[Homebrew] Setting noodling

[Desdichado]

Just noodling with some homebrew concepts. This homebrew has actually been percolating for a very long time, and I even ran a game in "Mk. II" of it (I'm now on Mk. IV.) Despite that, a lot of details never got nailed down, and frankly, I'm always tinkering with it, even at the core concept level. So I'm interested in posting musings about it and getting feedback, questions and commentary, especially if its in the form of great ideas that I can steal.

I should state upfront that this is not necessarily a D&D setting (in fact, the times I've run it, I used a different system) but I'm not against the idea of using D&D to run the game. I am, however, against the idea of assuming that D&D defaults are true; there are many, many ways in which that is not the case. In the past, I've run this with d20 Modern, and with a d20 system I "created" by combining elements from all kinds of games, including the magic (and sanity) system from the d20 Call of Cthulhu game. Currently, I'd probably favor using either a Savage Worlds variant, True20 or d20 Modern + d20 Past using the Shadow Stalkers/Shadow Chasers campaign model. In tone and general feel, I like to think of this setting as equal parts Edgar Rice Burroughs' Barsoom, Charles Dickens, Sergio Leone and H. P. Lovecraft.

Here's some basics about the world itself:

• Called Kael, intelligent life is not native. Or, if it was, native intelligent life is long-since extinct. Humans of various ethnicities make up the population here, but they retain an ancient tradition of coming from somewhere else. They failed to listen to a prophet, who predicted world-wide flooding, and mocked his boat-building efforts. When the rains did come, some tiny portion of them used sorcery to flee to Kael and escape drowning.
  
  
• With them came some animals; both herd animals that they brought on their own, and a few wild animals that escaped through their magical portal. It's now been many thousands (tens of thousands--perhaps even hundreds of thousands) of years since their arrival on Kael, and the populations have adapted and evolved to meet their new environment.
  
  
• The environment on Kael is not particularly friendly. According to legend, the planet was once warm and inviting, but whichever god or spirit caused the ancestors of the Kaelings to perish in the flood was wroth with them for fleeing his righteous indignation, and sent a comet blasting towards Kael. The impact literally scalped much of the crust of the planet from the surface. The debris gradually resettled into a dusty ring which surrounds Kael. Most of the surface water boiled off into space, and reverberations from the impact caused the planet to convulse in agony, splitting into gigantic fissures and titanic volcanic eruptions. Therefore, like our own Mars, it's possible to have gigantic shield volcanoes the size of Arizona and massive canyon systems as long as the Continental United States and as wide as Tennessee. In fact, Kael's equivalents to the Tharsis region and the Vallis Marineris are important terrain points in the setting. The setting itself is defined by the dry, harsh terrain that covers so much of the setting. This deific force then forgave the remaining survivors and left them to their own devices.
  
  
• Civilization grew rather quickly as industry was required to bring water from deep aquifers up to the surface. Primitive technology, of course, couldn't cope with that, but gigantic steam-powered drills and pumps could. Luckily, Kael has an abundance of coal (evidence to suggest that a greener past is almost certainly more than legend) to power these steam pumps. City-states built up around these massive pumps, which could be used to irrigate relatively large areas. However, due to the harsh terrain between pumps, empire building (or at least holding on to an empire you managed to build) was a logistic impossibility until the recent development of zeppelins.
  
  
• A few areas do retain surface water; in fact, it's my intention to start any future endeavors here on the shores of a vast sea, nearly as large as the Mediterranean---the largest relict of the world's once vast oceans. Other, smaller seas exist, but none (other than this one, the Mezzovian) are any larger than the Great Lakes of the northern Midwest, or the Caspian or Black Seas, and most are hyper-salinated as well because the water is evaporating over time. In fact, the largest and most long-lasting port cities on the shores of the Mezzovian have abandoned ruins stretching for miles into the terrain around them. Ancient wharfs and quays stand silently miles from any shore, and rotting husks of beached ships stand starkly in the arid scrublands far from the water; mute testament to the slowly dwindling surface water supply.
  
  
• Because of the extreme amount of time that has passed since Kaelings came from whatever homeworld they came from, they have evolved into completely different ethnic groups, unrelated and dissimilar to ethnic groups found on planets such as earth. The desert regions away from the sea are dominated by neverending conflict between red and green men; the tribesman of Kvuustu and Komewan. The red-skinned Kvuustos are consumate nomads, following their herds and water supplies and sweeping out of the desert as reavers and barbarian hordes, while the Komewan have lately turned to empire building and are slowly and surely spreading their monolithic cities out of their core regions on the southeast shores of the Mezzovian seas. Most of the rest of the Mezzovians, however, have tan skin of varying shades, and brown, black or occasionally pale hair, making them coincidentally not too disimilar to Westerners on earth (meaning that when the movie rights get sold, it'll be easier to cast after all. Not too many green-skinned actors.)

More details to come...

 

[Desdichado]

• Everything on Kael is suffused with orange rather than golden light, for two reasons.
  1. The ancient and tired sun of Kael is swollen and orange. It is an orangish giant star, like our own sun will be in many billions of years, nearly at the end of its life.
  2. An aftereffect of the cometary impact is that dust microparticles are suspended high in the atmosphere, causing the sky to be a faded reflection of the rusted colored horizon rather than blue.
  
  
• Like Mars, most of the surface is made of black soil and rock, relicts of ancient volcanic activity, but as the water evaporated, most of the surface has become covered with a thin layer of oxidized dust. All of this is somewhat technical, but the point is that the ground is reddish brown like rust, although just a few inches lower it's black as basalt. The sky is too. Fantasy Mars.
  
  
• Kael is outside of the galaxy, but only just. Its tired sun migrates around the galaxy as a distant satellite. This makes for very peculiar nightime effects; when there are no moons in the sky to cause light pollution, the galaxy fills a huge portion of the sky, as a flocculent whirlpool. The mythology and belief systems of no culture can fail to account for this fascinating feature in the night sky. Most see it as either a piercing eye averting it's baleful gaze on the world, or a sucking maw biding its time before it devours the entire world.
  
  By the way, this idea was stuck in my head as a very young child by this image, which I saw in an astronomy book when I was young. I actually stumbled across a copy of the book at a used bookstore recently, which is long since out of print, scanned the image in question and posted it on my blog a few months ago.
  
  
  

Still more to come...

 

[Desdichado]

The following familiar earth creatures exist on Kael, transplanted the same way humans were:

• Rats
• Cats
• Dogs
• Sheep
• Goats
• Horses (although these are rare and have not adapted well to Kael)
• Chickens
• Falcons
• Bats
• Monkeys

The following creatures have gone feral and evolved into completely new species; usually larger, more carnivorous and much more fierce:

• Cats
• Dogs
• Rats
• Falcons
• Bats
• Monkeys

Native Kaeling life is quite different, having evolved along parallel paths, naturally. Here's a few examples of some important species:

• Atross, or atroç -- a large creature that is bipedal, with shorter arms, but which maintains a nearly horizontal back, and therefore uses it's arms periodically for locomotion. The Atross is about the size of a horse, has thick armored plates and thick black or gray down, and a longish neck with powerful, broad beak that's underbitten, giving the creature a bit of a bulldog appearance. The atross is omnivorous and foul-tempered, but the barbaric Kvuustu ride them, and throughout the desert areas, domesticated atrosses are not unusual. Wild atrosses can be both larger and more fierce than the domestic variety, and tend more strongly towards carnivorousness.
  
  
• Murga -- an extremely large quadrupedal creature that lumbers across the lowland plains. It's fur is thick and flat, almost leaflike, and although it does not have any chlorophyl, the murga is able to conduct rudimentary photosynthesis. It's diet is primarily made up of dirt that it scoops up with it's large shovel-like mouth and tusks and swallows. Most of the dirt is later evacuated, but minerals, water, and microbial life forms remain in the stomach to be digested. Murgas are huge---in the same size range as the largest of dinosaurs---and may weigh 80 tons, or even more on rare occasions. They are relatively docile, and although they do not move quickly, the size of their step means that they can maintain a decent pace over time. Because of this, in addition to their ability to graze on dirt and process further energy via their limited photosynthesis, murgas are very popular as beasts of burden for caravans. Feeding them is not a cost, and the photosynthesis ensures that they have energy to keep walking non-stop, storing up energy during the day to use at night.
  
  
• Ganxo -- the ganxo is clearly related to the atross in some ways, although it is quadrupedal and very lean, like a greyhound. Ganxo's have long, barbed snouts and hunt in packs. They have never been domesticated, but are a serious threat to livestock and small groups of travelers. Ganxo do not get along well with caens, which are a true-breeding variety of feral dog, and if packs of the two of them meet, they often fight violently until many are killed and one group has been completely driven off.

 

[Desdichado]

Why did I ruin the imagery of my nice, Martian-like desert to plop a big inland sea down right smack in the middle of the action? Pirates, of course. The Mezzovian Sea is notoriously rife with them. Most of them are independent scalawags, but some are privateers with letters of marque from relatively respectable city-states like Iclezza, Razina, Sènt-Andriu or others. Some, however, come from the island nation of Carcosa. Carcosa is a jagged group of islands huddled close together that is nearly impossible to invade. Its shores are steep and rocky with few natural harbors. Jungle-covered fjords make up the coastline, and nestled deep in one of these on the north shore of the largest island is the city of Terrassa, a haven of pirates, cultists and worse.

A sorcerer rules the island in name, but is rarely if ever encountered by its inhabitants. Be that as it may, when his clanking leuitenants, steam-powered biomechanical monstrosities leading hordes of mindless automatons constructed mostly out of rotted corpses and rusted iron come a'calling, the "regular" inhabitants either flee as quickly as they can, or do exactly what they're asked.

As dark as the reputation of Carcosa is, the blasted plateau of Leng, many miles to the north of the Mezzovian Sea, is perhaps even more cursed a name. The inhabitants of the areas near Leng are twisted and cursed by the very presence of its malevolent evil; first their eyes turn black and empty, like those of a shark. With time, even their skin and hair turn as dark as obsidian and their flesh shrivels and dessicates like that of a mummy, while the poor souls still live. At this point, either their neighbors kill them or they slink off up onto the plateau itself, where they become mindless cannibals, their only commerce with other living creatures to gnaw on their freshly killed bones. Rumors abound of a society amongst these savage beasts, though---capable of returning their cunning and intelligence, if not their humanity. Ash clouds hover perpetually over the plateau, and the dead ground is covered with gray ash and frost. The only thing that can grow here are fungus and other lifeforms that survive by feeding on decay and death. Some of these grow to enormous size, forming massive mushroom forests deep on the plateau. It is unknown what mechanism could possibly cause this ash cloud to remain in place. However, from beyond the plateau itself, the more clever stargazers have determined that a single bright star remains in place over the plateau, a star that doesn't move like the rest of the night sky but remains always directly overhead. It can't be seen through the ash cloud, of course, but from just beyond the ash cloud, it can be spotted low on the horizon by the sharp-eyes, especially if they're looking through a spyglass.

More still to come...

Comments, as always, welcome.

 

[blargney the second]

Did you like Dark Sun, by any chance? There's a very similar feel here...

 

[garyh]

Very cool, Hobo! I've only read the first Barsoom book, but I definitely get that vibe from Kael. Looking forward to reading more!

 

[Desdichado]

Did you like Dark Sun, by any chance? There's a very similar feel here...

I actually don't know much more about Dark Sun than the Wikipedia entry says (I was completely removed from D&D during 2e.) I think that they probably are similar, but largely it's because of the drawing on the same source material for inspiration (I remember the campaign classics megaissue of Dragon said specifically that Dark Sun was heavily influenced by ERB's Barsoom). I stumbled across some old Leigh Brackett books from the 70s (Book of Skaith) and thought, "ah, man! She already had all my best ideas here!" I think Skaith is a good analogue in a lot of ways for Kael, coincidentally.

Very cool, Hobo! I've only read the first Barsoom book, but I definitely get that vibe from Kael. Looking forward to reading more!

A Princess of Mars is one of my favorite books ever. If you've read that, though, you should go ahead and read Gods of Mars and Warlord of Mars and finish up the first story arc. Sadly, even I have to admit that there's no compelling reason to read beyond that unless you really want to; those first three books really are the best Barsoom books.

Also; they're on Project Gutenburg. You can read'em for free.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Very interesting. Sounds like a fascinating setting...

 

[garyh]

A Princess of Mars is one of my favorite books ever. If you've read that, though, you should go ahead and read Gods of Mars and Warlord of Mars and finish up the first story arc. Sadly, even I have to admit that there's no compelling reason to read beyond that unless you really want to; those first three books really are the best Barsoom books.

Also; they're on Project Gutenburg. You can read'em for free.

Thanks for the tip! I picked up APoM at a used book store cheap, but knowing now that there's a specific arc to follow and that the rest is free (better than cheap! ), I'll have to give 'em a read.

Say, did you see the Barsoom-inspired mini-game in Dungeon a few years back? I think it was called "Planetary Romance" or something like that. I thought that was a real fun looking setting, and that was before I'd even read APoM.

 

[Storminator]

A Princess of Mars is one of my favorite books ever. If you've read that, though, you should go ahead and read Gods of Mars and Warlord of Mars and finish up the first story arc. Sadly, even I have to admit that there's no compelling reason to read beyond that unless you really want to; those first three books really are the best Barsoom books.

Also; they're on Project Gutenburg. You can read'em for free.

Have you checked out In the Courts of the Crimson Kings by S.M. Stirling? Very cool Mars story. Much better than The Sky People (set on Venus) that precedes it.

PS