The Astounding Mr. Goodner's Amazing Electric Widgets - Generic Widgets

Yet Another World Building Column #7

David Goodner — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 22:44:35 GMT

Magic of the Stars

Though cold winds assail me, I will not flinch
The sun warms me
Though I wander the night, I am not lost
The moon guides me
Though I am alone in the darkness, I will not fear
The stars shine above me.

Above the Land, above the Lesser Air, stand the spheres of the Greater Air, the abode of the gods. Similarly, the Spirits of the Greater Air stand above other Spirits. No wizard or king can command them. The most Men can do is call upon them and try to live as they would wish in hopes of their blessings.

Prayers of the Faithful

Only a few have the patience to learn the ways of spirits, but every man can call upon the gods through prayer and supplication. Men mark the turnings of the year through rituals, make sacrifices to atone for their sins, and pray for the favor of their gods when they feel the need. Wiser men also pray to thank the gods for their favors and make sacrifices to recognize their blessings. The gods truly have little need for such gestures, but they appreciate them.

Across the Land, there are many nations with many gods, and, in a way, they are all real. Most Men tie their gods to one of the Greater Lights, the Planets. They may have different names for these gods, but the similarities will outweigh the differences in the end. Men know also that the Stars are servants of the gods. The Spirits of the Planets are, in truth, too far beyond mankind to answer directly. Prayers are always heard by lesser Spirits within each god's Sphere. Various of the Stars have taken an interest in different nations of Men, and lend their own flavor to the religions that have grown up around them.

Prayers and sacrifices have a subtle effect in the world. The Spirits of the Greater Air rarely send down hosts of angels or part the seas. They gave Men the knowledge of magic for that sort of thing. But they provide inspiration, vision, and intuition that guide Men toward their will. They also grant minor boons. When the sea-swells fail to swamp a ship, a god might have been stilling the waves. When a soldier survives a battle, a god might have given him courage to fight and strengthened his shield against enemy blades. Those who discount the power of the Spirits of the Greater Air call such things nothing but fortune. Wiser men know that "fortune" is the desires of the Spirits of the Greater Air made manifest in the lives of men.

----------------------------------------
Gamespeak: Divine intervention is always tricky. Fortunately, if /everyone/ is calling on the gods, it mostly evens out. Seeking divine favor is probably worth a small bonus or a coincidental event every once in a while - when it will turn the tide. Divine displeasure can work the same way. A king who pisses off the gods might find his armies falling ill or his ships being becalmed until he does something to atone.

Cinematic Unisystem Drama Points map to divine favor pretty well. If a character has done something to earn divine favor, he might have some different options for spending his DP. If he's earned divine ire, he might end up sucking down a "When Bad Things Happen to Good People." If I end up using a system with no dramatic editing possibilities, then I'll probably add one in for divine favor/disfavor.
-------------------------------------------

The Spirits of the Greater Air granted Man dominion over the Land, so there is a special class of rituals concerning the powers of Lords and Demesnes. In many lands, the Lords claim that their power descends from divine mandate, and they are not wrong. However, more than a few Lords have learned that the Mandate of Heaven can be withdrawn as easily as it was given.

Lords who lose their Demesnes, or who sicken them through weakness of character, must appeal to the Stars to regain the mandate of their Lands. Often, this involves a difficult quest imposed by the Spirits of the Greater Air, made more difficult because it is undertaken when the Lord is at his weakest personally and politically, while his people languor in pain and despair.

In the lands of the Val Aleen, there is said to be a castle guarded only by women. The Lady of these women is so beautiful that to behold her is to be blinded as by the sunrise. She holds a drinking horn carved from one of the Great Beasts, and the mead of her hall, when served from the Horn, is sovereign to all ills.

But the Lady and the castle are like unto clouds of mist, first appearing, then disappearing. The Lady will only consent to grant her horn to one pure of heart, unflinching of courage, and unwavering of will, if that one can even find her.

Prophets and Oracles

When Dragada Iron Hand threw down the Pillars of Flame and conquered the Land of Kaamar, he put to the sword all the sons of King Elor, and took his daughters as slaves, except for one, Shalamar. When her father was slain before her, Shalamar screamed and fell into convulsions. When at last the tremors stopped, she looked up at Dragada with sightless eyes and said "Despair thy throne, Iron hand, for only a child of my father may stay the Desert's Wraith." Then she fell, insensible.

Dragada was troubled, but he knew the Desert's Wraith had not been seen for many years, and his fortunetellers had promised him that he had the blessing of his gods to conquer Kaamar. Also, Dragada carried a sword of starmetal that could slay any beast.

That year, the Desert's Wraith arose and buried three camps beneath the sands. Dragada rode out to fight the Wraith, but his sword, proof against anything that bled, was useless against a creature made of sand and wind.

Dragada called on his wizards and sorcerers to protect his lands, and their spells held the Wraith at bay. But blind Shalamar said "Despair thy wizards, Iron Hand, for none shall stay the Wraith until a child of my father inherits his throne. Half your realm, you will never see again, and all will be lost to you."

For a fortnight, the wards of the wizards held the Wraith, but then they cracked, and burning sands ravaged half the kingdom. When the stinging grains finally stilled, an ancient temple stood revealed three days' ride from the throne of Kaamar.

Dragada took his warriors and his wizards, and took also Shalamar and a priest. Under the spires of the lost temple, Dragada took Shalamar as his wife, and claimed her as his own before all assembled. Even blind, she fought like hellcat, even scratching out one of Dragada's eyes. But in the end, she was his, and filled with his seed.

The wizards were able to limit the damage done by the Wraith for three seasons, and then in the winter a son was born from Shalamar. Dragada named the boy his heir, and ruled Kaamar as Regent for many years, and the Wraith was quiet, beneath the sands.

Most priests are just men and women with a particular dedication to the Spirits of the Greater Air, or a desire for the prestige of the office. Some are also magicians who use their power over lesser Spirits to serve the greater ones. But a few are truly touched by the power of the Spirits of the Greater Air. They are regarded as greatly blessed, but also accursed. No one the gods touch escapes unmarked.

Oracles can hear the Celestial Chorus, the Music of the Spheres. As such, they are attuned to the will of the Spirits. And the Spirits hear the voices of the Oracles. Oracles speak words of prophecy and can deliver the benedictions or warnings of the gods.

Oracles are very rare. One might not be found in one hundred Lands. For some reason, most are women. Some say this is because womankind has a closer connection to the Celestial than males. Others claim it is because it is the lot of woman to be accursed and benighted for Her sins. Whatever the case, Oracles are sought after and cherished. Even so, the life of an Oracle is not one many would envy. With senses enmeshed in the Celestial world, she is often only barely in touch with the Land around her. She sees visions of past, present, and future, and hears words no mortal mind should hear. As such, an Oracle needs constant care. They almost always find themselves in the care of priests, eventually, and it is hard to say how much of an Oracle's life she knows.

Men speak in hushed whispers about Moria Mane, she of the blood-red hair, who speaks the tongues of beasts and can see a man's future in the way his shadow falls across a rose-bush. In fact, in the Nine Hills, most men will try to avoid letting their shadow touch roses, just in case she is watching.

Moira Mane wears cast-off clothing, but she is always well-dressed. A harsh word from Moira Mane can wither crops or stay the rain. A kind one can save a woman's son from wolves or cure a sick child of the night-fever.

Moira Mane never lifts a weapon, and only carries a copper knife. But a black hound shadows her every step, and he'll kill any man or beast who crosses her.

Moria Mane has no husband, no brothers, no sons. But she is always heard at the Lord's Court, because no lord in the Nine Hills dares not hear what she has to say.

Moira Mane knows. She knows when the rains will come and when the tribe in the next valley is ready for war. She knows when the lambs will come, and who's bed you laid down in that was not your wife. She knows if you'll have a son or a daughter, and she knows the day you'll die.

Don't ask Moria Mane any question you don't want answered, or your hair might be as white as hers is red.

Not all who are touched by the gods are quite so blighted. Prophets and Sybils hear the music of the Spheres to a lesser degree, and are often the focus of only a few voices. They have the same gifts as Oracles, but are not so overwhelmed since their gifts of prophecy come upon them only occasionally. Prophecy can still be as much a curse as a blessing, since the gods always speak the truth, and not all men wish to hear it. There are at least as many Sybils as male Prophets, and their gift of Prophecy is often stronger. Male Prophets are perhaps a bit more likely to master other mystical powers, and tend to be more active and nomadic than their female counterparts, but then again, this is often the way between men and women.

Unlike Oracles, Prophets often find themselves outside established religious orders. The Truths they impart stir up discord, and they are led on paths that do not fit the regimented life of a priest. Most Prophets seek out some other kind of power, and have an easy time finding it. The Spirits of the Greater Air gave Man all the secrets he knows, save those of the Deeps, and those are not good things to know.

--------------------------------
Gamespeak: Prophecy is a power that has brought many a game designer low. I'm pretty sure the way I'd handle it is to make it just a plot device, but if I was feeling frisky, I might make it so that a Prophecy creates a collection of metagame resources. When the PCs are trying to fulfill the prophecy, they have advantages, and can take advantage of dramatic editing. When they're fighting against fate, they're at a disadvantage, but will rack up Drama Points (or whatever) to help them later. And if they can find a way to fulfill the Prophecy and avoid the bad side, they get the best of both worlds.

In any case, "Prophet" or "Oracle" are probably not things you spend a lot of character-building resources on. They're value-neutral at best, or a disadvantage at worst.
------------------------------------

The Starborn

Kemp MacKoor all his life bore the curse laid on his father's clan when they stole the Stone of Lyssee, but he was born under Fortune's Star. No thatch would shelter him, no hearth fires would burn for him, and he would never have two coins to rub together. But Kemp MacKoor was always lucky.

Lucky, he was, to meet each of his Red Band, who were peerless at the skills of war and guile and stealth and strategy. Lucky, he was, to find the gnome caves that moved through the forest so that each day they were in a different place, and lucky again to befriend the gnomes so they taught him the secret of finding them. Lucky he was to slay the dragon Kes in her den, and take her heart that burned as hot as fire. Lucky he was to win the love of Lady Eleane, at least until she betrayed him.

But that is another story.

Every person born is seen by a Star, and every Star picks out a special person to watch and guide all his life. Prophets and Oracles, they say, might have been chosen by too many Stars, or by no Stars at all. But everyone else has a single Star watching over him. To follow that Star is to follow your destiny.

Destiny is a frightening thing sometimes, and a subtle one others. Most people go their whole life without ever hearing their Star, but a few learn to listen, or chance to hear, and those few are legends. Their Stars will guide them to greatness and imbue their deeds with magic stronger than any wizard's spell. A child called by a Star of War will be a peerless warrior, valorous and terrible. He could stand against armies and slay dragons. A child called by a Star of Poetry may never lift a sword, but the words he scribes could fell kings and change the course of nations.

The gifts of the Starborn are not the magics of Wizards. The Stars do not give Men the power to throw fire or fly on invisible wings. Instead, the Starborn work magic through mundane efforts. A Starborn hunter can track a grey hawk through a cloudy sky. A Starborn swordsman can sharpen a blade enough to cut light, or reverse it so it heals who it cuts. A Starborn singer can sing souls.

There lived a woman in Dunnan Wood who prayed to the gods with great fervor that her child would be blessed by the gods of War. The barin would be all that was left of her husband, who died in the King's war with the Kurnish. She prayed and sacrificed, and wore the blood of her sacrifices on her growing belly. By day, she called for their blessings, and by night she prayed for revenge against the warriors who slew her man, and the king who led him to his death. She prayed that her child would slay the Kurnish, unseat the weak and unsteady king, and take his daughter to wife.

And the gods answered. And the child was delivered... a girl. Even the gods of War have a sense of humor. A Spirit spoke her name into the mother's ear: Bellatrix.

When other girls played with dolls, Bellatrix wanted to play at swords with the boys, and she often gave better than she got. By the time she began to bleed and her breasts grew, no boy in the village could best her. When one boy who should have known better thought he deserved her favors, she killed him with her bare hands, and was obliged to flee for her life, since he was the Shire Reeve's son.

In distant lands, she learned the ways of sword and spear and bow, and she came back with an army to grind the Kurnish into the rocks, then to take the King's tower. And she did take his youngest daughter to wife, because gods of War are often honorable, and they enjoy happy endings.

----------------------------------
Gamespeak: This could end up somewhat "Exalted-like" but probably on a slightly lower scale and a bit looser. I like the idea of someone who really can talk her way out of a sunburn, or sing birds down from trees. A warrior who can fight an entire army is hell on game balance, but he's such a great literary archetype.

My rough thoughts are that a Starborn will have one special profession he was born to master. He'll pick it up as easily as he learned to walk and talk, and then he'll get even better. He'll be able to do flat-out magical things with his skill.

But there's a down-side to being Starborn. The Star you're born under has plans for you, and to really reach your full potential, you have to be willing to follow them, no matter what you'd really want to do. It's entirely possible to be the Starborn of a war god, but really want to be a florist. The gods don't really care. You're not going to be a legendary florist, and you probably ARE going to end up in a lot of fights where your only chance for survival is to master the ways of war.
-------------------------------------

So that sums it up for Celestial magic. I put in Oracles and Prophets and left out Fallen Stars. Perhaps I'll put them back in at some point, but really they're just powerful non-human beings. I've got Spirits of the Land for that, and Fallen Stars just complicate the issue.

But I'm a big Neil Gaiman fan, and have a totally inappropriate crush on Claire Danes, so don't hold me to that.

So anyway, next is Magic of the Deep, which I'm not quite sure how I want to approach. I'd like to do something unexpected - maybe take a riff from faerie-tale witches and wizards who are physically ugly as well as morally repugnant. The idea about Magic of the Deep is that it is WRONG. It's not necessarily "evil" because it could be beyond such concepts, but someone who practices it is almost certainly going to be evil by the time he's through, even if he started with the best of reasons.

After Magic of the Deep, the project I set out to do is done. I might decide to write up one sample Land with a few Demesnes in it, and I might decide to pursue it as either a fiction setting or a game setting. The former is dependent upon me coming up with a character idea I really like. The latter is dependent upon me hearing from a game company I really like with a system that fits really well. Or just deciding it'd be fun. That might also work.

For those who already really want to game this setting, daHob on RPG.net has been working up a very loose Savage Worlds treatment. He's not trying to get the magic to work the same way I describe it her, just to come up with SW analogs for everything. I like what I've seen of his work so far. It does the job well enough.

Yet Another World Building Column #6

David Goodner — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 19:49:53 GMT

Welcome to another installment of the project that never ends. I've decided to change my organization style a little bit to take on "magicians" all at once instead of spread out over Magic of the Lower Air and Magic of the Underworld. For one thing, I realized there was still more Magic of the Land that didn't quite fit the mold of the earlier article. For another thing, I'm hideously disorganized, so that's just the way I roll.

Ways of Magic

The Land provides power to kings. The Stars provide destiny to Men. But there are other powers and principalities in Creation, and those who learn their secrets can become powerful, or go mad. Men call them wizards and witches, sorcerers and shamans, or sometimes darker names.

Wizards, by whatever name, are set apart from other men by knowledge. They know secrets, both arcane and mundane. They seek out knowledge known to no other. Their knowledge is their power and often their downfall, because there are things Man should not ken.

Not all wizards have the same secrets, and not all men who know any secrets would choose to call themselves wizards. The smith who sings the songs of fire and iron and blood as he hammers ore into a blade has found a secret, likely taught to him by his master long ago, but he may very well know no others and would never think to learn them.

Common Magic

The bow bends as your back must bend.
The string holds, as your will must hold.
The shaft is straight, as your sight must see.
The fletchings are of falcon's feather, better to hunt.
The falcon strikes not where the rabbit is, but where he will be.
You do also.
-- A huntsman's rhyme.

The simplest magic, used by practically everyone, is the magic of harmony. The Spirits of Land and Lower Air follow patterns and forms. Even without knowing their languages, it is possible to interact with them in minor ways. In fact, it is impossible not to. The spirits are everywhere, suffusing everything. The magic of the common man is built upon harmony with the spirits. The Smith knows how to appeal to fire and iron. The farmer knows how to appease the spirits of the Land and those of his crops. The mother is familiar with the spirits of the hearth and asks them to keep her barins healthy.

-----------------------

Gamespeak: Common magic is just skills, at least at the beginning. There will be some sort of mechanism for really magical uses of skills. A normal smith can make a sword. A magical smith (or a wizard) can make a sword that can slay a dragon.

When we talk about the Starborn later on, we'll see something similar with them, I think.

The main thing for now is to get the idea that the way this world works is that spirits are part of everything. A fish really does participate in the category of "fish," as Socrates would have said. So when people manipulate their environment, they're doing "magic" in a small sense.
-----------------------

Hedge Magic

The bitter draught cures many ills
-- Old proverb

Somewhere near every village is a hermit's hut or a witch's cottage. Here, the small folk may go to intercede for help with the spirit world. So-called "hedge wizards" are often not very powerful, as the mighty masters of magic reckon such things, but they can heal simple hurts and prepare minor charms and potions.

Hedge magic is often drawn from local Spirits of the Land rather than any spirits of the lower Air. It is sometimes drawn from no spirits at all. A wise old woman can dispense advice that seems supernatural, but is really nothing more than the benefit of years of experience. That same woman probably knows every plant in the nearby forest, and which will cure a fever or cause a pox.

Most often, hedge wizards have no power to compel spirits. They can bargain with those they can see, and they know what those spirits want and what they fear. Some of this knowledge is useful everywhere, but much of it is strictly local. As such, hedge wizards are often rooted to one spot, a locus of power where they have struck pacts with local powers and learned the simple secrets of the people around them.

The Hedge Wizard's tricks:
- Healing craft and herb lore, and natural knowledge.
- Gossip: Often, Hedge wizards have spirits of one sort or another to collect intelligence for them. This is generally passive watching, rather than active spying. Besides that, the hedge wizard is often someone respected for wisdom, so people tell him things.
- Spiritual favors: Anyone can learn to bargain with the local Spirits of the Land, and most people at least learn to live with them. Hedge magicians learn their habits and manners, and can interact with them more easily than other people. This primarily involves learning what minor Spirits want, what they fear, and where they can be found. If the local mischievous sprites can't abide the presence of iron, then a Hedge magician who knows this fact can ward his home against the faeries for the price of a sack of old nails. If he knows they can be trapped in wicker baskets when they're drunk, and that they can't resist the lure of honey mead, then he has a way to force them to do his bidding. That could be dangerous, but useful. Bribery can also be efficacious.
- Minor powers: In their truck with Spirits of the Land, some hedge wizards earn or buy supernatural abilities. These will vary widely depending on what the local Spirits of the Land have to offer.
- Speech with the dead: Hedge wizards probably pick up a little about how to deal with Spirits of the Underworld, particularly those that manifest without being summoned.

---------------------------
Gamespeak: Hedge magic is minor magic that just about anyone might know a little bit of. In fact, the real keys are perfectly mundane skills with supernatural, or seemingly supernatural, applications. A hedge wizard is likely to use his Etiquette (Barrowmen) skill to do stuff like bargain with the Barrowmen to find lost sheep or to fight enemies. Anybody else in the village could do the same thing, but they're prevented because (a) they're afraid of the Barrowmen, or (b) they don't know what they can use to curry the Barrowmen's favor. Mechanically, this isn't stuff the hedge wizard has on his sheet, but to any superstitious peasant, it's plenty magic enough.

Hedge wizards are likely to have hit up any local spirits for supernatural abilities, if such things are available. For instance, if there were a Spirit of the Land who could convey the power of true seeing by kissing one's eyes, a hedge wizard is the person in the area who's likely to know that, and know how to ask the Spirit for the power without getting cursed or killed for his trouble.

Those powers will probably be some kind of Advantages/Disadvantages with pretty straight-forward rules, and would be available to anyone who took the correct actions. It's just that a hedge wizard is more likely than anyone else to know what the correct actions are.
-----------------------------

High Wizardry

Jared Dun was the seventh of seven brothers. When each of his brothers had reached his naming day and asked the village god for a gift, they had asked for strength of arm; sharpness of eye; for swords that would not blunt; for courage that would not quit; for limbs that would not tire; for fortunes that would not fail. But Jared Dun asked "May I always know what I need to know." His brothers mocked him for his weak gift.

In the neighboring valley, there was a king who's daughter had come under a curse, and together with her the whole valley. Everyone slept in endless sleep, circled round by great thorn vines. Thus it had been for all of Jared's life. And practically every young man tried his luck to enter the enchanted wood to free the princess. But no matter how strong their arms or sharp their eyes or swords, no matter how tireless their limbs or their courage, they could not pass the thorns.

After Jared Dun was named, he took up his staff with a bundle of his meager possessions and assayed the dark wood. Although there was little movement, he could hear the songs of birds, and Jared Dun reasoned that if the birds could move through sleep and thorny vines, might he not as well? Whistling the song of the birds, he entered the wood, which parted before him.

There came he to the castle gates, which were locked. But Jared Dun reasoned that all locks opened with a key, and if he had one key, might it not be persuaded to open many locks? He took an old iron key from his pack and whispered to it "Open," and the key opened the ancient lock.

Onward, Jared Dun walked, whistling his birdsong, and the vines parted before him. Where they parted, they revealed rich hangings, piles of coin, and the possessions of a wealthy king. At last, Jared found the princess, who slept on in a bower, perfectly preserved except for a wound on her finger where she'd pricked it on a spindle. Jared reasoned that the wound was magical, and if it were treated, she might awaken, and with her all the others.

But then did Jared Dun reason further. He knew this magical wood must have been the work of a powerful Lord or Lady of the Fey, who would likely be offended to see his work undone. So Jared Dun left the princess to sleep, with naught but a kiss. He filled his pack with coins and jewels and returned from whence he came, and at the edge of the wood, he buried three coins as payment to the lord of the wood.

So-called "High Wizardry" is only a few short steps from simpler hedge wizardry. They are steps that few people take, though. Much that magic can accomplish can be accomplished more easily by strength or human cunning. The rewards of wizardry are long in coming. "Wizardry" itself is a difficult term to pin down. Wizards learn to deal with all manner of spirits, and thus no single wizard knows more than a fraction of all the possibilities.

Spirits of the Lower Air: Wizards who learn the secrets of the Lower Air master the powers of the physical world. They can call down fire, dissolve into clouds, heal wounds, and the like. This is accomplished through knowledge, rather than supernatural will. A wizard learns the ways of different spirits, and ultimately their special languages, which he may divine through meditation, study of ancient texts and natural philosophy, and the revelations of the stars. At the last, a wizard transcends mere mortal knowledge and can understand things as the spirits do. Then, he can call upon spirits, compel them, bind them, and use them for his own ends.

Such arts have limits. A spirit can not be summoned where none exist. Nor can one be commanded to do things beyond its personal ken. Thus, a wizard of fire might need a raging bonfire o're which to work his arts, and he could bend a spirit of flame to the task of burning something, but not to the task of knitting wool into cloth. If a true example of a Spirit's bailiwick cannot be produced, a symbolic representation will suffice, but the true thing is almost always to be preferred.

A wizard can command a spirit in almost any way inside these limits. Classically, the commands wizards give fall into these groups:
- Banishment: forcing a spirit to leave an area. Banishing a spirit ends that spirit's influence. If the Spirit of a fire is banished, the fire will flicker and die, although it might catch again and have a new spirit. If the Spirit of a city is somehow banished (no easy feat), then the city would die. In time, no stone would be stacked upon another. Although it is far more likely that the banishment would end before the city fell. For a banishment to be permanent, the wizard would have to find some way to make his pronouncement permanent as well.
- Binding: trapping a spirit in a place, person, or object. Spirits do not always object to this treatment. Binding by itself is a useful way to trap a spirit that has become hostile or dangerous, but it is more often used in the creation of magical tools. Spirits can be most easily bound into objects similar to their own natures. Thus, a fire spirit might be bound into a lamp easily, an iron sword with a bit more effort, but only into a milk pail with the greatest of difficulties.
- Service: forcing a spirit to do something. A spirit can exert influence directly over its bailiwick. It can control, aid, change, or harm that bailiwick. Powerful spirits can create or destroy their bailiwicks. Spirits can also scry on things at a distance, after a fashion. They are only really aware of their environments in the most basic ways, though. A cloud spirit can see all the Land beneath its cloud, but it doesn't really /recognize/ that land in the way a human would, so asking a cloud spirit to describe what it sees is like to be an exercise in frustration.
- Summoning: Calls a spirit to the fore. Normally, spirits of the Lower Air are content to follow their functions without notice of human activity. A spirit must be Summoned before it can be interacted with in any other way.
- Warding: Warding prevents spirits of a given kind from entering an area, person, or object. Warding is a useful way to provide defense. However, Wards have limited strength. A wizard would have to expend great effort to ward the bottom of a lake against water, likely far more than any one wizard (or even a dozen) could muster.

The practice of the magic of the Lower Air always requires at least speaking, and sometimes a great deal more. The more complex or powerful a command, the more difficult it is to communicate. Thus, a wizard who wanted to create a castle out of empty air might need to appeal to spirits of stone through a lengthy ritual in which he invokes symbols, makes sacrifices, dances, and chants for days. The duration of a spirit's command depends on how permanently it is invoked. Spoken words will compel weak spirits for days and strong ones for only hours or minutes. Written runes last longer, and carving in stone or metal lasts longer yet. Wizards of different lands use different methods and trappings, but the end effects are generally the same.

------------------------
Gamespeak: This is the bones of a freeform magic system. I am very fond of the one from Buffy, and if I end up building this, mine will be similar. A wizard can generate any effect he can think of, but he'll need three things.

- He'll have to know the right language. In a system with a lot of skills, each kind of spirit could have a different language skill. In a lighter system, there will still have to be some kind of limit for that.
- He'll have to have the time and resources to do the necessary spell. The bigger, more powerful, or more complex the effect, the more effort it will take to "explain" to the spirit.
- He'll have to be able to scribe the spell in a way that will last long enough. There are some options here: carving in stone, repeating endlessly, etc... For simple, quick effects, just a few words and a gesture will be enough anyway.

A few classics:
- Fireball: Pretty simple. Get a fire spirit and tell it to blow something up.
- Flight: A wind spirit can make you fly on the winds.
- Transmutation: A spirit of whatever you want to transform something into can, with great effort, transform it. The further removed the target state is from the original state, the harder it is. Turning a prince into a frog until a princess kisses him is a massive effort. The wizard who can do such a thing is not to be trifled with.
- Scrying: essentially involves communication with a spirit who can go where you want to see. Sympathetic links help you scry on specific people.
- Invisibility: Pretty hard for the magic of the Lower Air. Spirits of darkness or fog could conceal you under limited circumstances. Wizards who can do this might be using different magics. Spirits of the Land can turn invisible, and might grant that power in return for some sort of favor. Spirits of the Underworld can probably also turn invisible, or at least make people not want to notice them.
- Cursing: A curse brought about by a Wizard probably involves placing some sort of spirit mark on the subject so that one or more classes of spirits are hostile to him. A sufficiently vexed Wizard could blight a town's crops, make it so that a warrior's sword writhed in his hands unless he fought for true love, or something similar. A really powerful one might level all sorts of difficulties, just making every Spirit in the area somewhat hostile to the target.

The system for Spirits of the Underworld will probably be somewhat similar. There are just different things Spirits of the Underworld can do.
---------------------------

Necromancy

The Underworld is the echo of the Lower Air. While the Lower Air contains what is, the Underworld contains what was. Those who learn its secrets are more often concerned with the past than the present. The Underworld is not inherently evil, but it is a place of darkness. Necromancers aren't evil by definition, either, but those who delve to the deeps of the Underworld are certainly drawn in that direction. After all, the Underworld is between the Land and the Deep.

In some ways, Spirits of the Underworld are easier to treat with than Spirits of the Lower Air. Human dead are still fundamentally human, and can be appealed to through human reason or human vanity. They often retain some of the goals they held in life, and can be induced to cooperate by one who will advance those goals. Besides, Necromancers have the most potent currency of all, the ability to bridge the gulf between the Underworld and the Land, however briefly.

That ability is the key to Necromancy. Every person who treats with the Underworld has touched its dark shores in some fashion. A child born with a dead twin, it is said, will be able to see ghosts all his life. A man who dies and returns from the dead will hear the whispers of the dead. The only survivor of a village wiped out by plague, or one who lived through a battle because a wound made him seem dead, might find that some part of himself was left in stygian realms. Some pursue this path deliberately, through self-mutilation or the drinking of poisons, or through mass sacrifices to attract the attention of the Underworld. There are, it is said, even less savory ways to draw up the voices of the dead.

Not all methods need to be so dire, however. Some Necromancers, particularly those who are satisfied with lesser power, began with a very weak thread tying them to the realms of the Dead and strengthened it through study and practice. Wizards who dabble in Necromancy are often so empowered, and might be better prepared than some to resist the call of deeper and deeper power.

--------------------------
Gamespeak: Necromancers aren't just Goth wizards. They're intimately connected to Death, and draw power through that connection. Necromancy is all about feeding energy into that connection and taking power out of it. Spirits of the Dead can't normally exist in the Land. When they do, it's unnatural, and probably bad. Necromancers are able to give Spirits of the Dead, even corporeal ones, access to the Land. That power can be used responsibly and well, but it can easily be abused.

An early thought is that a Necromancer's power will be largely measured in how strong his connection to the Underworld is and how deep he's willing to go into it. A simple medium who only talks to ghosts and never even channels them into herself doesn't need much of a connection and doesn't have to feed much energy into it - her own personal strength is probably enough. A terrible Dark Lord who wants to raise an army of rotting corpses to smite his enemies probably has a very strong connection to the Underworld - to the point that he might look like a corpse himself - and he's going to need a lot of energy. He might get it from ritually killing people, or from killing a powerful being like the local Genius Locus. Or he might have some kind of magical artifact that gives him the power. (A black cauldron, maybe...)
------------------------------

Liuz was born with a dead eye. That milky white orb saw things no one else could see, and her ears heard things no one else could hear. The people of the village feared the girl, but they feared more to kill her and be haunted by her shade, so instead they drove her from the village. Children would fling stones at her, and merchants would sell her only shoddy goods at too high prices. Everyone called her names behind her back. The cruel spoke them to her face. And the cruelest spat on her shadow when she passed in the street.

Her mother and father protected her as well as they could. They told her that even though the villagers were her cruel and ignorant, they were her kin and she should try to love them.

But in time, the old couple died, leaving Liuz alone. Of course the people of the village began to whisper that the girl with the dead eye was somehow responsible, even though both of them had been old when their daughter was born. Soon, Liuz found life in the village intolerable and she fled into the darkenvold, where none of the villagers would go at night, and few even in the daytime.

There were faeries in the darkenvold, but they avoided Liuz, all except Master Wolf. He told Liuz that he hated the villagers as much as she did, because they hunted his children and denied them their rightful food with fence and spear. He told Liuz she would be his bride, although she always refused him. She said she was of the human world, not of the Spirit world, and would not leave her kin even though they bore her no love.

One day, black ships sailed up to the village, and warriors with black armor and black swords spilled forth to raid and slay, to plunder and steal.

Liuz watched from the shadows of the darkenvold, and Master Wolf watched with her.

"All your kin are dead now," he said. "Come be my bride."

"I will come to your bed," she said.

When the Wolf was sated from their lovemaking, she took her father's gutting knife and gutted him as easily as she would a fish. Then, still naked and wet with the Wolf's blood, she took up her cloak and went back to the village. Through her living eye, she saw the black raiders as they took their pleasures from the few survivors. Through her dead eye, she saw the pitiful spirits of the villagers.

And with a voice long dead to human words, she bade them rise up and have their revenge.

The black-clad men were slain, and their dead rose up likewise until nothing but Liuz stood in the village, and only crows and flies lived there.

She still had her kin, but now she had shed her last connection to the world of men. She took her people into their fishing boats and the ships of the raiders, and now she sails the seas, looking for the land of the men in black ships. Her kin are hungry, and only the flesh of Men will feed them. They waylay such sailors as they find, and leave the ships stripped of life, but otherwise untouched, because Liuz is not a thief. Or so say the tales.

A Necromancer's power is proportional to his connection to the Underworld and the energies he can bring into play.

The least power is the ability to hear or see Spirits of the Underworld that have the power to reach the Land on their own, either by being bound to a fetter or having found some sort of fissure up from the Underworld. With this power, the Necromancer can interact with Spirits, but has no power but his charisma and wits with which to compel them. Even this is more than most can do, and some Spirits can be turned from harmful courses with the right words. Further, if a Necromancer of even this minimal power has the fortune to bend a few Spirits into allies, he can listen to their counsel and sometimes benefit from their powers.

With greater power, a Necromancer can call up Spirits from the Underworld. He still cannot command them, and more powerful spirits can refuse to answer. This is a dangerous power, since hostile spirits can answer a call if it is not sufficiently specific.

Many Necromancers develop the ability to command the dead in limited ways. One might have the ability to shroud himself from their senses. Another could make them flee his presence. Still another might learn to trace runes that will turn the dead away from a living dwelling.

Others learn to borrow power from the Dead if the Dead are willing. The spirits of the Underworld hold the sum of the past, and some have supernatural powers as well. Without some sort of external energy source, a Necromancer must allow the Spirit to enter his own body, or the body of another. This is a dangerous game, since the Spirit might not be willing to leave, and his presence exacts a toll that will eventually be fatal.

Beyond this level, a Necromancer's own personal energies are likely insufficient to bridge the gulf between worlds further. He needs sacrifices, gifts of power, or some other means of supplying his Spirits.

The greatest Necromancers can summon and command more powerful spirits. They can force Spirits into dead bodies to animate them, or fetter Spirits into specially prepared vessels. They can call forth armies of shadow creatures, and they can wield the powers of the Dead. A Necromancer of this puissance needs external sources of power, and by channeling so much of the darkness of the Underworld begins to become like a Spirit of the Underworld himself. In fact, the ultimate fate of all who pursue the powers of darkness for too long is to become indistinguishable from a dead thing.

----------------------
Gamespeak: Necromancers have abilities similar to Wizards, but rather than needing a huge breadth of knowledge, they need a depth of power to pull off the most amazing feats. The powers a Necromancer can use fall into a hierarchy, with greater ones requiring both a higher "Necromancy Score" and more "Fuel."

It might seem that Wizards have a better deal, and indeed they do in some ways, but Necromancers make out well on the low end. At least some Spirits of the Underworld understand human language and desires, and can be appealed to on that basis. And some Necromantic powers are passive. Everything a Wizard can do requires conscious effort. He has to project his psychic senses "upwards" where a Necromancer's naturally draw "downward."

The energy requirement is the reverse, of course. Energy naturally cascades downward, so Wizards can call on massive power, whereas Necromancers have to find fuel for the more outrageous things they want to do.

Will it all be balanced in practice? Who knows. I'm still not making up real rules yet.
-------------------------

And that covers the two "middle realms" in the great club sandwich that is this setting. Next up is the Magic of the Greater Air, and possibly the Magic of the Deep, since I'm not really sure how much of that I want to go into. Given my attempts at symmetry so far, there should be ways that people can call on/be seduced by the Spirits of the Deep, and special people who are their personal champions. Which is a sort of scary thought. I'm reminded of Ashitaka in Princess Mononoke. He might have been touched by the Deep and is now a "champion" against his will, slowly being overcome by it even as he's forced to use it.

Cool.

More generally, I've been thinking about Magic and how one of the great complaints of many games is that it's not very "magical." When a guy in a robe and a pointed hat levels his staff at you and shoots out a ball of flame, you don't think "Amazing! That man can call flames from nothing! We're doomed!!!" You think "He's got at least 3rd level spells. Could be a problem."

Some games try to get around this by making magic really freeform, but that doesn't really solve the problem. In a system like Ars Magica, you can still narrow down what the wizard did, so the mystery is gone. In a really loose system, you just get a host of problems relating to exactly how much the wizard SHOULD be able to do.

You could try to conceal the inner workings from the players, but that presents another problem - the players need to know what their characters can do so they can properly play their characters. The guy in the funny hat isn't going to point his stick at a hostile force unless he's pretty damn sure a ball of fire is going to shoot out.

So I've been musing on the idea that what magic can do at any given moment may change, but the players can see how it changes. Castle Falkenstein's magic deck is like this in a way. You can see how much "juice" is available within 100 miles or so, and that's all there is.

I wonder if I can think of something similar. It might not be too hard. A Wizard's training would tell him what spirits are in the neighborhood, and he'd know generally what he can tell spirits to do. To add a layer of mystery, there might be some kind of arbitrary restrictions on spirits' behavior that are based on local conditions. The Wizard is trained to be able to figure out what these conditions are and how they affect his powers. To other people, they seem mysterious.

But that could just be a useless layer of rules and complications.

I DO want magic to be mysterious in this world. This is a world of mysteries where Men face things beyond their ken (and generally stab those things with swords). We'll have to see.

It's also about time to start thinking about a system, if I'm ever going to use one. If I just decide to use this setting for my writing, I don't really need rules.

Yet Another World Building Column #5: Magic of the Land

David Goodner — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 20:27:21 GMT

RPGnet participant, occasional blog reader, and Domino Girls fan daHob has been making noises about wanting to write up this setting as a Savage Worlds PDF, so I suppose I'd better get on with it. Now we're getting into the hard parts. It's time to talk about magic.

By "Magic" I refer to all the means that humans have to manipulate the supernatural aspects of the world. Of course people in the setting have a different view than we do. To them, there's no division between the supernatural and mundane worlds. And don't even get me started on religion vs. magic.

Magic of the Land

The Lord is the Land. The Land is the Lord. This relationship is sacrosanct and unalterable. Once the Land recognizes a Lord, it takes its shape from his will and gives him power in proportion to his strength. The mechanisms of rulership vary, but they generally involve dealing with a powerful Spirit of the Land who dominates an area. If a Land doesn't have a powerful spirit, one will arise to challenge its new Lord soon enough. Then he must either defeat it or reach some kind of accommodation with it. The nature of this encounter will determine, to some degree, the Land's destiny under its Lord.

Qin-Zhang was a master of the sword and a poet and philosopher. He wandered the world, battling for causes he believed to be worthy and elegant, defeating bandits and kings alike. His legend was, if anything, a shadow of the truth of his deeds. But time flows like a river from the mountains of birth to the seas of death. Qin-Zhang knew that in time his blade would dull, as would his wits. He wished for a lasting testament to his life, and for a place to lay his head when he slept, and his bones when he died. The warrior and philosopher wanted a home and a wife. But what land could be equal to his brilliance, and what woman could be worthy of his seed?

Qin-Zhang took his parchments and inks, and his sword and armor, and went in search of his destiny. He followed the Jade River to its headwaters, and there he found a beautiful land nestled in the shelter of five mountains. He climbed the first mountain, and there he found un-men with arms like tree trunks and skin of bronze. He slew their leader and they bowed down before him. He left that place and climbed the second mountain. There, he found a serpent of fire, which he slew also, although it cost him the finest sword he'd ever forged. But the serpent's entrails were of ever burning flame, and its scales were of bright steel. He forged a new blade, better than the old, and journeyed to the third mountain. On the third mountain, he found nothing to battle, but voices howled on the winds and spoke riddles. In a shrine on the mountaintop, Qin-Zhang meditated for a year until he could answer every riddle, and when he'd answered the last one, it began to rain. Each raindrop became a silver coin. Qin-Zhang filled his pouch with silver, because even heroes benefit from good rice wine and a soft bed, and journeyed to the fourth mountain. There, he found water spirits, immune to his blade because their flesh was as water. He could not pass them nor defeat them, so he paused and wrote a poem of such sadness that it made the water spirits weep. As they cried out their tears, they dissolved into nothing, and joined the river of Jade . Qin-Zhang left that place and climbed the fifth mountain.

The fifth mountain was higher than any of the others, almost as high as the stars. Qin-Zhang's steps became heavy. He abandoned his pack, then his scribe's pouch, and finally his silvery sword, and ascended the peak in only his robe. Unarmed and nearly starved, Qin-Zhang looked up into sky more black than blue and fancied that he could reach out and touch the stars. As he reached up his hand, he saw a dragon descending from the sky. The sight so inspired him with awe that he was overcome with euphoria and fainted.

When he awoke, a woman stood over him wearing a robe of gold silk with a dragon's scales embroidered into it. The robe was open, and he saw her charms. She gave him rice and wine and told him that this land was hers, and that she had been waiting for one who could take it.

Qin-Zhang had no sword, but he had substantial charms. He opened his own robe and claimed the woman.

After she was sated, the woman, who was a dragon, told Qin-Zhang that he would have a place to lay his head when he slept, and to lay his bones when he died. He would have a land to rule, and his land would never forget his name. But he would never have a wife, and if he ever took one, she would take away all that she had given, for what mortal woman could be worthy of his seed? Qin-Zhang accepted this with equanimity, and descended the mountain. He retrieved his sword and his scribe's pouch and his pack, and when he descended, he found a great palace. There, he ruled for many years.

Each year, Qin-Zhang would ascend the mountain again. In time, his blade and his wits dulled. Age bent his back. And one year he did not return. But one claiming to be his son descended the mountain holding his sword and wearing his robe. The man had skin of gold and eyes of darkness, and ruled over the Empire of Qin for many years, stretching out his hand to conquer all of the nine kingdoms.

<2>Powers of the Lord

Once a Lord has claimed a Demesne, he has power over it. This power can take many forms, depending on the character of the Lord and the care he takes over his lands. Strong Lords have strong Demesnes, and have greater power over them than weak Lords.

Broadly, these powers fall into three areas. There are powers of the Heart, powers of the Eye, and powers of the Hand.

Powers of the Heart: The most elemental of a Lord's powers, and among the most subtle. Powers of the Heart are those that describe a Lord's relationship to the land he rules. His heart pumps blood and life into his Demesne. If his heart is weak, his land is weak as well. Powers of the Heart affect the Demesne more than the Lord. They shape the character of its terrain, the fertility of its fields, and even the nature of its people. A cold, cruel Lord will rule over a harsh Demesne. It might be prosperous, but its prosperity will come only with struggle and pain. Its people will be either fearful or cruel. Its Spirits will be dangerous. A kindly Lord will rule over a kindly Demesne, with happy people and lush fields. But it is easier to be strong and cruel than strong and kind.

-------------------------
Gamespeak: Powers of the Heart are the stuff that determines what the land is like. I'm the kind of guy who would model this by hand waving. If I were going to define a system for it, it'd be something like the Organization rules for Angel. You'd have various attributes of your land that you could assign points to. You'd earn points by doing lordly stuff. I think they'd need to be a fluid resource, rather than something you pay character points for, because the whole point is that they can be gained and lost. In a balanced point-gen system, being a strong Lord would be difficult because you'd need to spend points on Lord stuff OR personal stuff, and the system I'm trying to create says that the more personal strength you have, the stronger your Demesne is.

Powers of the Heart will probably work as kind of a shopping list of attributes and ratings. You can customize your Demesne by choosing the ones that fit best. They'll cover a lot of things like the general weather, the terrain, what kind of natural resources there are (although this can't be changed radically), and even the people. People from a land where the Lord venerates physical strength might really just tend to be stronger than their neighbors, but they might also be quicker to anger or a little less intelligent.
-------------------------

Powers of the Eye: The connection between a Lord and his Demesne gives him supernatural knowledge over it. Not all Lords have the wisdom or insight to excel in this area. All Lords have at least a vague sense of the health of their Demesnes, and they receive some kind of warnings when their lands are in immediate danger. Depending on the character of the Lord and the Demesne, this could come in the form of prophetic dreams, whispers from Spirits of the Land, or supernatural intuition.

More perceptive Lords begin to develop means of scrying over their realms. They might be able to locate game, know the status of distant cities, or call into vision different parts of their land. Often, this knowledge comes from totem animals or Spirits of the Land who answer the Lord's call. Lords schooled in magic might employ scrying rituals instead.

The knowledge gained this way is of concern to the Land, not always to the Lord. He might be able to send ravens to track an invading warband, but not to follow his wife who he believes is unfaithful. Or perhaps he might. The Land can be fickle.

Still more perceptive Lords begin to know their Demesnes as well as they know their own bodies or minds. They know when to plant, when to harvest, and when to seek shelter from a coming storm. They can look upon a suspect in court and know his guilt or innocence, and what punishment is most appropriate. The wisest and strongest begin to become infallible, at least insofar as ruling their Demesnes is concerned. As with the other powers of the Eye, these powers often have an external focus, but just as often, they are purely intuitive. The Lord simply is his Land, and knows it as well as he knows himself. Of course, this also means that a Lord can deceive himself about his Land as easily as he does about anything else.

-------------------------
Gamespeak: These are fairly straightforward. A Lord will have some kind of perception level, and as it increases he gets access to deeper levels of information and insight. Players will probably be able to define their own "special effects," but the powers will be pretty constant. There's room for some customization, though. A Chinese Emperor might want to know which bureaucrats will be best for certain jobs, while a Plains Indian chief wants to be able to find buffalo. So some of the specific insights might vary.
-------------------------

Powers of the Hand: A Lord in his place of power is fearsome to behold. He rules his Demesne through magic as much as through will and action. The stronger a Lord is, the greater his power over his Demesne, and the greater power he can draw from his Demesne.

By keeping his Land healthy, a Lord keeps himself healthy to some extent. While he's defending his own Demesne, very little can harm him, and he will not fall ill or fall victim to misadventure. But if hostile spirits blight his lands, or treachery weakens his will, he becomes vulnerable.

The Demesne also begins to answer the Lord's will. Its' people's loyalty comes as much from the bond between Lord and Land as from his decisions. Thus do strong, but cruel, Lords hold their people in bondage. They might hate him, but fear him too much to rebel until some greater force inspires them. Some Lords also learn to master the beasts of their realms, or even the weather.

All Lords have some sway over the Spirits of their Demesnes, but this is not a sure or certain power. Often, there is a price for invoking it. At the minimum, any Spirit of a Demesne will recognize its Lord and not commit treason upon him. Lords who take time to court their Spirits' favor might be served by spectral knights, or ride upon steeds of fire.

-------------------------
Gamespeak: This will be another thing to spend points on and to advance at different rates. In fact, the whole thing will probably work that way, with a Lord player choosing what aspects he cares most about and getting more points to spend over time.

One way to balance this against other players would be to follow the example of King Arthur's legend. While Arthur was the king, his Knights were often more powerful in specific ways. Lancelot was the greatest of sinful knights, for instance. So a PC party might have a Lord with all kinds of cool Demesne powers, but his companions might be a powerful, mysterious wizard, a Starborn bard who can literally sing birds down from the trees, and a Starborn warrior who can't be defeated in battle. Having those people as friends is part of the Lord's strength.

There will have to be a way to gain and lose power in your Demesne, involving events like going to war, being betrayed, or losing your heart, and acts of atonement like questing for the Holy Grail or going out again to fight your Demesne's Spirit.
-------------------------

<2>Banes of the Lord

A Lord has to stay strong to keep his Demesne strong, and he must periodically renew his ties to the Land.

While a Lord is supreme in his Demesne, he may fall victim to a greater Lord's invasion.

He might weaken either through age or lack of will. He might always know what is best for his Demesne, but he can deceive himself, and his judgment can be clouded in personal matters. A Lord who rests on his laurels and falls to drink loses his strength, and his land weakens around him.

Treachery is the greatest bane. Any treachery weakens the entire realm. A strong Lord's subjects might not be able to betray him directly, but powerful allies are not so bound, and even the least peasant is still a Man with the ability to influence his own destiny.

-------------------------
Gamespeak: This is the stuff that costs you "Lord Points." And generally, the GM gets to decide which of your advantages are degraded. The typical way will be for them to all be degraded more or less equally, but there could be exceptions depending on the kind of bane that hit you. It is, of course, especially nasty to lose your physical invulnerability in the face of a treacherous attack...
-------------------------

The Land wants to be strong. A weakening Lord will find his Demesne slipping away. A blind Lord might not notice. If he is wise or fortunate, he might have the chance to win his strength back through some kind of act of atonement. Such a feat is at least as difficult as winning the Demesne in the first place. Often, the best a weak ruler can do is to die to atone for his sins and leave a strong kingdom for his son.

<2>Succession

The Lord of a Demesne is not immortal. If a Lord becomes so, the Land begins to twist, because immortality is not the province of men. When a Lord dies, a new Lord is chosen. A Lord's children share in his command of the Demesne, and very often his chosen successor takes his place. The heir will have to face the same renewal ritual his predecessor faced, but this is often easier than conquering the land the first time. Thus, in fact, begins the fall of many Demesnes. The first Lord had to be very strong to take the land. His son doesn't need to be as strong, and thus might not be. Wise Lords send their sons abroad to face hardships and win victories, but this has a risk because the son doesn't have the protection of his Demesne so far from home, and enemies might seek to slay him. That would, in turn, weaken the Demesne as the Lord grieves for his lost child.

The heirs of a Lord, and sometimes his feudal vassals, share in his ties to the Land to a lesser degree. They will never have as much sway as the Lord does, but are often still quite powerful. A deposed Lord's subordinates lose all their powers when he is deposed. Of course, sometimes one of these subordinates is the one who claims the land from his ailing Lord. In this case, he will, of course, retain his powers and might choose to share them with his brothers and sisters.

-------------------------
Gamespeak: This is pretty straightforward up until you get to the Feudal system, where the King rules a big land that's cut into small pieces ruled by Dukes and so on. In those cases, a Duke probably has a Demesne with its own Spirit, but that Spirit is subordinate to the greater Spirit of the King's Demesne. The King has power over all of the Spirits and all the Demesnes, but a Duke probably has equal control within his own Duchy. Lesser Lords only inherit power from their Masters, if they get any at all. Some people just have to get by with strength, cunning, and charm.

We'll get into this a little more down below.
-------------------------

<2>Conquest

The Land is a living thing, and its Demesnes have life, breath, and will. A Demesne wishes to be strong, and has a natural urge to prey on the weak. Strong Lords are often moved by this will to conquer their neighbors. Just as much, a land with a weak Lord will slowly start to attract would-be conquerors as the Land searches for a worthy ruler.

A conqueror does not have to claim the Demesne as the original Lord did. By force of arms, he makes himself the new successor, and so only has to continue the rituals of connection. Matters are often not quite that simple, though. The Land will seek to test its new ruler, and might not immediately grant its powers. The new Lord will have to make some kind of accommodation with the Land before he rules it completely.

If the conqueror already holds a Demesne, the two lands are merged into one, dominated by the Spirit of whichever was larger. Spirits of the Land follow after the mortals in their realms, so the conquered people may find their land changing around them as once-familiar Spirits are displaced by new ones. The new Lord's character will start shaping the land within a year, as well.

Matters are more complicated yet if the old Lord and his heirs are not slain outright. If they escape or are exiled, there is always the chance they can return. The Land will accept a past ruler or his blood more easily than an entirely new conqueror. If the current Lord is weak, a Demesne might even start answering to the "lost heir." But sometimes a Lord of a Demesne bows his head to a greater Lord. In these cases, both lands retain their Spirits, but the conqueror’s Demesne becomes stronger, and the High Lord's power extends into the new realm.

-------------------------
Gamespeak: This isn't too complicated. It probably doesn't need a formal system. A deposed Lord who somehow escapes has the chance to come back and try to get his realm back. A callow orphan boy could turn out to be the True King. A King can grant power to his Dukes and Earls. The actual mechanics of the power work however I design the system to work.
-------------------------

Next up is Magic of the Lower Air, and possibly Magic of the Underworld. They may end up being really similar, since a lot of the powers actually belong to the spirits, not to the magicians. Sorcery and Necromancy are more about knowing secrets and being able to get spirits to do favors for you than having "superpowers."

Yet Another World Building Column #4

David Goodner — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 16:04:38 GMT

The glacial pace continues. Spirits of the Underworld took me a while because I wasn't sure how to approach them, and I wanted at least one of the nifty fiction sections like in Spirits of the Land.

Spirits of the Underworld

The souls of Men long for the Celestial Spheres, but are drawn by morbid gravity to the Depths. For those souls that have found neither fate, there is the Underworld, a place of cold and darkness. The Spirits of the Underworld were once human souls. Some might be again, purged of their past stains until they are light enough to ascend and be reborn. Others have been twisted into something else.

Souls are bound into the Underworld for several reasons. Those who die without proper funeral rites to clear their way to the heavens have nowhere else to go. Worse yet, there are rites that will bind a soul to the Underworld. Even with all spiritual care, some souls are so burdened that they cannot make the journey. An ill-chosen oath can leave a soul so bound, as can unfulfilled vengeance or desire. And finally, those slain by creatures of the Underworld are often transformed into creatures of the Underworld themselves. Thus does the curse spread.

The great majority of spirits of the Underworld are incorporeal and trapped within the cavernous depths. They can be called up by sorceries in the dark of the night. Such spirits might have greater or lesser power. The strongest can kill men, or drive them to madness. The weakest might be able to do no more than dim the light in a room or create a chill. But even the weakest of spirits might have knowledge. Those who practice the Dark Arts most often seek knowledge. Spirits do not willingly part with their secrets, however. There is always a motive or a price. Only the most powerful or clever of Necromancers escape such transactions unscathed.

This was the fall of Ahankara, that the people were prideful and haughty, and denied hospitality to a passing traveler. This man bore the dark mark, and saw the world through one dead eye. He spoke no ill of those who wronged him, but in the dark of night dropped a polished black stone into the town well.

Every night thereafter, the dead arose to howl through the city on dark, cold winds. They grew stronger with the waning of the moon, and weaker under Her light. Under the new moon, anyone caught outside was in risk of death, and of arising as a shade himself. At other times, the howling was enough to sunder sleep and to erode sanity.

The people of Ahnkara were wealthy, and promised gold to any wizard who could banish the ghosts, but the ghosts whispered to the necromancers of Ahankara's sin, and none would stay. To this day, no one knows what sin Ahankara committed against the wandering sorcerer. Her once proud people were reduced to being wanderers themselves, and if they settled anywhere, ghosts would come to hound them. In time, few people even remembered where the city was.

And at the center of a ruined city, at the bottom of a well, perhaps the stone still sits.

Some Spirits of the Underworld do not need to be summoned. They are bound to the Land, fettered to some place or thing or time. Most often, this is the result of a sorcerer's spell. The slaves of a mortal king might be bound to guard his grave and protect his grave-goods from robbers. Rarely, though, an object or place exerts such a strong pull that a soul might be bound to it naturally.

Spirits so bound are more resistant to the light of day than others. Their powers are often diminished, but they can still act or speak.

Kal the Bloodwulf took the land of Geth by force of arms and force of will. The symbol of his rule was Kallenfang, a sword crafted for him by the greatest swordsmith of his age. Fire and Blood were bound into the blade's metal, and the heart of the Dragon of Geth was set into the pommel. With the blade in his hand, Kal was unbeatable until slain by trechery. His son, Kel, took up Kallenfang, and with it, took up the might of his father. Kel died in the plague years, and the whole land mourned, for Kel was as dauntless as his father, but far kinder. The blade passed to his grandson, Dal, a child of Kel's daughter. Many thought that when Dal came to rule Geth, he would have to face the dragon, but the great wyrm recognized his claim, and he ruled with his grandsire's wisdom and his greatsire's courage.

The land of Geth fell many years ago, but the line of the Bloodwulf survives. They are slayers and reavers and men of great renown, with the courage of heroes and the wisdom of kings. And one day, one of them will destroy each of the petty kings who rule what once was Geth, and rebuild the Bloodwulf's domain.

Still other Spirits of the Underworld are able to leave its depths in corporeal bodies, grotesquely reanimating their own corpses or sometimes the corpses of others. Ghouls, Revenants, and Vampires are of the Underworld even though not in it. The Land rejects such beings, and the light burns them to some degree, although they might withstand it longer than fleshless shades. Animate Un-Dead are often very difficult to destroy. Magical rituals might serve, or weapons of Power. Fire is often efficacious. One fortune of Men is that many such creatures are vulnerable to some special thing, often silver, the Moon's metal. But in the night, when ghouls are shrieking for your blood, silver might be in short supply.

----

Gamespeak: Spirits of the Underworld will be handled in a similar manner to the Spirits of the Land. They'll have a list of capabilities the GM can "shop" from. I expect that there will be some kind of bestiary of sample monsters, but I want the setting to be mysterious, so I'm leaving a clear option for unique Spirits.

One power Spirits of the Underworld might have is the ability to possess humans. This could be good or bad, depending on the degree of control and the motives of the spirit. I'm particularly considering it in the case of fettered spirits. Someone wearing the torc of a bound ghost might be able to draw on his strength and skill. Alternately, the medallion of an ancient sorcerer might hold his soul and take control of whoever puts it on so that the sorcerer could live again.

Some basic rules that bind all Spirits of the Underworld:

-Light is bad for them. To some degree, they're bound by darkness.

-The Land rejects them. Spirits of the Underworld have some sort of taint they spread. It could just be a chill in the air, or it could be that plants die, milk sours, and so on. The worst ones might spread plague just by existing.

-Spirits of the Underworld exact some price on creatures of the Land. Ghosts will share their secrets, for a price. Revenants need revenge. Vampires drink blood. A Spirit of the Underworld can't just exist, although the price doesn't have to be particularly terrible. In one of the above examples, it's just that the holder of Kellenfang has to uphold the Bloodwulf legacy, or the sword will reject him and the spirits won't advise him or lend him their strength.

----

Yet Another World Building Column #3

David Goodner — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 16:15:42 GMT

Hi y'all. This has taken a while, because I kept forgetting to send it to my laptop, from which I do most of my blog posting, so it languished in obscurity in a sad, forgotten folder on a different computer until I remembered to email it to myself.

But now, at long last, a little more of my latest exercise in world-building is ready for your perusal.

Spirits of the Lower Air

The Lower Air encircles the Land, marking out safe boundries beyond which the Land cannot exist. The purpose of the Air is to provide the Land with breath. Sound, light, warmth, shadow, cold, and flame all travel through the medium of Air. And these are not just nameless forces, they are living things, breathed out by the Land. They are the Spirits of the Lower Air.

Unlike the Spirits of the Land, Spirits of the Lower Air are almost always incorporeal. They live only in their earthly manifestations, and never step beyond them. In every shadow is a sprit of shadow, but only in exceptionally rare circumstances will the shadow spirit take any action beyond slowly moving across the wall as the sun passes in the sky.

The Spirits of the Lower Air can be categorized, but some defy easy classification. Almost every natural occurance or element has a spirit. The works of Man can sometimes give birth to spirits as well, or perhaps to transform the spirits already inside. A sword of legend that has slain dragons and kings and lovers might have its own spirit that embues the sword with great power and Will, but not all swords have spirits beyond the iron in their blades.

Some philosophers even doubt the individuality of the Spirits of the Lower Air. Does a storm spirit retire to his bed when the storm abates, only to return for a new storm? Or does each new storm have a spirit that lives and dies within the span of the storm? The Spirits themselves are little help in answering the question. Their perception of time is different than that of Men. While a spirit can understand such concepts as "wait until later" or "before this, that," it will be utterly baffled by such questions as "when were you born?" or "How long have you lived?" In fact, most Spirits of the Lower Air can only speak of concrete, immediate things, and seldom speak at all other than to acknowledge commands.

----
Gamespeak: Spirits of the Lower Air have pretty simple balliwiks. A Fire spirit can make things burn, keep things from burning, and control fire to a limited extent. A really powerful Fire spirit might be able to make water burn, but most couldn't.

I'm thinking that Spirits of the Lower Air will have limits to their duration. I'll probably get into this more in the magic section, but the basic idea is that if you summon a fire spirit and take it out of the fire, it can only last so long, and as it expends its energy, it gets weaker and will discorporate sooner.

Anchoring the spirit in some way could give it longer time duration.

Spirits can only be called up within their elements. To summon a fire spirit, you need a fire, and the bigger the fire, the bigger the spirit you could summon. Human manufacture changes what spirits are available. For instance, a lump of raw iron ore could be used to summon a rock spirit, but if that iron were smelted and refined and beaten into a sword, the spirit would then be a sword spirit. If the sword were broken, the sword spirit would die (only to live again if the sword were somehow re-forged) and those particular fragments of iron might not be useful to summon anything anymore.
----

Spirits of the Greater Air

Beyond the Land and Lower Air is the perfect Celestial realm. Men cannot go there, and nothing from the Celestial spheres can easily enter the land. The Lunar Sphere marks the barrier between the Lower and Greater Air. Naturally, this means that on nights when the moon is dark, the barrier is weaker. New Moons are times of portent. Lunar eclipses are major events.

The Spirits of the Greater Air are both most and least like men above all other spirits. They understand the passage of time as Men do, although as immortal beings they see more of it pass. Unlike spirits of the Lower Air, the Spirits of the Greater Air are visible to human eyes, hanging in the sky. The barrier of the Lunar Sphere separates Man from the Spirits of the Greater Air. Men can call upon them, but cannot summon them or bind them, and Spirits of the Greater Air never touch the Land. When a star falls, the spirit is consumed and destroyed, leaving only a shard of stone. This stone, when found by Men, is of great power, but is no longer a spirit.

Legends say this is not always true. Sometimes, a Spirit of the Greater Air longs so deeply for the Land that he might fall from the sky and survive, diminished in power and cast into the form of a man or beast.

----
Gamespeak: as an unabashed fan of Neil Gaiman's Stardust, I am very likely to include rules for fallen stars, but I'm not completely decided. At the moment, this is a very "human" setting. Adding any sort of demihuman should not be done lightly.
----

The Greater Air is marked by spheres encircling the Land like nested dolls. Each Sphere is the domain of one of the most powerful spirits of the Greater Air, the Spirits who shape the destiny of the Land. Men all recognize these Spirits in some form, although the details, and even the names, might differ.

First is the Lunar Sphere. The Moon is one of the two Spirits closest to the Land, and the one that gives it light in the darkness. She (although the Spirits are not bound by human sex, the Moon is almost always seen as a female spirit by the peoples of the Land) represents Life in its physical, changing aspects: fertility, birth, aging, and eventual death, plants, animals, and the like. The Spirit of the Moon seeks to elevate mankind by bringing Man into harmony with the Land.

Second is the Solar Sphere. The Sun is the second Spirit closest to Man, and brings life-giving light to the Land. Without Light, the Land would be cold, dead, and unseen. The Spirit of the Sun holding purvue over life, healing, purity, and inspiration. His are the spiritual domains of life, and he seeks to elevate Men's souls.

Next is the Mercurial Sphere. The Dawnstar treasures knowledge above all else. This includes philosophy, secrets, and languages. It is the Spirit of Mercury who orders the Stars to reveal the secrets of the universe.

(aside: Yes, I know that the morning star and the evening star were really both Venus. Work with me here)

Fourth is the Venusian Sphere. The Spirit of Venus is concerned with the "soft" or "gentle" emotions, and seeks to elevate Man through love, beauty, and art. She inspires poets and romantics.

Fifth is the Martian Sphere. The Red Star is the star of War. The Spirit of Mars finds elevation in conflict: constant striving, challenging, biting, scratching for advantage. The Red Star finds Men at their best in the midst of a struggle.

Sixth is the Jovian Sphere. The Spirit of Jove admires all forms of strength, and believes the best way for Man to ascend is through the wisdom and strength of kings. It is by Jove's will that a Lord may rule his Land.

The seventh, and final Sphere is the Saturnian Sphere. Beyond this, is the Abyss. The Spirit of Saturn sets limits. He separated the Land from the Air, and the Lower Air from the Greater Air. He separates life from death and day from night.

Within the Celestial Spheres, there are countless stars. Each is aligned with one of the Greater Lights, serving and supplimenting it. Some of these are part of the celestial chorus, singing the eternal music of the Spheres. Others take a direct interest in human affairs, watching life play out far below.

When Men send up prayers and sacrifices to the Celestial Spheres, the Spirits hear them. For reasons of their own, they sometimes deign to answer.

----
Gamespeak: Spirits of the Greater Air are essentially gods and angels. They don't often communicate with individuals. The greatest of them don't even really care about countries or dynasties. They're only interested in the ideals they represent, and exert constant subtle influence to promote those ideals. Mars' light shines down on men and makes them dream of war and blood and glory. Lesser spirits associated with Mars might communicate with specific men, but only rarely. Men can pray to the gods, and by doing so can forge a slightly stronger connection to them, which sometimes results in minor miracles.

The big exception to this will be discussed in the magic section.
----

So, that's it for now. Spirits of the Underworld and of the Deep remain, and are actually not written yet. I'm trying (futily) to do NaNoWriMo again this year, so I probably won't have time to get to them for a couple weeks, at least.

Yet Another World Building Column #2

David Goodner — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 19:32:03 GMT

And now we're back. Obviously, when I said magic was next, I really meant Spirits were next. You got that, right? No, seriously, since I write these things off the cuff, I sometimes change my mind midway through. Spirits are so fundamental to how everything in this setting works that I decided I needed to handle them, first.

I’m breaking this down into sections, since otherwise it would be pretty long. (Also, this way I get several days worth of content instead of just one)

Spirits

Man and beast share their world with Spirits, born in the echoes of creation long ago. Spirits ruled the world before the rise of Men, and some say they will rule it again when the last Man dies. Sometimes allies, sometimes enemies, Spirits are at least as variable as humans, and wield fantastic powers.

Powers of Spirits

The ways of Spirits are not the ways of Men. Men are bound by flesh. Spirits are part of the eternal Land or the boundless Air. They are creatures of Will, rather than of Flesh. But they are also constrained in ways that men are not, enmeshed in their roles or lacking in substance.

Each Spirit is bound, to some degree, by its nature. A Hunting Beast must hunt. A spirit of flame must burn. A spirit of a lake cannot journey out to other lands. But within its purview, a spirit can be very powerful.

----
Gamespeak: My thoughts are that this needs to be a freeform system. A spirit will be defined by attributes that tell you how powerful it is, and what areas it can influence. Then there's a system for calculating how powerful a spirit needs to be to generate a given effect. On a scale of 1 to 5, a fire spirit with a 1 might just be able to light a candle, while a 5 STR fire spirit might be able to set a whole city afire. A Spirit's stat block would have whatever basic statistics are needed, plus its power level (possibly different for each of its areas of influence). Then some common/well-known specific effects would be a good idea, so you don't have to calculate them on the fly every time you need them.

The Buffy Magic system is a pretty good guideline, with its definitions of effect, duration, number of people, and so on. I'll probably end up with something like that.

The goal is to produce a system where the GM always knows what a given spirit can do, and the players can make informed guesses, but there's still room for surprises.
----

Spirits of the Land

The Spirits of the Land are manifestations of the Land's will and character. A land with no spirits withers and dies, becoming a blasted wasteland where nothing grows and nothing can survive for long. Far from the places of Man, the Spirits of the Land are vast and powerful. Primitive men in this primordial wild often worship them as fearsome and terrible gods. Wild Spirits of the Land generally have the form of great beasts. In places where the rule of Man dominates, the Spirits are diminished, but no less vital. They are shaped by men's wills into forms closer to human.

Wild Spirits

The Spirits that dwell in the wild are often savage and terrible, but also often hold ancient secrets and awesome powers. Only the bravest, or most foolish of men can face them. The risks are great, as are the rewards.

The Black Woods of Gothe are ruled by a black bear taller than a house, with burning embers for eyes, and with claws that can sunder tree trunks. Anyone who brings iron into the forest raises the black bear's rage. In his presence, fires will not burn, and shadows become visions of men's darkest fears. By day, the bear is never seen. Only the sharpest arrows will pierce the dark bear's hide, and any hurts he takes one night will be healed by the next.

Stories say that a warrior who kills the dark bear will gain his power - skin that turns blows, and strength beyond mortal ken; shadows that answer his call, and power over flame. No one has done so yet. Kenning Men say that one can, on the first new moon of spring, approach the bear carrying neither weapons nor flame, and the bear will judge the man's worthiness. For a worthy man, the bear will answer any one question, and give the man one of his teeth, which may be made into a spear tip or a dagger sharper than steel. But if the man is judged unworthy, the bear will kill him and devour him, such that no one remembers his name. Still other stories say that if the man is found worthy, the bear will still kill him, and he will rise three nights hence as a bear himself.

Each land has one totemic spirit, a Genius Locus. To defeat or treat with that spirit is to become a Lord. Thereafter, the Land recognizes its Lord and rewards him when he is strong. The Land makes demands of its Lords, though, and these demands must be met, else great doom befall the Lord.

Once, a mighty city stood on the mountain called Drakencrag. The city's first king slew the dragon of the mount with a sword forged from starmetal. As the dragon died, he granted the king and his descendants dominion over the mountain, the valley, and the fertile plains beneath, so long as the people never slew any of the lesser dragons that lived in the mountains, and each shepherd left his first ewe of the year as an offering to the dragons when it was a year old.

For many years, the people prospered. Their hunters brought back full sacks. Their fields produced more than sufficient grain. Their warriors brought back great plunder in raids against weaker neighbors. Until there came a king who grew tired of the wyrms that sometimes stole from his herds or burned his crops. With the sword of his fathers, he slew a wyrm. Thereafter, the city knew no peace. A plague of wyrms descended, burning the city and the surrounding villages, and killing those who lived there. The king and his warriors fought back, but they were defeated, and the starmetal blade was lost.

Now the Drakencrag is once again ruled by a great and powerful dragon, and legends speak of the wondrous treasure that might be found in the ruins of the city. The people who dwell in the valley and the fields beyond will slay such wyrms as descend from the hills to steal sheep, but they never pursue the wyrms into the mountains, for that is surely death. To appease the Dragon, they must now sacrifice to him a virgin girl who has just begun to have her moontime each year on the longest night.

Not all Spirits of the Land are gigantic or dangerous. Even in wild places, there are some spirits that can be helpful to men, although even these spirits are not to be crossed.

Many wild places are home to the Little People, who look like misshapen effigies of humans. They are attracted to human activity, but seldom do more than watch from a distance. Few travelers ever get more than a glimpse of them. When unobserved, the little men will steal small objects, often hanging them in the tree branches nearby, or work other small mischief. But other times, they will mark safe trails, or lead lost travelers from danger with their haunting voices, which warble like birds and click and croak like frogs and insects.

A man who touches a little man will have good luck all day, so some people think to capture one and keep it in a cage. This is a poor idea, since the others will take great offence and work their small mischiefs on the captor and everyone around him, and even if he releases the captive, they will never stop hounding him. Or so say the legends.

Spirits of Man

Spirits do not only dwell in the primordial wilds. They are part of the Land, and as such are found everywhere upon it. But in places dominated by Man, they are diminished in form and power. This does not mean they are powerless, by any means.

In the ancient city of Illyum , after the sun has set, fortunate men (or unfortunate ones) will sometimes see a trio of women, shapely in form, but clothed head to toe in red wrappings, with red cloaks hiding their heads and silver, eyeless masks hiding their features. These women sometimes walk, sometimes dance to inaudible music, but never speak. Everyone knows that the Red Ladies are harbingers. Anyone who actually hears their music will die in a fortnight. If he can actually hear them sing, he will die that very day.

Very rarely, a Red Lady will stop and lay hands upon a person, always a woman or a child. If she bestows her blessings upon a grown woman, that woman will conceive a child within the next year. If she chooses a child, that child will not fall ill until his beard begins to grow (if a boy) or her moontime begins (if a girl).

Once in a great while, only two Red Ladies will appear. They will dance through the city plaza in broad daylight, and everyone in the square will hear the haunting music. The pair will pick out a woman in the plaza, be she young or old, pretty or ugly, and dance around her, finally taking her hand and leading her from the plaza in a frenetic, spiraling dance. Anyone who tries to stop them will be compelled to dance as well, although not to follow. Those stricken will dance until the next sunrise, if they do not die first. The chosen woman will be led away and will never be seen again. The next time the Red Ladies appear, there will be three again.

Many peoples know of household spirits, like the Brown Men as small as mice, always dressed in clothes made from scraps of cloth and decorated with bits of stone and metal. The Brown Men live in the shadows beneath cupboards, in the gaps between stones, and in the void between roof and rafters. They prefer rough, somewhat shabby dwellings over the fine houses of the rich. Wise people will leave out a bit of food for them, and make sure the odd scrap of good fabric falls to the corner, because Brown Men will protect the house they live in. They chase away vermin, and do not foul what bits of food they steal for their own use as rats would do. Sometimes, they might also deign to do small chores like patching a leaking thatch roof or mending a small broken thing left laying out.

If they are well-treated, they will also protect the inhabitants from hostile magics. Whenever a malevolent entity or evil spell targets a member of the household or a guest, a Brown Man can choose to sacrifice his life in the stead of the original target. The next day, the lady of the house will find his corpse, blackened to a cinder, on the hearthstone. When this happens, it is important that the inhabitants of the house honor the little cinder with a proper funeral, scaled down to its size. Otherwise, the remaining Brown Men might give offence and leave the house.

----
Gamespeak: Spirits of the Land will have fairly esoteric power purviews like "Healing" or "Hearth" or "Hunting" (although they won't all have to begin with the letter "H.") I'll try to avoid the more elemental ones like "Fire" or "Storms" because those should be the realm of Spirits of the Lower Air. But fire or storms might be part of a Spirit of the Land's repertoire. A spirit of fear might only appear during storms. The Genius Locus of a volcano could well have a body made of burning lava. I'll have to think about how those work.

Next up, Spirits of the Lower Air.

Yet Another World Building Column #1

David Goodner — Sun, 30 Sep 2007 02:15:37 GMT

Seems like people would get bored of these.

Seems like I should finish the other world I started designing before I start designing a new one.

Life is full of things that seem really obvious, but aren't. :)

"Kickin' it Old School" has kind of fallen by the wayside because I decided I wasn't really all that interested in sky pirates. I didn't feel like I had anything really cool to do, and I couldn't work up much enthusiasm. Since this blog is purely voluntary, I'm letting that project languish in the back corners of my mind and the non-updated corners of my blog.

But all is not lost. Another old idea of mine has bubbled to the surface, and I think I'll use my blog to hash it out for a while. For now, I'm just concentrating on the setting, without thinking about rules or game systems. (Well, I say that, but really I'm thinking about rules and game systems, just not writing down the specifics.) My goal is to build the world and figure out how stuff in it is supposed to work, then figure out how to represent it mechanically.

So, let's get started.

Origins
This world came to me from several sources.

Princess Mononoke, with a modernizing world pressing up against an ancient, magical world. I love the talking animals and the god of the forest. I love how magic isn't something intrinsic to any of the human characters. People with magical knowledge use it the same way that people in the real world use practical knowledge.
The Arthurian mythos (also seen in other places) with the King's ties to the Land. The King is the Land, and the Land is the King. While Arthur was strong and true, his power extended across the world. When he was laid low by sloth, treachery, and falsehood, the very land weakened, and eventually Camelot fell.
A desire of mine for a world where "Magician" doesn't mean "Superhero in robes." (Not that there's anything wrong with that.) I like the idea that "Magic" is the manipulation of forces external to man. What this means in comparison to, say, a D&D Wizard or a Mage: the Awakening Mage is pretty subtle. On the surface of matters, there's not much difference between casting a fireball spell and summoning a fire spirit to tell it to burn someone, but there's a big difference in what the magician thinks about it, and a lot of little differences in how it all plays out.
A little bit of Hermetic lore I picked up in various places (including RPG.net, where all the cool kids hang out): One of the laws of Hermetic Magic (of which I'm ignoring many more) is that human magic can't affect anything beyond the Lower Air - which is to say the moon's orbit. Shadowrun had the same rule, as I recall. I wonder if the guys at FASA were inspired the same way I was. Another bit is "As above, so below," which points to a symmetrical world.

These tidbits floated around in my cluttered brain until they collided, and the shape they took was of a fantasy world with a different flavor than the bog-standard High Fantasy world I'm used to. I started thinking about how this world might fit together and what the people who lived there would act like.

So, without further ado, here's the world:

The World

In the center of creation is The Land, where men and beasts dwell. On the Land is fresh water and every manner of plant and animal. The Land shelters life, and is Alive. The Land is sometimes a lover to be cherished, a teacher to be respected, or a foe to be defeated for your survival.

The Spirits of the Land live upon it and within it. They take their shapes from the Land's nature and power. In the deep wilds, the Spirits of the Land are huge and fearsome. In the places of men, the Spirits of the Land are smaller and tamer, diminished and changed by the presence of Men.

The Wise might know the ways of the Spirits of the Land, but cannot compel them with words learned in the movements of the Stars. Men must contend with, or supplicate, the Spirits of the Land, for they can be deadly enemies or powerful allies. Every demesne within the Land is ruled by a powerful Spirit, a Genius Locus. A Man (or Woman, the spirits don't really care) who can bind this Spirit to himself through force of arms, cunning, or sacrifice, becomes the Lord of this demesne. Thereafter, the Land answers to the Lord, so long as he remains true to it.

Above and around the Land is the Lower Air, home to incorporeal spirits. The Spirits of the Lower Air are reflections of the primordial world. A Spirit of Fire is the essence of flame, and dances in every candle and sleeps in every ember. Spirits of Storms dwell in the heart of raging maelstroms, making the wind blow, spitting lightning, and crying out with voices of thunder. Ponderous and slow, the Spirits of Stone are hard and impenetrable when they are young, but over centuries are worn down to Spirits of Sand. Everything has its Spirit, its archetype and first cause. Those who follow the Wise ways can learn the language of the Stars, which allows them to speak to these spirits, and sometimes to command them.

Normally, Spirits of the Lower Air are incorporeal and only able to affect the Land in limited ways. Spirits of Storms do not cause storms, they are born in them, and they rarely take notice of specific places to savage or to avoid. They only interact with Men when they are called to do so, or in times and places of power.

Beyond the Lower Air is the Greater Air (or the Higher Air). Here, dwell the Spirits of the Greater Air. The Spirits of the Greater Air can never be summoned or compelled, only entreated. They cannot directly affect the Land, but they can inspire Men and Spirits to do their will.

The Spirits of the Greater Air wish to see Man ascend, but they are not united in the belief of how Man should ascend, or what ascension means. Thus, the Spirits of the Greater Air often contend with each other.

Every Star is a Spirit. Their movements through the heavens reveal secret knowledge to those who learn to read it. Every person is born under a specific Star, and some people are chosen by their Stars as special agents. Only through these Champions do the Spirits of the Greater Air directly act upon the Land. To follow one's Star is to follow one's Destiny, often into greatness, but just as often into death.

As above, so below. There are worlds of Spirit beneath the Land, as well as those above it. Beneath the Land, and in every dark place, there is the Underworld. Those human spirits that cannot ascend beyond the celestial sphere and are not dragged into the ever-darkness of the Deep dwell in the Underworld, as do fallen and corrupted Spirits of the Land and of the Lower Air. The Underworld is not evil itself, but much evil dwells there. It is a place of stagnation and rot, but also a place of ancient knowledge. Some who follow the path of the Wise learn to treat with the Spirits of the Underworld.

Like Spirits of the Lower Air, Spirits of the Underworld are generally incorporeal and unable to treat with Men. They can be called and bound, and they can touch the Land in times and places of power.

Beneath the Underworld, and beyond the Land, is the Deep.

The Deep touches all waters. The Sea is a barrier to the magics of the Land. No man can rule the Sea, even if he slays 1000 Krakens. Similarly, the magics of the Land often have difficulty passing over water. The magics of the Lower Air are generally unaffected, but the Spirits that dwell over the Deep are not the same as those who dwell over the Land, except for those of the wind, which blows everywhere.

People of the Land are always suspicious of those who choose to live their lives over the Deep, and those who live on the waves are rarely comfortable on the Land.

In the Deep, terrible spirits dwell. As the Spirits of the Greater Air wish to see Man ascend, the Spirits of the Deep seek to drag Men down and diminish Mankind. Men who fall to despair or hatred, or who were born under fallen Stars sometimes hear the voices of these Spirits. The Spirits of the Deep will offer knowledge and power and strength to those who hear them, but such power destroys the user as surely as it destroys all around him. The Stars will not shine upon such a one.

Next up, Magic (which might be split into several parts)

Beyond the Game Shelf: Blink

David Goodner — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 00:09:28 GMT

Blink

Welcome to what might be a new feature for The Astounding Mr. Goodner's Amazing Electric Widgets: "Beyond the Game Shelf." By the title, I of course mean real life - or at least non-gaming related stuff. I read more genre fiction than is probably good for me: fantasy novels, comics, horror, science-fiction. And a lot of it inspires my gaming. I read mainstream fiction, too, and that's a good resource as well. If you can stand the plots, nothing in this world will teach you more about character interaction than a romance novel. (Albeit a fairly limited view of character interaction, but the ability to generate conflict without violence or external stakes is a valuable one)

But fiction is just a tiny slice of the world, and it's filtered through the needs of a story. There's so much more out there that's worth a look. So, recently, I've resolved to start reading more non-fiction.

Of course, as enlightening as that is, there's not really any reason for me to inflict my reading on you. I'm not really interested in writing book reviews, and even if I was, I'm sure you could find other people to write them better. So why are we here? Well, I apply a lot of what I read or pick up from other sources to my gaming just like the movies I watch and the comics and books I read.

So, let's get started. Today I ran across a book called Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell.

Brief review

Blink is a book about how we think without thinking, our instinctive judgments that are often correct. Every person has the ability to take in a situation at a glance - Gladwell calls it "thin-slicing." The book opens with an example: a museum is offered a rare statue in amazing condition. They proceed cautiously, hiring experts to study the style, provenance, even the stone with the most advanced techniques available. The experts agree that the statue is likely genuine. Except that several other experts simply take one look at the statue and are convinced it's a fraud. And they were right. In a second, with just a glance, they got better information than a team of lawyers, investigators, and art experts could compile in months.

Blink is all about why and how, and what it means.

The book covers cognition, instinct, and how our instincts can be manipulated. Then it goes on to talk about how and why our instincts mislead us or fail us. It's written for popular consumption, so there's not much in the way of technical language. The writing was lively and easy to follow, with lots of examples. In fact, every section was built around case studies to illustrate the points.

After reading it, I have what I consider to be a good lay-person's knowledge about cognition, instinct, and reflexive decisions. I learned a bit about how they affect people unawares (like the fact that the package your ice cream comes in affects the way it tastes), and how they can be trained.

But What Does It All Mean?

The real point of all this is how I think Blink might affect my gaming. I'll focus on three areas.

Playing

From a player's perspective, I began to see just how limited the world revealed in an RPG really is. An expert on ancient Greek art can take one look at a statue and tell whether it is genuine or fake. He won't know how he knows, but he'll know. But as a player, I'm limited to what the GM tells me. Finding out the statue is fake probably involves asking for a perception roll of some kind, if I even think to ask. Thinking to ask involves me realizing the statue is important, whereas in real life, an art expert constantly makes these judgments.

On the other hand, I'm starting to re-think the way I think about combat. One really interesting section talked about the way our perceptions shift under stress. As your heart rate goes up, your brain filters out extraneous data so you can focus on the task at hand. At about 110, you reach a sweet-spot where distractions are distant, and the world seems to move in slow motion. But past that spot, your performance rapidly diminishes. Tunnel vision sets in, your ability to make rational decisions is impaired. Even your coordination drops as blood retracts from your surface muscles to protect you from injury. Trained cops can completely lose it. And the psychological aftermath of a shooting can be devastating. This is stuff I knew before, but it helps to be reminded.

I enjoy playing cool, steady combat monsters, but I should give a lot more consideration to how a less seasoned character would behave in a fight. I should also give more thought to the kind of psychology that makes someone find a firefight exciting, but not cripplingly scary. It's probably not a happy place to go.

GM-ing

All the above applies from the other side as GM. I need to think about ways to convey a lot of subtle information very quickly. What I'm thinking of is a look a each character's skills and stats to get some general thresholds of info. In my beloved Unisystem, it might go like this. (This is a rough draft. I haven't thought all this completely through yet)

Perception + Skill total of 2 or so: The PC is actively impaired. He gets outright disinformation sometimes, unless he takes time to look carefully. In combat, he could easily get tunnel vision and not notice the movement of any characters or environmental factors other than his chosen target. He'll see his target in the most threatening possible way. He won't be able to hear much at all.

Perception + Skill total of 4 or so: The PC knows what would be obvious to an average person. Almost everything I tell him would be true, but he wouldn't always get told everything. I'd throw in really obvious social cues like "the guard looks bored" or "the guy walking by looks kind of dangerous." The player would have to ask for more, and would need to rely on perception tests. In combat, he tends to have a tight focus, and might not notice anything beyond it. Situational Awareness obviously negates most of these penalties. That's what it's for.

Perception + Skill of 8-ish: Now you're talking about a major expert. The baseline knowledge I'd give this guy is really high. Without even a skill roll, he could spot a fake statue unless it was REALLY good (but he'd need to do research and tests to PROVE what he knows). A people expert would be able to tell more about the people he meets - I'd still probably use opposed tests for some things, but not all of them. A combatant with this kind of skill is aware of almost everything going on around him, and can easily stay in control of himself.

Perception + Skill of 10 or more: Now you're talking about someone with godlike instincts. He's the kind of person who, if he's a musician, can identify another musician's style from just a note or two. As a combatant, I might even start giving someone like this hints about what his opponent is going to do next. Unless something unrelated to the fight pushes him over the edge, he probably never loses control.

I don't know how much of that I'd implement formally, or what I might add to it, but at the very least I'm going to start keeping it in mind. The guy playing the mechanical genius can probably tell when an engine has problems just by walking by. The girl who's an Olympic triathlete (read "Sniper") probably has the ability to size up ranges without even thinking about it. I should just tell her "it's right on the edge of medium range" before she even asks.

Designing

I'm a pretty rules-lite kind of designer. If I were to design a game, there wouldn't be weighty systems to support casual perception, but I can kind of see how someone would go about designing them. For a rules-heavy kind of game, a combat system that takes into account tunnel vision and the like might be kind of neat.

For a game that deals with psychology like Unknown Armies or World of Darkness, a system to measure the initial effects of stress might be as interesting as the existing systems that measure the aftermath. Say you enter combat and roll some kind of willpower test, modified by your previous combat experience. It might be part of your initiative roll. The result gives you modifiers to know what's going on around you. A bad roll could send you into kind of a berserker rage against one target, completely unaware of the other potential threats, or worse yet unaware that your target isn't really a threat at all. A good roll might give you extra actions, or the ability to change your action based on what other characters choose to do because you're so hyper-aware.

But, like I said, I'm a rules-lite kind of guy.

So anyway, that's Blink. If I get the time to sit down with it, I think the next one of these will be How to cheat at Everything, by Simon Lovell. I skimmed it at work a couple days ago, and it had some really interesting stuff. But don't count on it. The whole point of this blog is that I don't have to be consistent. :)

Kickin' It Old School: Part 4

David Goodner — Thu, 10 Aug 2006 19:23:57 GMT

Nature Red in Tooth and Claw

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:

Easy targets: Not every adventure, or even every campaign, needs to be a deeply nuanced morality tale. While I'm not planning to have the goblinkin live in caverns with 10x10 foot halls, guarding treasure chests full of stuff they don't use, I do see them as useful for melodramatic adversaries akin to zombie pirates, Imperial stormtroopers, and Nazis in other forms of pulp-inspired gaming and literature.
A campaign-spanning adversary: In Lord of the Rings, the conflict that most people saw was humanity and its allies against the boundless hordes of orks. The more important conflict was Frodo's purity and bravery against Sauron's will and corruption, but that was more subtle, and not as fun for the other PCs.
A backdrop to other things: The goblinkin can be a constant, low-grade threat. They've mostly been pushed out to the worst of the wastelands. A goblin war is a possibility, but not a probability. So humanity has moved on to other pursuits, and other conflicts. But the threat of the goblin lands always lurks. If the relatively prosperous human civilizations were to decline for some reason - say, an internal war - the goblins might see their chance to strike again.

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.

Kickin' It Old School: Part 3

David Goodner — Mon, 07 Aug 2006 22:07:38 GMT

History of the World, Part 1

With my bare bones set, I usually start trying to figure out how to put the pieces in order. I've got some ideas floating around, unattached, as it were. Since I have to start somewhere, I find that a rough chronology is as good a spot as any. It'll end up changing in response to ideas I develop later, probably multiple times. But for now, it'll do.

The way I usually do this is with a pseudo-timeline. I'm not going to try to assign dates yet, just put events in order. At the end, I'll have a pretty good idea of how the setting developed from the "Big Bang" or whatever. (This being a fantasy world, it could be a cosmic sneeze, or any number of other things)

What you're going to see below is actually a pretty poor representation of my timeline. You'll just see it all laid out in order. There's no good way to show you the deletions, rewritings, and additions. You will probably see the uneven writing. I go pretty freely between "game text" and dry (or occasionally sarcastic) descriptions that just get the point across without being particularly pretty. This isn't the final product. It's just my notes.

The First Age

In the beginning, there was nothing. Father Sun and Mother Earth joined, and created the world. The races of man were few and scattered, and worshiped the Mother and the Father. They might have used different names, but they worshiped the same entities.

There was a third being at the beginning of time, the Darkness. The Darkness was opposed to creation. The Light burned him. The softest earth was like daggers to his feet. He retreated to the darkest places and slept. In his sleep, his dreams were of blood and fire and pain, of destruction to all that had been created. And because he was a god, his dreams were real.

Father Sun and Mother Earth saw that their creation would be despoiled by the creatures of Darkness, so they dreamed together, and their dreams were of gods and angels to defend the earth. Father Sun and Mother Earth were exhausted by their efforts and fell into sleep. Their children, the gods, divided the tribes of men among themselves and shepherded over them.

They young gods were dreams, and were shaped by the dreams of their worshipers.

The Second Age

The foundations of modern civilizations were laid. Each god or group of gods "adopted" a part of the world and the people found there. Some gods roved around, and had different guises in different lands. The rest, though, took on racial characteristics - shaped by their people and in turn shaping them.

During this time period, the gods lived on the earth as beings of flesh and spirit, just like humans, but vastly more powerful. They eventually forced all the demons into the dark places, beyond the reaches of men. (In point of fact, into a physical "Underworld" that can be reached by going deep enough underground.

In a way, it was a golden age. But it was not to last. Warfare between neighboring states led some people to wipe out others. The "orphaned" gods sometimes died, but other times went mad. Among those who went mad, some were tempted to the Darkness.

The Third Age

Eventually, as they always do, things went all to hell. The dark gods (those who had been corrupted by the Darkness) unleashed the forces of Darkness on earth. They attracted worshipers to the Darkness, which allowed for the Reign of Darkness. This lead to years of plague, the release of fell beasts and goblinkin, storms of ice and fire, and finally a global cataclysm as the Darkness tried to destroy the earth and all life upon it.

Humanity found allies in the Fey, who entered the world to battle against the Darkness. But even so, the tide was turning against the light.

The gods realized they'd failed their worshipers and sacrificed themselves to save the world. They fell into dreams and used their dreaming power to preserve their people's lives and keep the world from destruction. They forced the denizens of Darkness into the Underworld, and by their blood sealed the Darkness away.

The Fourth Age

The world had nearly been torn asunder, and much of the surface was still overrun with poisons, flames, and goblinkin. Many people retreated to the sky, on magical islands born on the wind. Those who remained on the ground had to be hard and fierce, or were corrupted by the remnants of Darkness.

There were years of upheaval in the wake of the cataclysm. A new order emerged. The sleeping gods could no longer protect their servants directly, and further, they had learned that it was better to inspire and guide humans than to treat them like sheep.

Or possibly they figured out that they couldn't lead them around like sheep anymore. The only way to influence mortal events was through living conduits -clerics, essentially. Either way, this marked the end of the age of the gods and the beginning of the age of man.

Some time into the fourth age is when most of the cool stuff of the game will happen. There will be modern countries, with their interrelations mostly worked out. Allies and enemies will mostly have the battle lines drawn, and everything is more or less at a stasis point, with the possibility for major change just a few key events away.

Where Do We Go From Here?

With the history done, I have kind of a road-map for future developments.

I know that the world is layered. There are sky islands, surface settlements, and underdwellers. I also know roughly when each came into being and what you're likely to find in them. The "Civilized World" is mostly going to be found up in the sky, with things getting more dangerous (and profitable for adventurers) as they get lower. With massive geological upheaval, I also have a nice excuse for lost cities and dungeons; always a good thing for a "Dungeons & Dragons" game.
I know there are multiple pantheons of gods. I'll have to think about how they interrelate. What happens when two gods of the Sea clash? Or when a cleric leaves his homeland?
I know where orks and goblins and monsters came from, by and large.

I also know I'll probably be revisiting the history for more work at some point.

I still haven't figured out quite who the dragons are. The easiest answer, though, is that they're Faeries, just like the Elves and other demihumans - more powerful, but of the same stuff. So I'll have to figure out how they fit into the overall scheme of things.
Exact details of which gods went to the Darkness and when will also be important. That'll come into play when I start designing the gods and their religions.

So, lots of work still ahead, but I can see how it's shaping up now. My next step is likely to be flora and fauna, which mostly means monsters. But I could start with cultures or something if that strikes my fancy instead.

Fourth Age history will be expanded more than any of the previous ages once I start really writing the world's history. Before that, history was almost more myth than fact. Different regions probably have different takes on what happened. But now that I have the basics down, I can start skipping ahead to the modern age and working my way back along the path, rather than trying to build everything from the most ancient past to the present in exact order.

In fact, I don't really want to get too detailed with history until I have to. Leaving some gaps gives me more options as I go along.

Kickin' It Old School: Part 2

David Goodner — Thu, 03 Aug 2006 01:13:27 GMT

Where to Begin?

So, I've undertaken to create a world. After I say "Fiat Lux" and take the rest of the day off, what do I do next?

Twenty years or so ago, I'd sit down with a piece of hex paper and sketch in a big, vaguely Australia-shaped continent with a few islands off to the sides, and start filling in terrain any old way that struck my fancy. Deserts next to forests near the coast? No problem.

But now I'd like to take a little more care. I want to create a fantastic, yet internally consistent environment. This task is made a little more difficult since I'm thinking in terms of a Dungeons & Dragons game. I have to have room for wizards, elves, magic items, and monsters. Dragons would be nice, too. Otherwise, it's just "Dungeons &" and nobody wants that.

I have some touch points I need to hit for this to be a good world.

It has to be a place to have adventures. Further, I don't want to design a world with one overriding conflict. I could do that pretty easily. It's even my usual mode of setting design these days. I just want to try something else.
It has to be a recognizable setting - but not just plain vanilla. Worlds that are basically earth with different continents need not apply. I want something different. Something fantastic.
It has to be viable. But that's fairly easy with magic mucking around with things. I just need to be sure not to overdo the magic.

So before I get too married to any one concept, I'm going to brainstorm stuff I think would be cool. Not all of it might make the cut, but I'll give everything a good look.

Brainstorming

Sky pirates! Flying ships in general are cool. Possibly even something more like real aircraft, rather than boats with wings.
Magic as technology. It's been done, of course, but in the D&D mode, it makes a lot of sense. If one out of 1000 people, even, can cure the sick, create light, or throw blasts of fire, that's going to change things. Even with just one out of 10,000 that's an important issue. But let's keep the magic "magical" as much as possible. It won't take on the forms of technology, just fill the functions. I'll go for all new forms if I can get them.
Ancient ruins. Ruins in various types are a staple of the genre. But let's see if I can come up with a really cool reason for them.
More nuanced religion. I have it in my mind that people worship different kinds of things. Druids might be mystics who are in tune with some kind of nature spirit. Clerics could be chosen by real, existing gods who are physically present in the setting - or maybe it's not necessary to have "faith" at all. Anyone who follows the necessary rituals can attune himself to a source of cosmic power. I'll have to think about it, but one way or the other, religion needs to be a big part of the setting.
Mecha. Everything goes better with Mecha. Or is that tobasco sauce?
I'd like to do something really new with the demihuman races. I'm not quite sure what yet.

Cruel and Unusual Geography

One of the big things I'd like to see in this setting is a new foundation. I really like Creation from Exalted. D&D's Hollow World was cool, too. The little pocket realms from Ravenloft are neat, as are the "floating" realms in the Faerie world in Deleria. There are some other neat options, looking a little further afield. Discworld (by Terry Prattchet) is a flat disc held aloft by four elephants on the back of a giant turtle. There was a nifty video game called Septera Core (I think) with a world made of nested spheres that align once in a while. And in the late, lamented comic book "Meridian" (alas, Crossgen, we hardly knew ye), the world was made up of islands that floated in the air over a poisoned world.

Yeah. I like that.

There are some issues, of course. What kept the islands up? Where did they islanders get food and water? Way up in the air, there are probably problems with solar radiation and thin air, for that matter. So I'm going to have to come up with some answers.

In the comic, the rocks floated because they were largely made of a buoyant ore. Ships flew because trees that fed their roots from tainted ground absorbed whatever chemical made the rocks float. Of course then one wonders how the ships ever got down to the surface, and why they'd be ship-shaped. It's not really a very good idea. There's no reason to build a flying craft that's only water-tight on the bottom, or to limit yourself to sails only on the top.

That's all in the fine details, though. For now we're working in broad strokes.

The world used to be pretty normal - a spheroid floating in space around a sun (or maybe with a sun and moon orbiting around it. Why not?). Then there was a major cataclysm, which is pretty common in Fantasy literature. The cataclysm ushered in the modern world with floating cities and all. I'll have to decide when that happened. The world will be a lot different if it happened "yesterday" than "untold generations ago." I'll probably shoot for somewhere in the middle. Shadows of the world that was can still be found in the world that is.

I'll have to decide how many islands there are, how big they are, and how close together. For now, let's assume they're far enough apart that it takes several days to sail from one to another, although they could be arranged in "archipelagos" to some extent. They were primarily mountainous regions that were torn from the earth and floated in the sky.

Rather than a "natural" phenomenon, my sky islands will be artifacts. Each one has a Heartstone that makes it fly and provides other needed functions. Without the heartstone, the island sinks back to the earth - probably fairly rapidly and uncomfortably for anyone standing on it. Larger landmasses take bigger, or more, heartstones.

Sky Islands might move slowly, drawn on currents, or pushed by magic. Maybe just a few of them can and the rest are still mostly stationary.

Since Heartstones are a major resource, everybody has to protect them. Evil islands could raid their neighbors and steal their heartstones.

Down below, what would we have? Whatever it is, it drove a lot of people up to the sky. I'm envisioning a blasted, cracked world, and the fissures lead down into hell (perhaps literally). There's still life of a sort, perhaps even verdant life in places, but poison seeps up from the depths to taint and kill it.

And there need to be ruins: cities choked with alien plant life, fallen islands, older structures that nobody understands. Brave explorers can try to delve into the secrets of the past and try to bring up ancient treasures.

Places to Go, People to See

With a rough idea of what the ground (and lack of ground) under everyone's feet will be like, I'm ready to move on to who the people are and where they go.

First of all, there are at least two, possibly three obvious groupings

Islanders
Surface-dwellers
Subterranean cultures

Dungeons & Dragons also provides some groups to consider

Humans
Elves
Dwarves
Halflings
Gnomes
Half-orks, which means I have orks.
And possibly others. Half-elves fit in somewhere, and there's various monster races like centaurs.

I'd like to avoid monocultures for any of these groups. At the very least, there will be different cultures represented on the islands, the surface, and the "underdark," rather than just "Islanders," "Surface people," and "Dwellers below." I haven't decided how to implement the demihumans yet. Depending on how wide-spread they are, they could have fewer cultures than the humans (who are presumably natives) do.

At this stage of my planning, all I have are some ideas.

Islands are mostly individual city-states.
A powerful empire or trade federation that controls multiple Islands and possibly is also significant on the surface.
I'd like to see Dwarves as a major power.
There should be cults. Every setting needs cults. This one can have crazy druid cults dedicated to corruption and pollution.

There will, no doubt, be more later. But now I have some bare bones to start with. Next, I need to start working out some specific issues that will shape the rest of the world development. But that's a post for another day.

Kickin' It Old School: Part 1

David Goodner — Mon, 31 Jul 2006 18:34:22 GMT

In the Beginning (or a little before)

Introduction

Back in the day, I loved nothing better than to sit down with a pad of loose-leaf, college-ruled paper, some hex paper, some graph paper, and a pencil and some colored pencils and whipping up D&D campaign worlds. My high school gaming days were never given over to a single, generations-spanning campaign. We'd switch GMs and settings often, so I ended up writing a lot of campaign worlds.

In retrospect, it is probably a kindness that I didn't keep any of them, because they were pretty bland. Mostly, it was just an exercise in poorly thought-out maps and ideas where I stuck in everything from the PHB and the Monster Manual. By the time I got better at world design, I had mostly abandoned D&D as a system.

But the appeal remains. And now I have this bright, shiny blog that constantly hungers for new content. So I've decided just for the heck of it, it'd be fun to whip up a campaign world. Maybe someone will like it enough to offer me money to finish it. :)

So, here are the parameters:

My world has to have room for every race in the Player's Handbook.
I'm not allowed to add any new PC races. I will try to avoid adding new monster races.
All the Player's Handbook classes have to be present and make sense in the setting. I am, however, allowed to suggest that certain class/race combinations are frowned upon.
Should the time come, I am allowed (ye even encouraged) to write new PrCs. But mostly I'm planning on skipping the mechanical sections.

My goal is to create a basic gazetteer that covers every region in the setting, world and "nation level" history, and discusses races and classes in some depth. I might also do some maps. It'd give me an excuse to learn some more about Campaign Cartographer. When the world guide is done, I'll consider mechanics. Maybe I'll even use d20, but I'm leaning toward Unisystem, since it's what I dearly love.

But rather than just produce the world book and post it here, I'm going to use the blog to post my initial thoughts, then assemble them into the coherent book at the end.

Now, let's begin.

Setting Flavor

Most D&D worlds derive from Middle Earth, and hence are European-flavored worlds with Elves off to one side, Dwarves off to another, and Hobbits hanging around somewhere. There are Wizards and Clerics, and incredibly powerful monsters like Dragons, and yet normal, mortal humans tend to rule most kingdoms. And I'm not going to completely condemn that approach. It produces a setting that's familiar to most players, so it's easy to communicate. If you have to spend too much time figuring out the setting, you have a very hard time doing anything else. Tekumel and Journe have their hardcore fanbase, but they have never reached a lot of popular appeal simply because they're difficult to get into.

And yet, there's no good reason that a D&D world would look anything like medieval Europe. Why wouldn't magical "technology" have caused massive societal changes? Why aren't Dragons in charge? Spell-resistant, damage resistant, magic-using creatures with massive damage capabilities would be hard to beat.

For that matter, why should we limit ourselves to a spherical world floating in space? How about a flat disc with the bowl of heaven up above? That'd sure be easier to map, let me tell you.

So my goal for this setting is to find a good middle-ground, to produce a setting that isn't too tied to convention, but stays close enough to it to be comfortable. I'm looking for a novel approach to traditional material, rather than a whole new paradigm.

Over the next few posts, I'll be looking at many of the common assumptions of a D&D world and seeing how I can bend, twist, and shape them to work for me.