Kiero
2013-12-19, 07:43 AM
I've been talking about the setting for our upcoming 13th Age game, Acrozatarim, a lot lately, and figured it could do with a thread of it's own. I should start out by making clear this isn't actually my setting, but the work of our GM. It's very much a work in progress, the results of which are slowly populating our campaign wiki (http://wiki.rpg.net/index.php/Acrozatarim). I figured since Ac is going to be on-holiday-but-with-laptop and writing stuff for the setting, he might be willing to discuss stuff if people have questions (which I can relay to him). Mostly I'm just excited about the game and want to be able to talk to other people about it! :)
You may have seen some of our previous works; we had a long-running WFRP2e game called The Shadow of the Sun (http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?648702-Warhammer-Fantasy-2e-The-Shadow-Of-The-Sun-Part-2), which ran from 2008-2012, though with breaks to do other things. Those breaks were shorter games, such as Transcendence (http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?622888-nWoD-Mass-Effect-Mass-The-Effecting-Transcendence), our Mass: the Effecting (http://wiki.rpg.net/index.php/Mass:_the_Effecting) game, The Unforgiving (http://wiki.rpg.net/index.php/18thCenturyMage), which was historical Mage: the Awakening and Tyche's Favourites (http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?691470-ACKS-Mercenary-Liberator-Tyrant-Tyche-s-Favourites), historical ACKS. This is intended to be more like the former than the latter, a long-running "main game" we come back to after the interval "break games". Thus it's important to have something we are all engaged with and better yet have some input into.
Acrozatarim is not new, it's over a decade old and started life as a D&D 3.x homebrew setting. This is the third incarnation and involves changes not just to adapt it to 13th Age, but also to revamp various elements. There's a good summary of what the setting is about in the initial pitch (http://wiki.rpg.net/index.php/Acrozatarim/Pitch) we were delivered:
Where Shadow of the Sun was 'rise to power in the Border Princes then have some git stab you in the back', Acrozatarim's premise is wider-ranging and larger in scope and scale and a bit harder to encapsulate in a single sentence. Still, I'll try: Navigate the conflicts and politics of a land where young nations jostle for power and the mantle of a dead Empire, while Elder conspiracies and the tides of war threaten to bring down the foundations of civilisation and end the Zenith Age.
Acrozatarim is a game rooted in D&D, even if it sheds various of the standard sacred cows like the Tolkein races and so forth. However, while there will be dangerous delves and similar, this will (as you've come to expect from me) not be a game of dungeon-crawling; there will be Stuff To Kill but it will be seated in the context of a wider world of nations, people and eldritch beings, rather than free-floating murderhobo underground assault courses.
The game draws a bit on a few wuxia themes - there are areas of lawlessness that need heroes to bring justice and fight corruption; a code of behaviour and morals to live by is important. There is also the concept of the overarching empire and nation; how important is it to belong to that greater sense of a unified people, and to what end is conflict or tyranny for greater ideals justified or wrong.
Quick cosmology (http://wiki.rpg.net/index.php/Acrozatarim/Cosmology)/history for Acrozatarim; the universe was created by four elemental super-beings. However, while they could create inanimate things, they tried and failed to create life. Frustrated, they went to sleep to contemplate the matter and their dreams birthed the Elder gods. They could create life and went to town on making all sorts, first driven by the urge of their elemental sires, later making the servitor races to fulfil particular roles as whim struck them.
The first era in the world they created was called the Dawn Age, which lasted for a time, and the greatest civilisation was the Drakkath Empire. While great, it wasn't "good"; they worshipped and worked with the Elder gods, who became increasingly mad and erratic, even more arbitrary and arrogant. Indeed when the Dawn War against the Elder gods began, the Empire tried to stay out of the fight.
The Dawn War was a cataclysmic conflict several centuries ago (exactly when is hard to pin-point, the Elder gods messed with time) where the Races of Man rose up against the tyranny of the Elders, aided by the Younger gods. They were a mixture of human heroes and spirits of the world who wanted freedom from the capricious rule of their creators. If this is sounding Exalted-like, the setting actually predates it. The humans and Younger gods eventually win, heralding the Zenith Age, though at great cost in people and messing up the lands. The Elder gods are imprisoned/driven away, their servitors scattered. The Drakkath Empire is shattered, its provinces collapsing or turning into warlord's fiefs, the heartland invaded by northern "barbarians".
Jump forward to today, those "barbarians" are now running a northern rump of the Empire's old lands, intending to snap up the rest of it. There's a colony of invaders from another continent in the far south who have imperial ambitions of their own and often try to play counterweight to the inheritors.
While there are many weird and alien entities and species in the world, including Elder servitor races and beings with even more obscure origins than that, there are not the usual elf/dwarf/halfling/gnome array. Standard playable species are mostly human-derived: Humans, genasi (earth, air, fire, water, storm), aasimar, tieflings; along with gnolls, draconians and vermen (a very rare species of ratman). New races to 13A are detailed here (http://wiki.rpg.net/index.php/Acrozatarim/New_Races). Other species like warforged can be playable as part of a One Unique Thing.
There are a host of independent kingdoms (see the Gazetteer (http://wiki.rpg.net/index.php/Acrozatarim/Gazetteer) for more details), a lot of them magocracies, and scads of relics of the Dawn Age all over the place. Thing is these are not man-portable magic items, most of them are great works and magical infrastructure, the Elder gods like things big. For example the "vessel birther", which is an automated construction device (the size of a hangar) that makes ships. Another is the "chariot" of an Elder god, complete with the corpse of said god still sitting in his control throne, around which people built a city.
Magic and the Eldritch: There are many forms of magical practice in the region; the blending of science and magic in the form of the thaumineers and the fleshtwisters, the cryomancers of High Kyros, the battlemagi of the Flame Guild, and the sorcerers of Naseria are perhaps the most major. In this flourishing age of civilisation, there are plentiful practitioners of the arcane who wish to codify, dissect and understand the energies that they command and that the Elder Gods wrote into the underlying fabric of reality.
Technology, Arcane and Mechanical: Technology is advancing in the setting. In the centuries since the Dawn War, advancements have been made and have slowly spread. Now, aided with the magic of inquisitive-minded magi, things are progressing further. There are very rare steam or arcane engines made with thaumineering; the alchemists of Adbar jealoiusly hoard their secrets of chemical compounds but crude versions of gunpowder have been discovered elsewhere. Arcane technology generally is not made in the mindset of industry, nor does it look like industrial stuff; this is an earlier stage of development than that, and lacks the industrial style of design that you might think of when imagining steam engines etc.
The other major source of technology is pre-War tech, the leftover artifice of the Elder Gods and the people of that time. This stuff is weird, alien, often poorly understood but also often very potent. The threat of Sukumvarang's cache of Elder technology is enough to hold back Huron from full-scale invasion, and the notion of a Chariot of the gods is one that could entirely throw the naval balance of power of the region out of whack. Where they exist, remaining pieces of Elder technology are commonly very large, not small bits of technology; entire edifices of strange machinery.
Of course a lot of these things are far from obvious how they're used, and knowledge is power in a big way. As an example, one of the Icons (http://wiki.rpg.net/index.php/Acrozatarim/Icons) is the Vault Keeper, a powerful noble who has the largest collection of arcane lore on the continent and uses it to get more lore and concessions out of others. By contrast another is the Truthseeker who thinks all that lore should be shared. All of our Icons are custom-made, here's one example (note all barring a city are Ambiguous - this is intentional).
The Shadowfury
The avenger for whom no price was too high.
Usual Location: At the heart of the Dread Marches stands a bastion of black and silver, lair of the Shadowfury.
Common Knowledge: Some of the Icons might know what dark rage drove the Shadowfury in the past, but most people only know that she created the Dread Marches one hundred years ago in a cataclysm of dark magic and Elder technology. Forging an army of twisted beasts and undead, the malevolent genius of the Shadowfury scourged the Drakkath until her forces were defeated. But time seems to have tempered her anger, and the surviving people of the Marches are now her vassals and students, arcanists and furies learning the secrets of the sinister path she has walked. Exactly how the Shadowfury is still so hale and healthy after a century is not clear.
Characters and the Shadowfury: Few have the strength of heart to venture into the Dread Marches, but those that do often seek tutelage from the Shadowfury in becoming a fury empowered with dark energy or in the arcane arts of necromancy and daemonology.
Allies: Few icons are allies to the Shadowfury, or even acquaintances - in part because she has outlived most of her contemporaries. The Manipulator-General has sent envoys in recent years, seeking to unearth what knowledge has made the Shadowfury such a gifted creator of horrors. The Vault-Keeper grudgingly owes an oath of aid to the Shadowfury, one sworn by his predecessor; he is too afraid not to honour it but thankfully she has not yet come calling. The Eagle King fought against the Shadowfury as a youth, but the two seem to have come to some strange sort of accord born from mutual respect; the Eagle King mostly keeps her own counsel about the whole affair.
Enemies: Most Icons feel hostility towards the Shadowfury. The Thornmaiden and Magistrate both consider the Dread Marches a pit of evil that needs to be purified; the Flame Guildmistress and Lord-Commander see it as a strategic problem that needs to be overcome. The Silver Warder has a warded prison set aside just for the Shadowfury and looks forward to the day that the ancient fury becomes a permanent, unwilling resident of Pharam Sung.
The True Danger: The Shadowfury's rage has calmed, but if it were stoked once more to a blazing inferno then would she once again demand the world pay the price in blood and darkness?
There's a lot of weird stuff leftover from the Dawn War. Such as the Breach; a weapon of mass destruction levelled a city, but in the process opened a hole in reality. Through which have issued weird mechanical beings who are remaking the local area to fit their notion of order.
Relics of a Past Age: There are plentiful ruins and markers of the Elders' age of power, and their servitors still remain, but three particular examples of Dawn era strangeness are the Umbrals, the Hekatonchiere and the Ordinators.
Umbrals: A seemingly vanished people, the Umbrals (as scholars classify them) appear to have been an inhuman race of expert thaumineers who erected strange arcane technology, including bizarre towers and fortifications. These appear to be even older than the Drakkath Empire, and there's no clear explanation for what happened to the Umbrals, or what interaction with them the Drakkath may have had.
Hekatonchiere: The Hekatonchiere are a disturbing race of Elder servitors, eerie creatures made by Ephras or Hashrukk as servants to enforce their will. Once, the Hekatonchiere strode amongst the Races of Men to distribute the teachings and technology of the Elders; then many fought for their masters during the Dawn War, although some seem to have foreseen the doom of the Elders and instead retreated to their cities and weathered the war with isolation. One such settlement exists in the remote reaches of the Drakkath, and exists there still. Today, their strange influence sometimes extends itself; Hekatonchiere envoys demand knowledge or goods or offer eldritch gifts; sometimes they act with terrifying aggression, and other times are serene and peaceful. If they have an agenda, it is unclear, but they appear to be faring poorly with this modern age after the fall of the Elders.
Ordinators and the Breach: A weapon of mass destruction detonated in the Drakkath during the Dawn War, ripping a hole in reality as it engulfed and demolished a mighty Drakkath city. It's unlikely that anyone involved predicted what would happen later; that the hole appears to have served as a gateway, one through which the Ordinators have come. Utterly alien beings that seem to hold to unknown concepts of law and order, these semi-mechanical beings are slowly building an almighty tower at the Breach, and reformatting the surrounding landscape to a form more pleasing to their orderly minds.
Class-wise it's all the usual suspects, plus some custom-made ones including the Elemental Knight (http://wiki.rpg.net/index.php/Acrozatarim/Elemental_Knight), the Fury (http://wiki.rpg.net/index.php/Acrozatarim/Fury), the Vanguard (http://wiki.rpg.net/index.php/Acrozatarim/Vanguard)and the Thaumineer (http://wiki.rpg.net/index.php/Acrozatarim/Thuamineer)variant on the Wizard. Interestingly, out of four players who've chosen classes so far, three have gone for custom ones.
As usual, once the game is underway (which should be around spring-time, once we've wrapped up D&D4e Icewind Dale), it will be podcasted on In Sanity We Trust (http://insanitywetrust.wordpress.com/).
You may have seen some of our previous works; we had a long-running WFRP2e game called The Shadow of the Sun (http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?648702-Warhammer-Fantasy-2e-The-Shadow-Of-The-Sun-Part-2), which ran from 2008-2012, though with breaks to do other things. Those breaks were shorter games, such as Transcendence (http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?622888-nWoD-Mass-Effect-Mass-The-Effecting-Transcendence), our Mass: the Effecting (http://wiki.rpg.net/index.php/Mass:_the_Effecting) game, The Unforgiving (http://wiki.rpg.net/index.php/18thCenturyMage), which was historical Mage: the Awakening and Tyche's Favourites (http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?691470-ACKS-Mercenary-Liberator-Tyrant-Tyche-s-Favourites), historical ACKS. This is intended to be more like the former than the latter, a long-running "main game" we come back to after the interval "break games". Thus it's important to have something we are all engaged with and better yet have some input into.
Acrozatarim is not new, it's over a decade old and started life as a D&D 3.x homebrew setting. This is the third incarnation and involves changes not just to adapt it to 13th Age, but also to revamp various elements. There's a good summary of what the setting is about in the initial pitch (http://wiki.rpg.net/index.php/Acrozatarim/Pitch) we were delivered:
Where Shadow of the Sun was 'rise to power in the Border Princes then have some git stab you in the back', Acrozatarim's premise is wider-ranging and larger in scope and scale and a bit harder to encapsulate in a single sentence. Still, I'll try: Navigate the conflicts and politics of a land where young nations jostle for power and the mantle of a dead Empire, while Elder conspiracies and the tides of war threaten to bring down the foundations of civilisation and end the Zenith Age.
Acrozatarim is a game rooted in D&D, even if it sheds various of the standard sacred cows like the Tolkein races and so forth. However, while there will be dangerous delves and similar, this will (as you've come to expect from me) not be a game of dungeon-crawling; there will be Stuff To Kill but it will be seated in the context of a wider world of nations, people and eldritch beings, rather than free-floating murderhobo underground assault courses.
The game draws a bit on a few wuxia themes - there are areas of lawlessness that need heroes to bring justice and fight corruption; a code of behaviour and morals to live by is important. There is also the concept of the overarching empire and nation; how important is it to belong to that greater sense of a unified people, and to what end is conflict or tyranny for greater ideals justified or wrong.
Quick cosmology (http://wiki.rpg.net/index.php/Acrozatarim/Cosmology)/history for Acrozatarim; the universe was created by four elemental super-beings. However, while they could create inanimate things, they tried and failed to create life. Frustrated, they went to sleep to contemplate the matter and their dreams birthed the Elder gods. They could create life and went to town on making all sorts, first driven by the urge of their elemental sires, later making the servitor races to fulfil particular roles as whim struck them.
The first era in the world they created was called the Dawn Age, which lasted for a time, and the greatest civilisation was the Drakkath Empire. While great, it wasn't "good"; they worshipped and worked with the Elder gods, who became increasingly mad and erratic, even more arbitrary and arrogant. Indeed when the Dawn War against the Elder gods began, the Empire tried to stay out of the fight.
The Dawn War was a cataclysmic conflict several centuries ago (exactly when is hard to pin-point, the Elder gods messed with time) where the Races of Man rose up against the tyranny of the Elders, aided by the Younger gods. They were a mixture of human heroes and spirits of the world who wanted freedom from the capricious rule of their creators. If this is sounding Exalted-like, the setting actually predates it. The humans and Younger gods eventually win, heralding the Zenith Age, though at great cost in people and messing up the lands. The Elder gods are imprisoned/driven away, their servitors scattered. The Drakkath Empire is shattered, its provinces collapsing or turning into warlord's fiefs, the heartland invaded by northern "barbarians".
Jump forward to today, those "barbarians" are now running a northern rump of the Empire's old lands, intending to snap up the rest of it. There's a colony of invaders from another continent in the far south who have imperial ambitions of their own and often try to play counterweight to the inheritors.
While there are many weird and alien entities and species in the world, including Elder servitor races and beings with even more obscure origins than that, there are not the usual elf/dwarf/halfling/gnome array. Standard playable species are mostly human-derived: Humans, genasi (earth, air, fire, water, storm), aasimar, tieflings; along with gnolls, draconians and vermen (a very rare species of ratman). New races to 13A are detailed here (http://wiki.rpg.net/index.php/Acrozatarim/New_Races). Other species like warforged can be playable as part of a One Unique Thing.
There are a host of independent kingdoms (see the Gazetteer (http://wiki.rpg.net/index.php/Acrozatarim/Gazetteer) for more details), a lot of them magocracies, and scads of relics of the Dawn Age all over the place. Thing is these are not man-portable magic items, most of them are great works and magical infrastructure, the Elder gods like things big. For example the "vessel birther", which is an automated construction device (the size of a hangar) that makes ships. Another is the "chariot" of an Elder god, complete with the corpse of said god still sitting in his control throne, around which people built a city.
Magic and the Eldritch: There are many forms of magical practice in the region; the blending of science and magic in the form of the thaumineers and the fleshtwisters, the cryomancers of High Kyros, the battlemagi of the Flame Guild, and the sorcerers of Naseria are perhaps the most major. In this flourishing age of civilisation, there are plentiful practitioners of the arcane who wish to codify, dissect and understand the energies that they command and that the Elder Gods wrote into the underlying fabric of reality.
Technology, Arcane and Mechanical: Technology is advancing in the setting. In the centuries since the Dawn War, advancements have been made and have slowly spread. Now, aided with the magic of inquisitive-minded magi, things are progressing further. There are very rare steam or arcane engines made with thaumineering; the alchemists of Adbar jealoiusly hoard their secrets of chemical compounds but crude versions of gunpowder have been discovered elsewhere. Arcane technology generally is not made in the mindset of industry, nor does it look like industrial stuff; this is an earlier stage of development than that, and lacks the industrial style of design that you might think of when imagining steam engines etc.
The other major source of technology is pre-War tech, the leftover artifice of the Elder Gods and the people of that time. This stuff is weird, alien, often poorly understood but also often very potent. The threat of Sukumvarang's cache of Elder technology is enough to hold back Huron from full-scale invasion, and the notion of a Chariot of the gods is one that could entirely throw the naval balance of power of the region out of whack. Where they exist, remaining pieces of Elder technology are commonly very large, not small bits of technology; entire edifices of strange machinery.
Of course a lot of these things are far from obvious how they're used, and knowledge is power in a big way. As an example, one of the Icons (http://wiki.rpg.net/index.php/Acrozatarim/Icons) is the Vault Keeper, a powerful noble who has the largest collection of arcane lore on the continent and uses it to get more lore and concessions out of others. By contrast another is the Truthseeker who thinks all that lore should be shared. All of our Icons are custom-made, here's one example (note all barring a city are Ambiguous - this is intentional).
The Shadowfury
The avenger for whom no price was too high.
Usual Location: At the heart of the Dread Marches stands a bastion of black and silver, lair of the Shadowfury.
Common Knowledge: Some of the Icons might know what dark rage drove the Shadowfury in the past, but most people only know that she created the Dread Marches one hundred years ago in a cataclysm of dark magic and Elder technology. Forging an army of twisted beasts and undead, the malevolent genius of the Shadowfury scourged the Drakkath until her forces were defeated. But time seems to have tempered her anger, and the surviving people of the Marches are now her vassals and students, arcanists and furies learning the secrets of the sinister path she has walked. Exactly how the Shadowfury is still so hale and healthy after a century is not clear.
Characters and the Shadowfury: Few have the strength of heart to venture into the Dread Marches, but those that do often seek tutelage from the Shadowfury in becoming a fury empowered with dark energy or in the arcane arts of necromancy and daemonology.
Allies: Few icons are allies to the Shadowfury, or even acquaintances - in part because she has outlived most of her contemporaries. The Manipulator-General has sent envoys in recent years, seeking to unearth what knowledge has made the Shadowfury such a gifted creator of horrors. The Vault-Keeper grudgingly owes an oath of aid to the Shadowfury, one sworn by his predecessor; he is too afraid not to honour it but thankfully she has not yet come calling. The Eagle King fought against the Shadowfury as a youth, but the two seem to have come to some strange sort of accord born from mutual respect; the Eagle King mostly keeps her own counsel about the whole affair.
Enemies: Most Icons feel hostility towards the Shadowfury. The Thornmaiden and Magistrate both consider the Dread Marches a pit of evil that needs to be purified; the Flame Guildmistress and Lord-Commander see it as a strategic problem that needs to be overcome. The Silver Warder has a warded prison set aside just for the Shadowfury and looks forward to the day that the ancient fury becomes a permanent, unwilling resident of Pharam Sung.
The True Danger: The Shadowfury's rage has calmed, but if it were stoked once more to a blazing inferno then would she once again demand the world pay the price in blood and darkness?
There's a lot of weird stuff leftover from the Dawn War. Such as the Breach; a weapon of mass destruction levelled a city, but in the process opened a hole in reality. Through which have issued weird mechanical beings who are remaking the local area to fit their notion of order.
Relics of a Past Age: There are plentiful ruins and markers of the Elders' age of power, and their servitors still remain, but three particular examples of Dawn era strangeness are the Umbrals, the Hekatonchiere and the Ordinators.
Umbrals: A seemingly vanished people, the Umbrals (as scholars classify them) appear to have been an inhuman race of expert thaumineers who erected strange arcane technology, including bizarre towers and fortifications. These appear to be even older than the Drakkath Empire, and there's no clear explanation for what happened to the Umbrals, or what interaction with them the Drakkath may have had.
Hekatonchiere: The Hekatonchiere are a disturbing race of Elder servitors, eerie creatures made by Ephras or Hashrukk as servants to enforce their will. Once, the Hekatonchiere strode amongst the Races of Men to distribute the teachings and technology of the Elders; then many fought for their masters during the Dawn War, although some seem to have foreseen the doom of the Elders and instead retreated to their cities and weathered the war with isolation. One such settlement exists in the remote reaches of the Drakkath, and exists there still. Today, their strange influence sometimes extends itself; Hekatonchiere envoys demand knowledge or goods or offer eldritch gifts; sometimes they act with terrifying aggression, and other times are serene and peaceful. If they have an agenda, it is unclear, but they appear to be faring poorly with this modern age after the fall of the Elders.
Ordinators and the Breach: A weapon of mass destruction detonated in the Drakkath during the Dawn War, ripping a hole in reality as it engulfed and demolished a mighty Drakkath city. It's unlikely that anyone involved predicted what would happen later; that the hole appears to have served as a gateway, one through which the Ordinators have come. Utterly alien beings that seem to hold to unknown concepts of law and order, these semi-mechanical beings are slowly building an almighty tower at the Breach, and reformatting the surrounding landscape to a form more pleasing to their orderly minds.
Class-wise it's all the usual suspects, plus some custom-made ones including the Elemental Knight (http://wiki.rpg.net/index.php/Acrozatarim/Elemental_Knight), the Fury (http://wiki.rpg.net/index.php/Acrozatarim/Fury), the Vanguard (http://wiki.rpg.net/index.php/Acrozatarim/Vanguard)and the Thaumineer (http://wiki.rpg.net/index.php/Acrozatarim/Thuamineer)variant on the Wizard. Interestingly, out of four players who've chosen classes so far, three have gone for custom ones.
As usual, once the game is underway (which should be around spring-time, once we've wrapped up D&D4e Icewind Dale), it will be podcasted on In Sanity We Trust (http://insanitywetrust.wordpress.com/).