Let’s take a break about talking about Pandora Excess. Going through my old work getting nostalgic for some projects for other publishers that turned into total clusterfucks and led to nothing, I found a folder for a Savage Worlds Victorian alt-history/steampunk (I guess any steampunk is alt-history . . .) set in a Zanzibar colonized and administered by the Germans (due to an accelerated German colonization effort kicked off due to German Unification happening at the time of the German Confederation).
The reason I had chosen Zanzibar was due to its connections with the exploration of East Africa, and the work coincided with my reading Sir Richard Francis Burton’s First Footsteps in East Africa. I chose to have it run by the Germans as a very strong signal that this was not the history we know. While some might be aware of Germany’s late entry into the colonization of Africa, the mention of Prussian Zanzibar did the trick of shocking my players into a recognition that this place was very different™.
The plan was to have a couple of adventures immersing the PCs in a supernatural plot in Zanzibar, which would lead them onto the continent and get them involved in the exploration of East Africa. Two inspirations for the atmospherics for this part of the game would be the movies Mountains of the Moon and the Ghost and the Darkness.
This never happened. The playtest ran for two sessions, introducing the players to alt-Zanzibar and got them involved in the Zanzibar underworld and had a single encounter with something that was very wrong.
Very, very wrong.
I’m going to post some of the resources I was using, including the pre-generated characters, in the coming days. That will give you a nice break from my Borderlands obsession.
You can find more information on the amazing Sir Richard Francis Burton at Wikipedia.
You can find find his book First Footsteps in East Africa at Project Gutenberg.
You can find more information on Mountains of the Moon at Wikipedia and IMDB.
You can find more information on the Ghost and the Darkness at Wikipedia and IMDB.