Tzi
2015-09-18, 01:17 PM
The world of Astyra is a very diverse world, a world of many different races, cultures, languages, nationalities and religions. It is also fundamentally an alien world to all of them. As a matter of design elements, this is going to be a somewhat difficult balancing act between low-magic and plausible high magic. As little sense as that may make, hopefully it becomes obvious later what I mean.
Core Lore and Design elements:
Race origins are distinctly unknown and in world the subject of much acedemic debate. One theory claims that all the races were engineered from a common ancestor, others establish more mundane origins, some claim we all came from another world.
Religion: Much like Ebberon, its your religious beliefs that determine domains. This is an age when many more Universalist Religions have arisen and many of the old Civic religions have fallen or reformed to be Universal.
Kingdoms, Nations and States are effectively modern. Constitutional Monarchies are common, increasingly outright republics and democracies, even Socialist revolutions and Ideological divisions and cracking the world into pieces.
Firearms and modernish weapons exist. Think the grand period between 1840-1929 to give one a technological framework.
Magic is presumed to be a work in progress. While many spells exist or are theoretically possible, not every spell in the book has been cast in living memory.
Languages: Effectivelly there is no "Common," or "Elven" ect in the strictest sense of the words. Languages MOSTLY work as they do on earth.
Lore Background:
As rarely known historical fact, all the player races on Astyra are colonists. This world was not theirs and thus all creates that are Aberrations are the remnants of pre-colonization and terraformation lifeforms. Over three thousand years ago the races, creatures arrived and forever changed Astyra. Why they came is lost to history, particularly elder legends tell of a war in heaven. There is a vast, powerless hunk of metal and crystal lodged on one continent that is in all ancient tongues called a "Ark," but how one enters it, what it does or how it works is unknown.
Since then the races of the world have colonized, spread out, conquered, and warred with one another. In recent history, the Elves crafted a vast global super state at one point, an attempt at formal unity, peace, and harmony. Though the experiment failed after 130 years in action. Leading to the Dominion Wars, Succession conflicts and the over all breakup of the global dominions. In that world that emerged was a balkenized, divided world that is attempting to keep its own peace but may once more fail to do so. And in the age of interconnectedness and treaties may simply fall into massive global chaos once more.
... Now have some music, (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYb2dXUrcSo) and imagine this magical world.
Core Lore and Design elements:
Race origins are distinctly unknown and in world the subject of much acedemic debate. One theory claims that all the races were engineered from a common ancestor, others establish more mundane origins, some claim we all came from another world.
Religion: Much like Ebberon, its your religious beliefs that determine domains. This is an age when many more Universalist Religions have arisen and many of the old Civic religions have fallen or reformed to be Universal.
Kingdoms, Nations and States are effectively modern. Constitutional Monarchies are common, increasingly outright republics and democracies, even Socialist revolutions and Ideological divisions and cracking the world into pieces.
Firearms and modernish weapons exist. Think the grand period between 1840-1929 to give one a technological framework.
Magic is presumed to be a work in progress. While many spells exist or are theoretically possible, not every spell in the book has been cast in living memory.
Languages: Effectivelly there is no "Common," or "Elven" ect in the strictest sense of the words. Languages MOSTLY work as they do on earth.
Lore Background:
As rarely known historical fact, all the player races on Astyra are colonists. This world was not theirs and thus all creates that are Aberrations are the remnants of pre-colonization and terraformation lifeforms. Over three thousand years ago the races, creatures arrived and forever changed Astyra. Why they came is lost to history, particularly elder legends tell of a war in heaven. There is a vast, powerless hunk of metal and crystal lodged on one continent that is in all ancient tongues called a "Ark," but how one enters it, what it does or how it works is unknown.
Since then the races of the world have colonized, spread out, conquered, and warred with one another. In recent history, the Elves crafted a vast global super state at one point, an attempt at formal unity, peace, and harmony. Though the experiment failed after 130 years in action. Leading to the Dominion Wars, Succession conflicts and the over all breakup of the global dominions. In that world that emerged was a balkenized, divided world that is attempting to keep its own peace but may once more fail to do so. And in the age of interconnectedness and treaties may simply fall into massive global chaos once more.
... Now have some music, (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYb2dXUrcSo) and imagine this magical world.