David's Nearly Adequate Web Comic

#2

Here's number two.  (I really wonder why the text keeps disappearing when I edit posts with graphics)

I finished up number 3 today.  I'll post it later.  Then I'll have to see how much time I have, since each of these things takes a couple hours, and I have other projects to work on.

David's Nearly Adequate Web Comic

#1

How odd.  I would have sworn there was some content here before.  Oh well, I'll just do the introduction again.

Hello, and welcome to David's Nearly Adequate Web Comic, the comic that might update occasionally.

I have about twenty rough drafts drawn over a couple days of inspiration, but I never really intended to publish them.  Then, a few days ago, some people at the library where I am employed asked me if I'd contribute a couple comic strips to a web publication they're doing.  So I now have two of them inked and lettered.  All the artwork is done by hand.  All the lettering is done by Photoshop Elements, because I figured people would want to be able to read it.

These were pretty fun, and if they don't take too much of my time, I may keep doing them.  But don't pin your hopes for the future on it or anything. :)

Guardian Demon

Character type: Hero

Attributes
Strength: 8 Dexterity: 6 Constitution: 8

Intelligence: 2 Perception: 3 Willpower: 2

Life Points: 98
Drama Points: 10

 

Qualities
Maulthite Demon: 1 (see my Unisystem Qualities entry), Natural Armor: 5, Regeneration: 1, Natural Weapon: 1, Nerves of Steel, Situational Awareness, Hard to Kill: 8, Fast Reaction Time, Antisocial Impulses (Violence): 1, Obligation: 3, Vulnerability (Magic), Age: 3, Immortal, Contacts (Demon Underground): 2, Resistance (pain): 2.

Drawbacks
Adversary (Demons and Whatnot): 5, Adversary (People you ticked off in a past life): 3, Honorable: 2, Humorless, Mental Problems - Cruelty: 1 (-1/0), Mental Problems - Recklessness: 1.

Skills
Acrobatics: 2, Art: 0, Computers: 0, Crime: 1, Doctor: 1, Driving: 0, Getting Medieval: 6, Gun Fu: 1, Influence: 1, Knowledge: 1, Kung Fu: 5, Languages: 1, Mr. Fix-it: 1, Notice: 1, Occultism: 2, Science: 0, Sports: 1.

 

Maneuver	Bonus	Damage	Notes
Disarm	10	none	Resisted by Parry
Dodge (Getting Medieval)	12		Defense Action.
Grapple	13	None	Impairment varies
Axe	12	40	Slashing, can use 2 hands
Stake	12	16	Slashing
(Through the Heart)	9		X4 for humans, x5 for vamps
Punch	11	16	Bashing.  Slashing for natural weapon.

 

Character Sheet by UniForge Version: 1.1. Last Modified 2006-08-17 14:33:01

Background on the Guardian Demon

My brethren and I were born for battle, serving demon lords and mortal sorcerers alike for centuries.  Countless times, I have died and been reborn in a life of endless battle.  My first master was a Blood Wizard of ancient Lemuria who sent me against the Atlantean host.  Later, I served a demonologist in the burning land of Al-Khem, and still later, a magi of Rome.

And in this age of light and steel and toxic smoke, I was summoned to serve a sorcerer of vicious cunning and boundless cruelty.  Great would have been the battles I fought, the kingdoms I brought to the ground.

Alas, it was not to be.  A group of children led by a Slayer disrupted the ritual by slaying my master-to-be in the middle of the summoning.  I arrived in the mortal world and was bound to the nearest magician, a mere slip of a girl who had been cowering behind a desk while the battle raged.

But I must serve her with all of my being.  Thus is my destiny, until I am slain and returned again to the dreaming blood.  So now I prey upon demons and vampires as I have in the past, but I am seldom allowed to eat them, and my mistress never wishes her share of my kills.

Mine is a vexing lot, but I will bear it, for that is my way.

Quote:  “Face me, Vampire, and I will rend you limb from limb, and feast on your entrails before I allow you the relief of death… um… if that’s okay, mistress.”

Roleplaying the Guardian Demon

You are a warrior born, consummate in skill, and in cruelty.  You have served bloodthirsty warlords, carnifex priests, and soul-destroying warlocks… and now an astigmatic vegetarian wicca who gets faint at the sight of blood.

You’re not really “evil” per se, just bloodthirsty and violent.  You’re pretty much as happy fighting vampires as you are slaughtering villages of innocent farmers.  In fact, you prefer a good fight over an easy slaughter.  You don’t understand a lot of this “protect the innocent” or “show mercy” stuff, but you’re bound to try.

Suggested Equipment

Big Axe, Overcoat, Broad-brimmed hat, Sunglasses.

Actually, just one map this time - a fantasy coliseum.  It's fairly sketchy, but it doesn't need to be a lot more.  It's for a PbEM fantasy game I'm running.  I'll be using it as a battle map for a scene that's going on right now.  Perhaps it'll come in handy later, too.

Hello Everybody!

In my continuing quest to become an adequate user of Campaign Cartographer, I've now started working on interior maps.  Presented below is a mid-century service station based off of various pictures from Google Image Search.  My concept of the place is that it's a converted house.  The two bathrooms and the garage would have been additions on a shotgun style house.  The up-stairs apartment would have been added when the garage was put on, giving whoever ran the shop a place to live.

I'm not 100% thrilled with this map.  There's no basic dungeons template of convenient size, so my map has no borders.  Life goes on.  (I  have an idea for a future project, though - a set of "Map Border" segments you could attatch to any map like some of the wall symbol segments.  That'll happen once after I learn to draw symbols, if ever.)  I substituted symbols in other places, too.  The store counter is really a desk set, the garage doors are sliding doors, and the stairs are a little funky since there wasn't really an "L" shaped stair like I wanted.  It gets the point across, though.

So, without furhter ado,

First Floor

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.