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Random Setting Ideas, now by anyone who feels like posting.

Started by SilvercatMoonpaw, October 31, 2006, 10:58:22 AM

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KeshFerrar

Here's a setting that hasn't gotten past the brainstorming stage:

Heaven and Heck Close their Doors, or the Sundered Gods

Either a great civilization sunders the gods, or the gods simply get tired of their gig and close up shop. The outcome is the same: the spirits of the dead have no where to go.

    The spirits could be ephemeral occasionally manifesting, or if they're strong enough they rise again as undead.
    In a world where death has no teeth how do adventurer's stop the bad guy?
    Do undead rule the world and outnumber the living?
    Or have the living found a way to "burn" the souls of the dead through magic ritual so they can never return?
    Can people still be born, or are there now a finite number of souls to go around?
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Raven Bloodmoon

Oooh!  I like!  Elyria doesn't have an afterlife that anyone is aware of, so souls tend to linger of just disappear when someone dies.  But you raise some other good questions, too.  Thanks!  The gerbil in my head just hopped back on his wheel.
This technique of roleplaying has been passed down the Bloodmoon line for generations!

`\ o _,
....)
.< .\.

Matt Larkin (author)

Quote from: KeshFerrar
    The spirits could be ephemeral occasionally manifesting, or if they're strong enough they rise again as
unread. [/list]
...
    Do
unread rule the world and outnumber the living? [/list]
I like the idea, too.

And an "unread" spirit.  This has to be something else for Meepo's Typo monsters list.
Latest Release: Echoes of Angels

NEW site mattlarkin.net - author of the Skyfall Era and Relics of Requiem Books
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SilvercatMoonpaw

You forgot reincarnation.  The souls of the dead don't linger because they go right back into mortal bodies, leaving you with less of a soul shortage, and you don't have the worry about the BBEG unless he figures out a way to retain his memories.

I'm just bringing this up because your setting sounded like you are assuming that the dead can only go on to an afterlife.
I'm a muck-levelist, I like to see things from the bottom.

"No matter where you go, you will find stupid people."

Matt Larkin (author)

The premise of his setting assumes that by its very nature.  It would fall or become meaningless without that premise, unless he were to then assume that the samsara (or whatever) is guided by a deity.

Even then, I don't know that I've ever seen someone succeed in merging the ideas of a classical afterlife with reincarnation.  At least not to my satisfaction.  A setting usually works better if it employs one or the other as the standard.
Latest Release: Echoes of Angels

NEW site mattlarkin.net - author of the Skyfall Era and Relics of Requiem Books
incandescentphoenix.com - publishing, editing, web design

SilvercatMoonpaw

Well, in that case it works.

But still a few things (in the order posted):
1. You could have it be both, with the really strong spirits becoming undead.
2. You can still kill him.  He just comes back as a ghost.  So far it's not any different from what a capable BBEG can do.
3. Depends on what the souls are allowed to do.  A world ruled by undead sounds interesting even if you don't have this idea.  But that's not all they can do.  Look to Terry Pratchett for what happens when dead people come back and keep their positions filled.
4. So you "kill" souls?  Sounds as grim as you can get.  Maybe people come up with a way to "trap" the souls in special pocket dimensions attatched to items, maybe each family has one for all its dead relatives.  This might be a good way to introduce Incarnum.
5. This relates to why I brought up reincarnation: Were the gods the ones making new souls?  Because the "classical" afterlife always makes it sound as if once the soul is there it stays there forever.

I think there is still a real-world model that relates to this: ancestor worship.  Your dead relatives stick around you and influnce your life.  This answers the questions about what the dead souls do, but not whether new people can be born.
I once thought of the idea of soulless people, individuals who were normal except they didn't have souls.  This works if you accept that a body acting naturally would be indistiguishable from one with a soul, that you only need a brain.  It's a scientific view that I came up with after seeing way too many shows in which humans who loose their souls just stop working.
I'm a muck-levelist, I like to see things from the bottom.

"No matter where you go, you will find stupid people."

Epic Meepo

Quote from: KeshFerrarThe spirits could be ephemeral occasionally manifesting, or if they're strong enough they rise again as unread.
I think my campaign setting rose again as an unread.
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Raven Bloodmoon

Quote from: SilvercatMoonpaw5. This relates to why I brought up reincarnation: Were the gods the ones making new souls?  Because the "classical" afterlife always makes it sound as if once the soul is there it stays there forever.

Alternatively, you could just shuck Western concepts of the afterlife and do one of two things:

1) Use a Bhuddist view fo the afterlife where you are basically waiting to be reincarnated.  If your karma was good, you get to wait in a country club, otherwise it's off to Naraka with you where you can spend the next 500,000,000 years beign killed repeatedly in various excruciating ways until your karma is clean enough to reincarnate.

2) Take a more Shinto-esque opproach adn just have no afterlife at all.  When a soul dies, it just becomes one of teh spirits.  The less powerful souls can't really influence the world significantly, but more powerful ones may eventually even become gods.  Personally, I love this approach, as you will see in my next post on Elyria. [/shamelss self promotion]
This technique of roleplaying has been passed down the Bloodmoon line for generations!

`\ o _,
....)
.< .\.

deadone

The Limited Lands

The limited lands are, at their widest, 100 miles across.  Two mountain ranges intersect the lands, and the center is dominated by a primeval forest.  The ruins of ancient civilizations litter the landscape.
The land is surrounded by a ring of humaniods.  Beings of all humaniod races make up the ring, the only thing unifying them is their unmoving, seemingly eternal nature, the fact that they are armed, and the fact that they invariably strike down any who try to pass them.
In the four thousand years of recorded history, only one has ever been recorded to have escaped.  Entire armies have met their doom against the ring on unmoving killers.  Any trying to fly above the ring are shot down by the bows and arrows of the ring.  Those who try to dig beneath find their tunnels collapsing and might spears driving down through the earth.
There is the one, however, who escaped.  It is said that he found a minuscule gap the the border.  It is said that at one point in the ring stand a dwarf with an ax and a human with a sword, and the distance between them is just great enough that if you are fast, and nimble, and clever, you can dodge your way past them with only the most manageable of wounds to the lands beyond.
Beyond the ring can plainly be seen a land of fertile plains stretching into the distance.  Forests and mountains can be seen on the horizon.  There are even signs of civilization beyond the ring.
Filthy human worm-babies!

Stargate525

Quote from: Raven Bloodmoon1) Use a Bhuddist view fo the afterlife where you are basically waiting to be reincarnated.  If your karma was good, you get to wait in a country club, otherwise it's off to Naraka with you where you can spend the next 500,000,000 years beign killed repeatedly in various excruciating ways until your karma is clean enough to reincarnate.
So what happens to the neutral people? Are they stuck waiting for 500 years in a heavenly waiting room reading 4000 year old parchments?
My Setting: Dilandri, The World of Five
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Matt Larkin (author)

Neutral?  If that was a joke, ignore this.

Rather than neutral, it is a matter of paying off all your karma.  The more you have, the longer it takes.  A person with a lot of bad karma will have to suffer longer - or rather their own soul forces them to suffer.  Short, imprecise, explanation.

The religious system doesn't really assume people are good, evil, and neutral the way an alignment system does.
Latest Release: Echoes of Angels

NEW site mattlarkin.net - author of the Skyfall Era and Relics of Requiem Books
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Tangential

Quote from: deadoneThe Limited Lands

The limited lands are, at their widest, 100 miles across.  Two mountain ranges intersect the lands, and the center is dominated by a primeval forest.  The ruins of ancient civilizations litter the landscape.
The land is surrounded by a ring of humaniods.  Beings of all humaniod races make up the ring, the only thing unifying them is their unmoving, seemingly eternal nature, the fact that they are armed, and the fact that they invariably strike down any who try to pass them.
In the four thousand years of recorded history, only one has ever been recorded to have escaped.  Entire armies have met their doom against the ring on unmoving killers.  Any trying to fly above the ring are shot down by the bows and arrows of the ring.  Those who try to dig beneath find their tunnels collapsing and might spears driving down through the earth.
There is the one, however, who escaped.  It is said that he found a minuscule gap the the border.  It is said that at one point in the ring stand a dwarf with an ax and a human with a sword, and the distance between them is just great enough that if you are fast, and nimble, and clever, you can dodge your way past them with only the most manageable of wounds to the lands beyond.
Beyond the ring can plainly be seen a land of fertile plains stretching into the distance.  Forests and mountains can be seen on the horizon.  There are even signs of civilization beyond the ring.


Weird.
Settings I\'ve Designed: Mandria, Veil, Nordgard, Earyhuza, Yrcacia, Twin Lands<br /><br />Settings I\'ve Developed: Danthos, the Aspects Cosmos, Solus, Cyrillia, DIcefreaks\' Great Wheel, Genesis, Illios, Vale, Golarion, Untime, Meta-Earth, Lands of Rhyme

SilvercatMoonpaw

Some time ago I posted a one-sentence idea of a setting where the magic items adventured and people were traded up.  Now to do this in D&D you'd have to design a whole slew of new mechanics and fluff to go along, but the idea of magic items in charge is an interesting little addition to any world in which they can be intelligent.  So here are a few thoughts I had on the subject:

How do they have control?
Now a single intelligent item could reasonably pull the strings of a ruler just by advising or lying to him/her, since normal people do that all the time.  Likewise if the magic item is the best or even the only defense against something that threatens the ruler and/or country the item can probably get its way.  But if you want an entire culture of these items then you either have to come up with a reason why so many key people need them or just go with a charm or dominate effect.

Item Attitudes
Ruler: thinks its okay to treat people like some would treat an item, wearing them out and replacing them without a care.  Maybe this is a big revenge fantasy, maybe the items are just sadistic, maybe because items just sit around unless they are used the items need this near-constant activity in order to real feel that they live.
Riders: they treat people like a work animal the must be taken care of, but may or may not care whether the people really want to do what they are directed to do.  Riders are kind of like Rulers in this respect, but their view of the beings is more like perpetual children who wouldn't have any direction or purpose without the items.
Questors: items that ask beings to help them in fulfilling a task.  Questors won't force anyone into taking up what they want to do.
I'm a muck-levelist, I like to see things from the bottom.

"No matter where you go, you will find stupid people."

Wensleydale

I can see a crown being an interesting intelligent magic item - perhaps dominating all other intelligent magic items and controlling its wearer. I did this to a PC once... it was an interesting campaign. He ended up manipulating the other PCs through his own will, until eventually they realised what was happening and melted the crown. 'Course, they had to keep said PC inactive until they could manage to do so...

SilvercatMoonpaw

The Old Civilizations Fall, But Not Quietly
In nature species rise and fall based on whether the world can support them or they are out-competed.  In time the elves and dwarves too began to fade, their civilizations crumbling and their numbers dying away.  They were sad, yes, but they accepted it as part of the course of fate.  The Age of Fey was setting, and the Age of Mortals dawned.  Particularly the humans.

(Note: One could instead decided that the elves and dwarves are desperate, and that they think that if they destroy all the mortals than nature will have no choice but to let them live.  Thus all the war described after this pits the elves and dwarves as the villains in a human setting.)

But the humans were arrogant, they assumed that since they survived that they were "right".  And by that rightness they could do as they pleased.  They were also fearful, for unlike the fey that came before them their lives were short.  They rushed to cram experiences into these short lives, tearing through whatever got in their way.  The Age of Mortals was dawning on an entire world that was dying.
But the elves and dwarves refused to die knowing that their world would come down with them.  They gathered together with the creatures that were dying because of the humans.  They made a pact to fight the humans until either they were dead or the humans were no longer a threat.  But the numbers of both dwarves and elves would never be sufficient to stand against the hordes of the humans.  So the elves used their powerful magics to call upon the spirits of ancient warriors to return to battle one last time, creating the first of the purpose-born [undead, but the idea is in this setting that all of them have been raised by their own spirits to fulfill some purpose they've decided to take on (asked of them or of their own volition); no mindless and/or just plain destructive undead].  Against armies of undying warriors armed with the greatest of dwarven-forged weapons the humans stood no chance, and fled in terror not only of being overrun but simply because the dead were rising against them.  The elves would ride into battle atop skeletal horses and unicorns, weilding scythes, their faces painted like skulls, calling out to the huamns that this was nature fighting against her murderers.
Yet the fey were still dying, and it might happen that they would die before fulfilly their mission.  So the elves and dwarves conceived of warriors who would never die, who could continue their crusade should they fall.  The elves grew the bodies out of the plants of the earth, and the dwarves forged bodies of metal for them to inhabit.  And when that was done they put words in their heads as one puts words in the heads of golems.  Yet these were not words of obedience, these were words of justice, of honor, of freedom.  And when finally done they were the first race never to be created by the hand of nature or a god, the Forged, the legacy of the great fey races to carry on their ideals.
[This is about as far as I need to take the idea.  After this it's all a question of whether one wants to campaign in the war or after, and what the result was.]
I'm a muck-levelist, I like to see things from the bottom.

"No matter where you go, you will find stupid people."