Third time lucky

[Kindling]

Okay, so twice now I've had a go at this setting writing business, and both time's I've not got very far.

With my first attempt, Dark Silver, I myself ran out of inspiration pretty quickly.

With my second, I tried for an Orc-dominated setting, an idea I still love, but I quickly realised once I started that although the Orcs were a dominant force, they mainly existed either as invaders to resist or occupiers to rebel against.

So, I'm gonna have a go at a third setting, with Orcs in a prominent position, but one that makes them available as a player race more smoothly, with less of a seperation between them and the other races.

Once I have some serious stuff sorted out this will become the discussion thread, and the main setting will be posted in the Homebrews section, but for now I want to use this thread to chuck around some raw ideas and get feedback. Before I embark on anything in too much depth, I want a definite idea of what I'm doing, you see.

Okay so the first few things I want to talk about...

One is races. I want to keep the options to a minumum. There's no real logic behind this except that I don't really see the need for fifty billion sentient species, so long as there is sufficient cultural variation within the few that do exist.
So at the moment I was thinking of just having three, Orcs, Elves and Halflings.

Now, my Orcs are probably going to be closer to "slightly civilised Hobgoblins" than core Orcs in D&D terms, but really the D&D Hobgoblin is descended from Tolkein's Uruk-Hai, who were Orc/Human crossbreeds, so I feel fairly justified in using the term Orc for the race. Plus the name "Hobgoblin" has always seemed somewhat clunky to me.
However, leaving them described as just "Hobgoblins with a bit less savagery" is simplistic. They will have a culture (in fact several different cultures, depending on the region) all their own.

Elves will to some degree or another be the typical "noble elder-race in decline," as more and more of the world that they for so long dominated comes under the domain of the newly-flourishing Orc kingdoms.
This should not be interpreted as all-out war between the two races, but rather lots of minor conflicts between individual nations.

Halflings are essentially surrogate humans in this setting, the main differences being cosmetic and statistical. I'm not really too sure how to implement them, except to people any cultures that I want to use which I find it hard to imagine either Orcs or Elves living in. Any better suggestions than that are more than welcome :)

The other main concern I have on my mind at the moment is that of technology level. I have some wonderful mental images of tribesfolk with bone and flint weaponry, covered in warpaint, draped with pelts and crowned with feathers, but at the same time I want to have fair amount of nations with bronze-age technology.
For this point I mainly wanted advice on how to get two divergent tech-levels to coexist in my world while retaining "intra-relative realism" or whatever...

So yeah... give me advice, suggestions and so on, please. I know its not much yet, but the purpose of this thread is for you to help me to build from these small starting blocks into something ABSOLUTELY INCREDIBLE :D

[Matt Larkin (author)]

I think keeping the number of races small is a good idea.  Some may disagree, but I find with fewer players, you naturally place more detail and emphasis into each.  You are forced to more closely examine the motivations of a race/culture when there are fewer players on the board.

As for divergent technology, there is no reason different races/cultures couldn't have differing levels of advancement, especially if their contact is limited (or limited to combat).  Maybe elves have advanced technology, while the agrarian halflings have never studied metal forging and thus do not understand the process.  It was actually a fairly big leap, so at the same time you had people that were stone age alongside bronze age.

On the other hand, you could make the newer culture more inovative.  Perhaps orcs are on the rise with their new bronze technology, while the stodgy elves are declining because they refuse to learn the new ways of the savages and their artificial weapons (melted ore as opposed to stone).

[Seraph]

I like this.  I've recently done something very similar with the orcs in my campaign, Avayevnon.  I hadn't thought of the connection with the Uruk-hai, but yeah that's really more what I was going for too.  I wanted orcs to be a bit more civilized than they generally are, and actually, Hobgoblins seem like the most civilized race of all the savage humanoids, really.  To me, at least, I don't know what other pepole think.  
Mine have a proud culture that once ruled an empire in the Underdark (or something along the lines of the underdark)  The fall of their empire left them scattered in small tribes across the world, though they appear in enough frequency in a certain are for it to be referred to as a nation.  Here they consist of a number of warring tribes, all of whom wish to be the dominant ruler of this proud, but rather broken people.  As such, they are still warlike, but not savages.
I don't konw if that helps you at all, but I thought I'd mention it.  Maybe we could bounce ideas back and forth.

[Kindling]

Thanks for the feedback. I'd definitely be up for chatting a bit about Orc plans, Seraphine. Maybe some PMs are in order.

As for the idea of the Orcs having a higher tech level, I like this a lot, but at the same time I can't imagine the Elves being stone-age, at least not the mainstream Elven culture anyway.

So perhaps the Orcs have discovered steelworking... Its definitely a possiblity, in fact even a probability, that I'll use this one.

If anyone else has anything to add, please do!

[Seraph]

Elves could be stone age if you think of wild elves.  High elves would make no sense as stone age though.

[Matt Larkin (author)]

I agree with Seraphine.
Remember the Celts actually had advanced iron working techniques (later adopted by the Romans), yet they were the "barbarians," according to Rome.  Your orcs could have the advantage of iron work (perhaps developed out of need from their war-like nature), while the elves just barely have bronze and halflings (the runts) are stuck in the stong age.

[Kindling]

Sounds like a plan, Phoenix Knight.

Okay, I have a couple of new thoughts to throw out at you today...

One is a society of Elves, not their mainstream society, though. The Elven homeland is a jungle, and when they spread outward from this jungle in ages past, the jungle-dwellers cut them selves off from those who had moved away, becoming an essentially isolationist society.

As such, they were never exposed to the new skills of metallurgy.

Over the years their society became stagnant and corrupt. Basically the tone I'm after here is... cavepunk. As in cyberpunk being fairly hi-tech, steampunk fairly low-tech and cavepunk... basically stone-age.

Imagine a steampunk city. It may well have started out, in the distant past, as something like Camelot - all high towers and noble kings and happy citizens. And then over the years it has decayed into the urban hell that it is today.

Now imagine that if the starting point had been not a Camelot-alike, but an Elven treetop city. Yep, that's basically my idea for the jungley Elves.

Thoughts?

[battleaxbaby]

I love the idea of halflings essentially replacing humans in the world, so please dont give up on that.
I also really like the suggestion of the different types of elves being seperated by different technology levels, you can do alot with that. Sorry I dont have any brilliant ideas like these guys but I can tell you what I like...

[Kindling]

Okay... I'm now not going to post anything for a while.. Just write stuff up until I am comfortable with the volume of matierial I have and then I will start the setting thread proper. May take me a while, may be pretty quick, depending on how hard and accurately inspiration strikes me.

In the meantime, I'll probably just be bumbling around the boards from time to time commenting on stuff.

But rest assured, eventually, EVENTUALLY, the setting thread will appear.