It's based on an idea from Monte Cook. His early campaign world called Pramael is a setting before history. The idea is that the world is new. There are no ancient ruins to explore as there are no structures to become ruined. There are no gods yet. Magic is in its infancy. Building a campaign for this would be extremely hard, as it would require both setting and adventures to be made from scratch.
I'm thinking it would have a "points of light" feel, with agrarian villages scattered about. I could draw heavily on real world evidence of the rise of agrarianism. At the same time, I don't want it to feel too low tech. One idea is to have a stunted civilization. There would be competing nomads who would raid these villages. Some would be working for the bad guys.
Perhaps some classes would be preferred: Barbarian, druid, ranger, sorcerer. Removing clerics and wizards would make this much easier. I like the idea that the races are intermixed and don't have homelands. I could do all the handbook races, reduce them, or increase them. Imagine a world where there were originally 12 major races living side by side. Tieflings, aasimar, lion men, whatever.
I like the idea of a major force keeping the good races down. There's one race that prevents these disparate communities from growing and sharing information. It could be giants or dragons or devils or something Cthulhuesque. This will likely be the source for the supernatural weirdness of the world, preventing the campaign from feeling historical. Perhaps they use the humanoid communities for some purpose: food, power, an experiment (perhaps reaching its conclusion). Who knows. The elites of this world may be experts in tying communities together, seeing it as their only long term salvation. Think druids and rangers. There would be one key organization of these folks that would be preservers of knowledge and runners between communities. Turning the nomads to their cause would be a major goal.
I like the idea of not knowing much about the area. I envision using GW's Mighty Empires hexes and starting with one hex. I would intentionally not know what was over the mountains as DM. On the other hand, I really liked making my Lebanon campaign, as it head built in cultures, geography and easily adapted ideas.
The rules would be interesting to devise. It would be a Pathfinder game. I would use Iron Age charts of weapons available (I'm sure that's around somewhere). The magic would be the hard part. Perhaps early adventures would be about finding special components or hunting down that "one guy" who knows how to craft a magic sword and getting him back to the village from far away. Perhaps all the magic of the world is obtained by stealing it from our bad guys. I like the idea that all magic comes from dragons or from the devils.
This doesn't mean the campaign would be low fantasy. There would certainly be low level tasks to perform, but it would be clear from the onset that the people need to be liberated to succeed.
Nobody really reads this blog, but feel free to comment and make suggestions.
