On: Inspirations and Helpful Guidelines

My current interest in reading up on B/X & BECMI products have been related to what I've labeled "Setting Material," while many of the adventures and rule books had some setting stuff, it was the release of the Gazetteers and Creature Crucibles that really began to be BECMI's "Campaign Setting" information.

As I've leafed through them (I will sit down and read them in publication order one of these weeks), I stumbled across PC2 - Top Ballista: and realized I had found a good chunk of stuff we could look at when dealing with aspects of our game, after all, the area defined in that product was a floating city!

Firstly, there are Sky Gnomes, which, as the book states are "mechanical maniacs, filled with a consuming desire to invent newer, bigger, ever more bizarre and complicated contraptions for the weirdest, most impractical purposes." Well, parts of that sound familiar! We've already recognized that the Gnomes in Deminar are the most adapted to their new environmental, they're the species that started working with steam power, and some (not all, many are more grounded mechanically to stick with practical inventions) are exactly like that description above. That's not to say we're going to take all the stats and personality from PC2 and copy it over wholesale (legally we couldn't anyway), but it certainly a good thing to read before sitting down to write out our version.

Second, there are rules for flying machines in the book, and while they're more styled off of WWI-era fighters, and some of our airships are HUGE, again, we can use these for details we may have not thought of. Or current plan was to take the rules for naval movement and tweak it some, but I think that plan, mixed with some reading of PC2's rules for flying may come up with a system that's still "Basic Rules Lite" but helps sell the aspect of flying about.

See, sometimes inspiration just falls right on top of you!