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.

I found a typo, so I have reposted this.  I hope it comes out in the right order.  If not, I suppose you'll all live.

This is a tribute to one of my favorite DC characters.  The conversion isn't quite perfect, but it does well enough.

The Perfect Weapon

Character type: Champion

Attributes

Strength: 5 (+1 from Demon Hunter, + 1 from Athlete)
Dexterity: 5 (+1 from Athlete)
Constitution: 5 (+1 from Demon Hunter)
Intelligence: 2
Perception: 5 (+1 from Demon Hunter)
Willpower: 4

Life Points: 65
Drama Points: 10

Qualities (20 + 10 from Drawbacks)

Demon Hunter, Athlete, Attractiveness Quality: 3, Nanjin Adept, Supernatural Senses - Empathy (from Perfect Weapon), Hard to Kill: 5 (From Perfect Weapon), Natural Toughness (from Perfect Weapon), Situational Awareness (from Perfect Weapon), Nerves of Steel (from Perfect Weapon), Fast Reaction Time (from Perfect Weapon), Perfect Weapon,

Drawbacks (10)

Physical Disibality - Impaired Language: 3 (from Perfect Weapon), Adversary ("Father"): 5, Adversary (Various): 1 (From Demon Hunter), Antisocial Impulses (Violence): 1 (from Perfect Weapon), Honorable: 2, Mental Problems - Delusions (Supernaturals are evil): 1 (From Demon Hunter), Outcast

Skills (30)

Acrobatics: 5, Art: 0, Computers: 0, Crime: 4, Doctor: 1, Driving: 0, Getting Medieval: 6 (+1 from Demon Hunter), Gun Fu: 0, Influence: 0, Knowledge: 0, Kung Fu: 6 (+1 from Demon Hunter), Languages: 0, Mr. Fix-it: 0, Notice: 5, Occultism: 3, Science: 0, Sports: 4, Wild Card: 0

 

Combat Moves

Maneuver	Bonus	Damage	Notes
Catch Weapon	8	None	Ranged Defense Action
Decapitation	8	Varies	Total damage x 5
Disarm (GM)	11	None	Resisted by Parry
Disarm (KF)	10	None	Resisted by Parry
Dodge	13	None	Defense Action
Grapple	15	None	Impairment Varries
Jump Kick	10	18 bash	Dex + Acrobatics roll adds SL to damage
Kick	12	12 bash
Parry	13	None	Defense Action; -2 against ranged attacks
Punch	13	10 bash
Stake	13	10 slash
Through the Heart	10	10 slash	x 5 damage for vampires; x 4 for other folks
Sword	13	20 slash
Takedown	13	5 bash	Knocks target down

Background on the Perfect Weapon

Words are... hard for me.  I was raised with no words.  My... father... made sure no one spoke to me.  Where you learned to speak, I learned to... move.  I learned to fight.  I learned to kill.  He wanted me to be... like him?  Worse?  Better.

Someone else can say it better.  Words are hard for me.

We found her in the midst of a pack of Nosferatu, killing them at least as easily as a young Slayer might.  As best I've been able to determine, her "father" was a member of the order of Turaka who killed any mortal parents she might have had and took her to raise himself.  This behavior is not unknown amongst vampires with sufficient age to have become sentimental and sufficient willpower to be able to resist the lure of easy food.

What is unusual is what he did with her.  He made sure she never heard human speech at all.  Instead, from the time she could walk, he forced her into a regimen of physical training, teaching her acrobatics, stealth, and combat... all in complete silence.  I can only imagine how that worked.

She has been trained by the best warriors, hunters, and assassins on the planet, and possibly beyond.  Her body and mind have been honed into perfect tools of violence.  Her abilities border on supernatural.  She "reads" people's body language as easily as you or I would read a book.  She knows what you're going to do as soon as you do.  She can see your every weakness, possibly even know what you're thinking.

And she always wins at Roshambo.

She is not the most forthcoming, but I have managed to piece together the rest.  Her "father" intended to allow her to reach physical maturity, then slay her so she'd rise again as a vampire herself.  He did not reckon on her extraordinary perception.  She saw his intentions at some point and broke away, and now she hunts vampires with all the fervor with which she would have hunted humans.

We have more or less adopted her, if only to keep her under nominal control.  Left to her own devices, she has no sense of perspective and no idea when to quit.  She also has almost no ability to deal with modern society.  She can only barely speak a few words, and is completely illiterate.  In fact, I think she's severely dyslexic.  Her spatial and linguistic thought centers are irrevocably intertwined.

Nonetheless, I hope we will be able to improve her quality of life, and god forgive me, we need her on our side.

Quote: "..."

Roleplaying the Perfect Weapon

You're a highly-trained, utterly ruthless assassin, except that you have a deep regard for life.  You don't mind killing vampires.  In fact, you like it.  But you don't want to kill humans.  Hurting them is fine, though.

You're also a teenage girl (or boy, if you'd prefer.  We're not sexist here), with all the hormone-driven insanity that brings.  And things are really complicated for you.  On one hand, you have no social skills at all.  On the other hand, you can tell what other people are thinking by just looking at them.

So now you hunt monsters, knowing that at some point a showdown with your "father" is inevitable, and you try to figure out how to be a person instead of just a weapon.

Sample Equipment

Sword, Leather armor, Throwing Knives (bat-shaped shrunken optional)

 

Character Sheet by UniForge Version: 1.1. Last Modified 2006-08-07 17:25:32

Comments: As I said, not quite perfect.  Cassie should be able to understand any language, which is an ability worth two or three points.  But then again, she probably understands only basic, declarative, concrete concepts, so I guess it all evens out.

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.

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.

Tim has now fixed the posting identity issue.  Yea Tim!

David G.

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.

Due to some odd glitch in the blog software, posts to this page all say they were posted by Tim Rayburn.  That's actually true of the "Play's the Thing" entries.  He loaded them up after he set up the blog so there'd be some initial content.  But we don't know why the blog still thinks all the posts are from him.

We'll figure it out eventually.  Till then, I suppose you'll just have to trust me that it's me and not Tim.  Or perhaps you don't really care, so long as the content is good.  Or, for that matter, for all any of you know, "Tim Rayburn" is just my alias.  (But he's not.  Honest.)

Identity on the internet is so ephemeral.

Anyway, despite what the blog settings might say, everything posted after the columns were entered and backdated has been by me, David Goodner, and not by Tim.

We now return you to our regularly scheduled broadcast, already in progress.

Technomancer Press Arms RPG Players
August 8, 2006

Technomancer Press, LLC (TCM) is launching a new RPG Theory line-- books about playing beyond just win/lose or min/max. The first book, due November 23rd, is "The Play's the Thing", a collaboration with columnist David Goodner, RPGnet, and TCM. "The Play's the Thing" features 100 pages of advice for players and GMs looking to get into character.

David writes, "The Play's The Thing is about a player's job in an RPG", and provides an interesting way of looking at playing RPGs.
This collection features entries from David's long-running RPGnet column and makes for ideal late summer reading. "We feel that gamers
are also readers" gambles TCM's Sandy Antunes, "and gamers will want books about playing a more enjoyable RPG."

Sneak peek copies will be on sale at GenCon, and the book will be available via retailers and at the PAX convention on November 23.
Information on Technomancer Press, LLC is at www.technomancer-press.com, RPGnet is of course rpg.net, and retailers and distributors can get our books via their Studio2Publishing account. Subsequent RPG theory books are planned for 2006-2007.

And with that, please permit me to do the dance of joy.  :)

It is my great pleasure to announce the imminent publication of The Play's the Thing by Technomancer Press.

With any luck, it will be available for GenCon in a couple weeks.  I will now dance with glee.

(Fortunately for you, the site doesn't come with video)

Zombie Pirates!

As the Aztec civilization fell to European invaders, the Aztec blood gods took one final stroke of vengeance, cursing a stone chest full of sacred coins so that anyone who stole them would never die, but never live.  All pleasure would be denied the thieves, and the moonlight would reveal them as the rotting husks they were.

Naturally, some pirates stole it anyway.  Now they sail the seas, trying to find every last coin, because the curse cannot be lifted until each one is returned and paid for in blood.

Undead Curse Victim (57-point Quality)

Just in case some enterprising Cast Member decides turning into an immortal zombie would be a good idea, here's what you get for your Doubloon of Death.  Keep in mind, though, that this is a *curse*.  The Aztec blood gods have no sense of humor, and will not take kindly to you abusing their divine justice.  And besides that, it's not very pleasant in the long run.  Generally speaking, this Quality should be strictly theoretical.

The curse turns you into a walking dead man (or woman.  The blood gods aren't sexist).  You'll never die, no matter how much you suffer.  You don't need to breathe, eat, or drink.  Damage doesn't damage you as much as most people.  Pieces can get cut off, but they keep working, and you can just put them back on.  You won't heal from any lost parts you lost before the curse, though.  Essentially, you're completely invulnerable to physical damage.  Some forms of magic might be able to hurt you, though, so don't get cocky.

(Essentially, you're paying for Reduced Damage level 3 for everything (you take 1/10th of any damage received, with no multipliers) and Con/Turn regeneration, which doesn't quite cover full invulnerability, but it should do for most purposes.  Like I said, normally Cast Members won't have this Quality for long enough to really need to pay for it.)

With all that, you'd think people would be lined up 'round the block for a chance to steal some cursed Aztec gold, but there are some pretty significant drawbacks to that course of action.  You cannot feel any pleasure at all.  Food tastes like ashes.  The best wine tastes like lukewarm piss.  (Unless you *like* ashes or lukewarm piss, in which case it probably tastes like something else.  And you need help.)  Your lust can never be satisfied.  You can't really enjoy *anything*.  No, not that either.  Nothing.  Nada.  And if that weren't enough, whenever the moon shines on you, you're revealed as a rotting zombie, even if you just stole the gold a few minutes ago.  As a rotting corpse, you're at -10 to Attractiveness.  You don't actually get any bonus points for this.

Also, the Aztec blood gods have your number.  If you should ever find some way to escape the negative side of the curse, you'll have them as an Adversary worth as many points as the Director decides is appropriate.  Or they might just wait until you're about to get killed and lift the curse.

----

Undead Pirate Grunt

Here's your basic zombie pirate.  He's a tough customer, but not unbeatable, except for the fact he's invulnerable, and pretty mean.  You'll notice that he has Life Points, even though they're mostly pointless.  You still need to know them to calculate decapitation and limb removal.

Undead Pirate Grunt

Motivation: "Yo-Ho, Yo-Ho!  A pirate's life for me!"
Critter Type: Undead
Attributes: Strength 4, Dexterity 4, Constitution 3, Intelligence 2, Perception 2, Willpower 2
Ability Scores: Combat 14, Muscles 14, Smarts 10
Life Points: 38
Drama Points: 1
Special Abilities: Invulnerability (total)

Combat Maneuvers

Maneuver	Score	Damage	Notes
Dodge	14	None	Avoid getting hit
Pistol Shot	14	12	Bullet damage
Punch	14	8	Bashing damage
Sword	14	16	Slash damage

----

Undead Pirate Lieutenant

Here's a pirate a little further up in the chain of command.  He's got life points, too, along with a little Hard to Kill to make him nastier.

Undead Pirate Lieutenant

Motivation: "If anyone so much as thinks the word "Parley," I'll have his guts for garters."
Critter Type: Undead
Attributes: Strength 4: Dexterity 5, Constitution 4, Intelligence 3, Perception 2, Willpower 3
Ability Scores: Combat 16, Muscles 14, Smarts 11
Life Points:47
Drama Points: 2-4
Special Abilities: Invulnerability (total), Hard to Kill 3, Situational Awareness, Nerves of Steel.

Combat Maneuvers

Maneuver	Score	Damage	Notes
Dodge	16	None	Avoid getting hit
Pistol Shot	16	12	Bullet damage
Punch	16	8	Bashing damage
Sword	16	16	Slash damage

----

Undead Pirate Captain

This guy has a really fancy hat, and could easily be a Big Bad, in which case he probably deserves a full character sheet.  As is, he's pretty tough, with 5 levels of HTK and lots of combat related advantages.  There's a reason he's the captain.

Undead Pirate Captain
Motivation: "For too long I've been parched of thirst and unable to quench it. Too long I've been starving to death and haven't died."
Critter Type: Undead
Attributes: Strength 4, Dexterity 6, Constitution 4, Intelligence 5, Perception 4, Willpower 4
Ability Scores: Combat 18, Muscles 14, Smarts 15
Life Points: 57
Drama Points: 5+
Special Abilities: Fast Reaction Time, Hard to Kill 5, Invulnerability (total), Nerves of Steel, Situational Awareness.

Combat Maneuvers

Maneuver	Score	Damage	Notes
Dodge	18	None	Avoid getting hit
Pistol Shot	18	12	Bullet damage
Punch	18	8	Bashing damage
Sword	18	16	Slash damage

Hello everybody,

Some time ago, I decided it was time to learn to use Microsoft Excel, so I built a chart that calculates combat maneuvers for the Cinematic Unisystem, using all the ones included in Angel.  It's not very pretty as Excel worksheets go, but it does the job.

Unfortunately, then I accidentally deleted it.  But fortunately, before that I had uploaded it to a friend's website.  So now I have it again, and I'm posting it here.  That way, when I accidentally delete it again, it'll be easier to find.

EDIT:  Oops, forgot to actually upload the file.  Boy is my face red.

buffy angel cmt.xls (24.5 KB)

The format is changing slightly since I am writing these with benefit of some nifty chargen software I didn't have several years ago when I wrote most of the Buffy Archetypes.  The main thing is that Uniforge doesn't give me output that breaks down where all the stat and skill bonuses go, so you'll have to trust me.

These are, on the other hand, "made fresh" rather than recycling old material.

This one is one I'm playing in a PBP game right now.

 

The Reluctant Seer (Investigator)

Attributes:

Strength: 2 Dexterity: 2 Constitution: 2

Intelligence: 4 Perception: 3 Willpower: 4

Life Points: 26
Drama Points: 20

Qualities (10 + 10 from Drawbacks)

Contacts (Supernatural): 1 (1), Occult Investigator: 1 (4), Supernatural Senses - Basic: 1 (1), Supernatural Senses - The Sight: 1 (3), Occult Library: 1 (1), Supernatural Senses - Insight: 1 (5), Supernatural Senses - Fortune Telling: 1 (5)

Drawbacks (10)

Addiction (Smoking): 1 (-1), Adversary (TBA): 3 (-3), Emotional Problems - Fear of Commitment: 1 (-1), Honorable: 1 (-1), Impaired Senses (Vision, Corrected): 1 (-1), Mental Problems - Cruelty: 1 (-1), Resources Drawback: 1 (-2),

Skills (25)

Acrobatics: 0, Art: 0, Computers: 1, Crime: 2, Doctor: 1, Driving: 1, Getting Medieval: 2, Gun Fu: 1, Influence: 0, Knowledge: 5, Kung Fu: 1, Languages: 4, Mr. Fix-it: 0, Notice: 0, Occultism: 5, Science: 2, Sports: 0

Background on the Reluctant Seer

It all started with the Enigma of Astaroth.  Not Astaroth the demon of Sloth, just some 14th century sorcerer who liked his name.  Like there's fifty Balthazars, ya know.  But anyway, I'm a folklorist.  I studied various occult traditions and folkways for years without ever believing it.  Vampire attacks were just urban myths, like the Highway Hook Murderer (who is also real, by the way).  Wicked witches were just old religious propaganda.

That changed when the Enigma wound up on my desk, which was due to a screwup at the shipping company, but I didn't know that until later.  The Enigma was a book with a strange lock on it.  To open the lock, you had to work out the combination, which was a tricky math puzzle.  I love math puzzles.  So I worked it out.  After that, things got a little weird.  Then things got a lot weird.

I could see all kinds of stuff I didn't want to see, and I kept getting visions of the future.  So I did what anyone would do.  I tried to play the lotto a lot and ignore the rest of it.  An encounter with a fire spirit in the Dean's office put an end to that (and resulted in some not entirely voluntary time in a psychiatric hospital)

Now I'm trying to learn all I can about real magick.  A lot of what I know is true, but a lot isn't.  And let me tell you, nothing's quite as embarrassing as throwing a bunch of poppy seeds at a vampire and having him laugh at you.

Don't get me wrong.  I'm not some big bad hero here.  I'm just trying to survive.  That first fire spirit wasn't the only one.  It seems like every month or so, something new and interesting tries to kill me.

Fortunately, I've hooked up with some folks who are into this whole "fight the good fight" thing.  They're not the sharpest tools in the shed, but they have swords and guns and stuff that come in really handy when all the dead bodies in the cemetary arise and try to kill you.

Quote: "I predict that if you don't surrender now, there will be blood, pain, and ultimately death.  I just wish to hell I knew if it was going to happen to you or me."

Roleplaying the Reluctant Seer

You're a smart guy, but not at all a brave one.  And you're geeky enough to realize that it's a terrible cliché that you've taken up smoking, wearing a battered overcoat, and not shaving regularly.

You'd like nothing more than to somehow remove your powers and forget any of this ever happened.  Except...

Except, you like knowing what's going on.  Except, you know what it's like to be the normal person suddenly dumped into the deep end of the supernatural swimming pool, and you don't really want to see it happen to anyone else.  Except, you're pretty sure someone is trying to kill you, and he'll keep trying until you figure out who it is and make him stop.  Except, deep down, you really are a hero.  Maybe it's arrogance, but you know that you need to be doing what you're doing.

Sample Equipment

Laptop computer, The Enigma of Astaroth (a spellbook), Notepad.  No gun.  He doesn't really like guns.