Psion said:
I'd be interested to hear what kind of elements you are talking about and how you worked them into the world.
well firstly, when i world-build i tend to base cultures and regions off of specific examples from our world, rather than building them up from whole cloth. i find it saves me some time, and it helps the players if i can say things like: "the Subayic people -- think Bedouin nomads from the Arabian Desert," or "the Lasceans are like the Classical Greeks."
for this world, i zeroed in on the part of the world i wanted to emulate -- from the eastern mediterranean to india, and from the central asian steppe to east africa. the cultures i'm using are Greeks, Phoenicians, Arabs, Egyptians, Ethiopians, Swahili, Turks, Persians, Indians, and a few other minor ones stuck here and there.
i set my sights on what style of fantasy i wanted to do: my ultimate inspirations for this campaign world are the three "Sinbad" movies by Ray Harryhausen, Harryhausen's "Jason & the Argonauts," and the original 1001 Arabian Nights.
so i wanted to have a strong monotheistic religion like Islam, but still a little wiggle room for other gods for the parts of the world that haven't converted to it yet. i finally settled on 3 gods, 2 brothers and a sister. the brothers are Lawful Neutral and Chaotic Evil respectively, and the sister is Neutral Good. Azayl, the Lawful Neutral god is the one the Islam-like religion worships. Unamash, his Chaotic Evil brother, is seen as the enemy. Intar, the sister, often tries to arbitrate and make peace between her brothers, without much success.
i specifically made Azayl LN instead of LG so that he could have evil followers. this allows me to have internecine struggles between different factions of the same religion (LG vs LE). this is important. since such a large portion of the world all worships the same god, i needed some way of generating strife between nations that follow the same religion. having different factions within that religion was the answer. this also allows the same religion to host both paladins and LE assassins!
genies (djinn) are a very important part of the world. not only did they once control empires in the world that have left ruins to explore, but they are often summoned by wizards for magical power. they complete the trinity of extraplanar beings -- angels, fiends, and the djinn.
there are a few non-human races in the world, even though there aren't any in the source material, as at least a nod to standard D&D. humans, slightly-altered dwarves, and much-altered goblinoids are the only "civilized" races.
to increase variation, though, i decided the world has a fairly high percentage of aasimars, tieflings, and genasi due to the meddling of extraplanar beings. one dwarf kingdom is almost 50% aasimar, there are a few places where genasi form a significant minority (and are often the noble caste), and the large evil Egyptian empire's pharoah and nobility are mostly tieflings and half-fiends.
the world has settled down a bit from its chaotic past, but there are plenty of ruins of powerful, magical ancient empires lying around for the PCs to explore.
out in the deep ocean away from the continents, islands have a habit of moving around, even appearing and disappearing at random. it's impossible to map. these islands hold secret treasures and weird monsters, and are probably due to the gods' tinkering. this gives me the ability to run "voyages of Sinbad" type adventures without having to worry about forevermore pinning down the location of the island the PCs discover. the island might not even be there if they try to return to the same location!
i made a few changes to existing character classes to fit them into the world better. mostly adding a few new class skills here and there.
bards are now called
rawis, and their abilities are based more on storytelling and extemporaneous speeches than music, since Islam tends to frown on music. so most of the bardic abilities are now language-dependent.
paladins are
ghazis, the holy warriors of Azayl. since they worship a LN god, they are allowed to choose to
detect and
smite chaos instead of evil if they so desire.
the world is still very much a work in progress, so there's a lot of other little changes that i'm working on. it's very different from standard D&D, but it's the world i wanted to make, as near as i am able.
i've got some more information about this world in this thread:
http://www.enworld.org/messageboards/showthread.php?s=&threadid=12800
But, *in those days*, I think many will agree with me, Forgotten Realms was special. It had *snap*, and *mystery* TSR really screwed that special feel up, and it really has never returned.
