Introduction to Gotherron
This is the introductory article in a series about my fantasy TTRPG campaign setting, jokingly named Gotherron because I haven't thought of anything better. As you can probably tell from the name, Eberron is a heavy influence on my own worldbuilding, but my own take is rooted in what can best be described as spooky themes. Language is hard here, because I usually stop short of straight up horror (and I think most spooky D&D does the same), and even the word goth is going to provoke a lot of disagreement about whether goth refers specifically to the music subculture, or to a broad aesthetic movement. I don't have a better place to say it, so the games this setting is designed to be compatible with are D&D 5E, Daggerheart, Shadowdark, and Old School Essentials.
The first thing to know about how Gotherron differs from Eberron is that it is specialized for the Monster of the Week storytelling style (I am not referring to the roleplaying game of the same name). This is to say, a Gotherron campaign is mostly episodic, with each episode having a self contained story. The players go to a place or are hanging out in their home base, there is some sort of incident involving a monster or evil mage, and the players resolve the incident. Monster hunting and investigation are core to the gameplay, and stories tend to be told at the smaller scale in terms of stakes. Players fight over a handful of innocent lives, not the fate of the world. Scooby-Doo, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and early Supernatural are all good structural examples. The players could travel the country like in Scooby-Doo or Supernatural, solving monster shenanigans as they go, or they could have a home base like in Buffy and deal with anything that crops up.
Another core thing about Gotherron is that it is currently very heavily rooted in Americana. Which is to say, the nation I'm worldbuilding is clearly meant as a fantasy reflection of the 20th Century United States, and things like American cryptids and folklore do show up. If players are doing the "travel the country resolving problems" style of gameplay, the various places they travel should feel like specific regions of the United States. It's like how the two best Scooby-Doo movies, Zombie Island and Witches Ghost, take place in Louisiana and Massachusetts respectively, and are meant to feel like it. This even simplifies worldbuilding, because communicating "We're supposed to be in fantasy Texas right now" puts the gamemaster and players on a footing where they can all understand what the world should feel like. I said currently heavily rooted in Americana because I do dream of later having a United Kingdom expansion to this setting, though that is a very long ways off.
If you want a more deeply developed setting, the core "starter region" of my setting is based off of the area between San Francisco and Santa Cruz in California. This is the region in which I was born and raised, The Lost Boys is one of my all time favorite vampire movies, and San Francisco itself has a fair amount of prominence in the 90s/early 00s supernatural fiction I pull so much from. If you're looking for that Buffy gameplay style where the players stay put in one place over time, this region is ideal for that, being more fleshed out than most of the setting.
Another thing about this setting is the deep level of anachronism. Earlier, I was trying to bill 1970s Eberron, and that intense historical focus on one period just wasn't working. I've softened to a world that, politically, is early 80s, but aesthetically mixes elements of the 1970s, 1960s, 1930s, and turn of the century.
Let's go back to the subject of goth. The original goth music subculture arises out of the late 1970s punk music subculture, and has a lot of political connection to that movement. Early goth is neither pro-establishment, nor trusting of the government. It's a movement inherently in opposition to Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. I don't want to lionize the 1980s goth movement, because it wasn't perfectly progressive and had plenty of bigots (in particular, there is a strong history of racist exclusion in goth culture), but I hazard to say it had more acceptance of the LGBT community than mainstream society.
We can use all of this information. This setting looks at the President and his people as straight up villains, so the wider system is at best to be mistrusted. The government is on it's Moral Majority high horse, and this setting openly accepts the communities the government attacks, even where IRL goths often failed to. The history of white washing and exclusion is a big one to knock down. I personally know a lot of Black, Asian, and Latin people who are part of the goth aesthetic, and they have always been here. In fact, being from California, our local goth aesthetic has deep Mexican influences, something I'm going to get into in a later article. Gotherron is a setting that encompasses a wide variety of aesthetics that each has it's own gothic or spooky influences, rather than a setting with one specific aesthetic, and it openly embraces the wide diversity of gothic art.
Another core element of goth culture is the ability to see beauty in the dark and macabre. This is a vital element that distinguishes Gotherron from something like Ravenloft. Gotherron thinks the world is beautiful in all of its darkness, and that the darkness itself can be wonderous and amazing. This is often why spooky elements stop short of outright horror. Spooky isn't bad, it can even be comfortable. This also dovetails with the punk roots of goth culture. Punk inherently believes in fighting back, and Gotherron is saying that even though this is a world where bad things happen, the players can fight back and win.
Looking at the OSR version of this setting, what I am a big fan of is the concept of the iron hand in the velvet glove. The world is often comfortable, beautiful, and worth falling in love with, and embraces you in soft velvet, but underneath is iron, and when violence ensues, it's sudden, costly and horrific. The worldbuilding may be lighter and softer than most OSR games, but the combat hits just as hard, and the world just as deadly. That gorgeous rose has wicked thorns. This is of course toned down in the D&D and Daggerheart versions, as those are games with more powerful and more survivable player characters and much less expectation of frequent player death.
This setting also takes a lot from Eberron mechanically, though not everything. The primary example of something I do not want is the concept of Dragonmarks or Dragonmarked Houses. I also don't use the Khoravar or Kalashtar. Shifters and Changelings do exist in Gotherron, however, and Gotherron uses an organic variant of the Warforged that is meant to let you play Frankenstein's Monster. Something else I take from Eberron is the refusal to write an entire species as evil, with Eberron's Orcs and Drow being as morally complex as anyone else. Gotherron does treat Drow as an ethnic group among Elves, not a separate species, and Goblins are more prominent. Another take from Eberron is, of course, the Artificer class.
Gotherron also uses a lot of options from Ravenloft, at least in the D&D 5.5E version. Pulling out the new Ravenloft: The Horrors Within book, the subclasses and species are all allowed, though Lupins and Shifters are considered two options for the same species. Reanimator Artificer has some slight modifications, due to Raise Dead not being an allowed spell in Gotherron. The Haunted One, Investigator, and Spirit Medium backgrounds are allowed, but Mist Wanderer does not fit because Gotherron doesn't have the Mists or Domains of Dread. Dark Gift feats are allowed as long as they don't rely on the Mists or Domains of Dread existing. The reason the Mists and Domains of Dread do not exist in Gotherron is these are elements of the Shadowfell specifically, and Gotherron is the Material Plane. Which is to say, if the players did go to the Shadowfell in Gotherron, they would encounter the Mists and Domains of Dread, at which point such character options may become available. Gotherron is not Ravenloft, but Ravenloft does exist within the cosmology of Gotherron, and you could do a Ravenloft game using characters from Gotherron transported into the Shadowfell.