“The Crystal Frontier has been my home campaign for over a year, getting on to 25 sessions, with a 3rd and 4th level party. I’ve also written or at least written up notes on several more adventures for the setting, including the two large projects I’m working on currently covering the Frontier’s North Eastern coast, where fewer crystals fall, but the old history of the land is closer to the surface. So, while there’s only minimal published information on the Bull Kingdom and its Warlock King, The Successor Empire and its Syndicates, or the environs of the Crystal Frontier at large, I have a great deal of knowledge about it. For example I currently have enough notes and rough maps to quickly prepare, or run the following Crystal Frontier locations: The Tower of Musk (A manticore lair), Old Argento (Ruined former provincial capital), The Palace of War (A crashed yet mostly intact Empyrean invasion fortress/megadungeon), Cold Manse (ghoul infested haunted mansion), the Tower of Flints (pirates, owls, and a shrine to an Imperial sea god), Cold Water Hamlet, Stone Quay (a port ruled by cattle drovers), The Palace of Reflections (an extradimensional Empyrean villa accessible via a magic scroll and infested with a blue wyrm of unreason), The Bone Fields (ancient barrows being dug up to obtain ancient magic infused bones for fertilizer) and The Dead Colossus (a walking castle destroyed by the Warlock King himself during his ascent to power). Some draft art for these location illustrates this post.

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For the Crystal Frontier the influences are largely revisionist Westerns with very few fantasy elements, early Sword & Planet stories that are the inspiration for the Empyreans, a couple of books about early San Francisco and California, and a collection of short stories about the Russian civil war which focuses on the corrosive effects of moral certainty and the small brutalities of revolutionary war. Finally and perhaps most important, Moebius’ Western and Science-Western comics influence both the look (though I’m obviously a far, far worse artist) and setting.

  • Jean Giraud (Moebius): Blueberry, Airtight Garage
  • Edgar Rice Burroughs: Barsoom novels
  • Aleksey Tolstoy: Aelita or The Decline of Mars
  • Patrick DeWitt: The Sisters Brothers
  • Issac Babel: Red Cavalry
  • Cormac McCarthy: Blood Meridian or The Evening Redness in the West
  • Larry McMurtry: Lonesome Dove
  • Cervantes: Don Quixote
  • Herbert Ashbury: The Barbary Coast
  • Elmore Leonard: The Bounty Hunters
  • Isabel Allende: Daughter of Fortune”