Legacies: A Creative Commons Setting

[Ry]

Legacies is my new project to make a creative commons setting to go along with Legends, the free RPG I have in development. Since I'd rather see people get use out of this material (even if they want to publish their own version of it), I'm going to place these ideas out there in the Creative Commons with an attribution-only license.

The monsters, plots, scenarios, and other original fantasy or game concepts contained in this thread are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.


If you want to contribute an idea to Legacies, and you're willing to let your idea out into the creative commons, please e-mail me. My address is:

ryanstoughton zagga hotmail.com

where " zagga " is an @ sign.

[sblock='Disclaimer:']The Creative Commons license is non-revocable, so please only contribute ideas you're willing to see others use, even for commercial purposes. For example, if later on, someone wanted to write a novel set in the Legacies setting, and included a monster that you had written, they would have to credit you and the Legacies project, but you wouldn't be entitled to any money from them - or even the ability to tell them not to write something you disagree with. That said, you can still use your own ideas without crediting the Legacies project, and you have the freedom to use the whole setting so long as you give proper credit.

I appreciate anyone who wants to put their creativity to work in the creative commons. That said, my goal with Legacies is to make something that has its own distinctive flavor, and while it's going to be a big setting, not everything will fit. Of course, I have no control over Legacies once its released, but in terms of the project of putting it together I am trying to have a mostly-consistent canon. Since that's the goal, somebody has to make editorial decisions - at least at the start, that somebody will be me.[/sblock]

 

[Ry]

Some of the stuff for Legacies will come out of a random generator I wrote, which I'll proceed to work up into real material. This sometimes helps me generate new ideas. You can ignore this if you're just interested in the output so far or contributing an idea to the project.

[sblock]First, some baseline things about the generator:

The generator is really just a table roller in excel with a fairly straightforward execution. The user inputs a string in one cell, like so:

"The heroes encounter a ravenous <creature>"

The program then runs one iteration, looking for tables for anything inside <> brackets. This procedure is repeated until there are no <> brackets left.

Find creature and look up creature
Returned <monster>
Find creature and look up monster
Returned giant <vermin>
Find vermin and look up vermin
Returned <land vermin>
Find vermin and look up land vermin
Returned <unusual land vermin>
Find vermin and look up unusual land vermin
Returned black ant

So the final string was:
"The heroes encounter a ravenous giant black ant"

(Note that I am not using Vermin in the D&D monster sense, but in the "tiny little thing that flies or crawls along the ground because I need a word that includes spiders and worms as well as insects" sense.)[/sblock]

 

[Ry]

One thing to keep in mind is that this is not OGL material - using OGL terms and definitions isn't viable because the license Legacies will be released under will be even more permissive than the OGL.

For myself, and my generator, I split creatures into a few kinds:

monsters (mostly Chimeras - incl. dragons - and giant versions of animals)
spirits (even those that animate other things)
horrors (like the monsters of HP Lovecraft, and plague-zombies)
humanoids (anything from goblin to ogre to faerie)
beasts (current real-world animals and vermin)

 

[Ry]

In light of a vote on what people were interested in, I will be designing an Ageless Cyclical World: The world has always existed, and the deeper you go, the more history you find. Empires rise, fall, and are forgotten.

In this setting, I am trying to think of humans with a (very loose) analogy to ants - they are all over the place, but not the top of the food chain. They display incredible variety in their social organization and ethnography. They are threatened by other humans, natural disasters, and natures many monsters. The most remarkable colonies / cities / empires are those who find a special equilibrium with the other creatures of their environment.

 

[Ry]

The empire known as Te Zeum (tay zay-OOM) is the greatest of human lands. This is a massively multi-ethnic empire, stitched together by an imperial structure that enshrines the various noble structures under a single superstructure. This code is known as Zarath (za-RATH), and its customs apply the imperial Caste system across widely varied noble structures.

 

[Ry]

Bump, because in a flash of inspiration I rewrote the whole concept of the project, re-named it, and there you are.

 

[Ry]

Jdrakeh has kindly furnished me with an official forum and I have started the Legacies Canon wiki as well. Contributions are welcome!