GM's Notes 1: Exploring Settings

Welcome!  

Over the next few weeks, I'm going to be showing into a bit of my world-building process, and exploring in depth some of the custom settings that I can bring to your tabletop! To start out, I'd like to give something of an overview, to showcase the wide variety of genres of levels of weirdness and unique atmospheres that Tales of Dice and Magic can bring to your games.

Having a cohesive setting is one of the more daunting challenges a Game Master faces.  The players can choose to go anywhere, and do anything.  Sure, you can nudge them along towards the adventure you have planned, and most good groups are going to be willing to work with you on that... but having an open world for them to explore, with meaningful choices for them to make is going to make for a much more enjoyable game.  So it pays off to have a decent idea of what your setting is.  That is not to say that you need to have every corner of a world fully planned and developed before a game starts!  That's far too much work.  But a broad picture and a sprinkling of interesting details that you can turn to when your players wander off the map is a very good thing to have!  So lets dive in and take a quick look at some of the worlds I've come up with for future use over the years:

FRIJIA: A High Fantasy World Built for D&D

Let's start here.  Frijia is going to be the most recognizable world in this series for those of you familiar with Dungeons and Dragons.  I started work on this world specifically as a setting to run games for D&D 3.5, but with changes to the presentation of the races, cultures, and deities to make something more interesting to me.

For uncounted millennia, the planet Frijia drifted through the void, sunless and frozen. Across its surface, Humans and Orc warred and built cruel kingdoms dedicated to crueler gods of Night and Ice.  Mighty Dragons carved out their domains from the Ice, and their destructive fire was worshiped as life-giving.  Far below, hidden deep in the earth, the Dwarves lived in a secret kingdom by the grace of Voor, the god of the earth's heart-fire.

Then, just over a thousand years ago, the Elves came, from across the void, born by their gods, chief of which was Qetzaal the Sun Serpent.  They fled the destruction of their distant home, and brought new light and warmth to Frijia.  the Sun Serpent's power thawed a vast section of Frijia, and those Thawed Lands, holding four continents, are now the cradle of civilization.  

Since the time of the Thaw, kingdoms and empires have been built and toppled.  From the Ice, strange ruins of lost and forgotten civilizations have emerged, and many strange and monstrous beasts as well. The Gates to the Shadow Realm were discovered, a parallel reality rife with magic and illusion, but home to powerful and wealthy courts, and gods eager to return to a world they once had fled.

Fijia is an excellent setting for classic fantasy adventures.  There is enough room on the edges of the map, on the less well explored continents, and out across the endless wastes of Ice that anything could be out there!  It is designed to be familiar to those who have played in the default Dungeons and Dragons settings, but with tweaks to the characteristics of the standard player races, and a new pantheon of gods and powers that are more closely linked to the history and events of the world.

TITANFALL: A Very Strange Fantasy World

From a very familiar fantasy world, let's move to something far out of the ordinary.  This world was created largely as an exercise in weirdness that I couldn't leave alone.  It could probably support D&D with some heavy modifications, but would more likely be better suited to exploration with a customized home-brew system. Not for the faint of heart!

The planet now known as Titanfall was struck by a body some ten-thousand years ago.  The body was humanoid, nearly as large as a continent, and if it was not already dead while it was falling, it most certainly died upon impact.  The Fall of the Titan shattered the already existing ecosystem and civilization of the world, not only from the massive impact, but also by the release of vast foreign magic, transmitted through the blood of the dead Titan.

The Titan's death gave rise to new life.  Flora and fauna touched by the magical blood mutated and took on more humanoid characteristics.  Many plants have leaves like fingers, or fruit like eyes, and many animals sport uncanny human faces.  Entirely new creatures were also born.

The first great race to emerge from the Titan's Blood were the Paragons.  Giants, ranging in stature from 20 to 40 feet tall, brimming with magical power.  The Paragons lived in an age of upheaval and destruction, as fires still rained from the skies, the remnants of a moon destroyed in the Titan's fall.  They warred with the last remains of Elder Race, the mollusk-like precursors who had ruled the world prior to the Titan's Fall.  In the end, the Elder Race was beat back nearly to extinction, but not without their revenge.  The Paragons fell pray to a sterilizing disease created by the Elder Scientists. They returned to the site of the Fall to dwindle away.

There, in the shelter of the massive skeleton of the Titan, more new life had arisen.  Humans of ordinary size built and farmed in the Cage, below the Titan's ribs.  While they lived among the humans, the Paragons were as gods to the people, and are still venerated as such by the Paragon Primacy, one of the dominant religions of humanity.  Humans were not without their own power: Sorcery, based in blood, and passed down through bloodlines became the mark of nobility.  Sorcerer kings constructed their castles along the Titan's Spine, miles above the Cage Lands below.  Human settlements spread outwards through the Opens, following the massive skeletal limbs of the Titan.  The cities of Fist, Palm, Heel, and Sole were founded.  

As humanity spread, they discovered other races born of the Titan's Blood.  Where it had mixed with certain rocks and clays, the Dirtborn came to be.  Craggy and irregular, the Dirtborn tribes are barely civilized, and their brute strength and rocky durability make them dangerous raiders at the edges of human lands.  Where the Titan's Blood mixed with frigid salt-water in the northern seas, a race known as the Formless emerged.  Gelatinous and changeable, the Formless are highly intelligent, and have been known to adopt humanoid form and even infiltrate human settlements.  Most dangerous of all are the Spore, a collective of fungal creatures imbued with the Titan's blood and regulated by a ravenous hive-mind.  The distant southern continent is all but overrun, and the vast armies of the Spore gather at the borders of the Open Lands...

Titanfall is a great setting for players who want something very different. The landscape will always be full of disquieting details, shaped between the alien flora and fauna of the pre-fall world, and the warping anthropomorphizing power of the Titan's Blood.  There are plenty of mysteries to uncover here!

 SHATTERED SUN: A Sci-fi/Fantasy thing

To stay on the weird side, but in a completely different direction, let me tell you about Shattered Sun.  The basic idea is that it is a projection of the popular Shadowrun universe, a couple hundred years further into the future.  Here's the pitch as I initially wrote it out:

The year is 2820 and the Anti-god is summoned into the corporeal realm. A Galactus like being of unthinkable cosmic power, it seems the Anti-god is poised to destroy all sentient life.  Its planet-sized gaze held the Earth, and the sun was blotted out by its shadow.  All seemed futile--but Earth was not without champions, those who for good or ill refused to relinquish mortality and all eternity.

What happened next, no one properly knows.  Maybe the sheer act of outright defiance to absolute omnipotence brought down intervention from a truly divine source.  Maybe the combined efforts of the champions of earth found some fatal flaw in the baleful giant... or maybe we just got real lucky.  Whatever it was, it almost wasn't enough.

The Anti-god is dead.  Its flesh burned away, its skeleton a floating mountain range of adamantine concentrated evil drifting in space.  Earth is dead too.  Shattered into a million pieces by the battle, or maybe by the Anti-god's death throws.   Most of the solar system was in pretty bad shape for a while.  Mars had big chucks knocked out of it, Venus too, and the gravity of the dead Anti-god has pulled moons from orbits and knocked planets off their tracks. 

But the real miracle is that we survived.  Sentient races, all of them, humans, elves, dwarves, trolls, and of course the dragons, they clung to life.  Scattered pockets of the survivable planet allowed millions to keep living.  In the years following the Cataclysm, another big discovery was made.

Space was different now.  Something about the Anti-god's death had transformed it into a substance the sages and scientists began to call Aether.  Magically conductive, breathable, and frigidly cold, the Aether bubble wraps our solar system from the sun out to the Oort Cloud.  Soon enough, all manner of contraption, scientific and magical, and many a fusion of both, began to ply the Aether Sea.

Civilization was rebuilt.  The sphere we could inhabit had increased by so many factors of magnitude, it seemed incalculable.  Of course, we pretty quickly set to sizing and dividing it up, laying claim to the richest mineral deposits--or better yet, those intact fragments of Old Earth, treasure troves of lost magic and technology.

This new larger world is full of conflict and danger, and a multitude of surprises.  How were we to know, for instance, that Mars was a hollow tomb, and the magical blast of the Anti-god's death had revivified a civilization of ghosts who feed on magic and life force?  Or that within the Anti-god's skull was a nightmare realm bereft of all natural law, that would spew forth waves of monstrosities every seventy years?

Not that it has all been bad, mind you.  The Noosphere linking all the scattered stations, fragments, and planetoids is a big plus.  Faster-than-light communication is possible through a techno-magical array built into the very fabric of the Aether itself.  Aetheric processing is nearly unlimited, and rivals the sentient brain in its speed.

Near two hundred years have passed since the Cataclysm.  A new Millennium is fast approaching. The frontiers of the solar system lie in every direction, and whether you're a smuggler, a hacker, a gun-for-fire, a scientist, a philosopher--anything really, except maybe a Megacorp drone, its a great and exciting time to be alive!  So thank the Champions, the Saints of the Apocalypse, and get out there cowboy!

....That drifted more space-western as I wrote it, but honestly at this point I would lean into it.  The setting is meant to be a mash-up of Shadowrun, Firefly, and Cowboy Bebop, with a bit of Lovecraftian Horror clinging to the edges.  And another giant skeleton. It's a nice set piece, ok?  

DEADLAND REWRITE: AKA "RED DEAD REVOLUTION"

I want to end with a glimpse into an alternate-history western, heavily based on the existing Deadlands setting, but the weird pro-Confederacy subtext taken out.

In the original Deadlands, rogue Native American Shamans invoke a ritual that releases evil spirits across the land and blasts California into a shattered maze of canyons. The resulting disruption in the Civil War allow the Confederacy to continue to exist, and also nukes the site of the People's Republic of California (more on that later) both of which were somewhat unacceptable to me.  Deadlands also calls all of the evil spirits "manitous," a gross misappropriation of a Native American word.  So I fixed it:

Rather than retreating and burning Richmond, Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederacy, turns to his contacts among the Deep Asleeps, a terrible cult dedicated to the Evil Elder Gods and supporters of the Confederacy.  The Deep Asleep cultists enact a terrible ritual, promising Jefferson that they will "Summon forth the power of the Elder Gods and bring the Union to its knees etc. etc."  In a way, they succeed, but the rend in reality and the unleashing of apocalyptic evil also destroys the Confederacy, along with everything east of the Appalachian Mountains. 

The governments and industrial power base of North America are destroyed, replaced by a wasteland of undead horrors and fish-people.  Refugees flee westward, pursued by the forces of evil.  Standing against this evil are the Shamans and Medicine Men of the Sioux Nation and the Comanche, the Witch Doctors and Voodoo Priests of the Louisiana swamps, and the Eastern Mystics and Buddhist Monks among the rail-road workers in California.

Speaking of which, in the resulting economic collapse, California has a Marxist uprising, and the aforementioned People's Republic is formed.  The last great bastion of peace and prosperity in the West.

Meanwhile, the West is Wilder than ever.  Bands of Union and Confederate soldiers, bereft of the chain of command turn to banditry, while settlements struggle to survive without shipments of manufactured goods from the east, and the new threat of terrible things coming from that direction instead.

This setting contains a few inside jokes in its underlying structure, but I think the premise is very sound.  Deadlands is a great game, and these changes will serve to make that setting even more grim and eldritch. 

And that's going to wrap it up for now!

I'll be exploring each of these settings in more detail in future installments, as well as others!