I’ve been cooking up Homebrews for fun for a while now, and I pitched something for my Players with the new Daggerheart System, and in a theme somewhere between the old RTS game feel, and modern MMO design.
There’s a ‘new’ continent and everybody wants a piece of it, but the problem is, the continent isn’t ‘new’ and the locals aren’t too keen on these random and often arrogant newcomers trying to lay claim to their home, and the natives themselves.
Magic is seen as the manifestation of the Gods themselves, a literal blessing that allows Mortals to, on a tiny scale, reshape and change the world the same as the very Gods who reshaped the Chaos-that-Was to make the world and all within it. And that Grand Reshaping left behind fragments known as ‘Godlings’, tiny magical spirits who bind to certain things that are in, on or nearby the Leylines that crisscross the world.
Some of these Godlings are benevolent, some are tyrannical, others merely care about nothing but their 'territory, but all can grow more powerful by absorbing magic, earning or beating the allegiance out of other Godlings and Mortals, and all can grant magical gifts and knowledge, and thus we have a setting that allows players both to make their own, very personal Gods, and a reason why the ‘Gods’ of the settings aren’t all-powerful and capable of just fixing things with a snap of their finger, they’re just Demi-Gods at best, and Kokoro from the Legend of Zelda games at worst.
The ‘New World’ is a continent home to Ice-Age megafauna, the giant marsupial mega-fauna of prehistoric Australia, and a mixture of ‘normal’ creatures and the occasional Dire creature strain thrown in for the hell of it. The southern region is very cold and dry and home to steppes, cold pine, fir and oak forests, while the northern region is somewhat wetter and more temperate, and is home to saltwater marshes, plains both dry and grassy and divided up by canyons and mesas carved over the millennia by rivers and seasonal floods.
The native races are Orcs, Humans, Goblins, Faun, Fungril and Faeries, and most of them worship a form of ‘Positive Entropy’, in which one should take only what one needs, live a good life, and give way with grace to the next generation, returning to the earth to complete the cycle of life and death. Humans, Orcs and the Faun are quasi-nomadic, the Orcs because they’d strip the land clean trying to feed their bulk if they were permanently settled, and the Humans and Faun because it is their tradition to do so, leaving small permanent settlements and a few larger ones where the very old, the very young and those with knowledge of magic, trade-skills and craft-skills stay, share information and preserve it for future generations, and a constant exchange of those who stay and those who go ensures that there’s a good mix of peoples, attitudes and ideas between the three races, establishing a solid if occasionally ‘punchy’ kind of family between them. The Goblins prefer to stay in their forests and avoid contact as they have exceptional senses and most other folk are way too loud, while the Fungril (fungus people) and Faeries (insect people, seriously, check them both out) act as something of the religious ‘center’ of the combined culture.
Fungril have these two unique abilities, Fungril Network, which allows them to communicate, across any distance, to any other Fungril who is also touching the mycelial array that their kind leave in their wake, and Death Connection, where a Fungril can, with effort, withdraw a single memory from a dead body. Using those as a foundation, Fungril aren’t just an old race, they’re the First Race, created by an ancient fungal life-form that developed sentience after absorbing and assimilating the primordial life that first appeared on the planet, and created the first Fungril by assimilating and puppeting the corpses of the creatures that died nearby. These days, Fungril exist both as an independent race, but also tied to these ‘Mother’ colonies that can store and preserve the memories of those who are entombed near the ‘Mother’ colony, and all of these colonies are interlinked, forming a giant organic repository of knowledge from across the ages.
The Faeries, by contrast, are also a very ancient race, the descendants of a group of Fey who migrated to the Material world but found themselves aging rapidly as the forms they took to manifest turned out to be short-lived insects. The Fungril offered them a bargain, allowing their consciousnesses to take refuge within the Mother colonies, nurturing their offspring, and granting the memories of those original consciousnesses to these ‘new’ Faeries, essentially allowing the Faeries to be quasi-immortal in exchange for protecting and expanding the Mother colonies across the continent, and even beyond in some circumstances.
To the West, you have the Dragon Empires, ruled by the descendants of the now mostly-hibernating True Wyrms, the Drakona, who have their servants in the amphibian-like Ribbits and the tortoise-like Galapa, and this nation of ambitious Sorcerers and fierce soldiers seeks new Leylines to fuel their growth, with much of what their lands already produce either at maximum production already, or hotly contested as the Royal Families of rival True Wyrms square off over territory or ancestral grudges, but despite their drive, the ‘Scale Empires’ as they are derogatively known to the nations of the East and North, don’t do well in the colder parts of the New World and prefer to worship the True Wyrms, and not the Godlings, leading to friction with the more animus/nature worship led by the Fungril. The Dragon Empires are a very hot, wet and tropical environment, and are home to many Dinosaur, saurian and even distantly Draconic creatures as a result.
To the North, the Dwarven Dominion grinds down towards total social collapse, as the great Dwarven Clans find themselves locked into a stalemate by dint of tradition, inter-marriage and an over-supply of certain trades and a dearth of others. With the indigenous Giants, the Firbolgs (another example of Fey spirits transmigrating into the Material Plane and possessing hosts, in this case the great aurochs cattle of the region), and the Dwarven-made Clanks, very similar in theme to the Warforged of Eberron but legally distinct. Like their erstwhile allies to the East, and unlike the Dragon Empires and the New World, the Dwaren Dominion uses Mana Siphons, giant oilwell-like devices that drill down into the Leylines and extract magic directly, rather than allowing it to filter up and through the earth and into the water, plants, animals and air naturally.
While this has given the Dwarven Dominion an excessive supply of ‘mana gems’ to use to power their inventions and their weapons, denying this natural process is also draining the vitality out of the land, and while the Dominion has slowed down the process, the demand for magic to power and warm their great fortress-cities makes fully rolling back the process nigh-impossible, leading to an awkward shortage of food and dismal living conditions that drive many to seek out new settlements in the New World, where the conflict between the natives and the settlers often boils over into outright violence as the settlers see the nomadic lifestyle as an inherent proof of ‘savagery’ unworthy of ‘proper’ people who ‘own’ the land, while the natives see it as untold arrogance to believe that one can ‘own’ the earth like it was a tool or a garment, and see the Dwarven Dominion’s reckless drive for wealth as an active threat to the well-being of both the land and the Godlings they worship. Once home to many ice-capped mountains and rich, steep-walled valleys, now the land is dry and harsh and only the most durable of creatures yet remain, the forests thinning every year as the demand for lumber now wildly outstrips the trees’ abilities to restore their numbers.
To the East, things are even more dire, as the indigenous races there are Humans, Halflings, Elves (descended from the 5th, 7th, 8th and 10th Fey Migrations possessing Mortals and fusing Fey spirit to mortal flesh to create a new race), Katari (Cat-like beings that share the wild morphological traits of Elder Scrolls Khajiit), the Simiah (anthropomorphic apes and monkeys) and the Infernis (basically D&D Tieflings) find themselves on a continent being consumed both by unrestricted greed and religious fervor, both of which refuse to acknowledge the truth of their situation. The Humans, Elves and Halflings are ethnically diverse, but both have a long history of enslaving themselves, each other, and the other races of their own continent and beyond, interspaced with period of enlightenment where rebellion or wise leaders would liberate the underclass and try to build a better nation, before self-interest and arravice would kick the whole situation down a flight of stairs again to rekindle the ‘good old days’.
Like the Dwarven Dominions in the north, the Kingdoms of the East use Mana Siphons, but unlike the Dwarves, refuse to acknowledge that draining the Leylines without rest is killing the land and draining it of vitality and the ability to sustain life. Drought, plague and pestilence sweep the land, and those few groups or Kingdoms who do acknowledge and try to deal with the problem are quickly accused of heresy by their neighbors, or are attacked and dismembered as without a steady supply of mana gems, the magical weapons of choice, wands, staves and staves, quickly run out of ‘ammunition’. Those that can have fled to the New World, seeking advice, refuge and allies amongst the natives there and from the other continents, while the Kingdoms of the East squabble and bicker, trying to set up settlements in the New World to begin draining magic in earnest from the land to keep their coffers full and plunder the land for food and resources to keep their larders full.
Worst still, the second part of what makes the Kingdoms of the East so dangerous is that, long ago, a Godling struck a pact with a cabal of merchants and petty nobles that gave rise to the Church of the One God. Also known as the Church of the Only God, as the Godling enshrined therein began rapidly absorbing magic from the ‘offerings’ of its mortal co-conspirators and worshippers and became absurdly powerful, and it is only through this ‘One God’s’ blessings that the lands remain fertile and viable … and only through its blessings. The very shortage that is killing their continent is being leveraged to make the One God seem as the only salvation of the people, and the blighting as a sign of a lack of faith, driving more and more zealous behavior and paranoia of ‘heresy’ amongst everyone’s neighbors, and that the ‘heathens’ refusing to worship the One God is part of the reason the world is dying … And over the past few centuries, a growing number of children are being born as ‘Infernis’, or ‘Forsaken Children’, the lack of magic in the earth and the spiritual imbalance of the people, and the lack of other Godlings on the continent, causing a mutation that gives rise to chromatic skin-colors, horns and tails. And the way their societies are currently working, these mutations are seen as a sign of heresy and a lack of faith, giving rise to a burgeoning under-class of the ‘Inherently Unworthy’, reduced to slaves and indentured laborers because no true follower of the One God would associate with such heretics.
Before things went sideways, much like the Dragon Empires, the Kingdoms of the East boasted a large population of saurian creatures and thick jungles, with vast plains and black-soil marshes, long dry summers and short, almost perpetually storm-riddled winters, but now anywhere the One God is not pouring precious magic into the earth, the land is barren and sterile, little more than chalky dust and cracking stone, and unless something drastic happens soon, the One God’s hunger for worship and magic and the endless greed of the High Council of Sanctuary for material wealth and political power will turn the whole continent into a graveyard, and they will not stop until they have consumed the whole world on the altar of their ambitions.
Running with a certain theme, I intended it to be somewhere between a magical spaghetti western, with the most common forms of weapons now being wands, staves and staffs due to the potency and damage that magical ‘pistols’, ‘rifles’ and ‘heavy rifles’ and the occasional melee weapon from the Dragon Empires and Kingdoms of the East, while the Dwarven Dominion and the Natives of the New World prefer slug-throwers, pistols and rifles as the Megafauna of their native homelands tend to have much thicker hides and heavier frames than the lighter, scaly hides of the Saurians and Dinosaurs.
I’m still working out some of the kinks, but the table keeps pestering me to let them play already and I need to get this out to them before it joins the ever-growing pile of ‘never gonna be finished’ tabletop stuff I’ve got going on.