Campaign Toybox
The Story: North America wasn't what anyone thought it was going to be: just a series of archipelagos, only the largest islands having wide plains. Hardly enough for empires to fight over, but with some unique new flora and fauna. The lithe native horses of those islands have evolved to soar between islands on wings the size of surfboards. Which comes in hand a century later when the golden age of ballooning makes an incredible discovery: the world is hollow and you can touch the sky. To wit: seven miles up there is another world, another surface, a crest of mountains and stone that somehow floats above us all. Day and night are not caused by the spinning of our world but the rotation of the lands above, revealing the sun or hiding it away.
Novacaela, as it is called, is the new new frontier, and it's a very different place from the tropical paradise of the New West. While below, peasants and lords alike engage in mad-paced land grabs for their own piece of egalitarian beachside property, the peaks of Novacaela are only for the hardiest of men and women. Or the most insane. Or those with the most to hide, or the least to lose. It's a different kind of frontier, more savage, and far more deadly. Up there the air is so cold it hurts to breathe, and the ground so steep that normal horses – when they can be transported up by incredibly slow balloon stages – fall and stumble. No, such a harsh land can only be mastered by men who have first mastered the pegasi. In a moment of historic synchronicity, the right men and the right beasts come together for the right place and the right time. Only they can tame the Great White Ceiling, and they are the Mounties: the Royal Mounted Pegasus Corps.
And they always get their man.
Style and Structure: Frontier America has been done, and done to death. Switching to the savage frozen north of frontier Canada gives you variety and novelty without too much work or needing to change too many tropes. So it's a little bit familiar but with a whole different tang. Adding in the strangeness of a world above means it never feels too familiar, even if you know your Canadian history.
Of course, it does help to also actually know Canadian history, and that's not something easy to just absorb from films and TV (although reading Kate Beaton's Hark, A Vagrant comics might be a good start). The chief difference between the north and the south is independence: while the south was rallying for representation, the lands north of the St Lawrence River were firmly French then firmly English, bargaining chips traded as the result of a foreign war. One of the reasons “New France” never rebelled is it never had the population or the wealth, partly because nobody wanted to go to the frozen north and trap beavers when they could raise sugar cane in a tropical paradise, and partly because Cardinal Richelieu forbade non-Roman-Catholics from living there. With Novacaela literally in the firmament, there is little doubt that it too would be colonised by the religiously fervent. Early settlers were also generally more keen on integrating and working with the indigenous races, rather than exterminating or ignoring them. So while the Old West has its share of Indian Agents and Mad Preachers, the Great White Up will have little else besides - except for fur trappers by the score.
(Mining is also an option, too, of course, but remember that if you dig down too far, you fall. Which makes mining even more cinematically dangerous...)
Trappers, of course, don't need towns the way farmers do, or cleared land. They want wilderness and they want nobody else around dipping into their populations (and indeed, so do miners). The result is we move away from countless “points of light” in a sad, savage land of the Old West; in the north the townships of goodly folk to save are more likely to be terrifying foreigners, religious zealots or mountain men who have gone native (if not cannibalistic). That combined with an increased savagery of environment will stop things becoming too much like the Old West (or indeed any other 18th century frontier game).
PCs and NPCs: The default of this campaign is for PCs to be Mounties, because hey, if there's going to be a cool new power available (riding flying horses), PCs should all have access to it. Of course, you can mix it up a bit: if there are flying horses, then there might also be more vicious Hippogriffs or Griffons, harnessed by different types of riders for different kinds of missions. Resist the temptation to have too many mystical creatures, however, or people will get bored with their new horses, and you want them front and centre to explore in detail. Likewise, if there's too much flying around it will feel like the sky is the new frontier, not the new land above.
With people so few and far between, NPCs won't be much of an issue, which is also an indication of what you need from your PCs. Even if they aren't mounties, they need to be independent and self-sufficient because guidance and support will be hard to come by and often too late.
Plots and Villains: The Old West is a land of little kings and tyrants. In the uplands, there's no land for tyrants to grab, and control is rested in distant emperors and popes. That's why freelance regulators don't work as well as government agents: the latter can just concern themselves with crime, not justice. You can still keep this black and white morally by making sure the criminals are twisted even by the wild standards of the north, or you can make it morally grey by having the church and state set arbitrary laws and boundaries on pieces of paper in salons five thousand miles away, turning innocent men into criminals at the flick of a quill.
Your other villains is of course, nature. Mountains slow down travel greatly, as do thick forest or rocky ground, and while the rivers are quicker the rapids are even more deadly in the cold. Up in the air, of course, the cold is even more dangerous because the air is so thin that average human endurance will be a fraction of what it is on the ground. Nature is also full of animals and it is okay to consider more than just cougars and grizzly bears. Who knows what might lurk up that high? And who knows what new humanoid races might hunt those beasts?
Sources: Refresh your Canadian history with Wikipedia's excellent summary series here and then avail yourself of the fictional genre of the Northern (as opposed to the Western). Then watch Black Robe, Bruce Beresford's masterpiece about Jesuit priests in the Canadian wilderness. You can move onto Cecil B DeMille's epic North West Mounted Police (1940) and then thrill to Errol Flynn being the sexiest mountie ever in Northern Pursuit (1943). More easily found movies like Shoot to Kill (aka Deadly Pursuit) and The Edge (and even the recent Frozen River) have fun with the dangers of the great northern wilderness, and for flora and fauna there's many excellent documentaries like The Bear, Passage and Grizzly Man. Reading Call of the Wild and White Fang will also help with the beasties and the terrain. For more mounties, Due South had heart and soul beyond its twee concept, and Brendan Fraser's recent live-action Dudley Do-Right was good fun and was a direct copy to the original cartoon, which was in itself a loving parody-cum-homage of the Northern genre.
RPGs: You need something gritty to make sure the PCs really feel the environment. Call of Cthulhu is good and has gone north more than once before (1920's Montreal is detailed in Horror's Heart and the western mountains in Compact Trail of Tsathoggua). Borrow or convert the dog-fighting rules from any RPG that has them (Star Wars, D20 Future, Hero, Mutants and Masterminds--in Mecha and Manga--TMNT's was excellent) but remember horses are slow and like the ground more than your average plane. For balloons and airships to reach the new ceiling, you may want Castle Falkenstein or Forgotten Futures although they lack any girt (or again, TMNT had some excellent airship combat rules). Deadlands had excellent rules for horses (both just as vehicles or as companions) in its original incarnation, some of these must have survived to the Savage Worlds rules set, or can easily be converted. And speaking of Savage Worlds, and speaking of flitting between floating land-masses, the awesome Sundered Skies combines the two in one perfect package. No, I did not steal this idea from it!
