Where are the Big Dumb Objects in your campaign?

[L. Marcus]

Yeah, I've seen that one. Entertaining and a bit disgusting.

[Lucius]

I think we might have wandered off topic

 

Lucius Alexander

 

The palindromedary buys Detect Topic as Direction Sense

[L. Marcus]

Ah, cities are big and dumb in their own right.

[Markdoc]

Thread drift on the hero boards? I'm shocked! Shocked, I tell you.

 

cheers, Mark

[L. Marcus]

The thread stayed on topic for a whole page; that's not bad.

[Old Man]

One thing that I've found odd about fantasy is the lack of vehicles as BDO.  Once in a while a ship or some other mode of transportation will be prominent, but I really haven't come across the fantasy equivalent of a USS Enterprise or Millennium Falcon.  Has anyone seen anything like this?

[mhd]

Airships enjoy some popularity, especially if you're veering towards steampunk or JRPG territory. And of course the Princess Ark series published in Dungeon magazine for D&D's Mystara setting.

 

Basically you are limited to ships, as nothing else is big enough in a quasi-historic setting. For anything horse-drawn, the animals themselves would seem more important than the vehicle itself. You could theoretically have a coach that's used like the A-Team van, but I've never encountered anything like this in fiction.

[Markdoc]

In my last campaign, year 2 was a pirate-oriented series of adventures. In that, the PC's ship served as their floating base and all the adventures revolved around it, or involved it to a greater or lesser extent. There have been other similar circumstances in other campaigns. In a much earlier campaign set in the same gameworld, the PCs were all part of a travelling circus, which basically existed as a cover for their spying activities, so they trundled about the landscape in a big wagon train. That game unfortunately, though it started well didn't last, due to two disruptive players.

 

Last of all, in the same game world, some of the Dymerian warguilds (think of them as either Medieval orders like the Templars or Space Marine Chapters from 40K) have flying castles that serve as their base of operations: those have never played more than a peripheral role in the game, though.

 

cheers, Mark

[dmjalund]

Fantasy somethimes has creatures as BDO's especially ones with cities on thier backs

 

(or worlds - see Discworld)

[Chris Goodwin]

Here might be found a few appropriate entries:  Wonders of the World

[Tasha]

I would say that your common Dwarf Hold is a BDO. A city built in a hallowed out mountain or even more suidical, An Active Volcano.

 

Some Fantasy Cities also resemble this. The Forgotten Realms is chock full of them. The Elven City of Myth Drannor with it's magic forcewall over the whole forest that prevented Teleports, and various monsters and people from coming into the vacinity. Also the City of Waterdeep itself is a BDO much bigger than any fantasy city probably should be. Below that is the Mega Dungeon of Undermountain run by the mad Mage Halaster Blackcloak. If you look Hard enough The Realms is full of stuff like this.

I remember another fantasy World where an Iron Golem the size of a mountain was buried up to it's torso. There was a city built below it. Some day a god would come back and reanimate the golem to fight the some apocalptic battle. I don't remember the game world though.

[Lucius]

One thing that I've found odd about fantasy is the lack of vehicles as BDO.  Once in a while a ship or some other mode of transportation will be prominent, but I really haven't come across the fantasy equivalent of a USS Enterprise or Millennium Falcon.  Has anyone seen anything like this?

 

The Argo

 

Lucius Alexander

 

YOU try hitching a wagon to a palindromedary!

[Old Man]

I actually thought of that one, but I don't remember anything particularly distinctive about it.  It just happened to be the boat they were on.

[Michael Hopcroft]

I'm reminded of the golem Martina, a princess so insane that she seeks to sacrifice the world to a demon lord that exists only in her own imagination, tries to fight Lina Inverse with in Slayers NEXT. It's a huge metal mechanical man, with Martina piloting it. Think of it as a magically-powered Gundam or Transformer. Unfortunately for Martina, its ability to withstand the sorcerous equivalent of a tactical nuclear device proves mildly inadequate (although she herself survives, the golem is reduced to slag and her entire city ends up in ruins).

 

As far as cities, there are certain things yo simply have to have in order for a city to survive, and if you don't have them then your potential city location is a bad choice. The only reason you would have an abandoned city a hundred miles deep into the desert is if the area wasn't desert when the city was built and inhabited. Some catastrophe, either sudden or gradual, would have had to alter the climate to an astounding degree, cutting off the supplies of food and water cities depend upon. The result would either be a somewhat-orderly evacuation, with people leaving with whatever they could carry and probably scattering over the countries for hundreds of miles around, or carnage on a truly impressive scale.

[Markdoc]

Actually, history is full of medieval or ancient cities plonked down in deserts: Petra, Palmyra, Agadez, Zaoula, etc. Some of these cities sprang up around oases in the desert: an oasis in the middle of a desert is pretty valuable real estate, so it makes sense to set up on top of it and defend it. But Petra does not even have a sizeable oasis: the Nabateans built aqueducts to carry in water and tried to capture every drop of rain from the infrequent storms that blow in across the desert, and the sparse winter rains. They dug cisterns and drains to extract as much water as they could from the run-off from the surrounding mountains.

 

All of these cities outgrew the ability of the local area to produce enough food and all of them suffered from water shortages to a greater or lesser degree. But they thrived anyway, because they were not built on local resources but were built on trade. Agadez and Zaoula were part of the thriving trans-saharan gold/slave trade in medieval times (and you can’t get much more arid than “in the middle of the Sahara”) and became so wealthy that they imported much of their labour force: echoes of today’s Gulf petro-states. Palmyra sits in the middle of the Syrian desert and for centuries was a stopping place for east-west caravans heading from the Med. to the Euphrates. The Babylonians called it Mari, the Romans alternately allied with, and fought with the Palmyrans and it was still going strong under the caliphate. Petra had a shorter lifespan, but served the same function for trade passing from the Red Sea to the Med. These trade cities didn’t exist despite the arid terrain, but because of it. They were places of respite from the surrounding deserts.

 

But of course, once the trade dried up, the natural rigors of the area meant that people just left: these cities could not support themselves without trade. Medieval Zaoula is just a heap of dusty dried bricks today. Petra, before being resuscitated by tourists, became a small town, but as the work to keep the water collection systems functional was too much for them, was gradually abandoned to wandering pastoralists. Palmyra survived as a backwards little town, because after all, it still had an oasis, but even today, the ruins occupy a larger area than the town itself.

 

Just as I noted earlier with regard to underground cities, humans will build anywhere. Underground cities, floating cities, cities in the middle of deserts, cities on mountaintops, cities in jungles: the only thing fantasy has given us that history hasn’t, is flying cities and that’s only because we could not get them to stay up J

 

Cheers, Mark

[Lord Liaden]

I actually thought of that one, but I don't remember anything particularly distinctive about it.  It just happened to be the boat they were on.

 

IIRC, the Argo had a figurehead on the prow carved from one of the oracular Speaking Oaks of Dodona. The figurehead would sometimes prophecy for Jason.

 

Ah, here we go: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argo

[megaplayboy]

I would think that an abandoned castle built by and for giants would be, by definition, a Big Dumb Object.  Even a "small" keep would be humongous by comparison with human scaled adventurers.  And just imagine the size of the creatures that could wander in and make their lair there...

[Markdoc]

IIRC, the Argo had a figurehead on the prow carved from one of the oracular Speaking Oaks of Dodona. The figurehead would sometimes prophecy for Jason.

 

Ah, here we go: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argo

 

 

So ... a small, smart object, rather than a big, dumb object?

 

cheers, Mark

[Outsider]

The various Dwarven kingdoms used to one-up eachother in my old campaign world by building fortifications and other structures using bigger blocks of stone than the other guy.  The stones got up to a couple thousand tons each before the practice fell out of favor.   No magic used, as that would be cheating.