campaign setting, work in progress.

[rankrath]

ok, so after lurking on this board for a few months I finally got off my rear and started working on a project. This is my first homebrew work, and I'm not sure how cohesive it is (working while stuck at home with food poisoning). All comments are welcomed, thanks in advance.


Balskiva
A low magic campaign setting.

Section 1:
Gods and planes.

The gods


The gods in Balskiva are based around the calendar, so to understand them one must first know the Balskivan calendar. The year is broken up into eight months, each twenty-eight days long, for a total of 224 days per year. Weeks are still seven days long and days are still twenty-four hours.
Each god has a month named after them, and that month is the time when that god’s power is the strongest. Two gods also share each season, and depending on when their month falls, they are known as the first and second god of each season.

Goddess of first spring: Mola’ena
Month: Mola
The first month of the year, Mola is a time of renewal, for Mola’ena is the god of healing and of rebirth, providing the earth with care after the ravages of winter. She is the lover of Suil’vipis, god of first summer, and the enemy of Hyl, goddess of second winter. Her favorite weapon is the quarterstaff. Common followers of Mola’ena include druids, rangers, and clerics of the animal and healing domains.
Domains: animal, healing, plant, and earth.
Alignment: Neutral.
weapon: longsword

God of second spring: Sel’vagem
Month: Sel
God of tricks, drink and music, nothing pleases Sel’vagem more than a good party or practical joke. Carefree and unattached, his followers know not to expect too much in the way of aid or blessing, and even the clerics don’t seem to take him seriously. At the end of each month, Sel’vagem’s followers hold massive celebrations at their temples, and he graces the best one with his presence. Common followers include bards, good and neutral rogues, barbarians and brewers.
Alignment: Chaotic neutral
Domains: chaos, trickery, luck, travel, war
Favorite weapon: rapier.

God of first summer: Suil’vipis
Month: Suil
God of growth, Suil’vipis is the god of farmers and others who survive by working and hunting from the land. In love with Mola’ena, Suil’vipis once married Hyl, however he left her after she revealed her true nature.
Alignment: chaotic good
Domains: good, chaos, plant, earth, protection
Weapon: sickle

God of second Summer: Guoru
Month: Guo
The god of war, Guoru is fierce and vicious, hating quite and cold, and reveling in war and fire. He often touches off forest fires for fun, and loathes both Hyl and K’reou, the winter deities. Common followers include barbarians, fighters, and pyromaniacly inclined spellcasters.
Alignment: chaotic evil
Domains: war, chaos, destruction, fire, strength
Weapon: bastard sword.

Goddess of first autumn: Bou’loam
Month: Boul
Goddess of harvest, Bou’loam sees it as her job to make sure everyone has enough to make it through the winter. Sister of Sel’vegam, she shares his affinity for celebrations and drink, and encourages religious ceremonies to be harvests and parties, thanking the gods for the crop they raised. Common followers are druids,
alignment: neutral good
Domains: good, protection, earth, healing,
weapon: sickle

Goddess of second autumn: Del’fst
Month: Del
Goddess of death, Del’fst is morose and serious. Taking no joy in life, Del’fst sees it as her sole goal in life to bring an end to the summer celebrations. She tolerates Hyl and K’reuo, and cannot stand any other god. Common followers include undertakers, necromancers and chartered accountants.
Alignment: lawful neutral
Domains: death, destruction, earth, law
Weapon: all axes.

Goddess of first winter: Hyl
Month: Hyl’mad
Known as the scornful one to her followers, Hyl is a goddess of deception and seduction.
Full of wrath, she is quick to anger and takes cruel revenge for the slightest offensives, and condemns those she sees as the perpetrators of a major offensive to freeze forever.
Hyl seduced and married Suil’vipis back at the dawn of the world, bearing a son, then showed him the “kinky” side of her personality, driving Suil’vipis away out of horror.
Alignment: Lawful evil
Domains: evil, law, trickery, death, knowledge.
Weapon: dagger and whip

God of second winter: K’reuo
Month: Kre
Guoru’s brother and opposite, K’reuo is just as unpredictable as Guoru, however rather than torching fires and causing panic, K’reuo prefers slower, more certain means of destruction, freezing the unwary traveler slowly and destroying farms with icy blizzards.
Common followers include mages who favor ice over fire, methodical rogues, and evil druids.
Alignment: Neutral evil
Domains: evil, death, destruction, war, air
Weapon: mace



The Planes
The planar system in Balskiva contains twelve planes, split into three groups.

The Material plane and Hell are “real” planes, i.e., creatures on these planes not natively of the mythical plane have real substance. The material plane holds all normal and magical creatures, and hell is the home of the demons and devils.

The Mythical plane serves as the gateway between all planes, and links the alignment planes and the real planes. The only creatures natively of the mythical plane are those that would be incorporeal or ethereal on the material plane.

The nine planes of alignment are the living place of outsiders, and they live on the planes respective of their alignment. Note that demons and devils occupy Hell, not the chaotic evil plane.

[Umarth]

Couple questions:

Low magic setting (woot my favorite) but all you tell us about is high magic stuff (the gods and multiple planes of existance). What makes it low magic?

Do all the diffrent languages and cultures have the same names for the gods? For the months? The number of months in a year?

[rankrath]

Couple questions:

Low magic setting (woot my favorite) but all you tell us about is high magic stuff (the gods and multiple planes of existance). What makes it low magic?


I probably should have mentioned this, but this is one of many bits to the setting. I'm starting with the big picture and working in, starting off with the gods and planes, moving to countries, then races, then classes.



Do all the diffrent languages and cultures have the same names for the gods? For the months? The number of months in a year?


Yea, the gods are universaly known and accepted.

[rankrath]

Section 2:
Rule and Fluff changes

Magic

Arcane Magic is another element, similar to fire, earth, air or water. Most people have no idea of the type of forces that surround them, as only a select few, known as adapts, bards and sorcerers can sense this fifth element. Adapts are those with a “limited” connection to magic. Bards manifest their power through the arts, and sorcerers are those who are the most in tune with arcane magic.
Note that wizards are not a playable class in Balskiva.
One would think that with such an abundance of magic, powerful spell are easy to use, but that is not the case. When one casts any spell that involves interplanar travel, all spells of the polymorph school, and all ninth level spells ,they must make a DC 15 + the spell level will save or become fatigued. Also, wish, limited wish, and time stop are all now divine spells, and not arcane spells.

Divine: Divine magic is power requested and granted by the gods. As such, Paladins, druids and rangers must worship a god in the same way clerics do, but they do not gain domain spells. Druids can loose their power in the same way a cleric and paladin can, but only if they cause massive intentional damage to the natural world, such as burning down a forest without sufficient reason.
Ninth level divine spells and spells that bring people back to life will only be granted by the gods after spending 24 hours per spell in meditation and prayer, and the caster must rest for eight hours after.
Limited wish, wish and time stop will only be granted to extremely devout worshipers after 48 hours of prayer and meditation, and even then only at the discretion of the deity. The caster must then rest for 16 hours after attempting to secure wish, limited wish, or time stop.

Extraplannar travel: Any spell involving extraplannar travel, including the restraints already on them, have a 30% chance of having the opposite effect, i.e. banishing the caster to plane they were trying to summon creatures from, or bringing a random creature from the plane the caster was trying to travel to. (Monsters of correct alignment only)

Undead: Undead of any kind are not evil or “unholy” and therefore cannot be turned or rebuked, nor do druids consider them unnatural. Skeletons and Zombies are just bodies that have been animated, such as an object would be, and are therefore are of neutral alignment. To replace the lost turn or rebuke attempts, clerics gain the ability to smite evil if the are of good alignment, and smite good if they are evil. Neutral clerics may choose either. Attempts to raise undead fail 25% of the time, and have a 10% chance of turning on their creator as soon as they are raised.

Magic Items:
Items that cost 1,000gp and more cannot be created or purchased, they must be found by the party at the DM’s discretion.



Races

Dwarves and gnomes are races of similar interest, both keenly focused on metal work, but have very different philosophies regarding it.

Dwarves are a rather conservative race, preferring to do it the established way, and spend long years checking and double checking any changes they plan to make to the way they learned it. Dwarven homelands exist both in the Darmork Mountains and in steep ravines in the Malson wilderness, where outcasts from the Darmork range tend to make a living. Those who chose to leave their home tend to settle in either Lamork, where they play their superior skills as weapon and armour crafters to the highest bidder, or in Askon-Riam, where the more eccentric dwarves can carve a comfy little niche for themselves.
-2 charisma is replaced by -2 dexterity. Dwarves are tough but not nimble or fast.

Gnomes tend to be wild eyed inventors, loving change for the sake of change. They often make changes to a design irregardless of whether or not it’s an improvement, they want to change it. Gnomes also tend to focus more on jewelry and metal weaving than armour and sword crafting, leaving what they consider the dangerous stuff to humans and dwarves.

Elves: Where dwarves and gnomes both focus on metal and the beauty brought from it, Elves are the masters of most other arts, excluding sculpting. The best of human painters and musicians, writers and poets, pail in comparison to the elven ones, simply because an elf lives many times longer than a human, giving them much more time to both study from the past masters, and to revise and redo their drafts. A human does might feel sick at the notion of taking forty years to write a single novel or write a single song, but to an elf, that is about average. The only problem with this long work period is that elves can, and often do, produce long, involved books measuring in the thousands of pages easily, or paint frescos the size of small forts. This long process has lead to many human to consider elves over focused and trite, and to elves considering humans to be inpatient and shallow. Dwarves and elves get along quite well; each admiring the work of the other, and trade between then is common.

Half-orcs are rare except in Lamork, where the close proximity of serf villages to orcish woods lead to many interracial marriages and rapes. Half orcs are that do not take up the adventurers mantel typically join mercenary units fighting in the Lamork Civil War.
Half orcs no longer suffer from a -2 charisma penalty.

Half-elves tend to live like those they were raised by. If raised by elves, they tend to become sculptors, where they have unrivaled skill, much to the confusion of the elves.
When raised by humans, they tend to become successful Businessmen, owing to their longer lives, allowing then to master the art better than a Human.

Halflings do not exist in Balskiva.

Favored classes no longer exist, xp penalties for multiclassing only apply if character has more than two different classes.

[EvilElitest]

Section 2:
Rule and Fluff changes

Magic

Arcane Magic is another element, similar to fire, earth, air or water. Most people have no idea of the type of forces that surround them, as only a select few, known as adapts, bards and sorcerers can sense this fifth element. Adapts are those with a “limited” connection to magic. Bards manifest their power through the arts, and sorcerers are those who are the most in tune with arcane magic.
Note that wizards are not a playable class in Balskiva.
One would think that with such an abundance of magic, powerful spell are easy to use, but that is not the case. When one casts any spell that involves interplanar travel, all spells of the polymorph school, and all ninth level spells ,they must make a DC 15 + the spell level will save or become fatigued. Also, wish, limited wish, and time stop are all now divine spells.

Divine: Divine magic is power requested and granted by the gods. As such, Paladins, druids and rangers must worship a god in the same way clerics do, but they do not gain domain spells. Druids can loose their power in the same way a cleric and paladin can, but only if they cause massive intentional damage to the natural world, such as burning down a forest without sufficient reason.
Ninth level divine spells and spells that bring people back to life will only be granted by the gods after spending 24 hours per spell in meditation and prayer, and the caster must rest for eight hours after.
Limited wish, wish and time stop will only be granted to extremely devout worshipers after 48 hours of prayer and meditation, and even then only at the discretion of the deity. The caster must then rest for 16 hours after attempting to secure wish, limited wish, or time stop.

Extraplannar travel: Any spell involving extraplannar travel, including the restraints already on them, have a 30% chance of having the opposite effect, i.e. banishing the caster to plane they were trying to summon creatures from, or bringing a random creature from the plane the caster was trying to travel to. (Monsters of correct alignment only)

Undead: Undead of any kind are not evil or “unholy” and therefore cannot be turned or rebuked, nor do druids consider them unnatural. Skeletons and Zombies are just bodies that have been animated, such as an object would be, and are therefore are of neutral alignment. To replace the lost turn or rebuke attempts, clerics gain the ability to smite evil if the are of good alignment, and smite good if they are evil. Neutral clerics may choose either. Attempts to raise undead fail 25% of the time, and have a 10% chance of turning on their creator as soon as they are raised.

Magic Items:
Items that cost 1,000gp and more cannot be created or purchased, they must be found by the party at the DM’s discretion.



Races

Racial variants: No racial variants, such as drow, duegar, sea elves, or suchlike exist. Elves are elves, dwarves are dwarves, and gnomes are gnomes.

Dwarves: -2 charisma is replaced by -2 dexterity. Dwarves are tough but not nimble or fast.

Half-orcs: Half-orcs no longer suffer from a -2 charisma penalty

Favored classes no longer exist, xp penalties for multiclassing only apply if character has more than two different classes.

A tad bit more fluff on how these races fit into this world would be nice, as to an explanation of these race chances
from,
EE

[rankrath]

Section 3: Countries

Selkon
Population: 12,500,000
Capital: Selsoon City
Current system of Government: Theocracy
Racial split: 99% Human
1% others
Culture: the priesthood is in complete control of Selkon, ruling with an iron fist, supported by the holy guard, both inherited positions that make up the upper and middle class respectively. The remaining 80% of the population is oppressed and down trodden, forced to pay enormous tithes to the church, and live under extremely strict laws, for which the punishments range from lashes to stoning.

History: Originally a Monarchy, a growing cult to Hyl staged a coup, ousting and killing the king and most of the nobility in Selsoon and Orkais, resulting in a civil war between the nobles and church. The war lasted from 1255-1261 and led to the division of Selkon into modern day Selkon and Celon.

Disputed area: the area in south-east Selkon is currently disputed with Lamork. As Lamork is currently deep in civil war, Selkon is controls most of the area.


Celon:
Population: 12,000,000
Capital: Mas-Kan
Current system of Government: Oligarchy
Racial split: 40% Humans
29% Gnome
11% Halfling
15%Elf
5% Half-elf
Culture: Some what opposite of Selkon, Celon is organized along a three class line with the nobility on one top, the townsfolk and merchants at the bottom, and the farmers in the middle. The nobles elect a ruling council of eight, who rule over the country in major issues, but leave the nobles to run the day to day on their estates or towns. Modes of address, by rank; (used by all, regardless of status)
Ruling council: “Your high council
Noble with farmed estate; “Your lordship”
Noble with town or city; “Your grace”
Noble with both town and farms; “Sire”
Merchant/townsfolk “goodman”
Farmer: “good sir”



History: Originally Part of Selkon, Celon broke off after a civil war that started when the Priesthood seized power. It is noted that the city of New Orkais was originally called Brughan, but was renamed in honor of the city of Orkais from which no nobility survived the civil war.



Lamork
Population: 17,000,000
Capital: Pal-hen:
System of Government: Feudal Monarchy
Racial split: 53% human
15% Gnome
7% Elf
13% Dwarf
12% half-elf

Culture: Lamork society is based on the feudal system, with two distinct classes, serf and noble. The serfs are all but livestock to the nobles, and are treated as such, and land is everything, with a nobles title is determined by the acreage he owns.
Modes of address; (used only by those referring to their betters)
King “your highness”
Earl (50sq miles or more) “your grace
Duke (25-49sq miles) “your grace”
Baron (24sq miles-1500 acres) “your excellency”
Noble (<1499 acres) “your lord”
Knight: (unlanded nobility) “sir”
Peasant: by name, or “you” when addressed by a noble

History: In the twenty years since the last king, Henry Pal-hen XXXXXXVII died heirless, civil war broke out between the Tame and Reh-lan houses for control of the throne. Each side has employed the Orcs living the Lamorkwood as mercenaries, and the Tame forces seem to have the upper hand currently.

Askon-Riam
Population: 15,740,000
Capital: Askon city:
System of Government: Monarchy
Racial split: 60% gnome
12% elf
17% Human
11% Dwarf

Culture: A highly creative and well educated population, the majority of Askon-Riam’s population is either inventors or craftsmen of some sort, producing the finest goods outside of the Damork Mountains. As such, Akson-Riam is a very rich country, and others tend to leave them alone, lest they be cut off from the quality weapons and armour. Wealth determines status, the only exception being the king and his relatives. Modes of address are a non entity. Buildings tend to be low, domed roof type of structures, furniture is rare, most people just use cushions.

History: Askon-Riam used to be two separate countries, known as Akson and Riam, and ruled over by the dynasties that gave their names to their countries. Askon simply annexated Riam after the collapse of the Riam dynasty in the year 2381. Many subjects of both former countries resent the move, and tensions run high in some parts of the country.


Tamul
Population: 362,000
Capital: Melan/Dann (disputed)
System of Government: Military Hierarchy
Racial Split: 95% Elves
5% Humans

Culture: fierce and warlike, the elven population has been fighting a civil war for the past thousand years over the location of their capital. The elves have abandoned most of their civilized brethrens arts, rejecting the natural world and focusing more on armour crafting and sword making. The city of Viskeg, on Tamul’s northern coast is a corsair stronghold where the Balskiva’s southern pirates come to spend what they take on the seas.

Damork
Population: 20,000,000
Capital: Velonce
System of Government: Democracy
Racial Split: 34% human
23% Dwarf
30% elf
10% Half-elf
2% Gnome

Culture: The pinnacle of learning and enlightenment, Darmork is a country abound with civil rights. Almost every philosopher, scientist and mathematician lives in Damork, and its classless culture is just one of the many benefits it enjoys, along with running water and indoor plumbing.


History: At one point, Damork ruled an empire reaching from the northern expanses of the Malson wilderness to the border of present day Celon, however it broke up due to the huge logistical difficulties. Modern days, it is moderately isolated, leading to its brilliant ideas never reaching farther than its borders, and forcing Damork to remain self-sufficient due to lack of trade.

[puppyavenger]

just a few questions, first why is the pyro god cg after all he burns down forests(evil) and is a god of destruction and war(both evil without circumstances

[rankrath]

just a few questions, first why is the pyro god cg after all he burns down forests(evil) and is a god of destruction and war(both evil without circumstances


umm, typo? ya, that should say chaotic evil, thanks for catching that.

[puppyavenger]

also you weren't clear are wish linted wish and time stop both arcane and divine or just divine.

[rankrath]

also you weren't clear are wish linted wish and time stop both arcane and divine or just divine.

Fixed. ARE YOU HAPPY NOW??? :smalltongue: