It’s been awhile since I’ve done any serious solo gaming. Mendy got stuck pledging her life to the Prince of Aldeir in gratitude for the ring that saved her life, and I haven’t figured out what to do with that just yet. And Chloe the Cryptid hunter, well, I don’t know how she might possibly survive if she actually finds the sewer gator with just a camera to defend herself, so I haven’t finished her first mission yet. I had a couple of false starts with other characters, who died too quickly to mention, and due to time constraints and a flood of good games on PC, I’ve been on the computer a lot. Mostly playing Mount and Blade Bannerlord. And I keep wishing I could turn that into an RPG. I am kind of burnt out on levels and high fantasy, and using an Inworld AI mod to talk to some of the characters in Bannerlord, Lady Sora of the Northern Empire asked my character to find the Eye of Eternity. Thers is no such quest in Bannerlord, it’s pretty much just a combat and strategy game, so…
I’ve decided to build Calradia and undertake that quest, and several others. I’m going to actually learn GURPS, a game I’ve been interested in for a few decades now. I think the dynamic combat system and human scale will lend itself to the setting. But, I’m going to add monsters and a small amount of subtle magic. I like low magic campaigns, but I do like a bit of the supernatural, and reclusive monsters that are the stuff of legend and whispered night-time fears can easily be placed into a “human” world with carved out between harsh mountain ranges and blanketed in dark forests.
At this point, I’ve skimmed the rules a couple of times, and I’ve made a few practice characters to kind of get a feel for the power level I want. Watched and read several combat demos, but I’ve got a long way to go on game mechanics.
For world building, I’ve copied the “Calradia Expanded” map, a mod that I love to use in by Bannerlord campaigns, and copied the general geography into Worldographer, and placed the major cities (or towns). Making a judgment call on the distances between towns (deciding it should take one month to cross Calradia, the crumbling empire at the heart of that game), I’ve started putting together population estimates and can generate a local area map for use during actual game play. The world map is 25 mile (across) hexes, the local map will use 5 mile hexes.
I haven’t placed the trade routes yet. I need to take another look at the small area map and decide where castles (and their attached smaller towns) might be.
My next step is to decide whether to keep town names and cultures as they are, or to rename everything and jettison the faction that most annoys me, replacing it with something else. Then kind of jotting down culture and religion notes for the major players, and outlining any history I want to bring over or add.
Posts From a Long Winded Gamer 
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