I'm not running anything, in terms of RPGs, lately. I am taking part in my buddy Eli's over-the-Zoom Ravenloft game. Is it just me or is Ravenloft lack a little bit o' bite of late? Granted, I haven't really gotten too much into the thing, yet. We're only one session in and we got beat up pretty badly in this haunted house.
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| The Black Lagoon - pretty near my dad's place, where I took the 3rd oath |
For me, the Florida of my Youth borders directly into The Dreamlands. I often have these repetitive dreams of Florida, specifically the little parts called Miami Springs, Hialeah, and Coral Gables. There are the long tracts of nothing between Gainesville and Tallahassee, endless sprawling suburbs of Spanish-tiled rentals outside of Orlando. The dorms at University of Florida and Tallahassee which like in life seemed to me to be deathly quiet at times and spiritually empty. Often, I am in the plaza outside a Biology/Science/Botany building that doesn't really exist but might be an amalgamation of the ones i knew at Colorado State University in my time, there. I frequent simulacra of highways 826 and 836 in Miami where I learned to drive, and when I lean out the window in the howling wind and rain, I can see spiraling crypts dropping away into nothingness, rainwater pouring in. There is a version of Saint Augustine (the city, not the guy) which is stately and somber and very expensive and there I buy cast-off surplus military body-armor and scanning equipment, on my way past tourists bathing in lukewarm inlets, to the palm-coated beaches where trunks of gold coins wash up every night. Let's not tell the tourists, shall we? And don't get me started on the endless weed-choked canals where turtles, snakes, and alligators thrive and maybe we shouldn't inner-tube float down these, but we rarely lose people to the fauna in my dreams? The water is crystal clear and ice cold like the various hidden springs that my dad used to drag us to on summer weekends. Old American "indian" names. Micosoukee. Alachua, Micanopy. Ichetucknee. Apopka. I never really thought about it before. The respect that Floridians have for the indigenous people of the area is not quite reflected in the ubiquity of the names they've stolen.
When I have amassed enough snippets of morning-memory to commit them to "paper" then I have, in the past, made little settings out of them for DnD-alikes. Remind me to insert the links here for the stuff on RPGNow/DTRPG or whatever. There is often a junked-out booze-fueled armada settlement of boats, beaches where space-trash, treasure and pot-bales have washed up, long and crystal-clear swimming pools with very high diving boards, lots of undead, junk shops and spanish moss dangling from sprawling oaks. It's not unpleasant for a Dreamland, and the peninsula stretches out practically forever and there are mountains and caverns that are not filled in with water
So anyways, Florida Guy is a subrace and there's a couple examples. A sort of mean-spirited drug-abuser type, and another couple of ones which I like better. I haven't tracked down all of them, yet. Of course, memes being what they are Florida Guy is a monster, too, and probably a religion in DnD (Chaotic Neutral, of course). LET THE OUTSIDERS THINK WHAT THEY LIKE. I think one was done by Alice Witchfire, and another by Dungeon Malcontent and another by Eternall Newbie etc etc
https://www.reddit.com/r/DnD/comments/hyd7ep/oc_florida_man_human_variant/
I picked "Florida Guy" as my subrace for "human" in this Ravenloft game, modeled loosely on myself, my family members and this guy Ellis from Left for Dead 2, and the Scout from Team Fortress 2 but not from New York, or Boston or wherever.
Anyways, I ought to codify a little more this lush corner of Dreamland and make some money off'n it. May be best to leave it there, though.
EDIT:
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| Biltmore Pool, Coral Gables |
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| Venetian Pool, also Coral Gables |
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| The Villas, Miami Springs, frequent childhood haunt of mine long after its prime |
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| my dad's house has an unearthly oak with amazing Spanish Moss but this isn't it |
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| There''s not really any mechanics for tubing in OSR or DnD5e. Hmm. |
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| She overlooks the (incongruous) pits in which the dead are enshrined in Dream-not-St-Augustine of mine |
God/Arjuna/Y*Weh/Zeus/Poseidon/Aphrodite/Ba'al/Aar Bless the People of the Gulfcoast, speaking of which.
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