[Setting Idea] Gothic twist

tecnowraith

First Post
I had this idea for a couple of years now for a setting to create a world of mixed genre and time eras where the fantastical and supernatural are the dominate race and humans are the second class citizen. Take the Legacy of Kain video game universe and expand it.

Basically I want to have all the fantasy and horror races, mostly the Horror creatures have unique origin rather than them being a disease, alien origin, demonic/spirit possession or birth defect. Does anyone have good ideas or suggestion on any unique origin for the vampires, werwolves, fae, dragons and other popular creatures?

The main races I want in setting other humans are as followed: Vampires, Werecreatures, Fae, Undead, Dragonfolk, Amphibian-folk (instead of just merfolk) and 2 more race which i have not decide on. Thanks
 

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Basically I want to have all the fantasy and horror races, mostly the Horror creatures have unique origin rather than them being a disease, alien origin, demonic/spirit possession or birth defect. ...

The main races I want in setting other humans are as followed: Vampires, Werecreatures, Fae, Undead, Dragonfolk, Amphibian-folk (instead of just merfolk) and 2 more race which i have not decide on. Thanks

Looking at your list of other races, I wonder if you realize how radically different the world would be? Going with the general mainstream ideas of those races, you're going to have a very peculiar world, and one where humans are fourth class citizens at best.

Vampires: Probably one of your most civilized races. They're going to keep humans as cattle. Sure, the humans might be allowed to live in villages and farm the land, but that's only because it's easier to let them care for themselves. Taxes will be paid in people, not grain.

Werewolves: They're going to hunt humans. Werewolves are creatures of the wild in most stories. Humans like to tear down the wild and build villages and farms. (Though this does get a lot harder when you have things living in the forest that can and will tear your arms off to keep you from swinging that axe.)

Fae: Depends on what kind of fae. For some, you're going to get a similar reaction to the werewolves. (Though those two groups may fight over forest land.) For some fae, the humans will be seen as something to torture or otherwise mess with. You need to decide what kind of fae. If you have mixed fae kingdoms, it's doubtful they'd have many humans, except possibly children who never grow old.

Undead: Don't have enough information. If they are their own race, not an infection or a curse, I'm not sure how they'd interact with humans since they aren't created from them.

Dragonfolk: What do you mean? If you mean humanoid dragon types, they'd probably be a lot more powerful than humans. Historically, more powerful groups enslave less powerful groups. Since the dragonfolk would be cold blooded and not even remotely the same species as humans, they may see it as little different than humans using horse or cattle.

Amphibian: If they can spend significant time out of the water, they'd be in contest with the other races for the valuable coastal property. Land on water is settled first. If, on the other hand, the amphibian race is primarily below the water, then they might have good relations with other races since the two occupy different territories and it's almost impossible to invade each other. Any race that followed the historical human custom of dumping nasty stuff into rivers and the ocean would probably come up against the amphibians, which would either lead to a greater geographical separation or to much cleaner harbors.

Keep in mind that without a lot of magic or extensive land settlements, technology for the amphibians will be low. For instance, mining iron might be possible on the sea floor, but smelting it into steel would be impossible without magic or some kind of volcanic activity.
 


Looking at your list of other races, I wonder if you realize how radically different the world would be? Going with the general mainstream ideas of those races, you're going to have a very peculiar world, and one where humans are fourth class citizens at best.

I was thinking about this, and you can have a slightly higher than fourth class human citizenry if you change a few things. Almost all of them result in humans living either in hiding or in walled city-states.

  1. Humans have a big brother. There's something -- angels, giants, werebears, armies of golems, or demons -- that likes humans. Maybe the humans sacrifice stuff to it, maybe there's some inhuman altruistic motivation at play. Regardless, they like what we'd regard as status quo, and so they maintain human habitats.
  2. Humans have a BIG brother. There's a god of humans, a curious property to human blood or human dwellings, or ancient magics in place since the Dawn Times which render human habitats inhospitable to the critters of the night. In fact, this one is reflected in Sigil, where the Lady of Pain keeps the peace and stops all the CR 8+ outsiders from eating the low level PCs alive. Think about it.
  3. Humans are stronger than you think. PCs, far from being rare, are relatively common -- all werewolves are ferocious balls of fur, but every city has (in addition to somewhat useless men at arms) a full retinue of NPC heroes whose full time job is remaining in town to enforce the peace. What's rare are roving PCs; as they get to be higher and higher level, the remaining strongholds become more and more desperate to have them "retire", so that they can help keep the citadels safe.
  4. Human Reservations. Humanity is a relatively unmagical race, and so it's not as affected by dead- and dying- magic zones or wild magic zones -- and so they make their homes there. The other species don't want that land or have to interact with humans on pretty much the same level while on them, and so again, humanity is able to eke out an existence. This is an especially neat option because it means you don't have to think too hard about the repercussions of what you're designing -- on human lands, physics works the way we expect, so castles make sense. Elsewhere, magic holds sway, so +5 swords and dungeons make perfect sense.
 

I had this idea for a couple of years now for a setting to create a world of mixed genre and time eras where the fantastical and supernatural are the dominate race and humans are the second class citizen. Take the Legacy of Kain video game universe and expand it.

Basically I want to have all the fantasy and horror races, mostly the Horror creatures have unique origin rather than them being a disease, alien origin, demonic/spirit possession or birth defect. Does anyone have good ideas or suggestion on any unique origin for the vampires, werwolves, fae, dragons and other popular creatures?

The main races I want in setting other humans are as followed: Vampires, Werecreatures, Fae, Undead, Dragonfolk, Amphibian-folk (instead of just merfolk) and 2 more race which i have not decide on. Thanks

Interesting. Let us know how your campaign shapes up!
 

Just to let you know, I'm playing the devil's advocate here to try and help you develop a stronger, more robust world. It's clearly an interesting idea. I'm just trying to pick apart pieces of it to help you define it more clearly and to give your players less things to stretch their suspension of disbelief.

[*]Humans have a BIG brother. There's a god of humans, a curious property to human blood or human dwellings, or ancient magics in place since the Dawn Times which render human habitats inhospitable to the critters of the night. In fact, this one is reflected in Sigil, where the Lady of Pain keeps the peace and stops all the CR 8+ outsiders from eating the low level PCs alive. Think about it.

You could twist this a bit and use the holy symbol idea. As long as the human believes in BIG brother, they can keep the various nasty races back by displaying their symbol, because brandishing it causes pain and/or damage and/or weakness. To counter this, count on the nasty races developing various long ranged attacks. (Vampires don't like holy symbols, but vampires with crossbows or longbows at max range are maybe not so bothered.)

If you have an active big brother who is not a god, they'd have to be everywhere, in every human settlement. That or they'd be on all the border areas and some in the inner areas of human settlement, but it's understood that if you come in and kill some humans, big brother slams back hard.

[*]Humans are stronger than you think. PCs, far from being rare, are relatively common -- all werewolves are ferocious balls of fur, but every city has (in addition to somewhat useless men at arms) a full retinue of NPC heroes whose full time job is remaining in town to enforce the peace. What's rare are roving PCs; as they get to be higher and higher level, the remaining strongholds become more and more desperate to have them "retire", so that they can help keep the citadels safe.
This means that the men-at-arms will not be anything except human police. If a typical man at arms is puppy chow when a werewolf comes calling, then men-at-arms would not be trying to stop them and would be a completely separate organization.

For a real world analogy, when someone attacks your town with a tank, you don't send in the cops, you call out the Army.

A societal situation I think this would bring about would be in women trying to get pregnant from the male adventurers. This would be both to try and get the adventurer to stay in town and to try and sire more powerful citizens to help protect the next generation. (There is historical precedent for the idea of trying to breed powerful men to produce more powerful men.) Since the typical D&D world is far less gender biased than history was, you're going to run into more female adventurers and such. This would adjust things a bit, but I think what I've stated would still be true.

(To anyone who's offended by the above, please understand I'm only pointing out how our own world has worked in history, not advocating a particular mindset.)

[*]Human Reservations. Humanity is a relatively unmagical race, and so it's not as affected by dead- and dying- magic zones or wild magic zones -- and so they make their homes there. The other species don't want that land or have to interact with humans on pretty much the same level while on them, and so again, humanity is able to eke out an existence. This is an especially neat option because it means you don't have to think too hard about the repercussions of what you're designing -- on human lands, physics works the way we expect, so castles make sense. Elsewhere, magic holds sway, so +5 swords and dungeons make perfect sense.

This doesn't prevent raids into the human lands, it just makes them less effective. It does mean that the raids are without consequence, however, as the humans would be mulch if they tried to raid back out of the anti-magic reservation.

The other flaw I see in this is that slavers can still go into the reservation and extract humans, then bring them back out where they're easy to keep enslaved to their powerful master. If our own world's history is any indication, there will be humans willing to bring the potential slaves out and sell them to the mystical races. (For instance, the people of Africa selling slaves that were then bound for America.)

Historically, the strong enslave the weak. Why should a vampire till the soil when they can get a lesser race to do it for them? (To a vampire, a human is a lesser race.)

Economics are your answer if you don't want slavery to happen. Slavery is only viable if land is cheap but labor is expensive. This is why it was economically viable in the American south when there was tons of land but not enough workers. If land is scarce but labor is cheap, slavery tends to be far less viable. (I could go into more detail, but that generality will help you set up something reasonable.)



I believe you need to spend some time developing the history of the various races and their countries, at least in broad strokes. How did various areas come to be settled? Why are the dividing lines where they are? In general, where are the conflicts arising?
 

What if humans have horses and the others don't? Men roam the plains in large numbers protected by mounted warriors, constantly on the move. The humans may also have domesticated the dog, trusting the hounds to warn them of danger.
 

Sounds like World of Darkness a lot. Monte Cook recently did a D20 World of Darkness book, which is described as a reimagining of (White Wolf's) World of Darkness with a d20 twist.

http://www.enworld.org/forum/general-rpg-discussion/259130-monte-cooks-world-darkness.html

Yeah I know about his version but I would like to go further than what Monte did. I thought doing a technology and science-fact twist to their origins. Not with with aliens but more natural science or "earth" based science.
 
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Back in the old days, some folklore said sinners would become monsters. For instance, someone who committed suicide might return as a vampire. These monsters were a punishment, often to both the person who was the monster, and the community it plagued.

In this world, What You Are is related to Who You Were. Monsters are what happens when People Go Bad. If not individuals, than communities. They are the results of curses, the anger of Gods, the meddling in Forces That Which Shall Not Be Meddled With, or those that have given into their bases.

A society that practices cannibalism eventually becomes ghouls, for instance. Hedonists or the savagely violent become lycanthropes, because they wallow in their animal natures. Witches or hags are those that have hateful feelings towards others, that have jealousy and vengeance in their hearts.

The reason that the monsters are the dominant forces? Because Humanity dropped into the Dark Ages of Morality. The humans that remain are really the only Good humans left.

This would also instill a serious paranoia among humans that they can't make mistakes, have to police their own, and basically engage in a constant witch hunt for sinners, evil doers, etc etc. Humans also have mundane countermeasures vs. the monsters: the dead cannot cross lines of salt; the scent of wolfsbane repel werewolves; the fae cannot cross lines of cold iron, and only on Certain Days are they truly free to pursue mortals.

Basically I want to have all the fantasy and horror races, mostly the Horror creatures have unique origin rather than them being a disease, alien origin, demonic/spirit possession or birth defect. Does anyone have good ideas or suggestion on any unique origin for the vampires, werwolves, fae, dragons and other popular creatures?
Aside from Vampirism being a Curse (Thou Shalt be a parasite to Man, to drink his blood, to live in his Shadow) that just managed to catch on really well?

Man has always been afraid of the dark. The dark holds the Unknown. It is that which lives at the edge of the light. It is the home of monsters since before there were light. And while Man shuns the dark... some embraced the darkness. They took it into themselves, and became one with it, so that they would not be afraid any more. But when you take the Dark into yourself, you can no longer bare the light; it burns you just as it burns the shadows away. And, as Man fears the darkness... the darkness feeds on man's fear. The blood of a terrified man is ambrosia to one who has embraced the Darkness; it is distilled Fear.

On the topic of Fae, Raymond Feist's book (Fairy Tale) had two interesting notions. 1) The Fae's origin are angels who, during Satan's uprising, did not get involved; were too wicked to be allowed in Heaven, but not evil enough to be damned to hell, so instead fell to earth. 2) The fey have a pact. All faeries are contained in one general geographical area, but that area moves every six months. They cannot actively accost humans unless the pact that binds them (buried treasure at each location) remains buried (hence, theirs). If the pact is broken, all bets are off.
 
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What if you did something along the lines of having humans making areas of permanent sunlight (wither through magic or divine intervention). Such areas would kill creatures such as vampires and you can say that lycan revert to their human/weaker form when entering such an area. These regions would essentially even the playing field for humans while there.
 

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