Zamonia as a setting for an RPG

[CelestialSloth]

I have read the books in the Zamonia series (the ones that have been translated to English, anyway) and was wondering if anyone had thought to use Zamonia as a setting for an RPG.
So, have you?
Does anyone know what I'm talking about?

[Yora]

I would say the first thing you need to decide is what kind of campaign you want to run. It does not strike me as a normal adventuring world.

[Eldan]

I'd say there are some traditional adventuring locations, though. Large stretches with little civilization, plenty of wandering monsters, a highly dangerous underworld...

[ExLibrisMortis]

I've only read about the 13 1/2 lives, so I don't know all about Zamonia. It sounds like a good setting, except that it's probably hard to find hardcore evil. Only a couple of species are really what you call 'acceptable targets', and they're rare. You'd have to be willing to run a game where you fight people you don't neccessarily want to kill, or a low-fighting game. You could run a fun (naval) game about the Moloch, though.

[Eldan]

There's Rumo, it features said underworld and an entire race of torturing slavers. Also demons and soulless clockwork killers.

[I3igAl]

I have read the books in the Zamonia series (the ones that have been translated to English, anyway) and was wondering if anyone had thought to use Zamonia as a setting for an RPG.
So, have you?
Does anyone know what I'm talking about?

Fun fact: A friend of mine only wanted to join my RPG-group if the adventures took place in Zamonia. I declined though. However I might base adventures on scenarios from the book.


It would work pretty well. "Rumo", " The 13 1/2 Lives of Captain Blue Bear" and "The City of Dreaming Books" all include pretty classic areas for adventuring.

Unholm - a city with trap filled catacombs beneath, full of adventurers from all kinds of monstrous races trying to raid them for rare books
The Underworlders - forcing their slaves into gladiatorial battle, having a clockwork army
time warping tornado - with a city inside
Gourmet Island- filled with giant man eating plants
Bollogg - giant large enough to adventure on his body
Moloch - giant ship of metal

There are also lots of strange monsters. Since most of his books are about traveling there isn't much stuff for intrigue left.

[SpectralDerp]

I'm german, so a lot of my friends know the books in the series. One of them suggested Das Schwarze Auge as a system, which could probably work since it also allows a lot more mundane characters (you can be a confectioner if you want to) but we never got around to it (I'm afraid the system may not be easily available unless you speak german). We could never figure out when to set it. Do you have Atlantis, or do you have colored bears? Thinking about it now, the easy way out is to have "New Atlantis" as a cop-out.

Anyway, the setting certainly does allow interesting campaigns, but the group would have to be very familiar with the books (depending on which ones you use) and you would have to put some amount of work into it, but it would definitely have the potential for a unique campaign.

Thinking about it now, I would probably chose a system like FATE. Combat abilities are pretty uneven between races like Eydeets (the multiple-brain geniuses) and Blutschinken (the top bear bottom human dumbasses) and the Schrecksen (the insanely ugly witches) are the only ones who can use magic, not sure which system I would pick for that. I think at one point in planning I proposed that Nachtigaller had invented magic (yay Simpsons references).

As for evil, I think you have a lot of options. Ensel and Krete reveals the Woodspiderwitch from 13 1/2 Lives to effectively be The Color Out of Space (http://www.dagonbytes.com/thelibrary/lovecraft/thecolouroutofspace.htm) from H.P. Lovecraft, the villains in Rumo are great, the underworld of Atlantis works, the Bookhunters in Bookholm and so on.

By the way, I had to look up what to call Bookholm (it's Buchheim in german, which is a pretty literal translation) and I think it's hilarious to see the changed names, never thought Hildegunst von Mythenmetz would be called Optimus Yarnspinner in the english version.

[CelestialSloth]

Hmm.
I think Bookholm would be a good place for an adventure - the catacombs are a classic DnD dungeon.
Still unsure of what game would be used. FATE would probubbley work well.