We could visit Calif Hornea, and see some of the strangest, most diverse creatures on this continent. Giant, muscular, bronzed barbarians who hang out near beaches doing pointless manual labor all day long; scantily clad enchantresses that glide along on wheels attached to their feet; mechanical dancers that have a convincing, humanoid appearance; and a ruler who often yells at children to drop their baked treats, and climb into flying machines.

Calif Hornea is a crazy place.

In my case, I have also looked at it from the point of view of what would/could make magic cease to exist? I have come up with a sort of partiall hidden mythology that makes it possible for magic to fail and for the Earth to return more or less normally to our actual timeline. (of course the players want to prevent this from happening and some times they get the chance – and don’t screw it up too badly).

I’ve had a great time with the ‘what if’ concepts, working and building in reasons why the roman empire and neo-ancient greece and egypt exist side by side with portions of feudal europe. Lots of fun creating a reason behing all that.

Points 1 and 2 are very valuable by my estimation. If you reference arthur or merlin or excalibur, most every player has an idea what you are talking about and they likely have some of their own views on the subject. You don’t have to describe the power of the magic sword or go into great detail about how powerful a king Arthur was. Instead, becuase the players already know or at least have an inkling, you can focus on differences.

In the same way, you can use such ‘common knowledge’ as points of reference for other things in the campaign. Like that wizard could have been a peer to merlin or this magic sword pales in comparison to excalibur etc. (Don’t even get me started on greek mythology).

And on top of it all, if you don’t know too much about the subject . . . well the hsitories just got it wrong is all. There are no contermporary writings about arthur. He isn’t even mentioned (to the best of my knowledge) until centuries after he lived. playing around with the historiography by itself can be fun plus you can use it as a shield for you lack of scholarly knowledge on a specific subject.

and if you look back far enough, there is already a great deal of published information for earth based D&D games from the old 2nd edition green books to several interesting Dragon articles. If you can get your hands on some you’ll find that a good deal of the work is already done and you just have to do some mix and matching and fleshing out the things that you want to do.

Earth is Awesome. Thanks for inviting me Ed!