Building a Broken World (Setting, WIP, Blog-style) (Open for input)

[The Glyphstone]

Here will be my latest attempt at collecting, categorizing, and creating the various details of a fantasy-world setting I've technically been designing bits and pieces of since high school - though that iteration would be nearly unrecognizable from this current one.

This time around, I'm working from a template of sorts - The Giant's series of articles detailing the step-by-step construction of a campaign setting; http://www.giantitp.com/Gaming.html. I plan on using those articles as writing prompts of sorts, to brush the dust off my brain and get details to paper about my own setting-in -progress. But I expect those 9 prompts won't last too long, and I know from experience I'll stall out of ideas to write about before I run out of things I need to write about. So I want comments, questions, anything you're curious about and want me to elaborate on, ask. Poke me with the inspirational cattle prod and tell me what I should explore and detail next.

First up, to be posted momentarily, Purpose And Style. Coming soon, to a thread near you.

[The Glyphstone]

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]

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 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]

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]

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]

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

[moossabi]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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

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]

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]

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]

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

[The Glyphstone]

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.

Spoiler: So what is a stoneborn?

Show

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]

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]

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

[The Glyphstone]

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]

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?

- 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?

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

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

[Jakodee]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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.

[The Glyphstone]

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]

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]

Update!

Spoiler: So, Sidhelings.

Show

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]

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]

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.