And now it's time to populate the world, which might seem a little out of sequence since I don't have a world map or anything. Life is funny that way. That'll happen soon enough. But for today's exercise, I don't really need any details about the terrain.
Today, we're doing monsters. And probably some plants and slimes and stuff, but mostly monsters.
Back in ancient days of yore, I pretty much just assumed anything I wanted from the Monster Manual (and later the Fiend Folio) could be found in my world wherever I wanted it. Education about the basics of geography, climatology, and ecology would come later, along with a more developed understanding of world building in general.
Now I know better, at least a little bit. My world-populating is done with a more considered process. I start by answering several questions.
What kind(s) of creatures exist? A game set on modern earth with few or no supernatural elements has "only real ones." A game set in a Star Wars-esque Space Opera universe could have all kinds of strange beasties. For my purposes, we're somewhat closer to the latter than the former. I don't necessarily want hundreds of sentient species or thirty-seven varieties of "ork" but there's more than just normal animals.
Why do the species that exist exist? Once again, on earth, this is pretty easy to answer. The Flying Spaghetti Monster did it. But for my D&D style game world, there are more complicated answers.
Normal creatures Humans, horses, sheep, frogs, and whatnot (all the normal stuff) got there in pretty much the "normal" way. Whether it's evolution, intelligent design, or outright creation isn't completely important. The point is, all these organisms were created through the union of Mother Earth and Father Sun. They're the normal flora and fauna. In the absence of all the stuff that makes the campaign world cool, they'd be all there is.
Fantastic Beasts The next category I know I'll have are "good" monsters. These might not actually be "good" in the sense of being nice or not trying to eat people, but they're more closely related to the world than the ones that will follow. These will mostly be the creations of various gods. Some may also have been created by powerful wizards.
Fantastic Beasts are somewhere between the zone of "animals you should only kill if you need to" and "monsters it's always a good idea to kill." Of course, for much of human history this line was drawn between "people and livestock in your village" and "Everything else," so that's not a huge deal. But the point could matter if there are demihumans who don't fit into the other categories. Orks (a staple of fantasy genocide) will be Goblinkin (see below). Elves will be Faeries (see below). But what about Centaurs? I'm not sure I'm going to have Centaurs, but it could come up.
A better example might be Gnolls, or perhaps Lizard Men. Goblinkin will all be bad. It's in their nature. But Gnolls might just be "barbaric." Slaughtering a Gnoll rading party would be perfectly moral. Wiping out a Gnoll village would be more dubious. Declaring war on the Gnoll race just because they exist would be pretty much evil.
This gets into the whole area of D&D's Alignment system, and whether Alignments are external absolutes or internal guidelines. I'll come back to that later if necessary. For now, I prefer to leave myself a note and otherwise avoid the issue.
Right now, I suspect the majority of Fantasitc Beasts will be wizardly creations: golems, sorcerous hybrids, the ever-popular mimic, and so on. The picture of the world that's building in my mind is a place of nearly Space-Romance level pulp sci-fi wizardry rather than the more classic Tolkien-derrived high fantasy. We'll see if that remains to be the case. Staying with high fantasy was one of my goals, but goals get discarded all the time.
Faeries The Fey Folk, all the demihumans and probably the Dragons, came to the world from somewhere else. I haven't worked out where that is yet, but it'll come to me. I do see one potentially tricky decision ahead. The demihumans who had innate powers will almost certainly have to have lost them in order to be playable characters. In the stories, it's all well and good for the Faerie Lords to be able to reshape the world to their whims with glamours and beguile men's minds, but in game that makes them way too powerful/expensive to play alongside normal humans.
I have a few ideas about how I'm going to deal with that when the time comes. If I don't make this a D&D game, the problem may be more manageable. I wrote up a fairly decent Sidhe Quality for a Buffy game that isn't too awfully expensive. If I stick with D&D, I'll have to work out some kind of schism between the PC demihumans and their more powerful counterparts. That should be manageable.
The idea that the "worldbound" Faeries have lost some of their power is one I'll probably keep. It gives me a source of vastly powerful potential threats, and makes the PC-level Faeries nicely angsty. There are also potential plots involved in why they lost their power and how they might get it back.
Goblinkin In a way, the Goblinkin are dark mirrors of the Fey. In fact, I could end up drawing on the Seelie/Unseelie dichotomy and saying the Elves and their kin are the (sort of) good Faeries and the Goblins and their kin are the (Just about universally) bad ones.
Continuing with that line of thought, the Goblinkin are similar to the Faeries in that they aren't native to the campaign world. They came here from elsewhere - brought by the Darkness or Created by the Darkness. They're BAD, always. There's no way to redeem the orks or civilize the goblins. Evil is in their bones.
Which brings up an interesting point where Half-orks are concerned. I'd love to just skip them, but they're part of the project goals. So I'll take the dodge that the "human" half of a Half-ork gives the "ork" half the chance to be a free moral agent. Half-orks still probably have violent inclinations and dark desires, but they can master them.
So then the question is, why are the goblinkin always evil? Wouldn't it be more fun to be morally ambiguous?
Well, maybe. But there's plenty of moral ambiguity left as it is. Humans can be good or evil, too. Having one thing you know it's okay to go hit is... liberating. Goblinkin, as tools of the Darkness, are a constant threat and symptom of the corruption of the world. They're meant to be used in a few ways:
Dark Faeries Goblinkin may be a subset of Dark Faeries, but for the moment I'll keep them separate. The main creature I see in the "Dark Fey" category are the Drow Elves. (I might rename them "Sluagh" if I veer away from D&D) They're Elves who betrayed their kin because the Darkness could give them back some of the power they lost when they became worldbound.
Drow are almost trite these days. I hope I'll be able to put a new spin on them and make them more interesting. Drow should be (to my mind) utterly terrifying, seldom-seen, and as beautiful and terrible as a pit of vipers.
Fell Beasts As the dark reflection of Fantastic Beasts, Fell Beasts are big, nasty monsters beholden to the Darkness. This is sort of the same catch-all category as Fantastic Beasts. If something doesn't fit well somewhere else, it goes here. I can also imagine a few specific Fell Beasts, akin to the Kraken of Greek Mythology or the Terrasque in D&D - terrible forces of nature, rather than animals.
It could also include smaller stuff, monsters that are too powerful to make the cut as goblins, but too cool to leave out. I could also see this as a category for demons, unless I decide to make demons and devils a separate category unto themselves.
Undead So at last we come to that which lives without life. The obvious route is to make undead be servants of the Darkness, but I think I'm going to go a different way. Back in the mythology segment, I killed off a bunch of gods when their worshipers were all wiped out. But can a god really die?
What if, instead, the dead gods lived on as the hollow shells of gods, and their power stretched out from beyond the grave of the heavens and created a twisted semblance of life? What if they're like a cancer that might be cut away or burned into remission, but is never really cured?
When someone dies outside the protection of the living gods, his spirit might not be able to rest easily. He might rise as a wraith or a ghost, or even a vampire. Improperly buried bodies might rise as ghouls, hungry for the flesh of the living.
Cunning, or foolish, magicians and insane or evil priests might learn to harness the forces of these dead gods for unholy spells. They'd be able to raise zombies and skeletons to serve as slaves and warriors. They might find a way to slip between life and death as Liches.
And there'd be a third major pole of power, opposed to the living gods because of jealous hatred, and opposed to the Darkness out of cold-burning desire for revenge. That's always nice to have.
Celestials and Infernals I haven't completely settled on a structure for the higher/lower planes yet. Until I do, I'm not sure what the inhabitants of those planes will be like. Demons might fall into the category of "Fell Beasts," and there might not be angels in the conventional sense at all. But it's a possibility, so I'm leaving the option open.
So that pretty much covers the broad classes of creatures. When I get ready to fill in the blanks, I'll have a guide to follow. From here on out, I'll be working on progressively more specific stuff. I think one more "broad strokes" piece is in the offing, where I start trying to rough out the basics of the ethnology of the world. Then, just about all the bones will be in place and I'll have to start making specific decisions.
Things will slow down then. My free time and attention span will stay the same, while the amount of work involved in producing a finished piece will go up.
That's also about the point where I have to really decide on mechanics to use, and I honestly have no idea which way I'll go. It should be fun to find out, though.
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