Now that I have finished a first pass at an explanation of my elevator pitch for the setting allow me to go through some unusual features of the setting that may be different from what you have come to expect from a traditional fantasy setting. Most of these features are just personal preferences on my part, although some of them are also more of an exercise or ‘self challenge’ because I haven’t seen them used much in fantasy games.

Not Human-centric

My world is not primarily peopled by humans. Not only this but I am designing many unique ancestries of creatures for players to play as in my game, many of which are designed to have a similar feel to classic fantasy races, but are truly distinct from them. This isn’t to say that Humans, Elves, Dwarves, and the other classic fantasy races we are all familiar with are not present in the setting or that you cannot play in them if the rule-set allows it, only that they do not make up the majority of the intelligent life in the setting and that they do not take center stage.

I have several reasons for choosing to do this. One is that most fantasy settings I’ve seen always seem to put humans as the currently dominant force in the world but in my opinion never really give a satisfactory reason why that would be true when all the other ancestries in the setting have advanced natural or magical gifts that would seem to give them a distinct advantage over humans. A second important reason for my setting in particular is that the environment is very hazardous to baseline humans and most other classic fantasy ancestries. A final reason is that, while I love the classic fantasy ancestries in all their various variations, I want to explore a world with more creatures that are more distinct from us that just, “humans but with pointy ears” or “humans, but shorter”.

I look forward to introducing you to my new ancestries in future articles.

Monotheistic Religion as the Default

My world does not have the pantheon of g-ds that has seemed to become the standard religious system of fantasy settings. Partially due to my owe personal and religious preferences and partially because I don’t see it done very often in fantasy settings I am making the default religion in the setting a monotheistic one. This doesn’t mean that everyone has to believe in an individual divinity, or even that every ancestry/nationality currently on the planet shares that belief system, but that the majority of the individuals alive today in the setting still believe in some form of the dominant faith from before the fall of the empire, which just so happened to be monotheistic. I haven’t put too much thought thus far into the specifics of this religion other than bucking the trend of the pantheon system, but rest assured that I intend on exploring this element of the setting further in the future.

Magic as Building Blocks

I mentioned this element of the setting in my previous article, but its worth mentioning again here for completeness. This is an area of particular interest for me in the setting. I am a fan of worlds like those found in the works of Brandon Sanderson or Robert Jackson Bennett’s Foundryside series. These settings present magic that not only has a series of logical rules which can be understood by the reader, at least in principle, but which the reader could anticipate combining in new and interesting ways. I’d like to develop a magic system that allows for a similar feel for my setting.

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Obviously these ideas turn many of the default fantasy gaming tropes on their heads. Magic users and in particular the divine powered classes as they are portrayed in many rule-sets would not function in my setting. I would just like to stress that although these are the defaults for my settings that doesn’t mean you have to go along with them. If anyone else ever runs this system, whether using content from future articles on this blog or through some official product I develop in the future, they are, of-course, free to change them to fit their table’s personal preferences.

That is all for today folks. I’ve been reading “The Kobold Guide to Worldbuilding” from Kobold Press lately so I think I may go through the application of some of the articles from that as my next few articles to flesh out the world a little bit more and give me some time to develop some of the actual mechanics that goes with the ideas in this series of articles. See you tomorrow.