certain underlying assumptions that are deeply tied into our biology, linguistics, and culture, that we are not really aware of, and when trying to conceive of alien organisms we tend to heavily anthropomorphize them in ways that do not really make sense for how those creatures might have evolved.  Even our own cultures on earth are extremely diverse in their thinking, underlying assumptions, and cultural proclivities. To this end, the cultures and species of our fictional worlds should be at least as diverse, if not even more so. We tend to imagine languages as being weird and different with different cultures that are informed by them. Lets look at a central underlying assumption we tend to make about our societies: the universality of numbers. Here is a video f...