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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Deadguy" data-source="post: 1395326" data-attributes="member: 2480">When I started working on my Shattered World setting I really had only a couple of ideas to guide me:<ol> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">There are no Gods in this setting (I was sick of divinely-inspired railroaded plots!)</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Where standard D&D had Planes, I had Planets instead, orbiting the Shattered World. There were 4 elemental Planets and 2 Energy Poles (the Sun and Darkheart).</li> </ol>But I had worked on a Vampire game set in Old Babylon, so I had some ideas of the afterlife that these early civilised people thought up. And it's not pleasant: a grey waste of ashes where the dead simply endure - all of them, from peasant to king, pious to idolater. I guess it focussed attention on life!So I got to work. I imagined two great Rivers flowing through the Shattered World, one stream meandering from the Sun and eventually winding its way to Darkheart. And another, equally winding, from Darkheart to the Sun. These Rivers existed anyway, as they were the basis for my Cleric-analogues, the Theurges. When a sentient dies, its Soul is released into the Positive Stream, coming from the Sun. Unless it's unlucky or very motivated, and swims into a stagnant pool, hanging around as a Ghost. Anyway, a normal Soul passes along until it reaches Darkheart, and arrives in the Realms of the Dead.The Realms are a bleak place, as the Sumerians and Babylonians envisaged, a place of cold ashes. The place is made worse because long long ago a few souls managed to leverage themselves into positions of power over their fellow dead, becoming the first Lords of Undeath. Since souls are a source of power to these beings, they want nothing so much as to cause death and mayhem, and to send Undead back into the Shattered World.Pretty bleak? I know that one player when confronted by this cosmology said 'Why does anyone bother? It's all pointless in the end!' However, unbeknownst to most, there is a hope of sorts. A Soul that doesn't bargain with the Lords of Undeath may wait many long years in the Realms of the Dead. But eventually they are caught by the other River, the Negative one which flows to the Sun. Carried by this River they are carried at long last into the cleansing Light of the Sun. There, their past and their suffering is washed away, and eventually a cleansed and innocent soul passes out by the Positive River, to return again to the Shatterd World. Settling into a newborn, life begins again.I am quite tempted, because of this cosmology, to introduce the idea proposed by Monte Cook, of Talent Feats, representing inborn ability. Except that these won't be abilities developed in the PCs early years, but flashes back to an earlier life that wasn't entirely cleansed away in the Sun!Modesty forbids me tooting my own trumpet, but I do think this is a pretty neat cosmology!  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /></blockquote>

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