The New Frontier
From ENWiki
The New Frontier is a community worldbuilding project. The creation process will be organized through this blog. People who wish to post material related to this setting to their blogs should use the tag[New Frontier]in the title of their blog entry. Related forum posts should likewise use "New Frontier" as a tag (in ENWorld 2.0, there's a possibility to enter tags below one's post when starting a forum thread).
Summary
Our story starts out on the world of Darad, a planet where humans, elves, orcs, dragons, and stranger creatures live - sometimes peacefully, but all too often fighting each other. Kingdoms rose and fell. Magical knowledge was discovered and forgotten again. Mighty heroes appeared and vanished into the mists of time.
But this is not their story.
A century ago, a wizard discovered a ritual that allowed him to open up a portal to a different planet, a habitable but throughly alien world he called Lorsul, after the plane of the unmourned dead. While it was possible for humans to survive there, there were absolutely no familiar plants and animals, and for most of the last century few people saw a reason to go there - especially since opening a portal to Lorsul was very expensive, and the world was inhabited by many dangerous and ferocious animals (though no intelligent beings have ever been proven to exist on that world). A few curious scholars and bold explorers mapped small portions of this world. Several fringe cults, refugees, and other people who wanted to stop all contact with other human societies emigrated to Lorsul and vanished into the wilderness.
Then some explorers discovered some curious pearls that turned up on some beaches of Lorsul from time to time. When those pearls were examined by alchemists - who called those pearls Amrits - they discovered they had a remarkable effect on those who swallowed them - their aging process stopped for as much as a year!
This became widely known five years ago. Since then, settlements on Lorsul have sprung up almost overnight and expanded rapidly as everyone who can afford it moves to this new world in the hopes of finding many of those pearls, since everyone who is rich and powerful is willing to pay amazing amounts of money for those pearls. Fortunes are made in record time - and lost just as quickly to fraud, gambling, dubious entertainments and the many other dangers that threaten the unwary. And the conflicts of the old world are spreading out to the new as well - nations, guilds, religions and more are all too willing to plot against each other in the new settlements.
And that is far from the only danger. Nobody knows what kinds of threats might lurk in the wilderness beyond. Terrible monsters, mad cults descended from earlier settlers, and a landscape and environment that follows its own rules - and are there "really" no intelligent natives, or are they just hiding? But the opportunities are limitless: in this world, a small group of heroes can truly make a difference - and possibly shape the fate of an entire world.
The Setting
The setting consists of two worlds, with the main focus being on the frontier world of Lorsul:
Notes and Guidelines
Many pages will feature a section like this, where the general intentions for this part of the setting are explained and suggestions for other contributors are listed.
This setting idea was inspired by the settings of Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri and Blue Planet (for the latter, also see this review, where the idea for this project got started). In both cases, the scenario was that small groups of humans now have to exist in a very alien environment and somehow survive and prosper there. In neither case, this new world "appeared" to have intelligent inhabitants, but ultimately the truth was a bit more complicated than that.
There is no reason why the same scenario shouldn't also work for a fantasy setting. "Wilderness Adventure" games were always a staple of D&D, and having to survive in a truly alien environment should represent a refreshing challenge. At the same time, the "gold rush" atmosphere and all the newly established settlements create a niceWild West atmosphere, with law and order being only as strong as the local heroes of the community can enforce it.
The "default assumption" is that the PCs are new arrivals - people who have just stepped out of a portal and want to make their fame and fortune in this new world.
