The original idea for Nonesuch, at least as a G+ campaign, was to create a “honobono” heartwarming campaign… a campaign that de-emphasized fighting and dungeons in favor of friendship, exploring, farming and crafting.

This was inspired, in part, by a conversation Scrap Pruncess and Reynaldo Madriñan were having… although I’ve never actually played or even seen Ryuutama, it sounded kind of appealing. As I started working on it, though, it dawned on me that probably had fairly limited appeal and I was having enough trouble getting folks to show up regularly for G+ Hangout games. So I shifted it slightly, to a setting where those things were possibilities, but so was more straightforward kill-the-monsters-and-save-the-villagers adventure. It was the same consideration that made me decide to ditch using my own SFX! system in favor of hacking Labyrinth Lord. SFX! is still probably a better fit, but it’s just way easier for people to roll their stats and jump in to a D&D variant.

Nonesuch is also an opportunity to re-use some of the flashier bits of setting’s I’ve created in the past; some of them, like the Sea of Sky (pictured in the profile), have showed up in lots of my settings; others, like the city of Ash, or the Sea of Dreams, were planned for campaigns that never took off.

The central conceit of Nonesuch is that it is a world, like Oz, that was described in a series of children’s books in the early part of the century, but unlike Oz the books, and their author George Jester, have faded into obscurity… “Nonesuch: A World Like No Other” is the title of the first book of the series.