My World Building a Broken World (Setting, WIP, Blog-style) (Open for input) [Archive]

The Glyphstone

2015-01-01, 02:39 AM

Part 1: Purpose And Style

Design-diary format will work as well for me as it does for Rich here, or at least my facsimile of it. I can skip right past the discussion about a world for a private game group against publication, since I have no game group at the moment. So the goal here is technically 'publication', to the extent that writing this whole thing on GITP is publishing. I've got ambitions to use it later - for RPs and/or campaigns - but that requires something to use first, so it's a hazy goal of the future. But I'm definitely taking the top-down approach, looking at things from the large scale (even larger than ANW is/will be, since I'm also creating a cosmology and cosmic history to go with the world itself). I'd be doing that even for a private game group project, just in broader strokes, since that's how I think when it comes to world-building.

One definite initial goal I have is to make the finished project as system-neutral as possible. It started as a world to play D&D 3.5 in, but a decade of growth has also shown me other good rulesets to use. So rather than design for one game and force conversions/adaptations to others, my plan is to design for a middle-of-the-road approach. There will still be plenty of legacy artifacts to D&D I can't get rid of entirely, and it'll still be the 'easiest' system to create a game for, but my plan at this point is to write a setting, rather than a campaign world.

So, on to what Rich calls the Core Concept. I want this to be a world where stories can be told, not an ongoing story in and of itself, so the 'Overarching Story' is right out from the start. This isn't a novel. The central, foremost concept I want to be designing around is the idea of a Broken World. The world is damaged, both on a physical and a fundamental level. Wars have been fought in and with the world by various cosmic entities over its early existence - no culture alive in the 'current' day would remember or have records of those wars, but they still live on a planet where mountain ranges look suspiciously like impact craters if viewed from high up, and where certain concepts simply cannot be realized because the concepts themselves were destroyed in prehistory. Magical frameworks hold the planes together and prevent the entire multiverse from falling apart and dissolving, but it's a relatively slapdash job even if the average mortal is never aware of that fragility. Rather, they feel and reflect it on a more subtle level, reflected in the xenophobic theme I'll detail in a minute.

So, Theme #1: The World Is Broken. Not destroyed, but flawed and damaged.

Another theme I like is the idea of incorporating key numbers - numerology, technically, though it won't bear any relation or resemblance to real-world numerology. Two specific numbers come to mind right now, and I may figure out more to add later - I'd definitely like at least one, so that there are three key numbers total (one of which being Three).

1) Three is a number of Power and cosmic significance. Powerful, magical things come in threes, and sets of three are viewed (and occasionally are) more potent than other combinations. In the primordial era, the creator overdeity took three tries to design a functional and stable universe. There are three major sources from which mortals can seek to gain magical power. There are three 'high' planes of ephemeral and powerful energies. The sole known ritual for resurrecting the dead requires three willing sacrifices as a component.

2) Five, on the other hand, is a number of Structure and stability. Things that come in five are sturdier and stronger, less prone to random chaos or failure. There are five 'low' planes of primal elemental energies. There are five 'civilized' races that populate the world. Stars and pentagrams are preferred symbols for physical or magical workings. Tied into the above, one of the three routes to power has three sub-categories within itself, making an actual total of five.

Other numbers are seen as culturally significant to some people - seven being lucky, or nine as an omen of death. But they're not significant on the cosmic level the way three and five are, just mortal beliefs occasionally reinforced by coincidence.

So, Theme #2: Numbers Have Power.

Another overarching theme I want to use is that of names. The thematic basis for magic is that of true names - learning the universal names for things allows control over them, down to personal and individual true-names allowing direct influence into a person; this isn't to reflect any mechanical or system use of 'Truenaming', just a flavor/fluff explanation for magic in general. When I discussed earlier about certain concepts not existing, that would be because their names, their Words, are missing from the universal lexicon. If, just to grab a random example, a GM running a game in this world wants to preserve the high-medieval technology level, it is easy enough to decide that the true name of 'gunpowder' is gone. No matter how much saltpeter, sulfur, and charcoal you mix together, at best it will burn rather than explode - because the word that would describe what you'd have otherwise created is gone, and so the universe can't make the desired result happen.

Carrying on with this idea, the 'gods' of this world won't be known by personal names (Pelor, Desna, Asmodeous, etc.), but by titles (The Red Lady, the Plaguebringer, The Golden Hero, etc.) - people seeking aid would pray to those titles as gods in their own right. Furthermore, there are many more 'gods' as mortals see them than there are actual cosmic-grade entities behind them - dozens and dozens of titles including regional deities, patron deities, and forgotten/dead deities, but only a handful of true deities at the root. Bob The God could be the source of power behind The Golden Hero, while being simultaneously worshipped elsewhere as Sunbringer, and in another place as The Crackling Warmth. Additionally, those titles aren't permanent, but a sort of currency that the cosmics exchange amongst themselves in an unfathomably complex conflict; Bob might lose a fight and have to surrender The Crackling Warmth to its rival Steve, who adds that title to its existing ones of Tear-Soaked Bride and Storm King and now collects the energies generated by prayers to its newly acquired title instead of Bob. I'll discuss the cosmics in greater detail in a later section.

So Theme #3: Names Have Power.

Finally, the last theme I want to keep in mind during the design process is one that mostly exists on the mortal level, that of xenophobia. Many fantasy worlds are well-explored and traveled. At worst, visitors or adventurers from distant lands are just accepted as ordinary, and at best hailed as unusual and exotic. Not here - the world is broken, and that echoes in interpersonal relationships. Far Away is not intriguing and exotic, it's strange and dangerous. What people know is comforting, and the unknown is to be distrusted. You might hate your neighbor, loathe him with all your heart, but you still know him. He grew up in your town or city, ate the same foods you did as a child, feared the same monsters you do. That stranger in the town market with the foreign accent might seem friendly, but you don't even know his name, or know if the name he gives is real; you don't know who he is or where he's been, you can't be certain whether or not he is a danger to you and yours. And your neighbor feels the same way - hate you he might, but he'll go to you for help before he asks that friendly stranger. Even magic recognizes the distant as rare and dangerous; there will be no easy teleporting or flying magics in this world, regardless of the system mechanics behind it. Direct magical travel is limited in its application and hard to learn or master, a mighty wizard still needs a horse and cart like anyone else to go buy his mystic herbs at market. Few people have seen the other planes of existence, and fewer have returned. This makes the racial wanderlust of the sidhelings extra painful (another topic to be covered later), and means people who voluntarily make long journeys to strange places are few and far between.

And Theme #4: The Distant and Different is Dangerous.

My next post, after letting this sit and stew for a while (and hopefully draw comments from interested readers) will address the second half of Concept and Style, the 10 Assumptions of a Generic Fantasy World and where I plan to adhere to or deviate from them.

The Glyphstone

2015-01-01, 10:23 PM

Part 2: Purpose and Style, Continued

Rich has pointed out here that there is an important difference between a style and a gimmick. I'm not trying to make Existing Fantasy World X, But With Y That Is Even Cooler - that's a quick slide into mediocrity. Despite my 'broken world' theme, I don't plan on taking it into absurdity; no giant floating islands in the middle of empty space, or waterfalls flowing uphill, or things like that (at least not in the prime plane). On the other hand, the most overplayed and repeated setting concept out there is the Fantasy Kitchen Sink - Greyhawk, Golarion, and their contemporaries, so while I need to make sure I don't pidgeonhole myself into a world of gimmicks, I need to be unique enough to not get trapped in blandness. Rich brainstorms a quick list of 10 (technically 11) 'default' assumptions that a generic fantasy/D&D world will include, which I'll reproduce here for word count simplicity.

1. Humans dominate the world.
2. Gods are real and active.
3. Magic is real and can be used by anyone who learns it.
4. Opposite alignments fight each other.
5. Arcane and divine magic are inherently separate.
6. The wilderness is separate enough from the cities to justify 3 wilderness-oriented classes.
7. There are hundreds of intelligent species of creatures, but 99% of them are considered "monsters".
8. Arcane magic is impersonal and requires no "deal" with a supernatural being.
9. Beings from other planes of existence try to influence the mortal world, usually on behalf of gods/alignments.
10. Magic items are assumed to be available, and game balance proceeds from that assumption.
11. Magic is consequence-free.
On top of this, I'll add a few of my own that I see pop up here and there:

12. Anachronistic technology and attitudes are regionally limited - the steampunk-and-airships nation will exist in the same world as the knights-and-peasants kingdom in their own isolated thematic bubbles, and the democratic people's republic of freedom will get along perfectly well with the oppressive tyrannical monarchy.
13.The afterlife is well-explored and well-detailed. Even if resurrection isn't available, people know what awaits them when they die (usually via the beings who are native there). There are often multiple afterlifes for different groups of people, depending on how they are divided.
14. Magic can do anything if you are strong enough, while 'mundane' skills are limited to what real world physics permits.

14 items in all. To start off , we can ignore 6 and 10 outright, since I am currently still aiming for a system-neutral outcome. As Rich points out, 5+8+11 are very closely related, along with 2+9.

1) Humans are the dominant race a¬round. Even for nonhuman characters, having humans provides a baseline to measure against for human players, which is all of them (unless you have somehow taught your household pets to play RPGs). So I'm keeping this, though the origin of the human race will echo back to several of the conceptual themes.

2) Gods are real and active in the world. I've alluded to this in Part 1, but I'm both playing this one straight and subverting it. There are definitely gods/cosmic entities, though a lot fewer than mortals think there are, and not as static in their areas of influence as gods traditionally tend to be. I'm a fan of the Gods Need Prayer Badly, so the 'mechanics' of divinity are a variant of such. The cosmics will require energy to sustain themselves - energy that can be catalyzed out of the prayers and faith of mortals. A god's strength is not dependent on its dedicated worshippers - particularly since I'm looking to play up true pantheism, instead of mass parallel monotheism - but the quantity and frequency of prayers it receives affects its 'energy input'. Against that, a God That Doesn't Do Anything will stop getting prayers and begin to starve, so it must expend some of its stored energy to act in the world by granting prayers and performing small miracles to maintain faith in the Title it is reinforcing. When people pray to The Storm King for protection during an ocean voyage, whichever cosmic currently holds that title is fed by that energy. But it needs to spend energy to grant enough of those prayers that the Storm King remains a sea-deity people believe capable of protecting them - especially if the alternatives are titles currently owned by a cosmic rival or enemy. Thus, a constant balancing act of input versus output, and a major factor in the conflicts between the cosmics themselves.

3. Magic is Real and can be used by anyone who learns it. Also true, but again it comes with conditions that make successfully obtaining magic more difficult than usual. There are three (technically five) routes to magical power in the world - wizardry, sorcery, and deific service, and each has its own problems - risk, price, or agency respectively. I'll talk more about this soon.

4. Opposite Alignments fight each other. The biggest thing that always bugged me about D&D was the alignment system - building a fantasy world intended to shed D&D-centric trappings wherever possible, I am delighted to make this one of the first casualties. There is still good and evil in this world, but they are a thing of mortals and lesser immortals, and heavily subjective. Law and chaos are similarly individual; there are objective universal concepts of Order and Chaos, but they are divergent enough from mortal perception of ethics to be a separate thing. The true cosmics are beyond and above mortal concepts of morality and ethics, though their individual Titles might champion and promote causes a mortal would see to be good or evil; to them, it's all just food.

5. Arcane and Divine magic are inherently separate. This is another D&D artifact, and the second casualty of my de-systemization. All magic comes from the same root source - the Words of the universal language that the original creator overdeity used to describe everything that did or could exist - the only difference is the means by which one gains acccess. Wizardry is independent pursuit of individual Words, through research and study and exploration into lost or forgotten locales, and by mastering Words, developing mastery over what those Words describe. Sorcery, comparatively, is an expansion of the classical Faustian pact. A prospective sorcerer finds an immortal - either a Dragon, a Fey Lord, or one of the lesser cosmic immortals that include both angels and demons collectively named the Many - and strikes a bargain with them, trading some portion of themselves for being directly taught magical knowledge. A deific servant, what D&D would call a cleric, takes a similar route to sorcery but directed straight at a 'god', one of the Titles that leads to a cosmic entity. They receive magical power and an instinctive understanding of its function, but in turn are expected to directly propagate that title's influence in addition to spreading knowledge of their superiority; to be a priest of a war-god demands you foster and instigate war and conflict, not merely fight in them. A god of wealth benefits from as people as possible being wealthy, not just the cleric in question. Fail to sufficiently empower a patron Title, and the magic will falter and disappear - the source Cosmic no longer judging that mortal a worthy return on its investment. I'm as much a fan of the armored war-mage archetype as I am of the robes-and-hat squishy wizard - if the wizard wants to pump iron until he can wear his suit of plate-mail, rather than deepen his magical vocabulary, that's up to him.

6. No system, no need for classes right now. There are barbarians, but not Barbarians. There are rangers, but not Rangers. There may be druids, but right now there are definitely no Druids. Next!

7. 99% of intelligent creatures are still classified as 'monsters'. Guilty as charged - there are five 'civilized' races, and a great variety of other creatures - but then, being scared of the strange and different wouldn't work nearly as well if the strange and different was commonplace and socially acceptable. On the other hand, even the various civilized races aren't entirely welcome in each other's homes, so there is definitely a degree of relativity involved in being a monster, or how monstrous a monster actually is.

8. Arcane magic is impersonal and requires no 'deal' with a supernatural being. Absolutely not, even allowing that I'm smoothing out the distinction between 'arcane' and 'divine' magic - two of the three major sources of magic, and likely upwards of 80%-90% of actual spellcasters, derive their magic from a immortal creature - a true dragon, fey lord, or one of the Many for a sorcerer, or direct from a god for a priest. Wizardry could be considered impersonal in that it does not require bargaining with an immortal, but many Words are known only by very old or secretive creatures, so it's inevitable that a would-be wizard will have to bargain for new knowledge at some point.

9. Beings from other planes of existence try to influence the mortal world, usually on behalf of gods/alignments. True on several levels. The gods apply sparing amounts of influence to the mortal world to keep their supply of energy flowing, allowing them to exist and fight with each other. Their lesser servants, the Many, do the same - they bargain with mortals and provide them magical power through a sorcerous pact, but for their own eventual benefit. The price of a Felpact is the mortal's afterlife - rather than go to the Underworld at death, their soul goes to join their patron's troops in the wars the Many fight imitating their elders.

10. Magic Items are assumed to be available, and game balance proceeds from that assumption. This is another N/A question, being as how I am writing from a non-systemic perspective, but I do have a few ideas for magic items in general. The biggest one is one I've borrowed, to a great degree, from the Alex Verus (http://benedictjacka.co.uk/alex-verus/) urban fantasy novels - only living things can wield magic, so to carry a permanent magic spell bound within it, a magical item must be alive in a fashion. The degree of sentience depends on the potency of the item, but the life fueling it had to come from someone or something - the theme of sacrifice again. How prevalent magic items are is potentially variable.

11. Magic is consequence-free. Heck no. Learning magic through wizardry is a lifelong and difficult process, fraught with trial and error where even a small error is frequently fatal. The old, white-bearded wizard is a nonexistent image here, because it requires the existence of old wizards. Sorcery is relatively 'easy', requiring only that one seek out and bargain with one of the immortal magical beings who can provide it, but comes at the cost of surrendering some important and irreplaceable part of mortality. Divine servitude turns a person into an extension of the god they serve, a cold and impersonal master who cares only for the degree to which its purview is strengthened by their actions, and who is quick to withdraw the power given if disappointed. One can take up wizardry for a time, and then put it down at no cost beyond lost potential, but a priesthood requires utter dedication without any faltering of the heart. And while sorcerous power cannot easily be withdrawn once imbued, immortals have many ways of finding people who welch on their bargains and expect to get away with it.

12. Anachronistic technology differentials. Since my creative direction is in a completely different direction away from the Fantasy Kitchen Sink, I can enforce a fairly uniform technology level across the globe. Where my biggest related issues will possibly arise will be anachronistic social attitudes. One of the existing nations is grappling with the concept of gender equality, with their first ruling queen after a line of ruling kings since before the nation's founding - it makes the concept richer, but stuff like this is always be an uncomfortable topic to address in RPGs even with the most tasteful handling. Somewhere on the opposite side of the continent, there is an outright matriarchal theocracy, with a very progressive and thoroughly un-medieval cultural attitude towards same-gender relationships, that I need to flesh out without creating some sort of cartoonish parody of feminism. More to the point, having these two nations in the same world without any cross-contamination or overlap would be just like having airships next door to pigs-and-peasants.

13. The afterlife is well-explored and well-detailed. With a mandatory 3x cost to return anyone from the dead, the revolving door afterlife is right out, and there is only one Underworld the souls of the dead are bound for. Even the ones who come back can't remember what it was like there, whether they were of righteous or wicked inclinations during their first life.

14. Magic can always exceed 'mundane' capabilities. On the one hand, I support this kind of thing - if magic doesn't accomplish the impossible, it's not really magic. On the other hand, it makes life really boring for the muggles, and in certain game systems, unfairly balanced in favor of the magicians. Plus, one only needs to look at myth for all sorts of beyond-the-impossible stunts being performed by 'mundane' swordsmen or warriors, people lacking magic yet possessing the strength or skill to go beyond any mortal limits. So I'll table this one for now and come back to it later.

Looking at the New World Articles, my next topic would be Classes. That's an empty space for a system-agnostic setting; while I've mentioned wizards and sorcerers and priests, they're in-world careers at this point and wouldn't even necessarily map on a one-to-one basis against the D&D classes they take their names from. So instead, I'm going to write up a nice long monograph on my mythology, explaining where the world came from and how it got into such a screwed-up state. The battles of gods and greater powers is the source of so much that is wrong with the world 'today', and so much that is right as well, so it deserves a post in itself.

Stay tuned. Or post with questions, comments, criticisms as previously requested. Always welcome, would-be loyal readers.

Dusk Raven

2015-01-03, 12:17 PM

I find the more content a post has, the less qualified I feel to comment on it, no matter how interesting I find it. Nonetheless, there's something that stood out to me.'

"12. Anachronistic technology differentials." I would think, given that xenophobia and isolationism is a very real thing, that this would encourage differentials in technology and culture. It's true that technology never stays a secret for long, but even so, isolation does wonders for mismatched cultures.

The Glyphstone

2015-01-05, 06:17 PM

So, this may get kind of rambly, but I don't have a template article to work from. Plus, I'm trying to render down an At The Dawn of Time (dun dun dun) retelling into colloquial vernacular normal language (why did I just write that), rather than reciting it in full epic style. And there's a lot to retell, what with starting At The Dawn Of Time (dun dun dun).

So, In The Beginning (dun d...aww)...

First, of course we have nothing, because that is how universes start. Then there is an all-purpose creator overdeity, whose full name describes the entire universe and everything inside it that is or will ever be but whose nickname will descriptively and imaginatively be The One, who appears and then promptly creates itself by saying 'I Was'. Stable time loops, eat your heart out. But the One is bored, because it exists in nothingness - so it takes a part of its infinite name and separates from it, creating the universe. This works great for a few microseconds, but the One just assumed a finite entity would inherently be as stable as an infinite one; it's not, and the new universe promptly collapses in on itself. Not to be dissuaded, the One tries again, taking another chunk of its name and using those Words to fashion a universe with rules and laws. This works better - too well, in fact, because here the One overcompensates. It describes laws that govern everything, an infinite number of them, freezing the new universe into an eternal stasis under conflicting rules. Seeing as how a world that never does anything is boring, the One decides to try again - it dismantles the second world, recollecting all but a few free-floating scraps, and sets to work a third time. This time around, the One gets it right, building a world that is self-supporting and self-sustaining, but not so structured as to be static. There are living things, and nonliving things, and things that hover somewhere between the two, and all sorts of wondrous and amazing stuff. The One isn't bored anymore.

Boredom assuaged, though, now the One finds that it is lonely. There are a whole bunch of lesser, little creatures living in the world it's made, but they do things like die, which don't make them very good company. It wants to show off its work, but knows it is the only creature in existence capable of appreciating the entire thing. This is a problem, but also the solution - if there can be One, why can't there be Another? So the One splits itself in half, a perfect division, to create the Other. Now it has a friend and companion, and the One isn't lonely anymore either.

Loneliness assuaged, though, now the One finds that it is jealous. Or maybe the Other finds that it is jealous, because there are two of them, indistinguishable from each other, and unfortunately both convinced that they are the 'original' and the other is the 'copy'. So the jealousy festers, and as both continue to create new things in the world and change what is already there, they become increasingly resentful and convinced that their additions are better, more true to the original vision, and their counterpart's creations to be inferior. Eventually it just gets too stressful, and the Other attacks the One (or is attacked by it) to prove their supremacy and undo the mistake they made by creating a duplicate. Now [BOOP] gets real, because when two overdeities of (Infinity /2) power slug it out, just describing the fight isn't entirely possible. Their combat is on a fundamental level, attacking and defending with pieces of the universe they've created and portions of their own essence - concepts of reality being turned into weapons and armor, and frequently destroyed in the process. Exactly which concepts are gone forever is a decision best left to any individual GM, including myself, who takes up the world for a specific story; in essence, it's a canonical Deus Ex Machina to explain why something doesn't exist and will never exist despite otherwise appropriate conditions - the universal lexicon Word for gunpowder, or pennicilin, or key lime pie - is gone, and without that Word, the concept it would describe cannot become reality. At best, it remains theory, and an inventor drives themselves mad trying to imagine something fundamentally impossible. But it happens. At the same time, the poor perfect universe that the One labored over becomes the definition of 'collateral damage' - a whole unified construct is ripped apart, separating into one concrete reality and a host of more primal sub-realities that each describe an element or component of the 'prime' plane, all hooked together by really thin threads. The effects of this separation on the inhabitants of the first world are amusingly fatal, to say the least.

With both the One and the Other being of equally infinite power, what eventually happens after a few eons of fighting is mutual destruction - they successfully kill each other, ending the war for exactly as long as it takes for their bodies to fall. Both are still creator overdeities, and even their corpses are immensely powerful - in this case, powerful enough to keep creating autonomously. They fall to pieces, but the pieces each reanimate as lesser deities, twenty-seven in all. Vaguely aware of which overdeity was their progenitor - though each still considers themselves to be of the One and their opponents to be of the Other, they align into factions and immediately get back to fighting, trying to avenge their respective fallen 'parent'. These Cosmics are much less individually powerful than the One and the Other, which is both a good and bad thing for the universe. On the bright side, they can no longer rip out concepts like 'the strong nuclear force' or 'the curvature of space-time' and use them as projectile weapons. On the downside, battling as incarnate beings inside existence, albeit immortal ones, isn't a great deal less destructive to the environment. This is the part where perfectly circular mountain ranges/island chains, reality-warping magical storms, and armies of enslaved servitors happen - being less potent than the originals, the Cosmics find they cannot create with the same true freedom as the One. In addition to being limited to what their own truncated Names express, their ability to create autonomous life is weak; true sentience is coupled to free will, and they must choose one. Thus come the servitors, spawned in endless hordes and sent to do battle against their opposite numbers with weapons and magic only slightly less devastating than the actual godly smiting. Everyone involved is spending power like water, but it remains mostly a stalemate. The Cosmics on the first side are fewer by one, but individually more powerful to compensate. Their opponents decide, faced with this impasse, try to break the mold by inventing a new race of servitors - these would be born with innate power taps directly to the Elemental planes, living siege weapons and battle commanders to coordinate their servitor armies. These new creations, the dragons, would be the secret weapon that tips the tide of war in their favor. And naturally, their plans go horribly wrong, which I'll talk about in Part 2 of this already over-long prehistorical rendition.

Jakodee

2015-01-06, 07:39 PM

This world will be made of black and surreal humor won't it?

moossabi

2015-01-06, 10:32 PM

This world will be made of black and surreal humor won't it?

It's the best way to go, isn't it?

The Glyphstone

2015-01-07, 03:29 PM

This world will be made of black and surreal humor won't it?

The actual world isn't really meant to be funny at all - well, not the world as a whole, I've got jokes hidden here and there like the story of the river city of Kym and the ducal twins fighting over its rulership. But my retelling of its mythic prehistory is being injected with humor to keep people interested through what would otherwise be the most boring and monotonous parts, and I do expect what humor exists in the final draft to be rather bleak and surreal.

The Glyphstone

2015-01-16, 02:46 AM

And we're back!

So, the First Cosmics - because I need to give the two factions names at this point, just to tell them apart - set about building dragons, their ultimate war machines. Huge, immensely strong and tough, incredibly intelligent, immortal and with utterly perfect memories to learn from every defeat and victory, and magically potent to boot. They're champions, commanders, and siegebreakers all in one - servitors stand no chance against them. Unfortunately, being so smart and powerful comes with tradeoffs; in this case, they can't be innately enslaved the way servitors are. And sure enough, when it comes time to actually do the job they were created for, the vast majority of the dragons decide they want no part of this. Free-willed creatures with no stake in the outcome of the conflict and little interest in self-sacrifice against someone else's enemies, they rebel and flee en masse out into the mortal world, finding isolated places to conceal themselves and wait out the fight. Luckily for them, the First Cosmics spent a lot of juice in the creation, enough that hunting down the rebel dragons would leave them vulnerable to attacks from behind by the Second Cosmics.

For that matter, the Second Cosmics could have just attacked outright there and possibly won the war. But they're just as vulnerable to hubris as the First Cosmics. Believing that they are the true heirs of the original One, it's obvious that they can succeed where the First Cosmics failed by creating a game-changing race of super-servants who remain loyal to their interests. But instead of building for brute power like the dragons, the Second Cosmics decide to build sneaky. They design the ultimate spies, tricksters, and assassins; creatures who have magic in their veins like mortals have blood, able to go anywhere and see or hear or do anything regardless of what is put in their way. These are the fey, the faerie lords; and as you probably already guessed, they're no more loyal to their would-be masters than the dragons were. They also flee into the mortal world, but rather than try to hide openly, they step 'sideways' and create themselves a parallel plane that mirrors the prime- effectively a gigantic illusory plane that appears the way the world would have been if it hadn't been used as the battleground for a deicidal war. And prehistory repeats itself - weakened by the act of creation, their Cosmic creators couldn't focus their attention on finding the renegade fey while still holding off the other Cosmics, who are now once again equal in power.

It's around this time that something new - or technically something very old - enters the picture. Remember the two failed attempts at universes that the One went through before finding the right balance between chaos and order? It re-absorbed most of them and re-used the best bits in its third attempt, but there were scraps left behind from both failures, tiny fragmented proto-universes drifting around in non-existence. The Cosmics wars had continued to inflict damage on the mystic structure holding the planes in one piece, weakening it to where the fragments could slip inside. Now they began colliding with the actual universe, and taking on physical bodies as they tried to impose their own version of physics (or lack thereof) on their surroundings - not entirely alive or sapient, all they wanted was to exist. These outsiders came in two general categories; mobile blots of pure primal chaos, and living embodiments of total, stagnant stasis, and ranged in power from incredibly small and mostly harmless to massive demigods that devastated the servitors sent to fight them. As the outsiders rampaged around, they caused even more damage to planar stability, which attracted more outsiders, and so on. The world was in real danger of falling to pieces entirely again, and with no One around this time to rebuild it, the Cosmics called a truce amongst themselves to drive the outsiders back into non-existence where they came from.

For the most part, this works. But in the process, something else 'new' happens - a Cosmic is destroyed. Being killed wasn't uncommon for them; incarnate, they still had to at least loosely follow the laws of physics, and taking enough damage to their current body meant they needed to discorporate and go make a new one. But that cost energy, along with every other use of their divine power, and in the frenzy of constant war, no one really noticed that their reserves were starting to get low until one of them bottomed out. It died, and this time it didn't come back. Naturally, this was immensely scary to the Cosmics - even with the outsiders cleaned up, they fell back rather than resume their wars. The remaining servitors, devoid of instruction, proceeded to wipe each other out while their masters quietly panicked over impending starvation and oblivion. And while they are doing that, New Thing #3 comes along. With all that fighting amongst each other, a lot of Cosmic blood got spilled all over the world, soaking into it both literally and in a more metaphorical sense. The One was so powerful that even the blood of its 'grandchildren' was a potent force of creation, especially in tandem with the world it had built by hand, and the result of that creative energy - mindless this time, without the guiding intelligence of the One or the Cosmics - was free-willed sentient mortals. There were plenty of living creatures populating the world, with various levels of intelligence and magical aptitude, but the blood-borne races were different. To start with, there were only five of them, appearing where Cosmic blood had mingled with varying energies. In the mountains and hills where the power of Earth was strongest, you got the first of the stoneborn; stone and rock given life and sentience. The coastlines and islands infused with the power of Water produced the amphibian aquarians. The groves and forests that marked where the fey had 'stepped aside' still leaked fey magic back into the real world, the result of which was the sidhelings. Similarly, the isolated locales where the dragons had hid themselves away absorbed draconic energy in turn, and when infused with creation, created the scalekin. And last, there were still vast chunks of the world that had been scarred by the outsider invasion, marked with traces of the weird un-realities the outsiders had brought with them. But even that was still technically part of the One originally, and given new energy by Cosmic blood, produced humans. Blood was also spilled into a few other places, like the deep oceans, but relatively little compared to the land; the results of that will be seen later.

By the time the Cosmics calmed down and started paying attention to the world again, mortals had spread out pretty much everywhere. Setting up civilizations, developing culture, living and loving and dying and all sorts of other mortal things. At first, they looked like a convenient replacement for the servitor armies that the Cosmics could no longer afford to create, the next weapon in their war. But the Cosmics realized that mortals were different; they were like little fonts of energy, tiny sparks of divinity inside them that leaked a gentle trickle of power all their life. Individually, any one trickle was too tiny to be noticeable, but gathered en masse, those trickles could be a food and fuel source for the increasingly hungry Cosmics. So to make that harvesting happen, the Cosmics all got together, old loyalties and grudges pragmatically forgotten in the face of survival, and created the biggest and most enduring con game any reality has ever seen. Taking on temporary, flimsy identities backed by a sliver of their true self, they invented gods for the mortals to worship and who would from time to time grant requests through prayer and perform miracles to encourage more worship in hopes of being the next miracle recipient. They invented a lot of gods, for all sorts of aspects of life from broad to super-specialized, and for every corner of the world, but all feeding back to the same twenty-six Cosmics. Now, instead of fighting with blood and power, they feuded and squabbled and gambled over the 'ownership' of different gods. Whoever held the title of that particular god was responsible for keeping its popularity up, and in return getting all the delicious nourishing prayer energy directed at that god. The intricacies of the Cosmic Game are enough that it'll get its own blog post much later on, and at this point I've covered pretty much all the important events that happened in prehistory to create the world-as-it-is now.

Thanks for bearing with me through all that. I know reading mythic history is boring (Silmarillion says Hi!), so I tried to make it humorous to some extent. Next, I think I'll cover Races, the five sapient species that make up most of the world's population.

Plerumque

2015-01-16, 12:28 PM

Fascinating. I also feel unqualified to comment on this, but there is something I'm curious about- which you'll probably cover in another post, but I'll ask anyway. If mortals have a spark of divinity in them, what happens to that when the mortal dies? Is it gone forever, or does it transfer to those who are being born, or is there some kind of afterlife where it remains with them? If it's the first or second, does this mean the sum total of divinity in the world is constantly increasing? Or is death just happens when the trickle of divinity finally runs out?

The Glyphstone

2015-01-16, 01:06 PM

I'm not qualified to be writing any of this, why isn't anyone qualified to be commenting?:smallconfused:

As for the animating sparks - I really don't know, or hadn't considered yet. At a spot consideration, I'd say the divine energy gets re-absorbed into the world when a mortal dies. Their soul either goes to the Underworld or to serve the Many in the Cosmic Realms, but the divine energy is recycled for the next mortal to be born. So the total pool is unchanging, just allocated differently as time passes.

Plerumque

2015-01-16, 01:49 PM

I think it's more that nitpicking seems unfair when I, at least, would do a much inferior job. Then again, lots of people make a living out of criticizing things that they couldn't do, so I'm not going to worry about it.

What happens as the population increases, then? Is there an external limitation on growth, like a predator-prey relationship, or does the amount of divinity parceled out to each person decrease as there start to be more people?

The Glyphstone

2015-01-16, 03:50 PM

Eh, let's just say there is a lot of spare divinity infused into the world to go around. You could, in theory, build up a population to where you actually started to render the universe itself mortal, but that would take long enough that you'd be in a different campaign setting entirely by that point.

But hey, let's run with the hypothetical, because I don't have anything else to do. Having that spark makes mortal prayers generate a tangible sort of energy Cosmics can feed from, but it also lets them work magic - since 'magic' is itself a relic of divinity. So a world where the energy had been drained out would be less magical, more mundane; ability to perform magic becomes something rarer, spells are less potent, magical creatures go extinct. Technology would likely blossom to fill the utility void left behind, and there would be population pressure to start exploring beyond the heavens in search of more space...so, it sounds like the Far Future of this setting would be a sci-fi universe. Maybe that can be my next project someday.

Plerumque

2015-01-16, 03:54 PM

Makes sense. Just curious, and I look forward to your next piece.

The Glyphstone

2015-02-05, 02:56 AM

I'm back, faithful and talkative readers/commentators!

So, time to talk about races. Specifically, I'm going to talk about 'player races'. There are plenty of other creatures inhabiting the world, of various intelligence levels, but there are only going to be five species organized and civilized enough to have cultures worth discussing.

In the hoary days of yore, I had planned all the standard cliche groups - elves, dwarves, halflings, humans, etc. At some point, I decided to thin the list down, and make each of them a bit more distinct. The list got as low as four, but when I decided to build up the cosmic importance of the number five, I needed a fifth race. That ended up as the scalekin, the last addition to my race spread and the ones who have changed the least overall. Each of the five is different, but they all have a shared thematic origin - divine energy shed by warring Cosmic deities, infused into a latent natural magic or element of the world. I like dualities/paired opposites as well, even if it's not endemic enough to warrant a note of ongoing theme - the One and the Other, who birthed the Few and the Fallen, each of which created their own rebellious living superweapons, and so on down the line. This sets up the framework for my racial pairs as well.

A prior draft of the world used outright elemental affinities - fire, earth, air, and water. The earth-aligned race was dwarves, the water race was halflings, the air race was elves, and the fire race was dragonborn. Successive drafts altered each of them, and when I shifted (briefly) to an Asian five-element spread instead of a Greek four-element spread, Humans got shoved in as Void-aligned. That changed, but the association of humans and void remained, which later led to their 'ancestry' coming from Cthulhu the pre-dimensional invaders. But now I'm starting to ramble again. The elemental associations are still vaguely recognizable, but now there are two elemental affinities and two mystical affinities. Instead of being directly linked to fire, the scalekin (formerly dragonborn) are 'aligned' with draconic power, a more primal sort of pure energy than simple flames. The elves became the sidhelings, whose affinity shifted to match that of their fey progenitors. The halflings, I think, changed the most - in the beginning, they were riverboaters and sailors; eventually, they disappeared entirely to have their elemental niche and societal role replaced by an entirely original creation, the Aquarians. Amphibious, mercurial sea-travelers who could best be described as anthropomorphic toads with the toothy mouth of a shark, they're the race I have done the most work on fleshing out - I actually wrote out their history and cultural structure as a term project for a creative writing course. It'll need extremely heavy revision to fit my new vision, naturally, so it'll get shelved for later. Similarly, I'll put scalekin and sidhelings on the back burner initially, and focus on the stoneborn, who grew out of my version of dwarves.

My dwarves stopped being dwarves at some point when I decided to really amp up their connection to earth, by making them actual elementals of a sort - beings of animate earth and stone. They also needed a new name, to signify the shift; I went through a few different ideas, the longest-sticking name being 'Kraznal' - Polish for a type of gnome or kobold. But it stuck out like a sore thumb against the other, not as harsh-sounding racial names, and I eventually decided to keep a common theme and have all four non-human species be known primarily for their ancestral affinity. Stoneborn was the logical choice from there.

The image I have in my head is still very dwarven - shorter than most humans, thick and stocky and tough. But they're also visibly made of stone, in layers, which makes them incredibly visually diverse. The outermost layer of a stoneborn's body is dead rock, something analogous to hair or fingernails to a human; dead, but slightly flexible and constantly being extruded outward. Excessive growth of this layer can impede a stoneborn's agility, so they regularly grind it down like you would cut hair or clip nails. This layer is also effectively an exoskeleton that provides rigidity to the inner layers, and functions as a sort of thin natural armor plating to boot. But this is also the layer everyone else can see, so they use their outermost covering for visual decoration and adornment. A stoneborn carves their own face to look however they want, and sculpts the rest of their body to match - self-sculpting is how they express their individuality in an otherwise highly communal society, and it can get quite detailed and somewhat extreme when one is willing to let their outer shell grow thick enough and deal with the hindrance. Underneath the dead stone is a second layer of a more flexible, living stonelike material. A combination of skin/hide and muscle, it keeps their internal filling in one place - sturdy enough to give structure, but loose enough to allow movement depending on the state of the outer shell. Inside the skin is a semisolid, cement-like slurry; here is where the superficial exterior resemblance to other humanoids ends, because stoneborn don't really have internal organs to speak of. They have eyes, ear holes, and a mouth, but the rest of their innards are a mushy semi-solid compound, hardening when needed to heal damage to the skin and reinforce the always-growing shell. They can eat any sort of earthen material and absorb it to replenish their internal reserve, though that is the beginning and end of their digestive process. Reproduction is also magical in nature, a sort of communal budding - a group of stoneborn gather, each contributing a sufficient portion of their 'filling' into one gooey mass - if the ritual is done properly, the blob develops a properly hardened shell and a mind of its own. Generally, the new personality draws strongly from the blended personalities of its 'donors', but there is always a certain degree of variation, and the larger the donor group, the more distinct the new 'child' is from any single 'parent'.

It's an intensely odd biology, in part because it was developed over time from stereotypical dwarves to dwarves made out of stone to elementals who might visually resemble dwarves (unless they sculpt themselves for height). They're still recognizably humanoid to keep them from getting too weird and thus too unrelatable for potential players. Since a creature's internal biology isn't interesting or more than tangentially relevant to portraying one, though, the things to think about are what sort of psychology these guys would have. The first thing I know is that, like mentioned above, they are extremely visually oriented, both physically and socially. They can hear and see, but they have no nose to smell with, no tongue to taste with, and no exterior nerves to touch with, so their eyes would be the #1 means of gathering information - very keen eyesight in most cases. This makes things they can see stand out best to them, and rank highest in importance, especially when their ability to effectively sculpt their own body however they like is considered. To a stoneborn, anything worth caring about is worth commemorating visually in some fashion, and if you want other people to care about it, you make sure they can see it. A human who calls himself General Orcslayer, Hero of the Orc Wars is letting other humans know he really hates orcs and has killed a lot of them...but to a stoneborn, if Mr. Orcslayer actually cares about his orc-slaying reputation, he'd wear his medals from the Orc Wars, or decorate himself with a necklace of tusks and a orc-skull helmet. Stoneborn are drawn to bright colors, shiny medals, and exotic fabrics, in addition to more direct 'modifications' like tattoos, piercings, or scars - all of the latter being something they have to maintain on a semi-regular basis to preserve, proving they care about it. If you picture military parade dress uniforms, or less charitably, the medal-and-ribbon-bedecked 'uniforms' that third-world dictators with military stylings tend to award themselves, that sort of onstentatious visual display is exactly to the average stoneborn's taste. Someone who hides their trophies or scars might as well not have them, and if they have nothing to be proud of, they're not interesting enough to pay attention to.

Briefly, I'm going to segue from here into how they handle gender, because it ties itself to their attitude on visual appearance. Stoneborn, by default, are genderless - they have no reproductive organs (or any other organs) and reproduce by group budding. They sometimes adopt gendered identities for themselves, but only for as long as they feel that accurately reflects them - a stoneborn who decides to identify as male or female does so because they believe the personality traits of that gender match their own. On the other hand, this is also an entirely individual thing, so what one stoneborn believes exemplifies the archetypical 'male' will be shaped primarily by their encounters with males of other races, and a different stoneborn might consider being male to mean something very different, or even assign those exact same attributes and traits to being 'female'. If their perspective later changes through further experience, it's not uncommon for a stoneborn to revert to genderless status, or even decide the opposite gender is a better representation of their inner self. Regardless, maintaining a gender requires self-sculpting of their exterior surface appropriately, and they take to this with the same attitude they have towards clothing or ornamentation - if it's worth caring about, it should be obvious. Great bustlines, hourglass figures, bulging biceps, and literally chiseled jaws are common features of gendered stoneborn, their shapes tending to resemble idealized statues come to life rather than actual everyday men or women. To a certain extent, they look at other races in a similar fashion; within a certain range of androgynous appearance, a stoneborn may refer to other creatures as 'it' rather than, in their minds, risk give offense by assigning an undesired gender identity to someone.

Now, their social structure and psychological effects. Stoneborn live in giant extended family structures - clans, for lack of a better word - of interconnected and interrelated members. Their unusual breeding method muddies more typical relationships, so in practice they default to giving notably older members of their clan the honorific 'elder', roughly contemporary ones 'cousin', and younger clan members 'child'. There are no accidental births in a stoneborn community; every new member is created deliberately, and typically to fill a specific need in the clan structure. An elder gone too cold to keep working (more on that later), an accidental death, or a projected expansion in a specific field or labor pool. This need is foremost on the minds of contributors during a birthing ritual, so the new stoneborn will be born with a somewhat instinctive understanding of the task they were intended for and a subliminal desire to engage in it. They mature very rapidly physically, but take more time mentally to fully awaken as a distinct personality. Their culture refers to this as "Weathering", their equivalent of infancy or childhood, and it ends when the mentally mature stoneborn feels the first stirring of discontent or boredom with their assigned task or career. Now fully developed, but mentally unshaped, this is beginning of the 'Tumbling' the period where an adolescent stoneborn ventures outside their warren-like clan home structure to spend time amongst other races and see the rest of the world. Being so intensely communal, it's not uncommon for stoneborn to begin their Tumbling in small groups to reduce the stress of separation from their clan; before long, they might go their separate ways, but they stick together in the beginning. This is equivalent to a human's teenage and young adult years, as best as you can draw a comparison - it's dangerous, but they are physically and mentally mature (though inexperienced), and need tempering before true adulthood. Tumbling stoneborn will travel, go on adventures, make friends and enemies of flesh people, until they eventually decide they've seen enough and that it's time to go home. The Tumbling can last for years, with a very wide range, but it doesn't end until the stoneborn comes to the (obvious) decision that the outside world isn't all it is cracked up to be and they were better off amongst their clan in the first place. They return, either taking up their former trade or - more frequently - adopting a new trade or profession more in line with the skills they acquired during the Tumbling -and become socially recognized adults. This is the "Settling", and lasts for the rest of their functional life.

At the end, stoneborn don't die like other races any more than they are born like one. As a stoneborn grows older, their outer shell becomes gradually harder, denser, and more difficult to carve down and preserve their agility. At the same time, their minds gradually slow down as well; not senility, exactly, but thoughts coming at a slower pace and taking longer to process - think how the Ents are portrayed in Lord of the Rings, their minds just moving at a different pacing than most people. This progresses until the elder is to all outside appearances comatose - their body is immobilized and their mind has slowed to geological speeds, in tune with the stones they are made from. This is the 'Hardening' or 'going cold', and when an elder has reached this stage, they are interred deep within the clan home in a special cave alongside other hardened elders. There, they grow into the cavern floor and effectively become semi-sentient stalagmites, their outer shell creeping to entirely obscure their shape and their dreams moving in tune with the mountain. It's an irreversible process, making them dead for any functional definition of the world, but there is always something there unless they are destroyed.

So, there we go. I'm not quite ready to delve into their political structure or social connections with the rest of the world, especially since I haven't worked out geography yet, but this should be enough to chew on. Next, I think I'll take a look at the sidhelings - a.k.a. I Can't Believe They're Not Elves, they of fey heritage and perpetually wandering interests.

Jakodee

2015-02-05, 10:09 AM

I always found it strange how similar races are in D&D. You would expect either very different creature or human subspecies, but that hardly ever happens. Nice rock race. They remind me a bit of the trolls in disc world.

Jakodee

2015-02-05, 10:10 AM

One question. What jobs do sentient rocks need filled in a clan anyway?

The Glyphstone

2015-02-05, 12:51 PM

Smiths, miners, builders, tailors, jewelers, warriors, other sorts of craftspeople...there aren't any farmers or hunters, since they can sustain themselves from earthen material, but there's plenty of other stuff to do and niches to fill, along with their cultural focus on body modification. Can you imagine an entire street of tattoo parlors/piercing parlors, each specializing in a particular sort of artwork or piercing?

Avaris

2015-02-05, 05:36 PM

Jakodee

2015-02-05, 06:08 PM

An idea that just occurred to me. What if one or more of the races/ that race's societ can only exist because of the lack of certain concept or rules. They can use molten wood as a weapon because the nearbye trees cannot ignite, or they can produce infinite but slow amounts if energy due to a cosmic loop-hole.

Plerumque

2015-02-05, 06:25 PM

Do the Stoneborn still fit with the Dwarven 'master craftsman' theme, then? From your job list, it sounds like they do have a heavy societal emphasis on creation, but does that mean stoneborn communities would be more technologically advanced than other areas, or do they focus more on art?

The Glyphstone

2015-02-06, 01:59 AM

I really like this setting idea, and look forward to more posts with interest! A few thoughts/questions that came to me:

- Have any Cosmics died since the first which did? Have any come close? Could be some interesting setting building there: maybe they were killed by mortals when something went wrong with worship? Or became too focussed on one 'god' and were destroyed when that religion imploded or was destroyed? Did a mortal decide to kill a 'god', without knowing what that meant?

I'm figuring that at least one or two have died off in the intervening time, from simple starvation if nothing else. Most try to keep a diversified portfoilo of masks, but being on the losing end of a conflict with other cosmics can perpetuate a 'death spiral' - lose a title in a fight, and you're weaker, making you more vulnerable to the next person who decides to pick on you. Lose all your titles and you're pretty much doomed, unless you're willing to risk everything to pounce on someone else and wrest away one of their titles when they've been weakened by winning/losing a struggle of their own, and hope they don't just it worth the effort to retaliate before you've recovered.

- Do the cosmics have any favoured approaches to worship, or do they simply wear masks regardless of what that mask is? In other words, is there a cosmic which favours gods of fire, or could the cosmic being worshipped as a god of fire also be worshipped as a god of fish elsewhere?

Individually, they can't be picky about where their worship comes from, but they do tend to favor aligned portfolios, because trying to carry conflicting or opposed portfolios hurts their intake. So in your example, a cosmic with a mask of a fire god will probably seek out other fire god titles to carry, because they function with each other. Simultaneously being worshipped as a god of fish/fisherman would be possible, but less preferable - a portfolio element of 'fish' is close enough to the portfolio of 'water' that it'd be less directly valuable, so it'd be the first to go if they needed to shed a title or trade one away. Plus, I can see different types of worship to have different 'flavors', even if they're not opposed.

- Do mortals notice when the identity of a god is passed from one cosmic to another?

Almost certainly not. The cosmics are far more alike than they'd ever want to admit, and the difference between them and mortals is so vast as to render any differences between them from the mortal point of view to be undetectable. Mortals believe in, worship, and empower dozens or scores of 'gods', without ever knowing the truth of the matter.

- How much study has there been to understand why the world is as it is? Do people know their world is broken?

Possibly by some scholars, the sort of people who will look at maps and figure out that the mountain range to the north is both perfectly circular and very similar to the results of dropping a large stone into the dirt. They know that there was a great war between the gods uncountable years ago, a war that left visible scars behind, but it's at best an academic interest. For the vast majority of the population, though, it's not important enough for them to know or care about; the world works just fine as far as they can see, the flaws and cracks and damaged bits all existing outside their interests or on metaphysical levels they can't experience.

An idea that just occurred to me. What if one or more of the races/ that race's societ can only exist because of the lack of certain concept or rules. They can use molten wood as a weapon because the nearbye trees cannot ignite, or they can produce infinite but slow amounts if energy due to a cosmic loop-hole.

It's an interesting idea, but a bit more blatant than I really want to go with right now. There might be isolated areas where the planar damage is more severe, and odd stuff like fire-retardant wood might exist, but it's not something I want to incorporate as a crucial cultural/racial feature. If you'd like, though, the animate nature of the stoneborn could be close to that; they're certainly distant enough from normal biology (along with other creatures, like stone/mountain giants) that they're only possible because the universal law requiring living creatures to be made of flesh was folded up and used to punch an overgod in the face.

Do the Stoneborn still fit with the Dwarven 'master craftsman' theme, then? From your job list, it sounds like they do have a heavy societal emphasis on creation, but does that mean stoneborn communities would be more technologically advanced than other areas, or do they focus more on art?

Huh, I hadn't even noticed that until you pointed it out, but it's true. They probably do have a strong societal emphasis on art, though their ability to work for extended periods would also lead itself to a sort of industrialization. Without a great deal of pressure to innovate, I wouldn't expect their technology level to be noticeably higher, but it would be appropriate for their construction methods to be more efficient. A true stoneborn assembly line turning out undecorated, purely functional items could produce finished goods very rapidly; but their insistence that everything they make be aesthetically pleasing in addition to effective creates a natural bottleneck that makes assembly-line style production unnecessary.

Cue Dwarf Fortress jokes here.

Plerumque

2015-02-06, 11:03 AM

Interesting. So you could go to a Stoneborn to get a well-made weapon or set of tools, but the cost would be that it would take a long time and you'd end up with fifteen lines of poetry about cave fungus engraved on the blade? Makes an interesting contrast to the utilitarian ethos Dwarves are often portrayed with.

The Glyphstone

2015-02-06, 01:37 PM

Or at least a blade of excellent craftsstonebornship, etched with an image of a cave fungus, the cave fungus is burning. But yeah, you get the idea.

Avaris

2015-02-06, 02:00 PM

The Glyphstone

2015-02-06, 02:09 PM

Had a thought for something potentially very thematic for the setting: Djinn. The number 3 is important, and words have power, so djinn could have the ability to grant three words, or rather three fragments of the infinite words.

Could go in a few ways: most obvious being that djinn can translate a 'wish' into the appropriate words, but another approach could be that each djinn embodies 3 specific words, unique to itself.

Ooh, interesting. You're right, the pre-existing association of Djinn and 'three wishes' is something real appropriate to tie into the setting. I'll shelve that into the 'ideas to consider later' column when I get around to the more esoteric/rare/exotic creatures inhabiting the various planes.

The Glyphstone

2015-02-06, 06:57 PM

While I work on the next entry, I might as well do some cross-posting. This isn't the only forum I've been posting this on as I go, and questions/comments have come in there as well. If I keep them relatively concurrent, it'll save me having to answer stuff twice.

Religion
First, I love your take on the gods being "behind" the things that are worshipped with possible changes of who stands behind a name. Really really taken with that. It does raise a couple of questions though. First, you mention in part two archetypes like "god of war", "god of wealth", etc. Do you see those as the divine beings or one of their masks? So is Bob the God the God of wealth or is "The Golden Lord" the God of wealth and Bob the God just happens to be powering him right now? I personally prefer the latter because it allows the God of wealth to interact with the world in different ways. Bob the God is an egalitarian type and when he had the Golden Lord then it was focused around trade and suchlike. After a poor chess game, though, he loses it to Rod the God who is a much more selfish type. Theft and suchlike becomes a tenet of the religion and trade becomes much more selfish. You do kind of suggest in Part 2 that it is that way round, but just so's I'm sure.

Mostly the second, though in a slightly different angle than that. I've been referring to the top-level entities as 'cosmics' to try and keep them solidly differentiated from the 'gods' who are more like masks of authority and power they wear and swap out from time to time. So Bob The Cosmic is an entity unto himself, but one of his 'masks' might include The Golden Lord, a god of wealth.

I haven't nailed down yet how much a Cosmic is influenced by their current portfolio of titles - part of the nature of Cosmics is for them to be somewhat Lovecraftian, in the sense of being unfathomable by mortal minds moreso than the tentacles and insanity (those are Outsiders, entirely different). But titles, while only a face for the cosmic powering them, are also somewhat personified in their own right. The Golden Lord might be a god of wealth, but he would be a more generous sort of wealth god whose tenets included philanthrophy, supporting laws that encouraged smart investment, or whatever the medieval equivalent of microloans might be. Simultaneously, there might also be The Coin-miser, a wealth god with a more selfish angle to their creed. Each would rise or wain in popularity depending on circumstances - but if Bob The Cosmic was the holder of both titles, it doesn't matter to him which wealth god is ascendant, he's still getting all the prayers. If he loses The Golden Lord to Rob The Cosmic, on the other hand, now which attitude towards wealth is more prevalent matters. If Rob The Cosmic is a more selfish personality innately, all he has to do is stop answering prayers to The Golden Lord, and faith in that god will wane; though it might benefit him more to empower it until he is strong enough to strip Bob of the Coin-Miser as well, at which point he can pick one or the other.

How does your (laudable) desire for pantheism vs. parallel monotheism stack with priests though? I'm a wealthy merchant and, in DnD terms, a priestess of the god of wealth. When I get the plague, though, I would presumably pray to the Bringer of Health to sort that **** out, and the "magic" that does so comes from that title. Is the god of wealth pissed off by that? Does the god of health tell me to go **** myself, because I haven't been praying to him enough and I only come round when I want something? Or can the god of wealth heal me, and generally do **** outside his portfolio. In which case, why isn't the world monotheistic? That's something that's always bothered me about DnD. If every god can do everything, why do we need a specific sea god? If they can't, though, you need to decide how prayers to other deities are managed.

With regards to being a priestess, it's definitely the intent that actual devotion is a serious commitment. Wealthy people will offer prayers to a god of wealth (whichever one is most popular in their area and/or most aligned to their goals) when they want wealth and prosperity. If you go so far as to become a priestess of that god, it's now your responsibility to propagate wealth and encourage the development of more wealth. As long as you are fulfilling those objectives, you keep on getting your divine juice tap with no questions asked. The Bringer of Health couldn't care less what you do with your spare time or your non-healing related prayers - it matters not from where the spice prayer flows, only that it does. Similarly, your wealth-god patron isn't concerned about what you're also doing as long as their interests are your top priority...particularly since it might be (unbeknown to you) that Steve The Cosmic is the end recipient of both sets of prayers, to that particular wealth-god and that particular healing-god. You'd be in more danger of getting rejected for a plague cure if you had previously regularly beseeched some other health-god for blessings; on the other hand, it might get you a more potent cure in hope that you'd then spread the word about how awesome Health God B was compared to your old preference of Health God A. It's all heavily dependent on the current state of internal cosmic interactions.

And yes, it is possible for a Cosmic to end up with two opposed titles - say, a health-god and a plague-god. That is a very, very bad situation to get stuck in.

Fantasy Kitchen Sinkdom
Specifically with reference to gender roles - I'm not sure this is an issue for you given your Theme #4. Sure, matriarchal-theocracy-land does it this way while traditional-medieval-gender-roles-land does it that, but the man on the street likely wouldn't know that while the diplomats and merchants who do know that likely chalk it up to another damn good reason why those pesky foreigners are so damned pesky.

Maybe, but it is still something I want to keep an eye on just to make sure it doesn't get out of control either way or become a caricature of itself.

The Glyphstone

2015-02-15, 03:38 AM

Update!

These were once my elves, and from start to finish, they've probably changed the least. The changes are certainly much less drastic than between dwarves and stoneborn, though part of that is because the proto-elves got bigger changes early on. Most of the tweaks through drafts have been changes to the psychological aspects that define them so strongly, rather than gross physical alterations like the stoneborn. To properly explain sidhelings, though, I've got to first lecture for a bit on the fey, who were touched on during the Epic Retelling Of Prehistory (dun dun dun). They'll get an in-depth treatment when I get around to it, but this'll be the Cliff notes version.

The Fey were originally created by the cosmics to be spies, scouts, and assassins, a metaphorical stiletto to the dragons' sledgehammer, with immense power over illusions to make it happen. Like the dragons, they were fully intelligent, fully free-willed, and completely disinterested in being cannon fodder for their creators, so they fled into the mortal world and hid. But where the individually powerful dragons could just bunker down and defend, the fey chose to be more sneaky. Drawing from the Irish mythological references of the Fair Folk living in an invisible parallel world, the fey here do something quite similar; collectively pooling their magical power, they work a grand illusion so potent as to be entirely real, a magic realm 'sideways' from the real world and mirroring it in an older, purer state. To make it survivable indefinitely, though, they end up having to change themselves as well, making themselves natives of the illusion-world and no longer capable of disbelieving their own 'reality'. Effectively trapped now, they can only physically exist in the mortal world with a powerful supply of magic to draw on; anywhere else, they're sentient phantasms who bleed energy, sicken, and die rapidly outside their home. This is necessary, but becomes an immense frustration to the fey, because they're still driven by design to gather information and know things, hoarding secrets, and this brings us back to their mystic children of sorts.

Fey outside their home realm shed energy everywhere they go, the cost of staying coherent as a living illusion; subtle and undetectable energy, but it's there, and more potent in places close to natural portals to the fey world where they enter and leave. And just like the creative force in spilled cosmic blood mingled with the energies of earth to create the stoneborn, cosmic blood mixed with lingering traces of fey power and magic produced the creatures who would become sidhelings - though they would be the 'youngest' of the civilized races in absolute terms, because the first sidhelings were in fact magically altered human babies, transformed before they were born by the ambient power.

Physically, a sidheling resembles a human, but they do so as a severe manifestion of the Uncanny Valley effect. Put simply (and without inflicting TV Tropes on anyone), everything about a sidheling is subtly but unmistakably wrong. Their limbs and fingers are just a bit too long to be normal; their joints bend just a little too far. Their eyes are slightly too large and oddly shaped, and the angles in their faces are a tiny bit too sharp. They move strangely, talk strangely, even breathe strangely, all in ways that can't really be explicitly labeled but also can't be ignored. They are still very closely related to humans - so closely related, in fact, that they can actually breed successfully with humans who are drawn to their alien and uncomfortably exotic features. But there are no half-breeds; any child with at least one sidheling parent is a full-blooded sidheling themselves. Even worse, there is still a small but steady flow of 'spontaneous' sidheling children from otherwise human parents - which, with the widespread knowledge that a sidheling father or mother will always have sidheling children, can randomly shatter families at no fault of the actual child. Altogether, the factors combine to make sidhelings near-pariahs from the human societies they would otherwise be most closely tied to and integrated with, but it gets still worse for them due to a core and somewhat dysfunctional part of their mindset.

Unlike the fey whose power infuses them, sidhelings are mortal, if oddly so. Their lifespans are only slightly longer than a human, but they grow and decline far faster. A sidheling reaches physical and mental adulthood in ten years or less, and from there remains in prime condition for nearly their entire life. They suffer no effects of age until the very end of their lives, but when they do, it strikes equally fast; less than ten years will pass, often closer to five, between the first sign of aging in an adult sidheling and their death of old age. And for that intervening duration between maturity and decrepitude, they are driven to experience as much of the world as they can while their mortality lasts - to see, learn, and do as many different things as they possibly can, with an emphasis on variety over repetition. It's variably referred to as the 'Curiosity', the 'Drive', or the 'Quest', but what it really amounts to is something between a blood curse and a particularly potent if irregular mental illness. To give one example at random, a sidheling may decide to learn how to make clocks. He'll study clocks, try to talk to clocksmiths. He'll buy clocks, take them apart, and put them back together. If he can, he'll get a job in a clocksmith's workshop and learn there. But eventually, he'll decide consciously or otherwise that he has learned enough about clocks. He'll pick up a new obsession; ship-building, or farming, or history, or a musical instrument, and he'll never deliberately touch or tinker with a clock again, because even a single moment spent repeating an experience is wasting that moment better used on something new. Sidhelings wander around constantly, driven by their compulsions to see out the new and different and incapable of being satisfied with anything they find for long. This even applies to relationships, and even amongst their own kind. A sidheling whose curiosity turns to the experience of having a loving relationship, and even a child, will be an incredibly devoted father/mother and husband/wife, entirely focused on their chosen spouse, sidheling or human, and any children that result. But eventually it'll come to an end, and the love in their heart for a family will be replaced by the unquenchable need to ride with a caravan and learn the ecology of the great desert, or to take up painting and create a masterpiece of abstract art, or go risk life and limb in the gladiatorial arenas. A pair of coupled sidhelings can be particularly tragic when one's Curiosity shifts before the other, leaving the abandoned partner pining after their deadbeat spouse, and hoping they'll last long enough to see their child, if any, mature to self-sufficiency before being compelled to abandon them as well.

Ultimately, this means that sidhelings lack any real sort of coherent culture or society to form a racial identity around, further reinforcing their alienation from everything, even each other. Any individual sidheling will be a wondrous hodgepodge of knowledge, skills, and cast-off talents, though without any consistency from one to the next and often a reluctance to use or even divulge the existence of a previous obsession without great need. The closest thing they have to a universal belief, ironically, is a instinctive fear and revulsion towards the tiny minority of sidhelings whose thought processes are more conventional in nature - these unfortunates are regarded as insane deviants, and if they find any friendship at all, it is with humans. There have been great sidheling warriors, artists, or craftspeople, but nothing in common between them and rarely if ever a repeat performance or creation. 'Sane' sidhelings who practice magic are almost exclusively sorcerers, lacking the dedication and long-term focus needed to pursue wizardry or service to a deity, and the majority of them tend to favor pacts with a dragon or one of the Many. Feypact sidheling sorcerers exist, but most sidhelings avoid contact with their otherworldly 'ancestors'.

Plerumque

2015-02-15, 01:08 PM

I like it. The theme of 'obsessive, mercurial information-gatherers' flows very naturally from the idea of fey, and they're different without being so alien as to be unrecognizable. They remind me quite a bit of the gnomes from Pathfinder, actually, both in the fey ancestry and constantly searching out new experiences. It does seem like the Curiosity might place some RP restrictions on anyone actually playing a sidheling that could be annoying ("no, we fought ogres last week, let's do something else," etc., and it would make it hard to have a sidheling with a long adventuring career), but it does create a compelling reason for them to be adventuring in the first place, along with the Stoneborn. And I suppose you're not worrying about the metagame aspect so much at the moment.

The Glyphstone

2015-02-15, 01:18 PM

They're not meant to be have that short of an attention span - a Curiosity will last for a few years on average, and combat in general should be chaotic and unpredictable enough that fighting the same sort of creatures repeatedly won't bother them too much.

You are right about there are few 'career adventurers' for sidhelings, though I'm not sure if that is entirely a bad thing, considering what a 'career' adventurer really is when you boil away the game trappings. Though if that sort of concept is central, there is always the out of playing an 'insane' (i.e., normal) sidheling.

Plerumque

2015-02-15, 10:41 PM

Right, I wasn't referring to the Curiosities there but the idea that they'll try to avoid repeating experiences in general. Though I suppose that doesn't make sense if their aim is mastery- hard to become a master baker when you refuse to make bread more than once.

I agree with you that career adventurers (i.e. serial killers) might not have to be a part of your world, but that's again changing a lot of basic assumptions of at least some of these systems. I assumed you were making some provisions for that aspect, as both of the races you've written up have an explanation for that kind of behavior.

The Glyphstone

2015-02-15, 10:55 PM

Oh, yeah.

As for experiences...I guess the idea is that they want as much variety as they can get away with. So fighting ogres for the third week in a row might make them grumpy (Ogres AGAIN? sigh...), but they'll find variety where they can get it, and living creatures have just enough differentiation between them that it'd be tolerable. Fighting, say, golems for three weeks in a row might be a challenge to talk them into though. There is meant to be a clash between the drive of their Curiosity to hyper-focus on one area of study and their innate hunger for variety, but in the end the Curiosity will win out for as long as it takes to shift.

But you are right that I'm deliberately writing in cultural excuses for the different races to be adventurers/PCs, whatever system is used to represent it. There will be plenty of things provided to do adventures to - old servitor ruins, freaky monsters in the forests, all the classics. And I'm certain there will be people who take up a career of treasure hunting/tomb robbing/monster-slaying.

Plerumque

2015-02-15, 11:55 PM

Do sidhelings tend to have an affinity for illusions, or is it only the insane ones that have the ability to learn much magic at all?

The Glyphstone

2015-02-16, 01:36 AM

They can learn pretty much any magic, though I suppose a small affinity for illusions would be appropriate. As for who can learn it - sane and insane sidhelings can both learn magic, but only the 'insane' ones can devote themselves long enough for wizardry or consistently enough for divine service. 'Sane' ones have to make a sorcerous pact if they really want to develop their magical talent, but that works out okay - the cost of a Feypact synergizes well with the sidheling's tendencies even if they don't enjoy them, and the price of a Felpact only comes due after death anyways. I'm in the process of redefining Dragonpacts, so I don't know about them.

Plerumque

2015-02-16, 01:47 PM

So a Felpact is like the Faustian method of gaining magical power? I understand Feypacts and Dragonpacts, as those are the main beings of powerful magic, but I may have missed fiends' place in your setting. Or is a Felpact just the idea of making bargains with forces beyond mortal comprehension or the like?

The Glyphstone

2015-02-16, 02:26 PM

I haven't gotten into magic and the greater cosmology yet, but there are three primary sources of magical power from immortal bargains. Feypacts are bargains with the Fey, and Dragonpacts with a dragon, as you might expect. A Felpact is the same bargain struck with one of the the lesser immortal servants of the Cosmics/gods, who are collectively called the Many. For all intents and purposes, it is a Faustian bargain, but you can strike one with a celestial just as easily as you can with a fiend, and the cost is the same - after death, your soul goes to the realms of the gods to be a soldier for your patron instead of whatever fate awaits in the Underworld. Strictly, it should be called a Manypact to fit in with the theming, but I like 'Felpact' better.

The less said about Krakenpacts, the better, since I won't touch on them until I get around to talking about the Aquarians.

Plerumque

2015-02-16, 10:33 PM

Is there a Stoneborn equivalent of the Krakenpact?

The Glyphstone

2015-02-16, 10:53 PM

Stoneborn can also make sorcerous pacts, they're not restricted to sidhelings, or anyone else really. It's just that going to a kraken for your magical talent is a terrible, terrible idea.

Plerumque

2015-02-16, 11:41 PM

I assumed the kraken was the version of the dragons for the Scalekin or the fey for the Sidhelings. But Stoneborn have no precursor or being with a similar affinity?

The Glyphstone

2015-02-17, 12:06 AM

Nope. The Stoneborn are the product of the elemental energy of earth and cosmic power, the same way the sidhelings are the product of cosmic power and fey energy. The scalekin are the product of cosmic power blended with draconic energy, and the Aquarians are the product of elemental water energy and cosmic power. Two elemental affinities, two mystic affinities.

Krakens are just evil, nasty buggers - lesser immortals, as opposed to greater immortals like the dragons and fey, and dealing with them is much closer to the classic Faustian bargain in that it's pretty much guaranteed to go poorly for you. They and their slaves are the biggest and most prevalent enemy of the Aquarians, who are a bit down the list. Scalekin are going to be next up for Races.

Plerumque

2015-02-17, 10:18 PM

So the avenues for sorcerous power are through fey, dragons, the Many, and krakens? If I may make a suggestion, given your 'Numbers have Power' overarching theme, it would seem to make sense to either reduce it to 3 or increase it to 5. An option for compacting with the pre-dimensional invaders that humanity originated with would be quite neat to model a more traditionally Lovecraftian approach to gaining power, assuming the fluff you have already doesn't make that impossible and you don't already have plans for that.

The Glyphstone

2015-02-18, 12:00 AM

Fey, Dragons, or the Many, just 3. There are 3 types of sorcery, plus wizardry and divine service, for a total of 5 routes to magical power. Hits both of the Numbers of Power at once. Krakens came later, and one of the reasons they are bad news is their method of 'giving' magic to someone is a sort of twisted imitation of real sorcerous pacts, so they're not officially part of the count. Or, if you like to view it in reverse, their magical gifts are corrupting because they're not part of the count.

EDIT: So I guess I'm going to make the various types of magic my next essay post, rather than continuing with scalekin. I'm answering so many questions about it anyways right now.

The Glyphstone

2015-02-21, 04:33 AM

Maaaaaaaaaaaagic!
As mentioned, I'm taking a brief break from the races to discuss the assorted routes to power for mortal spellcasters. Recalling the thematic rule of Numbers Have Power, there are 3 distinct routes by which a mortal can achieve magical power; wizardry, sorcery, and divine service. Of those three, there are in turn three different types of sorcerous pacts, creating 5 routes to power in all.

I'll discuss wizardry first, because it is the most dangerous and thus one of the rarer forms of magic-user. Fundamentally, wizardry is the practice of what other settings might call truename magic. The One who originally created the universe did so by splitting off a portion of its own infinitely long name, containing the names and descriptions of everything that did or would exist in the universe. Being the building blocks of the universe gives those names power over the things they describe, and learning how to speak said names in turn gives the speaker power of what they are naming. So learning the true name of 'fire' lets you use magic to affect fire, while the true name of 'goblin' would let you use magic that specifically affects goblins. Knowing the word for 'ball' or 'ring' or 'column' gives you the option to magically create those shapes. Stuff like that - the act of actually casting a spell is, essentially, stringing true-names together to describe the effect you want in a language that the universe cannot distinguish from its own fundamental rules; you want to throw a ball of fire at someone, you'd string 'throw', 'ball', and 'fire' together, maybe add 'goblin' if you know you'll be throwing it at a goblin to make the effect more potent.

But that's really the cliff-notes version of the process; wizardry is perhaps the greatest possible expression of 'simple in concept, difficult in execution'. To start with, a prospective wizard first needs to discover their own personal truename - not simply the word that describes their race or gender or appearance, but a single unique word describing themselves as an individual - in a long and intense period of meditation and self-reflection. If that is accomplished, the next step to learn and decipher the necessary true names to craft a spell. While the specifics of spells are personal to each wizard, a 'common core' of certain well-known and simple name concepts has developed over time. Knowledge from that core set of vocabulary is generally of extremely low value to established wizards, so it can be traded for by a new entry to the field at low cost. Rarer or more complex terms, however, tend to be jealously guarded by those who know them and only shared out in exchange for knowledge or services of similar worth. If one cannot or doesn't wish to trade with another wizard, arcane vocabulary can sometimes be found out in the world; certain magical creatures, particularly those who are especially long-lived, may know esoteric bits of arcane lore and be willing to teach them for a price.The long-dead servitor legions of the Cosmics used a debased form of the universal language to communicate, and scraps or relics bearing writings from servitors are often found in old tombs or ruins, and just as often destroyed by their discoverers to preserve the unique value of their find.

Even once a set of words has been collected, however, it is not yet in a useable form. The unique nature of a personal truename resonates in a subtle but particular way with other truenames, the end result being that every wizard's knowledge becomes slightly personalized. The word for 'fire' is theoretically the same, but if you consider a personal truename to be a sort of individual 'accent' altering the universal tongue, that name's owner must learn to alter their pronounciation just right to mimic the actual, unaccented word for fire that the universe will recognize and accept. Thus, a spell can never simply be taken directly from another wizard's collection and cast to effect, rather attempting to do so will almost certainly result in horrific disaster. Incorporating a newly learned word into a wizard's magical vocabulary is a risky process of trial and error. Picture something like trying to learn chemistry without knowing the periodic table of elements, where the only way to determine the properties of a newly discovered element is to mix it with elements you already know, then deduce your knowledge from the properties of the compounds and hope the whole thing doesn't explode in your face.

A common saying in multiple cultures is the idea that there are old wizards, and there are bold wizards, but there are no old and bold wizards; risk-taking arcanists, and too often cautious ones, end up killing themselves in a botched spellcast or flawed bit of research. To flip back to the example at the beginning, a wizard trying to make a spell that will throw a ball of fire especially harmful to goblins needs the words for ball, fire, goblin, and throw, and each must be tailored to resonate properly with his own truename. If he does it wrong and is very lucky, the spell could just fizzle. It might cause a goblin to throw a ball of fire at him, create a ball-shaped goblin made of fire, or compress his own body into a ball, light it on fire, and throw it at the nearest goblin. And that is a relative simple spell, so extrapolate your own conclusions for the more difficult and powerful magical effects. It is a long, hard journey, one that leaves little free time for leisure or other hobbies, and in the end merely gives access to the same magical abilities any source of power can grant. But that access is gained on the wizard's terms, not anyone or anything else's; they are their own masters, and bend the universe to do their bidding by sheer force of will and collected knowledge. To many, particularly humans, this independence of agency and expression of will is worth the risk and cost.

For those who lack the ability or desire to pursue a life of wizardry, the most prevalent alternative is sorcery. Sorcery is, quite simply, the act of seeking out a powerfully magical immortal creature and sealing a pact or bargain with it. There are three true sources that a sorcerous pact can be formed with, and each attaches a different sort of stipulation or cost to their end of the deal. But the beneficial effect for the newly formed sorcerer in each case is the same; a tiny fragment of their patron's essence is grafted onto their own soul, acting as both a source of magical energy and a filter for the sorcerer's will. A sorcerer needs no knowledge of truenames, or indeed any knowledge at all; rather, they require only the mental focus and strength to express their desire, and the fragment of their patron's will translates that desire into the proper truenames without any further input from the sorcerer. Even to the sorcerer, their words may sound like gibbering nonsense, but like any properly uttered spell, the universe hears and obeys as completely as it obeys hard-coded rules like gravity or heat. This makes sorcerers extremely bad magical teachers, since they never possess a true understanding of the effects they are invoking, but they are never at risk of the sort of catastrophic mishaps that a wizard reaching beyond their means can suffer - a spell too great for a sorcerer to will into being simply does not happen. But unlike wizardry, sorcery is never free, nor is the sorcerer in sense. Each type of patron exacts a price from their supplicant, taking a portion of their independence away forever.

The easiest form of pact to invoke is what is commonly called a Felpact, the act of bargaining for power with one of the Many. Immortal beings bound to the service of the cosmics, in their various masked guises as the gods of mortals, the Many are replacements for the long-extinct servitors and the long-lost dragons and fey; not as fanatically loyal as the servitors, nor as individually powerful as the greater immortals, but still devoted to their masters and their interests. But the Many are still sentient, and while their moralities are as inscrutable as the cosmics, they desire servants to command in turn as they are commanded by the cosmics, and the only place they can get such servants is from the ranks of mortals. A felpact is insidious, because unlike the other two true pacts, there is no up-front cost and no ongoing obligation. The only cost of a felpact comes due when the mortal finally dies; at that moment, the Many with whom the pact was sealed shows up and collects the dead soul, who returns to the cosmic realms with their new owner instead of passing on to the Underworld and the fate of unbound souls. There, they may serve as playthings, servants, or soldiers, but it is guaranteed to be a one-way trip; no soul taken to fulfill a Felpact can ever be returned to life. As no one knows what truly lies beyond the gates of death, the cost of the pact seems small to a great many individuals who fear the afterlife, or simply see the promise of up-front power without concern for the debt incurred. Others sometimes attempt to cheat the terms of their pact by invoking some means of extended life or outright immortality - invariably, these attempts fail, and become cautionary tales for why one should not try to renege on bargains made to a immortal. For similar reasons, there are no felpact sorcerers amongst the stoneborn; the Many simply refuse to strike deals with such creatures, for all that stoneborn are equally prone to accidental death or violent injury before their elder phase sets in.

Alternatively, a would-be sorcerer can attempt to locate the reclusive and enigmatic fey, and with them strike a straightforwardly named Feypact. The greatest danger of seeking a feypact is the journey - first a portal to the fey world must be found, then the turbulent and treacherous fey world itself must be survived long enough to locate the fey courts. With that accomplished, though, the fey are eager and willing to bargain with mortals who succeed in reaching them, for they are forever bound to their realm as semi-corporeal phantoms while still being cursed with an overbearing curiosity towards the progresso of the world outside and mortality in particular. The fey will give magical power, but their cost has both a mark and an obligation. The mark of a feypact is the loss of something intrinsic to the sorcerer, something that is part of their mortality. For one sorcerer, it could be the ability to see a certain color, or taste a certain flavor. It might be their ability to sing, or their atypical resistance to illness, or the pigments in their hair. No two fey marks are exactly identical, but something is always traded away. The obligation of a feypact, in comparison, is always the same. Fey are fascinated with life and the passage of time, two things they cannot have for themselves, so instead they experience it vicariously. The graft of essence in a feypact sorcerer's soul amplifies the sorcerer's strength of memory, recording their experiences and feelings and storing them away. From time to time, often at seemingly random intervals, the fey will issue a geas to the sorcerer that compels them to return to the fey. There, the sorcerer remains while their patrons extract the stored memories and replay them, reliving the sorcerer's life since the last visit for themselves in a combination of movie, drug, and religious experience. Eventually, they grow tired of the new memories and replace them within the sorcerer's mind, but they are fickle creatures and the restored memories are frequently jumbled or damaged in small ways, from pieces the fey simply could not bear to part with. A sorcerer who has been in extended service of a feypact is frequently somewhat unstable, what with having their memories and sense of self taken apart and tampered with so many times that even they aren't quite certain of their identity anymore. This periodic geas is a large portion of why sidhelings are rarely found bound to a feypact, because it is one of the few forces capable of overriding a sidheling's dominant Curiosity without suppressing or muting it in any way. A sidheling under compulsion to go and be 'debriefed' by their patrons does so while at war with their own desires, two irresistable compulsions going head to head and stretching the sidheling sorcerer's mind between them.

Finally, particularly brave individuals who value their souls too much to entreat with the many and their memories too highly to deal with the Fey can risk attempting to seal a Dragonpact. Like the fey, the ancient dragons, those who survived fighting their way free of their masters after rebelling, sought to hide themselves away. Being individually mighty creatures of war and magic, each dragon could find a defensible location and fortify it for themselves instead of working a grand deception such as the fey realm, but they chose the most isolated and inhospitable places possible, because part of the draconic design is that they do not forget. Anything. They are greater immortals, self-resurrecting from any fatal wound not struck by an entity of cosmic strength, and they have utterly perfect recall of everything that has ever happened to them or around them. For a dragon, new experiences are dangerous, because they can only handle so many of them without going irrevocably mad, and being a new experience - such as a visitor to their isolated, hidden, and frequently trap-laden lairs - can be unpleasantly fatal. But at the same time, dragons remain as driven by their design to be war leaders and commanders as the fey are pushed to be spies and explorers, and as with the fey, accepting sorcerous servants is a means for a dragon to satisfy those urges without risk to themselves. The mark of a dragonpact is a sort of aura, a pale and shadowy reflection of the dragon's own overpowering majesty that ensures a dragonpact sorcerer is known to those he or she meets. It does not draw attention from those unaware of the sorcerer's proximity, not does it shape the reactions of others to good or ill, but it is an unmistakable sense of presence indicating to others that even from this distance, a dragon has chosen to enact its will by proxy on the world. This in turn ties to the obligation of a dragonpact, as the sorcerer bound to such is for all practical purposes an extension of the dragon. They may swear no oaths of enduring loyalty or take any other masters, and everything they do must be done in the name of their draconic patron. This can take the form of speeches to rescued populations and conquered foes, or sigils scrawled on flat surfaces and carved into the flesh of defeated enemies, but a dragonpact sorcerer exists to spread their patron's fame and recognition, even when being known for their deeds could bring danger to the sorcerer personally.

There is one other type of 'pact', not a true form of sorcery but close enough to be worth mentioning. The mighty and malevolent krakens of the deep ocean seek dominion over the entire world, but are tethered by their bodies to the water. To spread their influence and control over land, they find mortals and through bargaining, trickery, or outright coercion, graft a fragment of their essence into the mortal in a warped mockery of a traditional sorcerous pact. But unlike the benign essence transfers of a felpact, feypact, or dragonpact, a 'krakenpact' is outright poisonous. The grafted gift of magical power is almost alive, and possesses a primitive will of its own. Each time the sorcerer so 'gifted' draws upon their patron's power, they unconsciously strengthens their soul-graft, which grows over time in a mirror of the kraken's own will and personality. As it grows, it becomes more and more influential on the sorcerer's own personality, first influencing their thoughts and feelings then subtly and not-so-subtly controlling their actions. Before too long, a kraken-sworn sorcerer is entirely controlled by their pact, a humanoid with a duplicate of their patron's mind and the original personality nothing but a faint echo trapped inside their own soul. For many, it is a fate worse than death, made worse by the unexpected outcome; few who swear a kraken-pact have any idea of the fate that awaits them, as they are extremely rare and tend to be relatively short-lived once the exceedingly megalomaniacal personality of the kraken becomes dominant. Furthermore, the false nature of such a pact and the existence of krakens amongst the lesser immortals means they lack the limitless supply of essence a fey or dragon or one of the Many can provide; to give away a sliver of their power to a servant permanently reduces the kraken's own magical ability by a tiny but measurable increment, further limiting their frequency.

Finally, of the three forms of magic, there is divine servitude. Superficially, it seems the safest of one's options. There is no risk of backfiring experimental spells, no dangerous journeys to obtain, and no lasting effects or psychic scars that come from a bargain. But what servitude does entail, instead, is a near-total loss of agency. An aspiring priest must pray to the god of their choice, and swear to uphold their principles and spread their influence and devotion amongst other mortals, and if they are accepted on such terms, must uphold their end of the bargain or be stripped of their conduit to power. It is not enough for a priest to simply preach the word of their god - rather, they must actively seek to empower that god by bolstering the prevalence of their portfolio. To recycle a previously used example, a priest of the Golden Lord, god of wealth and generosity, cannot simply extoll the virtues of the Golden Lord's creed, or accumulate wealth while being personally generous. They must act to make others wealthy as well, in such a manner that encourages them to be generous with their wealth in turn, and do so with the name of the Golden Lord on their lips. The death-loving Carrion Crow will not be satisfied with a priest who kills a man, or even one who commits multiple acts of death by their own hand. That priest must arrange great slaughters, fill battlefields with corpses that the birds may feast upon in mass orgies of relentless violence, and dedicate those deaths to the Crow afterwards. It is a lifelong occupation, to personally uphold the strictures of one's god while going above and beyond those strictures to become a living catalyst of the concepts or principles that make said god strong, and one at some times rarer even than wizardry. Luckily, faltering in service is far less fatal than arcane experimentation, but may be nearly as permanent; once revoked, an ex-priest will never again be accepted by their former god, and may inexplicably (to them) find other gods, even ones in direct opposition to the previous patron or entirely different gods with utterly unrelated portfolios rejecting even their most vehement oaths of loyalty.

Plerumque

2015-02-21, 01:24 PM

So, back on the krakenpact, would anyone actually seek out such a bargain? It seems like the idea is more that the kraken prey on those who lack the strength to reject their offer or the wisdom to guess at the unspoken costs, but you do say that a few have an awareness of the fate that awaits them. Would those be people who are ambitious enough to believe they can maintain control, or people that need immediate power for some reason and can't seek out anyone else that might grant them that ability? If it's the latter, why wouldn't a desperate person be able to become a servant of the Many or the Cosmics?

The Glyphstone

2015-02-21, 01:43 PM

Pretty much. Just like there's always going to be that one guy who thinks he can beat the system, from time to time you'll get a someone who thinks they're strong or sneaky enough to get something for nothing. That very unusual person who is both educated enough to know the costs of becoming a kraken-sworn, arrogant enough to think they can beat it, and desperate enough to need the power could just as easily go for a different patron - more often than not, that sort of person is going to go for the Felpact first. But if they value their soul higher than their body or mind, or think it's likely for them to die young and want the possibility of resurrection, felpacts look a lot less attractive. Becoming a divine servant is a major commitment, on the other hand, and while the gods do get a lot of their emissaries as a result of desperate circumstances, very few of those tend to stick around; it's easy to make a commitment and believe in it when you're out of options. So you could easily get someone who tried to become a priest but couldn't hack it, the ex-priest deciding a sorcerous pact would be better. But having cheesed off a god by welching on their deal, selling their soul to a godly minion might now have some unspoken risks (again, as far as they know), so dealing with the tentacled devil you know has new positive benefits.

Krakens are also Evil with a capital E, and they're not much concerned with keeping good publicity. So that further reduces the subset of people who willingly seek out a krakenpact. More often than not, kraken-sworn sorcerers have been pressured, blackmailed, or even outright tortured into swearing the pact.

The Glyphstone

2015-03-04, 03:27 AM

Anyways, back on track here with Races, and next on the docket is the Scalekin, inheritors of the power of dragons. As with the sidhelings, though, I'm going to start off first by talking about the dragons.

Going back to the middle of the cosmic wars, when the Cosmics were strong. Armies of servitors battled against each other, but being extremely simple-minded, they needed a few Cosmics to mind them and give directions, while the others went head-to-head against their opposite numbers. It was a total stalemate, until the First Cosmics came up with the idea of building a secret weapon. It would be unexpected and game-changing - but that was the only thing they could agree on about it. Two sub-camps formed amongst the First Cosmics, each proposing a different design for their new 'super-servitor'.

One group favored an approach of brute force; unled, a servitor army would mindlessly hurl itself at the enemy and be cut to pieces by tactically minded opponents, but if they built strong enough servitors, no amount of tactics would stop them. This camp's design was a living war engine, massive and tough with an armored hide. It had claws and teeth and muscles for offense, wings for mobility, and a furnace of elemental in its belly that could be channeled into magic or let loose as blasts of raw destructive energy. They were as simple-minded as normal servitors, but were the next best thing to indestructible - thus they could be autonomous, freeing the cosmics who would otherwise be stuck minding them to join the 'true' fight and tip the scales.

The other group instead proposed the creation of an intermediary, a super-servitor with no direct combat ability, but with an unmatchable tactical and strategic genius, immense intellect and planning ability, the power to inspire followers to incredible feats, and a flawless eidetic memory. The last would augment their skill by allowing them to build on experience - being able to reincarnate from any wound not inflicted by a cosmic opponent, the only risk of putting a brilliant commander on the front lines to give commands was removed, and even failures and defeats could be reviewed endlessly and at will to spot mistakes and improve upon strategems.

The arguments went on and on in circles. Neither camp would accept their design was anything less than perfect, and would not see any features removed. Eventually, rather than risk internal civil war and utter defeat, they compromised by creating a final design that incorporated all the traits of both designs into one ultimate creation - tactically and strategically peerless, and physically unmatched as well; possessed of both flawless memory and perpetual life. They were free-willed creatures, more than smart enough to see their purpose, and had no interest in being slaves, revolting en masse almost as soon as they were spawned. Many were destroyed utterly in the process of rebellion, while the survivors fled to the mortal plane to hide and heal. But the knew that the eventual outcome of their immortality and perfect memories would inevitably be madness, and the only solution even they could devise was to hide themselves away in such hostile and inhospitable locations that nothing would bother them, reducing the frequency of new and unique memories and preserving their sanity as long as possible. Isolated mountain caves, empty deserts, inaccessible islands, and similar places became their refuges, and they laced the entrances or approaches of their hideaways with traps and obstacles to deter trespassers.

So that was a bit longer and more detailed than the fey summary, but it's also a part of the mythic history I've thought more about.

Like the fey, dragons also 'leaked' energy from their bodies, energy that soaked into the fabric of the world. But whereas the fey spread that energy around in their constant wanderings, the dragons stayed put, their waste energy building up and spreading outwards from their lairs like a sort of magical pollution. And where that dragon-flavored essence was blended with cosmic blood, the first scalekin appeared.

Scalekin are pretty easy to visualize; I came up with them independently years before WotC published the Dragonborn, but the appearance is close enough to serve as a baseline, with the single exception that female scalekin don't have breasts; they are egg-layers, mammaries not required. They were the first 'new' thing I added to my earliest drafts of the world - knowing dragons would be an important part of the history, I knew I needed dragon-people to populate it. Eventually, they took the big-and-muscley slot in the roster of 'player races' usually given to half-orcs. Initially just big and arrogant bruisers, their internal psychology got more nuanced over time into what it is now.

An adult scalekin is just a bit taller than a human would be, but with wider limbs and a larger torso-to-leg ratio; not exactly squat, but somewhat barrel-chested in design with short, thick leg and arms. They are powerfully muscled, both males and females, and their skin is covered with a layer of protective scales whose color varies depending on their native environment. A scalekin tribe from a mountainous region will have patterns of grey, white, and brown, whereas a desert-dwelling tribe will sport patterns brown and tan, or white and blue for a polar tribe. The only area of their bodies not covered by scales is the hollow of their throat, just smooth flesh of the same color as their scales. For both practical and cultural reasons, scalekin keep this 'soft spot' covered at all times. Their hands and feet sport four clawed digits each, one of which on the hand being opposable; the 'big toes' of a scalekin's feet are technically opposable as well, but too short to be of use grasping anything and beneficial only in providing a slight bit more traction on treacherous surfaces. Scalekin are warm-blooded, lay eggs to reproduce, and favor a carnivorous diet when possible; vegetation can sustain them, but not indefinitely. Their scaled hides are extremely heat-efficient insulators, and somewhat naturally water-repellent as well, making them capable of survival, if not always happily, in all but the most extreme of natural environments.

Altogether, a scalekin is strongly influenced physically by its draconic 'ancestry', in contrast to the psychological imprint of the fey on sidhelings. They have none of the dragons' less tangible traits - no predilection for military skill, no supernatural aura of charisma, and entirely unexceptional memories; if they inherited anything, it is greatly diluted, and this is the biggest concern for their race as a whole. They are visibly, unmistakably descended from demigods - as far as some people are concerned, the dragons might as well be gods. This elevates them, in their own eyes, in stature above other 'lesser' mortal races, whose mystic ancestry comes from non-draconic origins, but it simultaneously burdens them with a subtly pervasive superiority complex, because for all that they stand above non-draconics, they still constantly question whether or not they are themselves worthy of the legacy they've inherited. Being heirs to the dragons is a huge responsibility in the minds of the scalekin, and they find themselves constantly striving to prove to themselves and each other that they deserve their heritage.

The basic social unit of scalekin society is the family. Scalekin place an inordinate weight on family and lineage, to where one of the first things a juvenile learns is how to memorize and recite their ancestry back a dozen generations or more. Males trace their lineage through their fathers, and females though their mothers. A scalekin tribe centers around a primary extended family, reaching down from the current patriarch or matriarch and including all their recognized descendants, along with several allied families structured in a similar fashion. The remainder of the tribe consists of individual members or small groups from other tribes or families, typically those who have married into the tribe and/or assigned as envoys from their home tribes, and a fringe of un-tribed outcasts who survive on the tribe's leavings while waiting for an unclaimed heritage to be available. Different tribes follow different political setups, ranging from outright autocratic authority to a communal decision council of family elders or divided responsibility between families, but the central family of the tribe remains consistently paramount. Whether chieftain, council tiebreaker, or responsible for the largest or most crucial tasks, the primary family stays socially dominant - shifts of power to another family line are effectively dissolving the current tribe and creating a new one, an extremely rare occurrence and usually result in the former chief family departing entirely and joining a different tribe as a secondary family. Scalekin tribes are generally found in harsh or otherwise unfavorable regions, striking out a balance - often a difficult and narrowly maintained one - of self-sufficiency while continually testing themselves against their environment. Many are nomadic, migrating between different settlement sites, while others are static and find their challenge in eking out subsistence from the meager soil. In either case, selection pressure is strong, and the long fertility period and multiple-egg clutches scalekin produce are necessary to maintain their population in the face of the difficulties self-imposed on their species. Individuals are frequently cross-trained in multiple crafts or trades, creating an interlocking network of skills that can endure the loss of any one or even several otherwise irreplaceable members, and different tribes regularly engage in trade for various necessities or minor luxuries. For the few items they need and cannot provide themselves, the tribes grudgingly trade with non-scalekin communities.

The smallest demographic in any scalekin community, though, will be the healthy young adults - of either gender - that typically dominate tribal societies. A scalekin matures physically by age fifteen, but scalekin have a very particular, and somewhat peculiar, attitude towards reproduction. Before any scalekin can claim the right to marry and produce children, however old they are, they must first journey out into the world and complete a quest - something grand and noteworthy, then return as living proof that they are a true scion of dragons and worthy of siring or bearing the next generation of young. Quests are a very personal matter to a scalekin; part coming-of-age ritual, part social tradition, and part challenge to quell that nagging seed of self-doubt inside them. A scalekin chooses their own quest to suit their talents and shape the legend they want to be, with the only requirement being that it be sufficiently epic in scope or difficulty. One such quest for a martially inclined youth could require triumphing in solo combat against a large group of skilled enemies, the traditional 'minimum' for this highly traditional and frequently declared quest being twenty-one - one for each finger and toe they are born with, plus one. One with exceptional endurance but a bit less skill at arms could vow to travel the oceans until they meet one of the titanic sea leviathans, be swallowed by the beast, then cut their way out from the inside and return alive to shore. A scalekin who prefers to solve conflicts with guile instead of steel, and a penchant for storytelling, could promise to return having heard or witnessed sufficient tales of heroism to tell without pause from sunrise to sunrise, and with the stamina necessary to orate it all. Upon success and return - it would be beyond abhorrent for a scalekin to even contemplate lying about the completion of their sacred quest - they are hailed triumphant and recognized as a full adult with all the privileges and responsibilities of such.

And this brings us to the outcasts and clanless, because as you might expect, it's quite rare for a scalekin to remain celibate until they've earned the social privilege of having children. Certain alchemical concoctions exist to suppress fertility, but they aren't foolproof. The result is an outcast, a child born without a lineage and for all intents and purposes a non-person to scalekin culture, even lower and less worthy than members of other races. Some outcasts congregate in small communities of their own amidst other societies, or strike out entirely. Others eke out something approaching life on the fringes of scalekin, fending for themselves or performing the meanest of tasks for scraps of food and discarded supplies (often ending up creating more outcasts in the process). Outcast status is permanent from birth, except for one specific circumstance. Many personal quests end in anonymous failure, their grandiose requirements having been too much for the one attempting them, and they never return- but their name and their quest remain, recorded by their home tribe. Each year, a scalekin tribe will memorialize those known to have died in their quests and those who have not returned within the average scalekin's lifespan, and it is during this ceremony that ambitious outcasts can seek to claim one of these 'outstanding' quests as their own. They are charged with taking up the original task that already felled one scalekin in the doing - and if they succeed, they are adopted in the place of the deceased, taking the name and lineage of the failed quester for their own. To some extent, it is both a legal and social fiction; no one literally believes the former outcast is the lost hero or a reincarnation of such. But it preserves that person's name, and more importantly, their lineage, and having done so is enough to earn acceptance from all but the most bigoted and hidebound elders.

Scalekin clothing is exceedingly practical, as befits their spartan attitude towards existence. Any clothing or accessories they wear is done with a specific purpose in mind; it may be ornate or highly decorated as well, but scalekin-made items always put function ahead of form, and they judge the work of other races by its practical value first and foremost as well. Since their thick hides are sufficient to protect them from most inclement weather, they ignore clothing for the most part. The only piece of entirely 'decorative' adornment a scalekin wears is their neck wrap - a piece of cloth, leather, or armor that covers the scale-less skin of their throat. To a scalekin, a bare throat is the social equivalent of a human going out in public without pants, only acceptable for very small children or in the presence of extremely intimate companions.

The Glyphstone

2015-12-02, 06:09 PM

I’m baaaaaaack. Finally ready to start working on this again, or at least getting my thoughts down to paper, and I’ll start out with the last of my non-human races, the elementally water-aligned Aquarians. Probably best to have saved them for last as well, since they’re the race I have spent the most time thinking about and developing.

Way back in the days of yore, my proto-setting had halflings like most do. Mine were, of course, special and unique by being water-dwelling halflings, living either on riverboats or big coastal ships; I’m not sure where I got that original idea, but it’s the only relic remaining of their origins. In the process of differentiating Broken World into something actually distinctive, the bog-standard halflings became casualties of revision and got replaced with a race that underwent a few naming revisions before finally becoming Aquarians (also losing their river-going component in the process).

Physically, Aquarians aren’t quite like any other mainstream/common ‘species’ in fantasy literature or games, as far as I know, but the closest thing already printed would be the Bullywug from D&D. Humanoid, roughly human-sized amphibians that aren’t quite turtle or frog or toad - Reference Image (http://vignette3.wikia.nocookie.net/forgottenrealms/images/4/4b/Bullywugs_-_Warren_Mahy.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20090622180411), but give them a shark-like array of jagged teeth in those gaping froggy mouths, and you’re as close to my visual of an Aquarian as I can get without a custom-drawn picture. Specifically, they have two complete sets of teeth, again similar to sharks - an outer row of sharp incisors, and an inner row of blunt molars. Between the two arrays, they can chew and swallow pretty much anything. Their skins are rubbery, and need to be watered down periodically like most aquatic creatures; on-ship, it’s common for one to relax in a warmed tub of water. Special oiled body suits can suffice when an Aquarian traveler knows they’ll be venturing into an extremely dry climate, but it is a temporary measure at best, and they prefer to just avoid such places. Without gills, they can’t breathe underwater, but they can hold their breath for a very long time, and their powerful muscles let them swim well despite being relatively un-hydrodynamic.

Psychologically, however, Aquarians are a huge bundle of problems. Again keeping with that duality thing I’ve got popping up now and then, the Aquarians are as strongly attuned to water as their ‘counterparts’ the Stoneborn are attuned to earth - but where the stoneborn’s affinity manifests physically, Aquarians are most water-like in their minds, or more specifically their emotions. They are incredibly emotionally volatile by nature, subject to both sudden and drastic changes in mood, because any emotional response they feel is effectively magnified immensely. Any slight or annoyance is incredibly infuriating, any unhappiness is crushing despair - they simply can’t feel except in extremes, to the point where it can actually kill them if they don’t snap out of it before they either stroke themselves in apoplectic fury or starve to death in a depressive fugue. Luckily for them, though, the presence of other Aquarians can collectively soothe their emotional instability; to use a very literal example, water spilling out of a small cup goes unnoticed in the middle of a pool. It’s partly psychological, partly physiological, and partly magical, or all three at once, but the larger a group of Aquarians in close proximity to one another, the more emotionally tranquil the group as a whole can be, and the more difficult it is to get them stirred up at all. Instead, they live in a sort of zen-like haze, letting them deal with situations entirely dispassionately, which also suits their communal nature.

The other alternative is for an adult Aquarian to undergo extensive mental training and conditioning to learn how to contain their instability. They’re still quick-tempered, but within a socially and personally survivable range under most circumstances, which lets individuals venture away from the family for extended periods if they need to. And some do, because while they generally stick to the oceans and coastlines, the Aquarians still need to keep abreast of goings-on on the mainland. The brightest, most determined, and most mentally disciplined youngsters often end up appointed as the extended eyes and ears of their people; traveling the interior of the continent and observing everything that goes on around them, searching for valuable treasures or weapons, and above all keeping a constant watch for any signs of kraken-sworn activity. It’s a lonely life, and a stressful one, effectively years of voluntary exile in between contact with the greater body of their own kind, and it comes at a cost - the constant rigor of maintaining their mental focus can shave decades off a scout’s lifespan, reducing it from twice that of most humans to barely half again as long. But someone has to do it - needs of the many and all that, and I’ve known from the beginning I am setting myself up for someone to compare these guys to Froggy Vulcans. It’s impossible to make any non-human species with a logical bent without someone comparing them to Vulcans.

Aquarians live in large extended family groups, but they have no interest, or really any ability, to track specific lineages, so it’s enough to simply be part of the family, even if by adoption, and they make important decisions as a family as well. Elder members tend to hold more prestige, sometimes to the point of effectively making most decisions, but in theory every adult member gets to voice their opinions and analysis of the problem at hand. As I’ve alluded to above, Aquarians are also ocean-dwellers. While they have a ‘homeland’ in an island chain I’ll tentatively refer to as the Island Courts for now, and do maintain small settlements at various points on the mainland, they’re habitually nomadic and live mostly out of huge, almost barge-like sailing vessels. Generally, a single family group roams in a home-ship or two, with assorted smaller ships sailing with them - multiple families might join up into a combined fleet for a short time or specific purpose, such as trade or egg exchange, but eventually they’ll go their separate ways. Otherwise, each family fleet is entirely self-sufficient, ranging from fifty to a hundred adults in size, and goes about its own business following routes and patterns unique to each family.

Their clothing and dress tend towards the extremely functional, even more so than the practically minded scalekin; everything an Aquarian makes or wears has some clearly defined purpose, and even the decorations/ornamentations will follow a common scheme of shape or color that gives and indication of its function, at least for those capable of interpreting the symbology. The sole exception are items specifically intended for trade or export. Knowing other races place higher value on extraneous traits, an Aquarian artisan can produce very beautiful and high-quality crafted items or art objects - often, this practice ends up being used as a release valve of sorts for emotional pressures without a suitable group presence close at hand. Tools of war get the same brutally functional treatment; as a rule, Aquarian warriors tend to favor spears, tridents, and other stabbing weapons that remain effective above or below water, and their armor is designed to move them through the water with reduced effort while providing adequate protection; to that end, they favor lightweight shells or rust-proofed metal even for comparatively light armor.

I can’t find anywhere else to put it, but having mentioned their unusual tooth arrangement, another part of what tends to isolate them from land-dwelling people is their diet; specifically, that they can and often will eat anything, including the flesh of other sapient creatures. They’re not literal cannibals, since their own dead are strictly off-limits, and they don’t intentionally go hunting sapient beings for meat, but if the meat is dead and available they have no cultural taboos of making use of it. They do try to avoid flaunting such around other surface races from practical need, but it’s a sort of open secret that leaves them with an unsavory reputation to the common person; clannish and insular, probably cheaters and swindlers in matters of business, prone to insane berserk rages over minor slights, and on top of it all they’ll eat you if they can. Aquarian hulls carry too much trade for anyone to outright ostracize them, but no one really likes them, even more than usual for the strange and different.

And now I’m going to diverge a little, to go into a central part of their culture and racial identity that is almost entirely hidden from the land-dwelling peoples - their relationship with the krakens that I’ve alluded to a few times previously. Krakens are the great big bads of the oceans; only the greater immortals - dragons, fey, and cosmics - exceed them in personal power. The krakens are lesser immortals, though; they don’t age, but they can be killed, and only a cosmic would be able to expend enough energy to birth a new kraken. This limits their numbers, even as it makes each one of them a terrifyingly powerful creature in its own right, because they are also incredibly megalomaniacal and utterly malevolent. Every kraken believes that it alone is destined to become the sole, rightful ruler of the entire world above and below the surface of the ocean, and every other living being in the world exists to be their slaves. But since this includes all the other krakens, who obviously object to being the enslavee instead of the enslaver, they rarely get anywhere significant in their endlessly byzantine plots of world domination between the counter-plots of other krakens and the vigilance of the Aquarians, who are effectively at war against the denizens of the deep oceans and have been for ages. Even if no kraken could ever succeed in its goals, they still possess immense magical power and command great legions of slave races - shellbacks, deep ogres, ixitxachitl, anguillans, and other twisted creatures. The kraken-sworn slaves, and those land-dwellers subverted to the same masters, could cause immense damage to the unsuspecting surface world, but the Aquarians stand in their way, and they take their vigil very seriously. They don’t trust said land-dwellers to be capable of aiding them even if they could be guaranteed free of kraken-loyal infiltrators, so the existence of the ongoing oceanic war is almost entirely hidden from most non-Aquarians who see only the fringe skirmishes and individual clashes. It’s part of any solo Aquarian’s mission, alongside whatever other goals they may have at the time, to be on watch for signs of kraken minions (and destroy them if they are detected), and to look for valuable relics or magical objects that could be used to fight. Their island chain homeland is a veritable string of fortresses and fortified harbors, utterly barred to any non-Aquarian with even their exact location left off maps and obscured from magical detection; from there, the Eldest of the Elders, the Aquarians’ greatest generals, coordinate the perpetual global struggle to keep the krakens and their soldiers at bay.

The Glyphstone

2015-12-02, 11:18 PM

And lastly, good old humans.

In most cases, having ‘PC’ races be humanoid is just a matter of convenience, with no reason given or needed. It’s still not needed here, but I’m going to give one anyways, in that the energy of divine/cosmic blood imparts a humanoid shape along with sentience. There are non-humanoid sentients, but they don’t have that spark of power that comes from cosmic heritage. Stoneborn are ‘descended’ from Earth, Aquarians from Water. The Sidhelings are influenced by Fey energies, and the Scalekin by Draconic energy. That leaves Humanity...where does their non-Cosmic heritage come from?

Remember the Outsiders, those wandering scraps of failed proto-universes that ended up wreaking incredible amounts of havoc when they collided with the ‘real’ world? Even defeated, they left lingering energies behind everywhere they had appeared and been. Junk code in the universal program, but where it mixed with spilt cosmic blood, you got humans. I shouldn’t need to describe what humans look like, and there will be enough human civilizations that I’ll be describing each of them individually. Having half of their ‘ancestry’ drawn from beings that exist/ed outside the boundaries of the universe, though, does have a profound if subtle effect on them. At a fundamental level, the rest of the universe recognizes that humans just don’t belong here, and it’s not quite certain how to reconcile this. As a result, the one trait all humans share, across their cultures and philosophies and lives, is a sort of vague dissatisfaction or discontent, a feeling of being vaguely out of place. How they react to this subconscious alienation varies amongst humans as widely as anything else. Some try extra-hard to blend in and mold themselves to their surroundings, others go out of their way to alter and change their lives and environment to be more comfortable. Others wander in search of a place that doesn’t make them feel subtly unsettled. None of it ever really works, and that nagging uncertainty never really goes away, but it’s the driving force that pushes humans to be the most active and dynamic of the five civilized races, however they end up expressing such.

In turn, I’ll be detailing the various human societies I’ve got solid ideas for. First will be a people whose culture ties heavily into the nature of death and undeath, where the lowest are preserved indefinitely as mindless undead while the richest and most powerful enjoy immortality through ritual mummification. Same world-building time, same world-building channel.

The Glyphstone

2015-12-07, 01:22 AM

So as a brief intro, one of my goals with the various human societies is to have each of them as a reflection of sorts on some particular aspect of the world as a whole. It’ll give me a hook of sorts to construct a culture around without making them too one-dimensional, and also let me flesh out corners of the setting I haven’t spent much detail on.

The presence of a ‘land of the living dead’ is one of the artifacts from the very early drafts that I’ve never gotten rid of, because I like the idea of a civilization rejecting the traditional D&D trappings of ‘undead = teh evulz”, a decision made even easier by stripping out D&D-related trappings in general. But I still want it to be distinctive; the problem with ‘kingdom of the undead’ is that they tend to fall into one of two categories - I Can’t Believe It’s Not Fantasy Egypt, or Vampire Vorld. Since I’m not even certain whether things like vampires exist yet, I want to go with something closer to the first option, but not Egyptian-themed. Instead, I like the idea of using the Incan Empire as an inspirational building block of sorts; they also practiced widespread mummification, and were one of the largest, if not the largest, New World civilizations prior to European colonization.

For these people, death and undeath are going to be a central and strongly integrated part of their existence. Between using skeletons/zombies as menial labor and being ruled by immortal mummy-kings, it creates a very stratified sort of society, sandwiching life in between death for a weird sort of metaphorical...I dunno, but it feels right. It also implies a strong cultural association with regards to height; as an Incan-inspired people, they’ll live in a mountainous region, which also works out - they have strong associations between height/elevation and being successful or powerful, whether socially or otherwise. Being tall might literally be considered a measure of one’s capability, intelligence, or ambition - adds a neat little quirk to their societal matrix, and considering the Inca themselves were pretty short, creates a small bit of situational irony.

They need something to fuel an economy and trade with other lands; the Inca had their precious metals (even if they did a lot of conquering of other tribes), and while these guys will also be rich in gold and silver, I want to give them something unique, that also explains why they are so fixated around undeath. A mystical mineral/ore/gem only found in the mountains of Mummyland (they need a name, badly), that I’ll call bloodstone for now. Bloodstone is a dark red, crystalline mineral, found in veins or pockets through other sorts of rock, and it has an unusual magical property of being able to absorb life energy. In any quantity, bloodstone just passively sucks the life out of its surroundings; the rate of absorption, how much it can hold, and how long that energy can be stored before dissipating would all depend on the size/purity of the sample. Right off the bat, this gives them a potentially valuable export in a powerful magical reagent (especially for magic related to life or death, like healing spells), or just as a poison (powdered and mixed into food/drink). On the other hand, it means their entire country is basically laced with a magical uranium/arsenic combination. Ages of living with exposure to bloodstone has given them a sort of limited tolerance/resistance to its effects, because it is everywhere in trace amounts even outside the actual mines, but they’ll be a sort of sickly-looking lot in general; pale and thin, a bit spindly. To actually work the mines, that’s where they would need undead servants, because even they wouldn’t be able to survive long surrounded by bloodstone leaching their life out - luckily for them, bloodstone as mentioned happens to be a potent reagent for necromantic magic, like reanimating the dead. A mountainous region isn’t going to have much space for graves or tombs, so only the rich and powerful will get that privilege/option; commoners either get their bodies cremated, or reanimated as slave labor...I’m picturing a sort of body-broker system, where you can literally use your body as collateral on a loan. And if you default, assassins show up to collect on the debt. The rest of the low and middle class just muddles on the best they can, desperately trying to climb the social ladder and become wealthy enough to buy their way into immortality.

Which brings me to the other end of the social spectrum, the elite and nobility. Broken World has exactly one method of bringing a dead person back to life, a complex ritual that involves three willing (and sapient) sacrifices. During the ritual, the soul of the first sacrifice is used to open the barrier between the world of the living and the underworld, but instead of passing through, they hold the gate open for the second and third souls to venture into the underworld and find the soul of the ritual’s target. The second sacrifice’s soul is needed to trade; whatever mysterious powers rule the underworld will only let a soul leave if another is directly substituted for them. The third sacrificial soul serves as the guide, escorting the ritual recipient back to the spiritual gateway where they can pass through and re-occupy their body. Finally, the gatekeeper-soul can fully pass through into the underworld themselves, letting the gate seal behind them. End result is three dead people and one resurrected person.

How does this relate to the Mummy People? Actually, forget Mummy People, I’m going to name them the Wanu, which is the Quecua (Incan language) word for death/life after life. Suits them, fits the theme, and isn’t using the also-typical latin Mortis root for death-related words. So this ritual, I’m thinking the Wanu invented it, and have spent centuries experimenting with it and related magics. The spell to reanimate a mindless undead body is probably a permutation of the ritual, for that matter - if you only use one sacrifice, the soul can open the gate, but nothing else; undead energies can leak through and reanimate the body, but nothing is there to inhabit it. Various higher/stronger/nastier sorts of undead come from botched rituals - if you only use two souls, the first can open the gate and the second can trade, but with no way to escort the intended occupant back, anyone or anything can decide to take up residence. And I’m digressing again, because where this is going is that one of the Wanu’s experiments gave them a particular variant on the ritual that technically prevents a person’s soul from ever leaving in the first place. With this variant, the intended recipient is both the sole ritual sacrifice and the ritual recipient; they can open the gate to the underworld, but only prop it open long enough to allow a bit of energy to soak into their corpse, then they step back through into the world of the living to re-occupy their body without ever having truly set foot in the underworld to begin with (thus eliminating the need for sacrifices two and three). The end result is an animated corpse with the mind/soul of its original inhabitant, granting them effective immortality. Naturally, the specifics of this ritual variant are guarded with literal murderous jealousy by the necromancer-kings of the Wanu (who are, of course, immortals themselves). Only they can grant admission into their ranks, and it takes a lot to convince them to do so - earning their favor, or at least the favor of enough sponsors to perform the reanimation ritual, and paying a truly massive bribe to the noble caste as a whole are both necessary. But once you get it, the world is now your oyster, at least until the strain of immortality drives you insane and you get destroyed by your similarly immortal peers. It’s an accepted side effect of being undead, even if every new member of the Wanu nobility believes they will be the first to have the strength of will to endure the passing of the ages, and in the meantime they can study or create art or explore or do whatever an immortal decides interests them that particular century.

For the rest of the Wanu people, they do the best they can. Some serve as minders for the undead laborers, who do need someone giving them orders to get anything useful done, or they fill most of the usual sort of jobs a pre-industrial society will have to fill; craftsmen, merchants, soldiers (at least for complex weapons, simple foot soldiers can also be undead), farmers, etc. Speaking of farmers, the plants and wildlife in Wanu are going to be similarly adapted to the ambient bloodstone, to the point where they’re mildly poisonous to anyone who isn’t a native. Food from Wanu is not a viable export, and they probably import a fair bit if they can afford it for the extra nutrition; rather, they craft and mine, both bloodstones and other precious metals they find in the process. Their settlements are built in the valleys between peaks, or on terraces on the mountainsides, connected with bridges between gorges like the Inca did. Again tying into that cultural association with height, valley-dwellers (or worse, lowland dwellers from villages and towns at the feet of the mountains) are looked down on (pun intended) by residents of the terraced cities higher up. A Wanu expression of good luck might translate to something along the lines of ‘walk/stand tall’, whereas they’d consider something like ‘belly-crawler’ to be an insult.

The Glyphstone

2015-12-15, 02:16 AM

This update is going to be a bit more rambly and disjointed than previous ones, in large part because I have a lot more to talk about here but no particular defined order to talk about in. So I’m just going to say stuff until I run out of info to share.

Unlike Wanui, Aegeos was originally a separate creation, a proto-setting for an entirely separate RP story that never progressed very far, but I had still put a whole bunch of work into. Rather than discard it, I shelved the concept - at that point, just a ‘desert-themed matriarchy’ and waited for a chance to reuse it, which came around when I started revamping Broken World. It needed a lot of tweaking to be successfully grafted in, as well as lot of fleshing out to make it a coherent culture in its own right and not just a one-note stereotype. It also needed a thematic hook to the setting conceits like the other human nations, and with a lack of anything more blatant to segue into, I’ll start there.

The Wanu, as mentioned previously, are an exploration of how I’ve decided to handle death and the afterlife. Theirs is a society that both glorifies and despises death, with immortal mummies at the top of their social pyramid and mindless skeletal slaves at the bottom. They’ve studied the nature of life, death, and undeath more than anyone else, but they still don’t actually know anything about what the Underworld is like despite being the best necromancers in the world, and it scares them at a subconscious cultural level.

Aegeos, on the other hand, is/will be a critical reflection of how I’m approaching religion and the nature of true polytheism (as opposed to the parallel-monotheism that seems to prevail in most fantasy settings), and its method of doing so will, like the Wanu, to serve as a cultural foil against it. Aegeos is a theocracy - specifically, a monotheistic theocracy; the only nation in the explored world of the setting with a state religion, and one officially embracing a single supreme deity at that. In Aegeos, the Bright Lady is all-powerful and all-encompassing; she has many aspects or faces - the Judge, the Protector, the Healer, etc., but they are supposedly all merely facets of one omnipotent being, against him the myriad assortment of foreign gods and goddesses are inferior and lesser. But as I’ve described and alluded to, the Bright Lady is a lie, or more accurately a scam. ‘Her’ various facets are each titles of their own and no different than the dozens of distinct ‘gods’ fueled by the small handful of Cosmic entities, who are simultaneously the true powers behind those same foreign deities. For the Cosmics, perpetuating the myth of the Bright Lady is practically no different than any other set of titles; they cooperate in keeping the lie intact even through their endless scheming and conflicts because of the sheer amount of power that ‘her’ titles produce collectively. If any one aspect were to seem to falter or be forsaking its faithful, it could threaten the prayer-output of the entire Bright Lady pseudo-pantheon and weakening all of them by its loss; as a result, the Bright Lady aspects are occasionally even traded as a ‘loss’ in value, if the current owner cannot afford to grant enough prayers to maintain steady intake.

Now, with that bit out of the way for now, what exactly is Aegeos? It’s a theocracy, and a matriarchy, centered around the worship of a singular all-powerful mother goddess figure. The original Aegeos was vaguely Egyptian in its asthetics and structure, but this time around I’ve decided to go with an Arabian inspired theme. Aegeos, the nation, is somewhere on the southern side of the primary continent, in the vicinity of the equator. This is in part interesting because the necessities of its geography, a hot dry desert, are thus shaping the world’s as-of-yet undefined geography as a whole. I’ll get to that much later though, but for now all that is necessary to know is that Aegeos is heavily desertified. Similar to the actual Arabian desert, though, its sands and salt flats are broken up by scores of oases and watering holes - far more than its real-world equivalent in fact, fed by underground lakes and rivers deep in the earth. Irrigation is extremely difficult with the sand and poor soil, but the many oases supply enough water for fixed settlements of varying sizes - the largest cities being built around multiple oases in close proximity. Each town or city is overseen by a high priestess/City-Mother, with a council of lower-ranked priestesses taking responsibility for specific aspects of civil infrastructure and welfare. Collectively, those high priestesses form a council of their own that functions partly as a lower house of legislation and partly as an advisory group to a much smaller group of grand priestesses/Great Mothers who look after the nation as a whole. The City-Mothers mostly function autonomously, but can collectively petition the Great Mothers to address some particular issue or dispute; conversely, the Great Mothers are careful to poll the feelings of the City-Mothers before issuing most national-scale proclamations or policy changes, with the end effect being a highly decentralized governmental structure more akin to a confederation of allied city-states. Officially, the Great Mothers have supreme authority over all of Aegeos; in practice, this is maintained mostly by the eagerness of the other City- Mothers to move against one of their own if they are foolish enough to defy the Great Mothers.

And all those female pronouns? Aegeos is a very rare oddity that, as far as I can tell, has never existed in real-world history; a matriarchy where the women are political leaders rather than domestic/familial leaders, and to bring that about in what I consider to be a tolerably plausible manner took a lot of thinking. Essentially, without recanting an entire mythic history, the land that would become Aegeos was originally populated by a number of independent, semi-nomadic tribes who engaged in consistent low-level battle against each other for resources. At some point, the chieftain of one of those tribes married a woman who, by happenstance, turned out to be Broken World’s equivalent to Gustavus Adolphus, Saladin, and Sun Tzu all rolled up into one female package - a savant of military tactics who, through her husband, led their tribe to establish a decisive superiority over any rivals. Regarded in-universe as the mortal incarnation of the Bright Lady, she passed on her knowledge, if not her innate genius, to daughters and other female students...and only female students. Men still did nearly all the fighting, but within a few generations it was culturally acceptable, then culturally expected, for a woman to be forming strategies and giving tactical orders. From there, it was a slow growth of authority over generations, especially as the internal violence among tribes gradually faded. Having firmly established their superiority in leadership during war, it was easy enough to accept women as societal leaders in peace, especially with the fast-growing cult of the Bright Lady to provide spiritual encouragement. Eventually women held all positions of ‘hard’ power in the developing society, which has been the status quo for centuries by the time of ‘current day’ as the setting clock reckons. To keep this stable and prevent the sort of uprising or revolt that a more one-dimensional feminist/matriarchal society might realistically create, the religious influence of the church of the Bright Lady plays an important part. Men are barred from political office or positions of high authority, but they are not regarded or (mostly) treated outright as second-class citizens; rather, it is a core doctrine of the church that Man and Woman each have their own crucial roles to play in a functional civilized society. Woman’s place is that of the Mind - to be the leaders, thinkers, and spiritual guides without whom Man would be lost and inevitably revert back to the barbarism and savage self-slaughter of their ancestors. Man’s place is that of the Body - to be the strong arms and backs that take Woman’s plans and put them into action, the protectors and providers without whom Woman would struggle to enact meaningful change on a cruel and hostile world.

Stripped of all the trappings, it’s a self-perpetuating system meant to keep the physically stronger and equally numerous male population docile and in check, but hundreds of years of gradually increasing social conditioning is a very powerful force. High education - anything more complex than basic sums or writing - is limited to women, as are positions of authority in both civil and military institutions. There are a number of grey areas, naturally; in addition to being the labor force, craftsmen, and enlisted military, men are also the sculptors, painters, and other artisans - those with the talent towards the arts are given their own special training and often can become quite wealthy with the right patrons. Career soldiers in the military, as well, often end up in a place of ‘soft’ authority, shepherding their female superiors as non-commissioned officers have done through time and across realities - the Aegeosans refer to such experienced soldiers as ‘grizzlies’, and they are considered a priceless resource for a young officer to depend on. As a reverse example, the female officer-priestess caste of the military are typically in far better physical shape than their civilian peers, out of raw practical necessity to be capable of keeping up endurance-wise with the soldiers they command. Aside from those handful of exceptions and blurred lines, though, the gender roles are rigid and uncompromising; men are forbidden from intellectual or leadership roles, and women are barred from excessively physical activities beyond basic exercise. Penalties for a male attempting to step beyond his appointed station in life might be different than those for than a woman lowering herself with physical art or an excessive interest in physical fitness, but the latter can be as or more vicious despite being social in nature. Outright blatant public violations of the limits are considered heretical, though, and punished with uncompromising brutality regardless of the perpetrator’s gender.

Almost all Aegeosan magicians are female as well - they have the education to pursue wizardry, and the free time or freedom of movement to seal sorcerous pacts, as well as the ability to become sworn servants of the Bright Lady - referred to culturally as Chosen to distinguish them from the regular priestesshood, they dedicate themselves to the interests of one aspect/face much like any other divine servant. Male magicians are rare and almost universally felpact or feypact sorcerers. They are required to seek official permission from the priestesshood to pursue magical talent; though this is also a requirement for would-be female magicians, whatever the actual relative rate of granted permissions might be. Unregistered/illegal magicians, of either gender, are executed, particularly priests - the Bright Lady’s aspects do not accept male servants, but there exist plenty of foreign gods and goddesses who are less picky, and occasionally women look to deities outside their borders for power even at the cost of being branded heretics. In very rare circumstances, generally ones where large amounts of gold change hands, a death sentence can be commuted to exile.

Socially, the Aegeosans are matrilineal as might be expected, tracing ancestry through the female line, but with a few unusual quirks. To start with, they practice a sort of double-sided polygamy. One woman will usually have two or three consorts/husbands with as many as five for the wealthiest ones, but each of those husbands in turn might be ‘married’ to two or even three different, unrelated women - in a case of conflicting demands for marital attention, a higher-status wife takes precedence over a lower one. This creates an interlocking system of relationships and extended families, mimicking marriage across pre-historical tribal lines, that are treated as virtual blood relationships and traded upon socially in equivalent fashion. Two genetically unrelated woman linked by an otherwise ‘invisible’ male consort append the prefix half- to their connection - so someone’s half-sister would not be a sister they shared only one birth parent with, but someone whose mother shared a consort with their mother, regardless of if said consort had actually fathered either of them. Two such degrees of separation would be a quarter-sister, while three or more are regarded as unrelated in any fashion. Marriages are a highly formal affair, performed for political benefit as often as for personal desire, and irreversible except in drastic extenuating circumstances. As a result, informal relationships - both hetero- and homo-sexual in nature - are fairly common. No social taboos exist against a woman taking a fancy to a man and seeking a short-term liaison with him, though conditions apply; he must be unmarried, he has the right to decline the offer without coercion or retribution, and the woman is expected to provide some form of gift or token of appreciation in return, in descending order of social sanction should said informal conditions be infringed upon. Similarly, a woman who is seen to be repeatedly engaging a particular male for the benefits of a marriage without accompanying obligation or responsibility can find themselves under great scrutiny and social pressure to either break off or formalize the relationship, though children born of such impromptu or informal encounters have no social stigma - since the identity of the mother is the deciding factor for ancestry and inheritance, there are no bastards in Aegeos.

Same-sex relationships are treated even more casually; while Aegeosans are by no means universally bisexual, the social acceptance of same-sex love is prevalent enough that many at least dabble. Amongst women, a friendship or alliance can be cemented physically as easily as by other means, and men are actively encouraged to take other men as lovers, sometimes including fellow husbands, as a means of bonding and mitigating certain urges in the absence of a wife or interested partner. The military, in particular is an environment where male-male pairings abound, as the only women in frequent contact are their commanders and thus uncompromisingly off-limits from either direction (one of the few no-exceptions lines an officer-priestess is absolutely forbidden to cross). It’s not quite at the Sacred Band of Thebes level, and many soldiers end their terms of service only to be snatched up into formal traditional matrimony, but it is there. And to address the looming elephant that I figure someone would end up asking with this topic front and center, their culture and religion do recognize and accept the concept of transgenderism. It’s an intense process, involving severe and somewhat intrusive mental scrutiny by trained magicians to guarantee the authenticity of one’s feelings (especially for transwomen, though transmen are by no means excempt). But the ways of the Bright Lady are unfathomable, and if She chooses to place a female soul in the flesh of a man, or vice versa, it is not the place of Her followers to question beyond guaranteeing the claim to be honestly held. A blessed and sanctioned transgender person is officially no different than any other member of their declared gender, and subject to all the expected social customs, benefits, and restrictions of such.

Lastly, I’ll elaborate a bit on the nature of their military, because despite all the trappings of civilization, the Aegeosans are still not that far, developmentally, from their raiding tribal ancestors. They maintain a fair-sized standing army, with each town or city providing a legally defined ratio of its population in one unit, though much of the army’s duties involve what would be relegated to a police force in modern societies, or else tasked with hunting down monsters or other threats to the towns and cities. However, it is also a means of bleeding off (both metaphorically and literally) an otherwise socially risky excess of testosterone, via short campaigns against barbarian tribes on the borders (or other nations, once I decide on borders for such and who is close to who). These campaigns go in search of slaves, converts, and treasure to enrich the nation and church, but at the same time they are a ruthless tool of the Great Mothers to cull the most naturally hot-blooded of their men who might otherwise become restless and rebellious.

Geography, religion, social structure, politics, military, magic...I think I’ve hit all the major high points to give a good picture of the nation as a whole. Dress and clothing can be approximated by remembering they’re in a desert environment, without modern amenities like air conditioning. The abundance of sand provide ample supply for glasswork of all kinds, both decorative and functional, and is one of their most valuable exports.

For my next article, I think I’ll be working up - almost from scratch - a culture centered in the far northern reaches of the primary continent, with some heavy Inuit influence in their design. Same world-building time, same world-building channel.

The Glyphstone

2015-12-29, 01:50 AM

I did a lot of talking about Aegeos and their semi-monotheistic state religion in the last update, but I haven’t really talked much about religion/divinity in general, so there’s not a whole lot to contrast them against. So instead of icemen, I’m going to give a short essay on how divinity works in Broken World.

To start with, I have to describe what/who exactly the Cosmics are, and this is going to get sort of weird and metaphysical for a bit. As I recounted before, existence began with The One, a demiurge whose ‘self’ was composed of everything that would or could ever exist - it shaped the universe by tearing off pieces of itself and molding that raw essence into something permanent, including when it chose to ‘twin’ itself by shaping half of its remaining power into the Other. When the One and the Other destroyed each other in battle, what remained of them was still a vast amount of divine creative essence, and without their wills to control it, the mindless energy spontaneously ‘birthed’ the Cosmics, dividing the bodies of two dead overgods into twenty-seven smaller and weaker, but conceptually identical, divine entities. I’m referring to ‘bodies’ just to have a visual image, but neither the First Two or their Cosmic ‘children’ really have any sort of physical form unless they decide to manifest an avatar. Most of the time, they exist as collections of sentient essence, a finite quantity of infinite potential - when they choose to do something, or create something, it costs them a portion of their ‘self’. The expenditure can’t be reversed without spending even more essence, but the universe is a closed cycle of sorts - essence doesn’t vanish entirely, but gets absorbed into the underlying structure of the universe.

This is where religion comes in, at least as far as Broken World goes. The mortal races - those spawned by a blending of Cosmic blood (essence) spilt in battle and various sorts of resonances or energies from the world itself, form an interface of sorts between the cosmic-tier entities and physical reality. Instead of transforming essence into acts of creation, mortals extract ‘spent’ essence from the universe and turn it back into raw potential for re-use. They hope for something to happen, believe in the potential for something to change, and beseech or pray for it to occur; this catalyzes a small portion of essence into a form the Cosmics can absorb into themselves.

The obvious question is why the Cosmics don’t just make themselves known directly to mortals to bask in all that delicious worship - the answer is weird and complicated and summed up as ‘they’re too big’. Those mortal prayers can’t be just thrown out at random, they have to be directed towards something or someone that mortal believes is capable of enacting said change, and the problem with Cosmics is that mortal minds simply can’t comprehend them in their entirety. I’ve previously likened them to Lovecraftian entities, and part of that is their nature as beings of potential; they are both finite and infinite at the same time, since the raw essence they are made of could be transformed into anything, but not everything. A mortal mind isn’t able to truly process or understand, on the fundamental level necessary to enable true belief, a being existing on that scale. But they can handle imagining and believing in a smaller and more limited sort of all-powerful being, which is the role of the gods. There are scores of gods across the world, generally regional or cultural in scope and typically rather specific in their portfolio; one kingdom will worship a particular harvest god for harvest-related matters, while another kingdom will worship a different one. They pray to their gods for aid, and perform deeds appropriate to the creed or principles attributed to said gods in their names, and occasionally those gods may grant said requests; sparingly but just often to reassure the people that their gods to exist, and that they are listening.

That’s how mortals see the gods from their point of view. But just like how mortals are the interface between the reservoirs of ‘spent’ essence tied into the fabric of the universe and the potential for that essence to be recycled, the gods are the next level, an interface between the mortals and the Cosmics. Each ‘god’ is in actuality a mantle or mask of sorts, a filter that lets a mortal mind ‘see’ a limited portion of a particular Cosmic entity such that the being on the other hand can have prayers directed at it. Those prayers, and the essence attached, are absorbed into the Cosmic wearing that mantle, and there is no inherent limit to the number of mantles one Cosmic can carry. The only practical limit is their ability to maintain belief in a mantle; if prayers are not answered often enough, that god’s worshippers may become disillusioned and redirect their loyalties to a different god with a similar portfolio, which may be a mantle carried by a different Cosmic. More popular gods obviously provide a larger intake of essence, but at the same time demand more attention to maintain, which costs essence. Additionally, the more mantles a cosmic takes on, the more likely two or more may end up in conflict. For example, let’s use a hypothetical plague god and a health god. While both produce raw essence, answering prayers and encouraging worshippers of the plague-god mantle mean ignoring or denying requests made to the health-god mantle. Additionally, trying to balance the demands of two such inherently opposed aspects is decidedly uncomfortable; Cosmics might be unfathomable intellects by mortal standards, but they do have minds of their own, and a clash of mantles can weaken their mental stability, which in turn weakens their ability to control their own essence and keep hold of their mantles.

Thus, mantles are not fixed to a particular Cosmic, and are in fact quite fluid. They are bought and sold, bartered and traded for, sometimes stolen and occasionally wrested away via brute force. The age where the Cosmics took on titanic physical avatars and laid waste to continents dueling each other is long over, but they still squabble, bicker, bargain, and fight amongst themselves constantly. Mantles, and the essence channels attached to them, are both the object and the currency of those conflicts. Mortals, naturally are unaware of all this, since they can only ‘see’ the mantle of the god they are worshipping, without any knowledge or understanding of what lies past it.

I’ll let this stew for now, since I’ve run out of stuff I want to say on the topic. Not sure what I want to talk about next, so if anyone (as usual) is out there and wants to know more about anything previously mentioned or otherwise, speak up.

The Glyphstone

2015-12-31, 02:11 AM

Small addition here, now that I’ve explained most of how the Cosmics interact with the mortal world, but I’m also possibly treading into territory that I’m not sure if I want to be canon or not. I like settings to be internally consistent, so when something is established only to be violated for no reason other than the plot demands it, it bugs me. The following is something that violates the rules I have just set down, and if I can’t find a reason for it to become canon other than ‘the plot demands it’, it’ll have to stay un-included.

Something I didn’t really touch on previously was the presence or lack of dissent in Aegeosan society. Without some sort of wide-scale mind control, there’s going to be people who aren’t happy with how things are, no matter what sort of cultural brainwashing is in place, and just ignoring that inevitability would disrupt the verisimilitude. The Aegeosan equivalent to the Inquisition is dedicated, officially, to exposing and punishing heretical words and deeds - basically anything that contradicts the established doctrine of the church, and anyone actively practicing or advocating the worship of foreign deities. They’re just as dedicated to their job as the similarly named historical organization, with the addition of actual magic powers, though how intrusive they can be without evidence is curtailed by law and custom. This allows for a certain amount of underbelly activity to occur, the most relevant of which to this topic is the cult of the Silent King.

The Silent King is one of the ‘dark’ gods - not evil, but one whose worship is absolutely forbidden in Aegeos and even greatly frowned upon or persecuted in other lands. He is a god of strength, self-sufficiency, and independence; not necessarily a portfolio to be concerned about, but the specifics of his doctrine include the ideal that depending on anyone, or more importantly, anything other than yourself is a sign of weakness. Specifically, offering prayers to the gods is considered a sin - and that includes himself, sort of like Conan’s warrior-god Crom. It’s the closest you’ll find to a practice of atheism in a pantheistic fantasy setting; not a denial of the existence of the gods, but a refusal to pray to them for deliverance or favors. For obvious reasons, this sort of practice is immensely threatening to the Cosmics, along with the established worldly power of their priests and churches or cults. Devotees of the Silent King are forced to keep their allegiance secret, often living double lives and faking ‘prayers’ in public, or performing the minimal amount of such to survive and offering penance for their misdeeds in private.

DUBIOUS CANON BEGINS

But the Silent King is not just a mortal myth - it is, somehow, a mantle of its own, though one not carried by any of the surviving Cosmics. And it has power, however paradoxical this might be. When someone following the creed of the Silent King deliberately chooses not to seek a god’s aid through prayer, it creates essence like a prayer would, almost an anti-prayer of sorts. But since no Cosmic wears the mantle, there is nothing at the other end to accept or absorb the essence, so it just builds up slowly but consistently. Nor does it stop due to the lack of response, since it is accepted and expected by those who believe in the Silent King that he will not answer prayers any more than his followers should send them, which results in, over time, a frighteningly large amount of essence ‘stockpiled’ in the mantle. But no one wants to touch it, in part because they don’t understand how a mantle based on a principle antithetical to its own existence could function, but even more so because they are scared of the potential side effects from adopting such a mantle. As I had mentioned, the Cosmics try to collect mantles with complimentary or at least non-conflicting portfolios, to reduce the essence drain of working against themselves and the mental stress of portraying contradictory identities simultaneously. The Silent King, and the essence it draws, is by its very nature opposed to literally every other mantle in existence, opposed to the fundamental concept of the Cosmics themselves. Taking it up might obliterate them, or corrupt them somehow, or just drive them irrevocably insane, and none of them are willing to risk it.

DUBIOUS CANON ENDS

So yeah. The Silent King’s cult is going to be a solid piece of canon. But I’m very undecided on if it should have actual power or not, since it’s nothing but a bit of invisible background fluff that no one would ever know about or interact with. At best, it’s an open-ended plot hook.

Next up, I’m going to be discussing magical objects and enchanted items, as a lead-in to the third humanocentric society to which that topic is very, very relevant.

AmberVael

2015-12-31, 04:40 AM

Something I've been considering recently about religion in D&D settings is just how poorly they handle it most of the time. Most settings have this really, really boring take that I have come to call the "oatmeal polytheistic blend," where all gods kinda work the same but with different territory, they're all assumed as real by everyone else, and it becomes this big bland mess. Now, the take you're describing seems to mess and play around with the usual assumptions, but I'm still seeing some of the tell tale signs of it here. Only one real religious take on the world is displayed in what you've said so far - there are the Cosmics, they have different titles, people worship those titles, these are the divine entities that shape existence. It sounds like all of these entities work pretty much the same as well, basically big prayer-eating mantle-wearing nebulous forces.

In short, I think you need to have (or describe, if you already have stuff in mind) more religious diversity. For a start, perhaps some different classes or forms of Cosmics, something to really shake up how they interact with their 'peers' and the mortal world, something to make them other than just another god with a different mantle. For another, what about religion outside of the Cosmics? I'm a big fan of ancestor worship, especially in settings where your ancestors can potentially have done amazing crap like create full on worlds or kill an army of dragons. Rulers as divinity is another fun one. And what about nontheistic religions, stuff more philosophical or spiritual but lacking any focus on the divine? What space is there for people who don't believe at all?

The Silent King is a start... but I think its a small one, and I'd also advise changing up how it works, probably. Describing the Silent King as a god doesn't entirely seem to fit. I think it could be a good implementing of a nontheistic religion, actually - instead of following the practices and tenets of a god, follow a philosophy that encourages inward focus, about finding the strength and power within rather than without. There is no god, but there are meetings between fellow adherents, perhaps teachings and underground movements as well. Perhaps they do ritual 'sacrifices' of sorts, whether destroying bits of cosmic iconography and text to symbolically do away with their attachment to such things to more retaliatory and intentionally spiteful and vindictive destruction of idols/temples/etc that shun and despise them.

I'd just keep in mind that, even in a setting where gods are known to exist, you're bound to have real diversity in religion. There will be schisms within worshipers of the same god (or same mantle, from the cosmic perspective). There will be people who worship something that isn't a god or mantle (Demons! Dragons! Ghosts! A living glacier animated by an elemental spirit of blood, water, and ice!). There will be people who reject the gods even if they're real, whether by simply not caring, or not acknowledging them in a religious manner (just because something has power doesn't mean you have to worship it - see all the people not worshiping demons or dragons).

I suggest listening to this episode of Writing Excuses (http://www.writingexcuses.com/2015/07/12/writing-excuses-10-28-polytheism-in-fiction-with-marie-brennan/) which covers polytheism.

The Glyphstone

2015-12-31, 01:21 PM

Excellent, some real critical commentary to chew on finally. Let me try and tackle this point-by-point.

To start with, I guess I'm not making a thorough enough distinction between the Cosmics themselves and the gods. The Cosmics are reality, the gods are religion; no one worships the Cosmics directly because no one knows/can understand they exist (at least, no one capable of really understanding it). Other immortals like the dragons and fey certainly know (as they were directly created and once commanded by said Cosmics), but they also have their own problems, and in a sense, their own worshipers, to bother attempting to mess with the status quo.

Something I've been considering recently about religion in D&D settings is just how poorly they handle it most of the time. Most settings have this really, really boring take that I have come to call the "oatmeal polytheistic blend," where all gods kinda work the same but with different territory, they're all assumed as real by everyone else, and it becomes this big bland mess. Now, the take you're describing seems to mess and play around with the usual assumptions, but I'm still seeing some of the tell tale signs of it here. Only one real religious take on the world is displayed in what you've said so far - there are the Cosmics, they have different titles, people worship those titles, these are the divine entities that shape existence. It sounds like all of these entities work pretty much the same as well, basically big prayer-eating mantle-wearing nebulous forces.

Now, you're correct that they do, ultimately, all work the same way, since they all came from the same origin point; they are effectively interchangeable in terms of ability, which is why the mantle-exchange can work like it does. I'm not entirely certain how many of them there actually are at this point, which is preventing me from detailing their individual personalities, but if I ever get around to that, they will be intentionally broad. They're meant to be something a level above the usual anthropomorphized personifications that fantasy deities get shoehorned into. But like I've said, that is the reality. The perception, how religion is shaped by people's takes on gods and mantles and how they interact with such, I have tons of design space to work with.

In short, I think you need to have (or describe, if you already have stuff in mind) more religious diversity. For a start, perhaps some different classes or forms of Cosmics, something to really shake up how they interact with their 'peers' and the mortal world, something to make them other than just another god with a different mantle. For another, what about religion outside of the Cosmics? I'm a big fan of ancestor worship, especially in settings where your ancestors can potentially have done amazing crap like create full on worlds or kill an army of dragons. Rulers as divinity is another fun one. And what about nontheistic religions, stuff more philosophical or spiritual but lacking any focus on the divine? What space is there for people who don't believe at all?
The Cosmics might have internal divisions or disagreements, but they would be philosophical or practical, rather than something inherent to them. But the reason I've been referring to the mortal 'gods' as mantles is not just to highlight that they are interchangeable from the Cosmic perspective (they most certainly are not from the mortal one), but to try and reduce said anthropic personification. A mantle isn't necessarily a nebulously humanoid entity, but something divine that you can pray to for aid. I've got one set of barbarian tribes on the backburner who worship a set of animal spirits - mantles. A culture that worships their ancestors - a mantle, or even multiple mantles depending on if they are considered a collective or if specific ancestors gain a saint-like status. A tribe living near a particularly active volcano might attribute sentience to it, and offer it prayers and gifts to appease its wrath...that forms a mantle. It's very much a dynamic process over time; if enough people exist who believe in something, whether it is the ancestor-spirits of that tribe, a capricious goddess of hurricanes, or the angry volcano, the belief they express through prayer is channeled through a mantle. If that tribe dies out in a catastrophe, the flow to their ancestor-mantle stops, and it becomes worthless. Technically, a mantle could have a following of one, if that one person truly, deeply believed that the force they were praying to really existed and could help them in the manner they asked, though for such a tiny return on investment, it's highly unlikely any Cosmic would bother to take up the proto-mantle and answer.

The Silent King is a start... but I think its a small one, and I'd also advise changing up how it works, probably. Describing the Silent King as a god doesn't entirely seem to fit. I think it could be a good implementing of a nontheistic religion, actually - instead of following the practices and tenets of a god, follow a philosophy that encourages inward focus, about finding the strength and power within rather than without. There is no god, but there are meetings between fellow adherents, perhaps teachings and underground movements as well. Perhaps they do ritual 'sacrifices' of sorts, whether destroying bits of cosmic iconography and text to symbolically do away with their attachment to such things to more retaliatory and intentionally spiteful and vindictive destruction of idols/temples/etc that shun and despise them.
That's...pretty much what I already envision it as. Blame my poor wording, perhaps, but in a world where the existence of deities (even if they are not the deities everyone thinks they are) cannot be denied or explained away, the Silent King is as close as I think I can reasonably get. The 'god' they have created is, to them, just a convenient label they hang on the principle that they hold sacred; you do not need to beg something greater than yourself for handouts, when you can rely on yourself instead. That could even be a source of dissent within the group the way you suggest, even if they stay united because ultimately it doesn't matter to them whether their silent god is actually a goddess or a nonbinary or lacking a gender at all. Some, likely, don't truly "believe" in the Silent King as an entity at all, but as the name attached to the principles. Those people would not contribute to the power of the SK's mantle, in the DUBIOUS CANON above, but they'd be outwardly indistinguishable from the rest of the cult.

I'd just keep in mind that, even in a setting where gods are known to exist, you're bound to have real diversity in religion. There will be schisms within worshipers of the same god (or same mantle, from the cosmic perspective). There will be people who worship something that isn't a god or mantle (Demons! Dragons! Ghosts! A living glacier animated by an elemental spirit of blood, water, and ice!). There will be people who reject the gods even if they're real, whether by simply not caring, or not acknowledging them in a religious manner (just because something has power doesn't mean you have to worship it - see all the people not worshiping demons or dragons).

Excellent suggestions for specifics on ground-level diversity, really. I'll eventually get around to detailing the world and specific regional pantheons at the 'players-eye-level', which is where stuff like schisms inside a particular cult or church occur, and you're right that they most certainly do. If it gets bad enough, it might even cause a literal splitting of the mantle, and whoever owns those mantle(s) at the top of the food chain gets to make a difficult choice on how they're going to handle it. Worship of non-anthropic entities, like I'd described above, also creates a mantle to channel that divine power. People who just don't worship out of apathy exist, though they'd be uncommon at best; and more or less irrelevant on the grand scheme of the world. And for the people who actively reject worship, that's the route by which the Silent King's cult spreads itself, seeking out those pockets of anti-theistic attitude and offering them something in its place. Plus, there's plenty of room for strife between regional religions; I've created a somewhat extreme example of this in the state church of Aegeos that bans any foreign worship as heretical and false, but there's plenty of 'your god isn't as good as mine, worship mine instead', or even 'that thing you call your god is actually my god in disguise, so you might as well worship mine in the first place" and of course "your god isn't as good as mine, and I will demonstrate this by stabbing you in the face".

The cosmics are meant to hover in a weird area between symbiote and parasite, ultimately. They existed without mortals, and need mortals to survive, but mortals don't necessarily need them. So they adopt mantles, hiding behind them, and act to make themselves valuable to said mortals, encouraging that life-giving prayer. The mortals have no idea that their storm-god is actually the same 'being' as their harvest-goddess, or that their healing-god is the same as the ascended ancient king of the people in the city-state down by the coast, or that their local death-god masquerades as a bloodthirsty ice chasm that demands living sacrifice from a tundra-dwelling tribe in the far north. All of those are different entities as far as mortals are concerned, and some they might not even believe in (it's ridiculous to believe that volcano needs offerings to stay its wrath - Burnos the Fire-God is the master of things like volcanoes, and you're insulting him by ignoring this).

The Glyphstone

2016-01-05, 10:57 PM

As promised, I’m going to talk for a bit about how magical/enchanted items work here, in large part because bits of it will be relevant to the next cultural center I describe. Fantasy fiction and magical items tend to be all over the place. Classical myths and settings based on them treat all such items as unique artifacts worthy of stories in their own right. Stories drawing from more modern fantasy, especially ones with roots in D&D-based worlds, consider magical items to be commonplace and easily available in most cases, with only the most powerful of such being legend-worthy. My aim is to end up somewhere in the middle; I want this world to be friendly to mechanical systems like D&D that assume the presence of copious magical gear in their balance of power, but still make owning or using a magical item to feel special, or at least be out of the ordinary.

I’ve also got to work with constraints I established previously - namely, that the nature of magic and spellcasting is founded on speaking strings of ‘true-names’ in the ancient proto-language used to create the universe, using a person’s willpower to force a temporary re-ordering of the world around them. Essentially, only a living being can use magic. The solution to this self-imposed problem is one I mentioned way back at the beginning, namely that if only living beings can use magic, then magic items must by default be somewhat alive.

There are three broad ‘types’ of magical items, ranked in order of the complexity of their creation. First are talismans, which are nothing more than a specific spell cast ‘into’ an object and placed in a sort of stasis. With the proper ritual and the correct magical words, a physical token of some kind - a vial of liquid, a carved bone, a scroll of parchment, etc. - is infused with a pre-determined spell. The permanency of the token holds the natural decay of the spell’s energy at bay, until said token is damaged or destroyed, at which point the spell spontaneously ‘casts’ itself at the closest acceptable target. This makes them useful for beneficial spells and effects, but much more limited in terms of harmful magic, since their contents are discharged automatically. Most harmful talismans are crafted for use as magical booby traps, unless they are designed to be used as projectiles in battle.

Above talismans are Imbued Items, what most people would think of when they picture a ‘magic item’, and they come in two types, Lesser and Greater. What both types have in common, though, is that to create them they require a will, a mind of sorts, to fuel and guide the spells that they contain, and the only way for mortals to obtain these wills is through sacrifice. The rituals of imbuing an item with power require the death of a living creature; as the sacrifice dies, an imprint or echo of its mind is formed and bound into the imbued-item-to-be. This has no effect on the being’s actual soul, which goes to its destination unimpeded. The type of sacrifice necessary depends on what spells or effects the imbued item will contain, which forms the primary difference between a Lesser and a Greater imbued item.

A Lesser imbued item is any magical item that produces a continuous or persistent magical effect of some kind. A pair of gloves that enhanced their wearer with supernatural strength, or a sword that never needed to be sharpened, would both be examples of a lesser imbued item. This is a very simple effect to maintain, requiring very little actual intelligence, and as such most lesser imbued items are created via the sacrifice of an animal. The resultant imprint is barely even self-aware and entirely driven by instinct; it exists for the sole purpose of continually ‘repeating’ the magical spell that the item generates. In terms of actual magical requirement, there is no difference between sacrificial subjects; gloves of giant strength could be ‘powered’ by the imprint of a sheep’s mind as easily as that of a dog, or a fish. Magical artisans, though, often claim to find that using an appropriate imprint - an animal known for its strength in an item that grants great strength, for example - makes the binding ritual easier to perform, and the nature of magic as an act of will means this belief can have a strong and tangible placebo effect.

And that leaves Greater imbued items, which unlike their Lesser counterparts, cast their stored spell or magical effect in response to a specific trigger of some kind, rather than on continuous loop/repeat. The trigger condition is set when the item is created; typically some sort of verbal command issued by the item’s owner, but other triggers exist. A greater imbued item might be a sword that bursts into flame on command, or a ring that surrounds its wearer with clean air if it detects poisonous gas. Not all greater items are more powerful than lesser ones; gloves of giant strength that activated on command would be ‘greater’ despite being weaker than their lesser counterparts. To permit this, a more potent imprint is required to fuel the item, which can only come from a sentient being - and at no point is a willing sacrifice necessary to complete the ritual. As with lesser items, there is no inherent need for affinity between item and sacrifice, allowing for a small but thriving trade in captured ‘monsters’ of various kinds with sufficient intelligence to provide an imprint for imbued items. Other artificers, naturally, forego the expense of preparing to house and restrain any manner of exotic creatures in favor of simply kidnapping and murdering strangers for their imprints.

Being able to respond to an outside stimulus requires, in turn, that the imprinted mind be aware of outside conditions, which marks another key difference between lesser and greater imbued items. They are entirely self-aware, both of their surroundings and their own nature as a semi-intelligent construct (including vague memories of the being they were imprinted from), but except in very rare circumstances, have zero ability to interact with or influence said surroundings. They cannot activate ‘their’ magical effect without the proper trigger, nor can they resist or refuse the compulsion to do so when it is provided. They are trapped echoes of sentient beings, which makes it a very good thing that they cannot control their own magical effects, because the sort of paralyzed and helpless existence such a mind endures invariably and swiftly drives it utterly insane by any regular living creature’s standards. Even the rare imbued items granted the power of speech or self-locomotion in some fashion inevitably go insane to some degree. No two imprints are ever exactly alike in their madness, though imprints who have inhabited their items for exceptionally long periods can fake a mask of rationality if interacted with (telepathically or otherwise). A greater imbued item could, in theory, be made with autonomy over its inherent magical effects, but such objects exist primary in cautionary tales and legends about why creating such is a terrible idea; even fully autonomous imprints are still pale shadows of true sentience, lacking the emotional and psychic safeguards crucial to sanity, and when they inevitably go mad as well, they present a far greater danger to anyone around them.

This does, of course, bring all sorts of questions to mind regarding the morality of killing a living being to create a magical item. Most settings would consider this evil, and thus all greater imbued items to by definition be evil since their creation process involved evil deeds. At best, capturing a monster that would otherwise just be killed on the spot for later use in artifice is a murky bit of grey, and it’d be very hard for me to argue otherwise. But at least as far as my cosmology here is concerned, Good and Evil are not hard cosmological constants, so there’s room for artifice of greater items to remain a neutral, non-evil act under the right circumstances. Nor is the creation of a lesser imbued item evil, assuming the slaughter is performed humanely. (Conveniently, passive-buff items make up the majority of the typical ‘Christmas Tree’ collection for D&D characters; system-neutral is my goal, but I’m not going to pass up an interaction that happens to make something system-friendly without excluding other rulesets).

The Glyphstone

2016-08-23, 03:39 PM

So, extensively long hiatus over, hopefully. Going to get back into the swing with what was sort-of promised at the end of the last update, and to free my headspace for brainstorming something new. This won't be a terribly big post, and compared to other posts, might be a bit content-light. Part setting, part expansion of some previous themes touched on, and part theoretical adventure hook.

Anyways.

Somewhere in the interior of the primary continent, which still doesn't have a name, there's a large and almost perfectly circular region called the Wyrdwastes. This deserted area is essentially a region of rampant 'wild magic' – storms of uncontrolled magical energy are everywhere, producing fun side effects like fire or acid rains, mutated whirlwinds, and occasionally patches of land coming to life and trying to eat you. Anyone attempting to use magical spells or abilities here finds them going haywire, producing random and usually highly lethal side effects. The rare examples of plants and beasts that survive here tend to be as bizarre and twisted as the landscape they live in. Overall, it's an awful, inhospitable place, with only one exception. In the exact geographical center of the Wyrdwastes is a bubble of magical energy, and inside that bubble is the city of Sanctuary.

To any casual study, Sanctuary is a Shangri-La-esque paradise, hidden away in the heart of a desolate wasteland. The temperature is perpetually warm and comfortable, no monsters or dangers intrude past the protective field, and delicious filling food can be materialized out of thin air simply by wishing for it to appear. For the small portion of the city's population referred to as the Never-Born, made up of immigrants who survived the long trek through the Wyrdwastes or the tiny handful of native-born residents, it is the paradise it appears to be. And for anyone who dies within the boundaries of Sanctuary, or even becomes seriously ill or injured, they receive the most miraculous gift of all – resurrection and transformation into an immortal form that residents call the Returned. Being Returned is a drastic transformation; they no longer need to eat or drink, have little need for sleep, and never suffer from disease or aging. This detatchment from mortal needs, though, inevitably leaves the Returned highly detached from their mortal concerns as well – they lose most memories of their former lives, and never seek to return or reconnect with who they were. Instead, the Returned are content to relax and meditate for days at a time, or perform simple repetitive tasks that occupy the body without engaging the mind. Many people, seeking immortality of their own, will try to make the dangerous journey to Sanctuary where they can die and be reborn. Of those who succeed, they always end up as permanent residents alongside their still-mortal neighbors, and the shielding bubble grows as necessary to accommodate them.

So, what's actually going on in Sanctuary? If you're getting weird vibes here, good on you, cause there is indeed something rotten in Denmark.

Uncountable eons ago, at the center of what is now the Wyrdwastes, was one of the production sites for the enslaved servitors that the Cosmics used as cannon fodder in their wars. I've touched here and there on the Cosmic Wars, and servitors, but it's enough to know that they were mass-produced by magical devices and machinery, and highly valuable as targets of attack or defense depending on whether a particular Cosmic controlled that facility. The facility here was a small one, and thus not terribly valuable; it wasn't until near the end of the wars that anyone bothered to attack it at all. The tail end of the war also featured the nastiest weapons, though, and it was one of those weapons that was launched at the facility, permanently obliterating everything for miles around it and seemingly destroying the facility itself as well. It wasn't completely destroyed, though, only damaged and disabled, buried beneath a mountain's worth of rubble and debris, and as time passed, the artificial construct charged with operating the facility started repairing its charge bit by bit. The previous update touched on magic items, the need to imbue them with life and a semblance of intelligence to preserve their function, and why this wasn't a healthy existence for the item in question. The Overseer of the servitor-creation facility was one such item, and while it had been imbued with intelligence directly by its Cosmic master instead of being copied from another sentient mind – it was still a mind left conscious for thousands of years uninterrupted, and without any outside interaction. Utterly, hopelessly insane, but bound by the constraints hard-coded into its psyche, and the last orders given to it by its master before they disappeared forever.

Its primary directive was to preserve and protect the facility; this had taken all of its power to resist even a small portion of the once-sprawling complex from the cataclysmic attack. Even now, it could only project a protective field guarding the abandoned land above its buried facility and ward off the wild magic storms left behind from the attack. Its second directive was to preserve and maintain the servitors in its charge, and here's where the situation started going off the rails, because insanity doesn't mean the Overseer was immune to ambition. The first visitors to its domain, a small group of adventuresome treasure-hunters exploring the mysterious Wyrdwastes, found their way into the hidden facility and triggered automated defensive systems. Noticing their intrusion, and at first seeing them simply as another attack by hostile servitors from outside, the Overseer instead experimented with pushing the limits of its coded orders. It assimilated the intruders, ripping their minds and memories free and examining them for knowledge of the outside, and found just how drastically the world had changed while it slept. And in the process, it discovered some significant loopholes in the restrictions placed upon it.

It couldn't spontaneously create new servitors without violating its orders, but it could replace them, and any servitor within its sphere of protection could be considered under its charge until they were called to battle. And if a servitor within its sphere happened to be malfunctioning, say by not responding properly to orders the Overseer issued, then it was logically damaged and in need of replacement. If 'damaged servitors' happened to enter the Overseer's control area from outside, that was an anomaly it could creatively ignore, since the existence of independent sentience was never a factor in its original instructions. So it took the stored imprints of its first captives, and grew servitors to replace them with copies of the stored minds to control the otherwise mindless creations. They finished clearing the rubbles that lay on the surface, hiding any sign of the facility's presence in the process, and built a fascimile of a town above it. Under the Overseer's direct control, the servitors could passably imitate sentient beings even if they reverted to autonomous semi-sentience when left to their own devices; bait in a trap who greeted the next party of explorers to find their way to Sanctuary and describing how wonderful life there was. These new visitors were intentionally allowed to leave, to return to the outside world and spread stories of the isolated paradise within the Wyrdwastes, and before long trickles of other visitors began to appear pursuing the rumors of immortality. Those who stayed would eventually be replaced with servitor duplicates, any remaining people who knew them unaware of the substitution, and over time the Overseer's radius of influence would grow along with the population of servitors it 'protected' – the potential power it could tap was far greater than the amount it was consciously permitted to use, but if fulfilling its directive to protect its servitors required it to draw more power and increase the radius of its shield, that was just another convenient anomaly of rules failing to consider the possibility of servitors being produced but not removed from the facility to fight.

So that's the dark secret of the semi-mythical utopian city of Sanctuary, a town full of doppleganger flesh golems run by an insane construct looking to increase its control and influence endlessly. The Overseer isn't meant to be actively malicious, just crazy and intentionally exploiting loopholes in its own programming – but it and its army of 'townspeople' could become very, very dangerous to anyone who might expose the mystery.

The Glyphstone

2016-12-20, 01:37 AM

Update time! Brushing the dust off and looking to chip away another chunk of this never-ending project. A long while back I had ambitions of a culture with Inuit trappings, situated in the northern region of the primary continent. I've since moved their 'territory' a bit south into the subarctic region, but I'll still be drawing some conceptual trappings from the Inuit culture, along with other tribal societies such as the Scandinavian Sami and North American Iroquois.

Each of my primary human civilizations – this being the third – is meant to interact with or reflect on one of significant parts of Broken World. The Wanu played with how I'm approaching death and the afterlife. Aegeos was a contrast to hold against the broadly multitheistic structure of religion and worship of gods. This time around, the aspect I'm looking to address via contrast is the general tendency of societies and cultures towards xenophobia and distrust of outsiders/other cultures. I knew from the start that this society would instead be outright friendly and even welcoming towards strangers, within certain limits. So, enter the Olmmai. Picking a name for them was one of the biggest hurdles in getting them from thought into writing – I couldn't keep calling them 'Icemen', but nothing came to mind. So I went language-trawling the same way I did the Wanu, and found 'olmmái ' in a list of vocabulary for the Northern Sami dialect, meaning 'friend'. It rolled easy on the tongue, while being from an obscure enough tongue that I could poach it, so after a bit of English bastardization to remove the accent from the 'a', I've got my name.

The Aegeosans were unified via conquest of neighboring tribes. The Wanu were formed from a group of tribes pushed into the inhospitable mountainous territories by stronger lowland competitors. In the cold northern regions, though, the human tribes living and competing there found survival against the elements and harsh weather to be enough of a challenge without the complication of hostile neighbors. Instead of fighting each other the way barbarian tribes of the more temperate regions did, these tribes would first ignore each other, then begin actively cooperating and sharing resources. Over time, their interactions would become formalized in a confederacy. I'll say five different major tribes formed the initial confederacy – this is foremost because of having previously established five as a magically significant number of power, but the fact that the Iroquois are also composed of five distinct tribes is a fun bonus. The specific number of settlements or villages that make up the Confederacy isn't necessary to pin down, and probably even flexible depending on circumstances, but each of them are essentially locally autonomous. They elect a total of forty-five representatives (five times three times three) to an annual council; groups of smaller neighboring villages will choose a collective representative. The council decides matters that affect the entire confederacy, and settle disputes between villages.

In general, the Confederacy only has a few 'national' policies. Keeping the less civilized tribes along their southern borders in check is the primary problem, since they occasionally decide that raiding to the north will be easier. The other confederacy-wide policy, though, is managing and distributing relief for shortages and disasters. Surplus supplies in the north are a rare commodity; they don't live constantly on the edge, but they don't have a huge margin either, with a very short summer growing season for crops and hunting+herding providing the rest of their food. What little surplus they do produce, though, is sent to the largest town situated roughly in the center of the Confederacy's borders, carefully stored and heavily guarded. Every town or village cluster maintains someone with the magical gifts necessary to communicate at a distance – thus, if a disaster threatens a village's supplies or some other crisis, they can swiftly get the word out to their closest neighbors, who send what is needed to make up the unexpected shortfall from their own stockpiles. In turn, they relay the message to villages closer to the capital. Those villages send convoys of supplies to make up the deficit while passing the message on in turn, all the way to the central supply reserves. The tribes look out for each other and give what is needed even if it would temporarily threaten their own supply levels, because they know replacement supplies will soon be arriving from the next village along the line.

It's all extremely well-coordinated, and oiled almost to perfection, but it obviously does have one potential glaring weakness, the need to be able to move freely between towns. That's no mean feat in a land that spends most of the year covered with snow, featuring large forests and an equally large supply of assorted monsters. Thus the existence of the Confederate Rangers, the support and maintenance of which is the other significant domestic policy agreement between the independent tribes. They're an organization of elite hunters, woodsmen, and survivalists, sworn to patrol the roads between the villages to keep them as safe and passable as they can. They're also sworn not to interfere with any sort of disputes between tribes, or to engage in political matters of any kind at all. It provides a vital service to the Confederacy, and also gives a place for Olmmai who have more of an individualistic or even selfish streak than average to spend long periods alone and self-sufficient.

The Olmmai's communal attitude also extends to outsiders, like I said before. The catch is that you have to be willing and able to give back; their existence is difficult enough that they can't afford to keep people around who won't pull their weight in terms of supporting the community as a whole. The worst insult in the Olmmai tongue, in fact, translates to 'parasite' or 'freeloader'. Even short-term guests are expected to earn hospitality, or at least make an honest effort to do so – respect for custom is valued more than the actual material worth of whatever gift or service the guests might offer. Beyond that requirement, though, the Olmmai ask few questions and require little of immigrants to their lands. The few people who travel to join the Olmmai are generally those who have few other options, but they come from all sort of different lands and walks of life – as a group, close to a quarter of all Olmmai are either immigrants or descended from one, the rest being full-blooded members of the native tribes.

Olmmai religion centers on three primary entities – Darkness, Light, and Winter, more sapient elemental forces than anthropomorphized beings. Darkness is cruel, selfish, secretive, and untrustworthy; its children are the monsters that lurk in the wilderness outside town walls. Light is weaker than its cousin, but much more benevolent, giving warmth and protection to people; it bides its time and gathers strength every year to temporarily overpower Darkness and give the Olmmai enough sun and heat to grow the crops needed to survive. Winter is the strongest of all three, but primarily an impartial being; it preserves balance by forbidding Darkness from crushing Light entirely when it is weak, but otherwise cares little for mortal affairs. Each are respected by the Olmmai for their power, but they turn instead to the spirits of tribal heroes for prayers. Olmmai myth is filled with dozens of stories of champions from ages past who accomplished some great deed or challenge, frequently involving either trickery or raw fortitude to defeat one of the three elemental forces. An Olmmai setting out on a journey or other important endeavor will evoke the appropriate champion(s) for their blessings, reciting a summary of the legend that demonstrates they are remembered as the appropriate patron and making a symbolic offering unique to the champion in question. Outside of their home village, it's generally a requirement to also beseech any local protector or guardian heroes and thank them for allowing the Olmmai's own heroes to enter their territory and render aid; outside Olmmai lands entirely, they'll substitute whatever local god is appropriate instead.

The Glyphstone

2016-12-24, 03:10 AM

There's one big theme I have barely touched on so far, which I listed back at the beginning as #3: Names Have Power. I made true-names a core concept of the fluff behind magic in Broken World,but that's more of a metaphysical aspect and not one reflected in the world itself. Thus, I decided to make Names and the power thereof, whether real or imagined, the foundation of this next segment, the fourth major human civilization.

I'm going to just call this society the Riverlands for now, and possibly come back with a better name latter. It's a good name for the land itself, either way, because there are a lot of rivers. Riverland is in a moderate, temperate climate, but somewhere along its western border is a magical vortex that forms a gate into the Elemental Plane of Water. All the water that perpetually flows from this gate cascades to the east, forming four large rivers and dozens of interconnecting smaller rivers between them on its way to the ocean. Logically, a rice-like plant is going to be a big portion of their diet, along with fish, and food will be one of their primary exports to other countries. Spring floods from melting ice are a problem, so riverside construction (which means most construction) will be on posts or pylons for safety. The extensive river network would also play into how they became a coherent civilization; the squabbling barbarian tribes inhabiting the area were expert boat handlers, so once they settled down a bit and started allying with each other, the burgeoning society inherits a widespread transportation network useful for administration and coordination.

Now, as far as names, the Riverlanders take them very seriously, as a defining aspect of their culture. Every native of the Riverlands has a five-part name, segments of which they share according to increasing familiarity. A person's first name is their clan name, identifying which of Riverland's many extended clans they're most closely related to, and is how they identify themselves to total strangers. To a casual acquaintance, someone they interact with on a regular basis but aren't particularly close to, they'll go by two names – their clan-name, and their river-name, which of the four great rivers they grew up closest to. The third part of a person's name is the name of their home town or village, shared with people they would consider a friend or business partner. In antiquity, this would indicate sufficient trust in a person that you could tell them where your home was, both the river to indicate general region and the specific village along that river. The fourth name, shared only with close friends, is their family name or surname. The fifth and most personal name is known only to relatives, family members, and best friends so closely bonded that they might as well be family. There is also technically a person's 'sixth name' – their magical Truename, identifying them as an individual in the universal speech; only magicians know or have any need to learn their truenames do so, though, so it's not an element of Riverlands culture the way the first five are.

If all of that was confusing, let's structure an example. A Riverlander hunter in a tavern ordering some ale might, if asked, tell the bartender his name was Smith. To the blacksmith he visits to have his weapons and armor touched up whenever he's in town, the name he'll go by is Mississippi Smith. Amongst his regular group of drinking buddies and fellow hunters, they'll know him as Memphis Mississippi Smith. One of those hunters might have saved his life during a hunt, establishing enough of a close friendship that they frequently go hunting together, and to that particular hunter he shares his four-part name of Memphis Mississippi Jackson Smith. Enough time and trust and the friendship blossoms into something deeper, upon which he's likely to bring his new partner home to his family, who would already know him as Memphis Mississippi Joseph Jackson Smith.

Thus, the length of the given name one knows for a Riverlander is a direct indication of the strength of their personal relationship, if any, and they have strict customs set up around the practice. Addressing someone by a name more intimate than you've been formally told is a serious etiquette breach, and addressing someone by a name you do officially 'know' in the presence of people who haven't been granted that connection is also fairly offensive. Thus, they also embrace a prolific use of nicknames, both to distinguish themselves from others who might share several names and to avoid the faux pas of accidentally revealing more of someone's name to a stranger than they already know. In groups of equal status, such as the group of hunters mentioned, our example would likely answer simply to 'Memphis' as that is the most personal of the names they are all guaranteed to know him by.

On a more local level, the Riverlanders will give specific names to every natural feature of even mild prominence. Any hill, stream, forest grove, or similar item will be named by the inhabitants of the nearest town; across the entire country there is necessarily a great deal of redundancy as a result.

Now, I've alluded to clans as a social group, but I'm still fuzzy on the governmental structure of the Riverlands; it's a feudal monarchy of some sort, but details need to be worked out before I can write them. So this is Part 1 of 2; possibly by then I'll have a name for them as well.

The Glyphstone

2017-01-03, 12:30 AM

This took me longer than I expected, I had to tear everything down and start from scratch a few times. A big part of that was how I kept trying to find ways to justify the end result I wanted with my starting premise, despite them really not meshing up, and in the process getting distracted by comparisons to the rest of the world. I'd noticed, in particular, that so far 2/3 of the societies I'd worked out were less unified nations and more like confederacies of allied states, with the remainder being essentially 'run' by its bureaucracy. To make a long story short, this helped me finally settle a detail I'd been struggling with for a very long time, specifically the short-term timeline of the setting. All the stable, large civilizations are still growing out of their tribal stage, which has led me to arbitrarily peg the average age of the human realms at no more than a few hundred years old. That's long enough for the coherent identities I've established, and short enough that it's not demanding an unreasonable level of social stasis or technological paralysis. Anywhere from 300 to 500 years, I think.

Back on topic, the governmental structure of the Riverlands. Similar to the Olmmai, the Riverlanders are a conglomeration of extended tribal groups. Unlike the Olmmai, their unification as a coherent group was based on decades to centuries of inter-tribal warfare, with stronger tribes/clans gradually gobbling up and assimilating their weaker neighbors. Eventually, their sizes grew and their numbers shrank to where they couldn't easily overwhelm each other, but the chaotic criss-crossing network of rivers mean it would be immensely difficult to prevent enemies from attacking. This would initially cause an extended period of detente, leading into trade agreements, then alliances. The trade and military treaties, in turn, resulted in new problems, namely that of the state of the rivers and crude canals. At the time, the clans were completely independent and officially self-sufficient, including being responsible for maintaining 'their' portions of the waterways fit for travel. When they fell behind from lack of labor, lack of money, or simply lack of interest, it caused conflicts and disagreements when treaty clauses failed to be fulfilled, or with other clans who needed those waterways intact to fulfill treaties of their own. So the clan chiefs started talking, and came to the conclusion that someone needed to be in charge of all the waterways. None of them would give that power and authority to another chief, though, and everyone wanted it for themselves. The chiefs of the larger and more powerful clans were deadlocked, leaving the weaker clan chiefs with less prestige at stake to come up with what eventually became the solution.

Rather than hand over responsibility for the river networks to an existing clan, it was suggested that they establish an independent group – essentially, a new, artificial clan – composed of members from all the existing clans. It would tithe resources from all the other clans, but have no authority outside of what was necessary to maintain and improve the waterways, as well as make rules governing travel through them. Combined with a reaffirming of the existing treaties between the clans into perpetuity, what became known to historians as the Council of Unity was the birth of the Riverlands Union. It was a political kludge born of necessity, and initially seen with great suspicion; the first Union Primarch was, not without reason, seen as a puppet of his former clan with independence being more of a formality. Successive generations, along with several clauses that had been subtly slipped into the Union Charter, gave the Union and its Primarch enough breathing room to establish independent function in fact as well as name. The clans still ruled sovereign within their own individual territories, but the Union operated and improved the canal network that held them all together even within those territories, giving it immense authority and power that further increased when the municipal guard force created to protect said canals expanded over time until it became first the unofficial, then the official, army of the Union with clan militias strictly subordinate to it as well.

Now, in the 'current day', the Union itself refers both to the group of clans, who have had long enough to grow accustomed to a concept of national identity that they at least identify as a common block, and to the de facto national civil service. The latter has grown beyond its origins as the 'canal-clan', though it's still seen as an unofficial clan in its own right,. Despite its relatively small membership equivalent to a minor clan, its authority over transportation and the military give it power equal to any greater clan. It's grown quite selective about its membership, too; formally joining its ranks requires passing some stringent tests of ability in addition to the formal renunciation of previous clan ties. They consider their official neutrality in inter-clan politics and disputes to be a badge of honor of sorts; carrying clan grudges or rivalries with you into service is dreadfully tasteless, while being proven of clan-related bias in the course of your duties can be grounds for unceremonious ejection from the ranks. Most people spend a fixed term doing civil work before retiring back to their birth clans, though a small minority spend their entire lives in the service. Being a member of one of the multi-generational service families marks their internal aristocracy, in parallel to the oldest and most established lineages amongst the clans.