Glensather
2016-03-28, 11:26 PM
00. Intro
Table of Contents
00. Intro (You are Here!)
01. Kingdoms of Man, and Others
Backstory:
Way back in the year 1980, a young man from Britain came to America with his whole life in a suitcase. He ended up in Atlanta, Georgia, and made some friends at the business he worked at. He introduced them to an exciting new board game by Francis Tresham called Civilization. Inspired by the idea of building an Empire where the player, as Emperor, knew how things were to play out in history, they pooled their cash together and bought ADnD 1e, and together crafted a world where they could play out their fantasies both as world makers, shapers of history, and kings and gods. They played in this world, developing it constantly, until 1995, when the DM handed it off to his son, who continued to develop and use the world.
In 2006, this second DM handed the world off to me to continue its legacy, as his own children were too young to enjoy it, and he had lost interest. For ten years I've continued to develop and create campaigns and adventures in this world, using its history and its future to come up with stories of my own. Now, I want to pass that knowledge on to you, and maybe together we can continue to shape the world.
Welcome my friends, to Solaris.
Overview:
Solaris is a world with a history spanning millenia. Taking inspiration from the real world, from social issues to parts of its history down to its world map (Earth, upside down and flipped; in the early 90s they melted the ice caps too), its story is just as unique and flavored as our own. Over the course of 30 years, 200 pages of adventure, history, legend, war, empire, magic, and life have been created. Kingdoms have risen, fell, and came back for a second round. Evil wizards have destroyed the landscape as quickly as druids have rebuilt it. Magical superweapons capable of destroying all life on Solaris have been built, with varying degrees of success and failure. At its height, civilization was so advanced it made ours look pathetic, and at its lowest, the most primitive of orc hordes made the elves cower in fear.
Heroes have ventured forth time and again, and just when it seems like the world has been brought to peace, another warlord or wizard or empire rises up to combat the status quo, and the world is shaken again. There's always a need for heroes, great and small, and modern day Solaris is in dire need of heroes.
The Creation Myth, and Its Origins - The Age of Myths:
The creation of Solaris started off simple. In 1981, it was extremely bare-bones: Essentially, the first version of Solaris was a typical fantasy world that the players used to get accustomed to how Dungeons and Dragons 1.0 worked. It was never meant to be the main campaign setting; hence why the map is just the Earth upside-down and flipped. The DM at the time wrote down an excuse plot of an evil Wizard who threatened a peaceful kingdom that was more or less based off of King George's England, just with some actual Sorcery and Elves thrown in. After the first few adventures, however, the players got attached to their high-level characters, and the DM attached to his world. He slapped a name on it (At the time it was just "New Earth") and went into some more serious world-building. Some of its elements are cliched now, but at the time were pretty new to the group.
The creation myth states that for millenia, kingdoms of elves, dwarves, and orks (originally Uruk-Hai, later retconned into DnD Orcs) ruled the land around their version of the Mediterranean Sea, vying for dominance as dictated by God (singular, uniquely for a fantasy setting), and that the dominant race would ascend to Heaven. Magic was wild, with only the Elves having the patience and knowledge to tame it for their own use. The dwarves combated this gift with unique resistance to magic, while Orcs simply used numbers and slave races to bolster their armies. Civilization was very basic; constant struggle had stalled technology at a bronze-age city-state level, similar to the Ancient Era of Civilization games (another inspiration during the age of DnD 2.0). Disease and famine were commonplace as arcane magic at the time was only capable of destroying life, and great tracts of land were unsuitable for farming.
This was the Age of Myth (originally just the "First Era" - named so because it was run during DnD 1.0 - but I retconned the name when I acquired the setting. I named it such because this time period is the one least fleshed out in the original DM's notes), and for many centuries, it seemed like the constant wars would never end.
It wasn't until dwarves travelled far to the north into what we would call Africa, through the Great Desert, that they would meet the Humans. Highly advanced comparatively with mastery over Iron and, uniquely, having access to Divine Magic, it was at this crucial moment in history that humans learned of the other races and, of course, dwarves learned of humans. They traded gold - which humans coveted but had little access to - for Iron, and used their advanced weapons to defeat the Orc strongholds, scattering the race into roving bands of brutes, much like classic DnD Orcs. They also managed to push Elves away from their ancestral homelands (basically the German and French forests) all the way to the Southern Coastline, and would have won if the Elves hadn't been secretly trading and allying themselves with a different band of humans, from the Far West - The Chinese.
Yes, really. You see, the Xia Dynasty really did exist, but their defeat in Ancient Chinese history did not just come from what would become the Shang dynasty. Instead, what happened was what they called the "Great Movement", when some... force pulled a significant portion of Xia Chinese to New Earth. Not just the people. but entire cities and towns were ripped straight off the face of the Earth and transplanted to this New Earth. Many believed they had been taken to Heaven, but once they realized that life was just as hard here as it was back "home", they instead settled into this new life. Now known as the Eternal Xia Empire and working with the Great Dragons, they sought to restore balance to the conflict between Elf and Dwarf and gave them advanced technology, taught them how to handle magic more efficiently, even lent them soldiers and generals. During the Age of Myth, nothing was off limits.
But how did this happen? And how did humans become so advanced compared to the others? This is where the original PCs come into play, and it's also home to the biggest twist of the Age of Myth/DnD 1.0. It's also the most contentious.
The story, according to the notes, goes that before the Chinese, before the northern humans unified, there was a much smaller "Great Movement"... more of a "yank". The victims were a group of humans from Earth again. This time, though, it was a group of humans from the 27th Century. An entire town from Antarctica, called the Antarctic Research Site (Later Antarctic Research Coalition, or ARC), was pulled to this New Earth. After much confusion, they decided to aid this version of Ancient Humanity that, at the time, was still living like cavemen. They researched the energy we know as "Magic", studied it, mastered it, and put together a plan known as "Project Humanity". Essentially, they knew the rules to DnD, knew how civilization advanced, knew how to make stable, orderly kingdoms... they were Player Characters with metagame knowledge. As native humanity advanced to a city-state level, the ARC perfected their research, and they sent out a group of 4 "Agents" - the actual PCs - to help unify humanity. This was very early in the Age of Myths.
Here is where things get a little fuzzy - as I said, the notes here are scattered across ink-stained pages from five different writers, each with their own ideas. As it goes, it appears that over the time it took from humanity to advanced from hunter-gatherers to basic settlements, the ARC more or less forgot how they got here, and eventually saw themselves as natives to the population of New Earth. Most of their technology had broken down; first their energy source (the first DM knew that Solar cells existed but did not forsee how advanced they would become, instead describing "great tracts" of solar cells that in todays world would power the town several times over) broke down and, lacking the know-how to fix them, soon lost electricity, which meant they lost their computers, their advanced weapons, their machinery, and soon were barely above Iron Age humans with their tech, excepting one 65-ton Battlemech (yes, really; they retconned one in after 1985. I assume they must have picked up BattleTech at some point) that they didn't know how to draw energy from and no one knew how to pilot. All they knew of was their mission to uplift ancient humanity.
There were apparently many adventures using mostly the same characters, although by the end of it they appear to have wiped at least twice, if not more. All of these adventures were done with the end goal of unifying humanity for when the dwarves discovered them (the PCs did play as dwarves and elves occasionally but these seem to have been retconned out). Their adventures included:
Several Modules, including classics such as Tomb of Horrors.
At least 3 evil wizards, one of which built a superweapon that was essentially an earthquake machine, just magical.
An entire kingdom that was exiled to where Liberia would be on a map of Africa. This one is important as that kingdom would continue to be a thorn in everyone's side for the next 30 real life years.
An incursion by some roving bands of Orcs. I'm not sure about the canonicity of this one.
Two undead uprisings.
A cult that followed a mad cleric.
An ARC civilian who thought he was literally Odin and managed to get the Battlemech moving, but was ultimately killed. The 65-tonner was later retconned out entirely.
A vampire prince who threatened a political alliance between several kingdoms.
The PCs and their weapons passed on into legend, and by the end of the Age of Myths several pieces of their gear had turned into artifacts, including:
Hunter's Edge, a bow that could kill "5 men with 1 arrow".
ARC Cannon, an ARC rifle enchanted to fire lasers (later Disintegration rays).
Thief's Wit, a set of lockpicks that could open any lock.
The Master's Hammer, a warhammer that could Cleave before Cleaving was a thing.
Axe of Virtue, a battleaxe that reduced damage taken from opponents in the front.
Wand of Rapture, which killed people by making them eurphoric.
Scroll of Unlife. Never used, it was purported to end the world if read.
Scepter of Gods. Any who held it could control a kingdom without question.
And many more, but their properties were lost to time.
Between adventures, the PCs would get to the meat and bones of why they were doing this in the first place: Building empires and Kingdoms. In the next part, I will discuss the Human (and other) Kingdoms of the Age of Myths.
Post-script:
One of the most interesting things about these notes is that they do not have hard numbers, nor do they mention rules from DnD 1.0. It's great for me because I know next to nothing about 1.0, but also it seems they were written this way in the event that the group jumped ship to another gaming system. There are three periods of time where this very thing happend, once with each DM. These are the Interregnum periods, which I'll also discuss when those points come up. Bascially, each group has at one point experimented with other gaming systems during pivotal points; once when ADnD 2.0 came out, again when 3.0 came out, and finally in 2010 when Pathfinder came out. It seems almost tradition for these periods to happen, and best yet, it seems that all or most of these events are canon. Furthermore, every DM including myself has experimented with GURPS, which I find hilarious.
Anyway the point I was getting at is that this setting doesn't have to be ADnD. Because of the lack of hard numbers and rules, the setting can be easily adapted to other game systems. There are a list of "rules", but they're more like guidelines.
I'm also willing to answer questions about things I have yet to or forget to bring up. There are a lot of pages of notes that only get more detailed. Compared to his dad, DM 2 was meticulous with his world building (although the setting moved away from Empire Building when DM 2 was in charge, there was still quite a bit of it) and most of the notes are his. Most of mine are in my head, and I have a file with keywords to trigger my memories about things, mostly to keep nosy PCs from reading about upcoming plans.
Table of Contents
00. Intro (You are Here!)
01. Kingdoms of Man, and Others
Backstory:
Way back in the year 1980, a young man from Britain came to America with his whole life in a suitcase. He ended up in Atlanta, Georgia, and made some friends at the business he worked at. He introduced them to an exciting new board game by Francis Tresham called Civilization. Inspired by the idea of building an Empire where the player, as Emperor, knew how things were to play out in history, they pooled their cash together and bought ADnD 1e, and together crafted a world where they could play out their fantasies both as world makers, shapers of history, and kings and gods. They played in this world, developing it constantly, until 1995, when the DM handed it off to his son, who continued to develop and use the world.
In 2006, this second DM handed the world off to me to continue its legacy, as his own children were too young to enjoy it, and he had lost interest. For ten years I've continued to develop and create campaigns and adventures in this world, using its history and its future to come up with stories of my own. Now, I want to pass that knowledge on to you, and maybe together we can continue to shape the world.
Welcome my friends, to Solaris.
Overview:
Solaris is a world with a history spanning millenia. Taking inspiration from the real world, from social issues to parts of its history down to its world map (Earth, upside down and flipped; in the early 90s they melted the ice caps too), its story is just as unique and flavored as our own. Over the course of 30 years, 200 pages of adventure, history, legend, war, empire, magic, and life have been created. Kingdoms have risen, fell, and came back for a second round. Evil wizards have destroyed the landscape as quickly as druids have rebuilt it. Magical superweapons capable of destroying all life on Solaris have been built, with varying degrees of success and failure. At its height, civilization was so advanced it made ours look pathetic, and at its lowest, the most primitive of orc hordes made the elves cower in fear.
Heroes have ventured forth time and again, and just when it seems like the world has been brought to peace, another warlord or wizard or empire rises up to combat the status quo, and the world is shaken again. There's always a need for heroes, great and small, and modern day Solaris is in dire need of heroes.
The Creation Myth, and Its Origins - The Age of Myths:
The creation of Solaris started off simple. In 1981, it was extremely bare-bones: Essentially, the first version of Solaris was a typical fantasy world that the players used to get accustomed to how Dungeons and Dragons 1.0 worked. It was never meant to be the main campaign setting; hence why the map is just the Earth upside-down and flipped. The DM at the time wrote down an excuse plot of an evil Wizard who threatened a peaceful kingdom that was more or less based off of King George's England, just with some actual Sorcery and Elves thrown in. After the first few adventures, however, the players got attached to their high-level characters, and the DM attached to his world. He slapped a name on it (At the time it was just "New Earth") and went into some more serious world-building. Some of its elements are cliched now, but at the time were pretty new to the group.
The creation myth states that for millenia, kingdoms of elves, dwarves, and orks (originally Uruk-Hai, later retconned into DnD Orcs) ruled the land around their version of the Mediterranean Sea, vying for dominance as dictated by God (singular, uniquely for a fantasy setting), and that the dominant race would ascend to Heaven. Magic was wild, with only the Elves having the patience and knowledge to tame it for their own use. The dwarves combated this gift with unique resistance to magic, while Orcs simply used numbers and slave races to bolster their armies. Civilization was very basic; constant struggle had stalled technology at a bronze-age city-state level, similar to the Ancient Era of Civilization games (another inspiration during the age of DnD 2.0). Disease and famine were commonplace as arcane magic at the time was only capable of destroying life, and great tracts of land were unsuitable for farming.
This was the Age of Myth (originally just the "First Era" - named so because it was run during DnD 1.0 - but I retconned the name when I acquired the setting. I named it such because this time period is the one least fleshed out in the original DM's notes), and for many centuries, it seemed like the constant wars would never end.
It wasn't until dwarves travelled far to the north into what we would call Africa, through the Great Desert, that they would meet the Humans. Highly advanced comparatively with mastery over Iron and, uniquely, having access to Divine Magic, it was at this crucial moment in history that humans learned of the other races and, of course, dwarves learned of humans. They traded gold - which humans coveted but had little access to - for Iron, and used their advanced weapons to defeat the Orc strongholds, scattering the race into roving bands of brutes, much like classic DnD Orcs. They also managed to push Elves away from their ancestral homelands (basically the German and French forests) all the way to the Southern Coastline, and would have won if the Elves hadn't been secretly trading and allying themselves with a different band of humans, from the Far West - The Chinese.
Yes, really. You see, the Xia Dynasty really did exist, but their defeat in Ancient Chinese history did not just come from what would become the Shang dynasty. Instead, what happened was what they called the "Great Movement", when some... force pulled a significant portion of Xia Chinese to New Earth. Not just the people. but entire cities and towns were ripped straight off the face of the Earth and transplanted to this New Earth. Many believed they had been taken to Heaven, but once they realized that life was just as hard here as it was back "home", they instead settled into this new life. Now known as the Eternal Xia Empire and working with the Great Dragons, they sought to restore balance to the conflict between Elf and Dwarf and gave them advanced technology, taught them how to handle magic more efficiently, even lent them soldiers and generals. During the Age of Myth, nothing was off limits.
But how did this happen? And how did humans become so advanced compared to the others? This is where the original PCs come into play, and it's also home to the biggest twist of the Age of Myth/DnD 1.0. It's also the most contentious.
The story, according to the notes, goes that before the Chinese, before the northern humans unified, there was a much smaller "Great Movement"... more of a "yank". The victims were a group of humans from Earth again. This time, though, it was a group of humans from the 27th Century. An entire town from Antarctica, called the Antarctic Research Site (Later Antarctic Research Coalition, or ARC), was pulled to this New Earth. After much confusion, they decided to aid this version of Ancient Humanity that, at the time, was still living like cavemen. They researched the energy we know as "Magic", studied it, mastered it, and put together a plan known as "Project Humanity". Essentially, they knew the rules to DnD, knew how civilization advanced, knew how to make stable, orderly kingdoms... they were Player Characters with metagame knowledge. As native humanity advanced to a city-state level, the ARC perfected their research, and they sent out a group of 4 "Agents" - the actual PCs - to help unify humanity. This was very early in the Age of Myths.
Here is where things get a little fuzzy - as I said, the notes here are scattered across ink-stained pages from five different writers, each with their own ideas. As it goes, it appears that over the time it took from humanity to advanced from hunter-gatherers to basic settlements, the ARC more or less forgot how they got here, and eventually saw themselves as natives to the population of New Earth. Most of their technology had broken down; first their energy source (the first DM knew that Solar cells existed but did not forsee how advanced they would become, instead describing "great tracts" of solar cells that in todays world would power the town several times over) broke down and, lacking the know-how to fix them, soon lost electricity, which meant they lost their computers, their advanced weapons, their machinery, and soon were barely above Iron Age humans with their tech, excepting one 65-ton Battlemech (yes, really; they retconned one in after 1985. I assume they must have picked up BattleTech at some point) that they didn't know how to draw energy from and no one knew how to pilot. All they knew of was their mission to uplift ancient humanity.
There were apparently many adventures using mostly the same characters, although by the end of it they appear to have wiped at least twice, if not more. All of these adventures were done with the end goal of unifying humanity for when the dwarves discovered them (the PCs did play as dwarves and elves occasionally but these seem to have been retconned out). Their adventures included:
Several Modules, including classics such as Tomb of Horrors.
At least 3 evil wizards, one of which built a superweapon that was essentially an earthquake machine, just magical.
An entire kingdom that was exiled to where Liberia would be on a map of Africa. This one is important as that kingdom would continue to be a thorn in everyone's side for the next 30 real life years.
An incursion by some roving bands of Orcs. I'm not sure about the canonicity of this one.
Two undead uprisings.
A cult that followed a mad cleric.
An ARC civilian who thought he was literally Odin and managed to get the Battlemech moving, but was ultimately killed. The 65-tonner was later retconned out entirely.
A vampire prince who threatened a political alliance between several kingdoms.
The PCs and their weapons passed on into legend, and by the end of the Age of Myths several pieces of their gear had turned into artifacts, including:
Hunter's Edge, a bow that could kill "5 men with 1 arrow".
ARC Cannon, an ARC rifle enchanted to fire lasers (later Disintegration rays).
Thief's Wit, a set of lockpicks that could open any lock.
The Master's Hammer, a warhammer that could Cleave before Cleaving was a thing.
Axe of Virtue, a battleaxe that reduced damage taken from opponents in the front.
Wand of Rapture, which killed people by making them eurphoric.
Scroll of Unlife. Never used, it was purported to end the world if read.
Scepter of Gods. Any who held it could control a kingdom without question.
And many more, but their properties were lost to time.
Between adventures, the PCs would get to the meat and bones of why they were doing this in the first place: Building empires and Kingdoms. In the next part, I will discuss the Human (and other) Kingdoms of the Age of Myths.
Post-script:
One of the most interesting things about these notes is that they do not have hard numbers, nor do they mention rules from DnD 1.0. It's great for me because I know next to nothing about 1.0, but also it seems they were written this way in the event that the group jumped ship to another gaming system. There are three periods of time where this very thing happend, once with each DM. These are the Interregnum periods, which I'll also discuss when those points come up. Bascially, each group has at one point experimented with other gaming systems during pivotal points; once when ADnD 2.0 came out, again when 3.0 came out, and finally in 2010 when Pathfinder came out. It seems almost tradition for these periods to happen, and best yet, it seems that all or most of these events are canon. Furthermore, every DM including myself has experimented with GURPS, which I find hilarious.
Anyway the point I was getting at is that this setting doesn't have to be ADnD. Because of the lack of hard numbers and rules, the setting can be easily adapted to other game systems. There are a list of "rules", but they're more like guidelines.
I'm also willing to answer questions about things I have yet to or forget to bring up. There are a lot of pages of notes that only get more detailed. Compared to his dad, DM 2 was meticulous with his world building (although the setting moved away from Empire Building when DM 2 was in charge, there was still quite a bit of it) and most of the notes are his. Most of mine are in my head, and I have a file with keywords to trigger my memories about things, mostly to keep nosy PCs from reading about upcoming plans.