The Northern Crown campaign, by Atlas Games, was easily one of the most original settings to come out of the
D20 creative wave. While most companies were re-visiting Lothlorien, cashing in on pirates or trying to somehow make drow interesting again, Atlas quietly published two books detailing
D20 adventures in an almost untouched genre: Colonial North America.
I first heard about the setting because Atlas posted a free adventure download on DriveThruRPG, called
The Caves of Chisca. I was interested enough in what I read to lurk Ebay for some time, hunting a good deal on the two core books for this setting. It took a while, because this bold setting was not wildly popular. I managed to snag them both in a single auction. They are:
Northern Crown: New World Adventures (hardback, 168 pages)
and
Northern Crown: The Gazetteer (hardback, 168 pages)
The basic idea of the Northern Crown setting is, "What if the European settlement of North American happened in a world where magic works?" (It's actually cooler than that sentence sounds.) Author Doug Anderson managed to thread the literary and historical needle to create a setting that combines the epic shadows of the North American wilderness, the sense of peril and adventure you find in a story like
Last of the Mohicans and the strong horror elements of
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (with Johnny Depp),
The Crucible (Salem Witch Trials) and
Rip Van Winkle. Toss in the Blair Witch, wendigos, haints, Ben Franklin, Squanto, Daniel Boone, Pontiac, Natty Bumpo, Pocahontas, Jean Lafitte, William Teach, Miles Standish, Crispus Attucks, El Dorado, Ponce De Leon and the lost colony of Roanoke and you have a good idea what this setting is about.
If you recognized at least half of the people, stories and places on that list, you have an idea of the potential scope of the Northern Crown setting. The key word for Northern Crown is "haunted." The wilderness is "haunted," with all that word implies. This is the creepy side of old North America that H.P. Lovecraft might have chosen to portray.
Both books have solid bindings and glossy covers with paintings by A. Campbell. The covers actually fit together to form a single panorama. An Indian warrior and a puma crouch on a cliff edge, beside what is obviously wreckage, looking at a pirate-type, who is looking down at an airship (although there aren't airships in the books). At the pirate's feet, just visible on the rock face, are two petroglyphs. The painting manages to give you the sense of a vast wilderness with conflict and danger and ancient mysteries hidden right at your feet.
The interior art will not win any awards and there is not a huge amount of it, but the simple line drawings do manage to convey the feel of the setting. Most of the drawings are of characters…people you might meet or portray in colonial America. If you paid even vague attention in U.S. History class, or if you watched enough movies, you'll recognize most of the archetypes and have a good idea how to play them.
Some features from Atlas Games'
Nyambe setting manage to leak over into Northern Crown.
Nyambe is fantasy Africa, and has its own setting book worthy of a separate write-up.
There is also artistic support for this setting on the Atlas website. Although the setting is no longer in print, Atlas still provides downloadable maps to help you get a grip on the Northern Crown. These maps help, but one weakness of this setting is the lack of a large, four-color map glued into the back of the gazetteer. Since Northern Crown is set in North America you could probably just look at a real-world physical map of the region.
Like any
D20 setting, one of the gulfs you must cross is how magic works in Northern Crown. There are special rules for magical locations, new spells, new spell-casting classes and the usual tripe about druids as defenders of nature. At least in the Northern Crown setting these rules make sense and add to the overall feel…they aren't there just for the sake of adding crunchy bits to pad out a book. If you're the type with the guts and players to take on colonial North America you'll want to use these rules.
Speaking of tripe…Northern Crown manages to keep it to a minimum….
The European colonization of North America was a real event and it can still be a very sensitive subject with lots of political correctness to navigate. Doug Anderson manages to avoid the pitfalls of settings like
Shadowrun, where Native Americans are quasi-elves who always manage to be bitter at the world, impossibly noble
and much cooler than you. They just aren't real people. Northern Crown takes a much more realistic approach to the "First Ones" (despite how that name sounds) and their relations with the "Uropans." The Uropans are visitors from their own enchanted realms, such as the "Albions"- from a fantasy British Isles ruled by a faerie queen. The Native Americans in Northern Crown come across as real people. Their interaction with the Uropans is realistic without pre-deciding who's a goodguy and who's a villain.
(Read or watch
Last of the Mohicans. Think about the motivations and viewpoints of the main characters. Now decide which character is actually a villain. If you have trouble deciding depending on which viewpoint you take then you probably understand what I'm talking about in the paragraph above…and what Northern Crown manages to accomplish.)
Religion is also a subject Northern Crown manages to deal with well. Clerics are part of D&D and they need some sort of religious background to work. Doug Anderson manages to deal with the historical themes of fantasy Catholics, fantasy Protestants, fantasy shamanism and the like without being either stupid or offensive.
You can't have North America and Daniel Boone without muskets and gunpowder. Northern Crown has workable rules for using these weapons. Firearms used to be outright heresy in D&D, but the
D20 spectrum includes both
D20 Modern and Star Wars. If you don't like the Nothern Crown approach there are other proposed systems to loot from a number of
D20 products.
Northern Crown is not about the American Revolution. America was a collection of colonies for longer than the United States has existed. The setting is pre-French and Indian War.
Unlike some of the publications I've mentioned before, Northern Crown is not uber-collectible. Rather, it is already rare and likely to more…um…rarer in the near future. Anyone who knows the history of table-top gaming knows that straying out of cliché medieval fantasy is very risky for publishers. Fantasy North America is a very selective market niche indeed. These books are collectible in the same way that obscure role-playing books like the Midkemia publications are collectible…or an obscure
RPG like
Rus...if only I'd snapped ‘em all up back then!
One of the reasons I bring this setting up here is because it was a serious attempt by a
D20 company to do something different. This is a nice example of the creative explosion touched off by the Open Game License. Northern Crown is worth reading and owning even if you never hanker to play a scenario based on
The Scarlet Letter. (Although it might work really well if you plan to play
Pirates of the Caribbean.)
Another reason I bring it up now is because both books are currently on sale on the Paizo website for $10 each. Scroll up several posts in this strand and you'll see the link to the Paizo sale. Find the link for Atlas Games and you'll find both Northern Crown books.
My advice as self-appointed
D20 faerie is that you go there and snap them up. If you found anything I have written above both comprehensible and interesting then these books are worth a read and stand a fair chance of increasing in value.