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Myth is ingrained deep into the soil of Scarn: divine visitations, ancient monsters, unknown lands, and glory-seeking heroes. The Scarred Lands are a place of magic, mystery, and horror on a properly epic scale…. vengeful creatures roaming eldritch landscapes; divine entities leading armies against one another; catastrophic weather and violent, sometimes phenomenal storms…; and myths and legends taking place all around.
The Scarred Lands as a setting are the perfect environment to run a mythic-tier campaign, using the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Mythic Adventures rules. It is not at all mandatory to use the Scarred Lands in this way, but GMs should find plenty of tools at their disposal for making their player characters into legendary heroes.
I don’t want people to get the wrong idea: The new Scarred Lands won’t look like Exalted. But this is a world where, more or less, Zeus has literally just overthrown Kronos and sent him to Tartarus. For many PCs, the Titanswar occurred within living memory, or at most just a few generations ago, so its impact cannot be overstated. Iliad, Odyssey, Metamorphoses, Bullfinch’s Mythology, the Golden Bough, these things have all influenced how I see the Scarred Lands.
Given the debts the setting owes to our own mythology, we have really tried to capture the feel of a young world, where gods and monsters are a part of everyday life, and with rich cultures that might resemble those of classic antiquity a little more than you remember from the original Scarred Lands.
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Just this year I got into this setting, so cool, I never knew what I was missing. I’m in the process of converting over to D&D 5th edition.
Is the Scarred Lands reboot/refresh going to have new art to go along with it? I have all the old D20 3.X books, and it was my favored setting to run campaigns in back in the early to mid-late 2000s. The setting and writing were great, but the art was lacking… especially the picture of Corean in the Divine and the Defeated. I hope he gets some new art that makes him look better.
Hi Kuya,
Yes, the new Player’s Guide: Ghelspad for Scarred Lands 2.0 will have all new art, with new art direction.
Yeah!
Cheers,
Scott
One thing I’ve always wanted to see from a campaign setting is an avoidance of the “every race but humanity is in decline” trope, enshrined by Tolkein in Lord of the Rings.
I had hoped that the Howard-inspired “Primeval Thule” setting published by Sasquatch Game Studio would be this setting, but sure enough, the elves are already an empire in the past tense, even as human city-states appear in their infancy.
As another campaign setting that defines itself as a young world, Scarred Lands has a lot of potential to be that setting where humans aren’t the default, where the expansion of human territories is limited by neighbors who can still assert themselves. Something to possibly keep in mind, depending on how much rewritinf the setting is going to get.