Eamon - Resources

Okay, I seem to have fallen into a rhythm of making a post every Saturday. Technically I guess I haven't broken my goal of making at least a post a week, but this is not what I had in mind. It's just that I've been very busy lately, and Saturdays have been about the only days I had enough free time to make a post.

Which isn't to say that's the only day I've been doing anything related to the blog. On the contrary, I've spent quite a bit of time this week playing other Eamon adventures to try to get a feel for the system, and planning out the adventure I'm going to create with it. And as I've played other adventures, I've found that several of the details of my previous post are actually incorrect... but more on that next post. For now, I want to get into Eamon's resources.

Speaking of "resources" when it comes to Eamon may seem a bit odd. It doesn't really come with any resources, in the sense I've been using the term in other posts; there are no preset monsters, locations, or other ingredients to put into a created adventure. Of course, it's possible to copy such items from other adventures, but that's true for many systems. However, what Eamon does have is a specific world it's set in. And while I didn't actually discuss settings when in my ground rules when I mentioned resources (maybe I should edit that post to put that in), I also intend, if a game creation system has a particular setting in mind, to create a game in that setting.

In case you were wondering, the rest of the last sentence is "and Darth Vader!"  As we'll very soon see, it's not wrong.

There's a little description of the world of Eamon in the Player's Manual, and a handful of adventures have established a few more details. The most centralized collection of information about the world is in the Eamon wiki. Essentially, Eamon is a planet in the dead center of the Milky Way (though according to the Wiki page on at least one occasion Eamon's creator contradicted himself and placed it at the center of another galaxy), orbited by three moons. In many ways, it seems to be a typical quasi-medieval fantasy world, but because of "the shifting pull of all these great bodies" of the galaxy moving around Eamon, the laws of science work differently there, and time and space shift and warp.

This last bit was clearly put in as an excuse for Eamon adventures that include elements not typically found in fantasy. Indeed, many Eamon adventures take the player off the world of Eamon entirely, pulling him into some other world and then dropping him back at the end. That this was fully intended by Eamon's creator, Donald Brown, is amply demonstrated by the existence of Eamon Adventure #6, The Death Star, written by Donald Brown himself. In this adventure, the PC is pulled through a "reality shift" into the Star Wars universe, starting on the Millennium Falcon and then making his way through the Death Star to possibly face Darth Vader himself (as well as a rather out-of-place kzin from Larry Niven's "Known Space"). Adventure #26 has the PC meeting the Fantastic Four; #28 brings him to the Tower of London on Earth, and #38 returns him to the Star Wars universe for a pastiche of The Empire Strikes Back.

I'm really not sure how this whole "new 'memories'" thing is supposed to work...

So clearly sticking to the established planet of Eamon is by no means a requirement for an Eamon adventure. Still, following established settings is a rule I plan to try to go by in this blog, so my adventure will be set there, even if all the old adventures weren't. I've already given some thought to what I can do that's interesting with the relatively little that's been defined about the world of Eamon, and my first idea was to explore the planet's immediate cosmological surroundings a bit more, in an adventure I was considering calling "The Observatory". This, however, was before I found that the earliest version of the Dungeon Design Diskette I had access to only supported up to 100 rooms; what I had in mind was a bit more extensive than that, and I didn't want to limit it that far. I then came up with another idea set in Eamon's polar regions that would address some of the history of the POWER spell and the reason for its random effects. (That adventure I'd considered calling "Icecap".) But then when I posted about the shortage of adventures for Eamon that were suitable for characters straight out of the Beginners Cave without cheating, I figured that if I was going to complain about that, I ought to do something about it, so I'm going to make an adventure that gives inexperienced characters a good chance at getting more experience and better weapons in an interesting way... and even provides a way for characters to increase their attributes, though that won't be easy. (It won't be easy for the characters, I mean, not that it won't be easy to program in.) It may not contribute to fleshing out the world quite as much as the other two ideas I had, maybe, but I think it could be a worthwhile addition to the collection of Eamon adventures. And as I said, I'm going to be revisiting Eamon later in the blog as I get to the time of newer versions, so it's not like I can't use my other two ideas later on...

Okay, this was a short post, I know. I'm not sure yet whether the next post will be about Eamon or about 001, but either way it's going to be substantially longer than this one. And I hope it'll be up before next Saturday. Anyway, see you then!