World Creation

And just like that, we are off to the races. There are random tables in the book for most of these topics, if folks are interested in using those. They are mostly d20 tables, with a d8 table for kingdoms / nations.

There's no need to create full encyclopedia entry for anything right off the bat, obviously. Let's embrace starting with building blocks or bursts of inspiration, and we can add details together, through conversation, interrogation, and -- later -- gameplay. You can get a lot out of a little, if those old JRPG manuals with their twenty-word summary of any given place or character are any indication.

Anyone can start with any of these! Go for it!

Well hello! Joined, looking forward to this!

🔸 Dig the idea of souls. Souls powering machines, souls becoming corrupted, feasted on by demons, etc.
🔸 Conflicts: love a messy relationship between old rival countries, or two countries posturing for war. Also like third / other countries caught in the middle.

Moving to straight world creation…

Hmm. Should we roll or choose? If rolling, one thing I’ve always liked to do is roll twice and choose the more interesting option. On magic, I’m okay with anything. I think high magic is probably best, at least fairly widespread? I’d love a mix of alchemy, magic, and science for airships, weapons, floating castles / islands, etc. Big enigmas and threats — love that, and would be interested in seeing the table value.

I think I’ll peek at those tonight after work…

Harri you’ve now already got me thinking about monsters/demons being this recurring "price-of-doing business" for operating soul-powered machinery. The same way that birds collide with planes, rats chew on electrical wires, cows kick over oil lamps, maybe some basic monsters are drawn to magitech and hitting them with a broom to make them fuck off is just another thing that has to be done. I can see an industry of Troubleshooters that are maybe handymen and IT support more than they are swordguys and exorcists here to smack a goblin.

For country rivalries, could easily give somebody more access to soul-juice and make them the equivalent of an oil powerhouse? Or go sideways and maybe somebody has the lion’s share of some ancient ruins that hold the components needed to make the widgets and gewgaws that you need to turn soul-juice into actual mechanical motion/power/whatever.

Just percolating over here. But one more post incoming.

While driving to work my brain buzzed at me, idly thinking about the first goofy step to pick your planet shape. I was idly thinking, I dunno, maybe doing flat world high fantasy could be unique in its own right. That definitely changes some dynamics if you literally can’t wrap around to the other side of the map, could be good weird fun.

And then my brain started thinking about oceans running off the edge (don’t worry, they fall *up* and replenish the sky, duh) and I was thinking "huh I wonder what the firmament is like in this case, is it flat too? How is it staying up?"

And my brain answered "pillars, obviously," and so now I’m over here thinking about what if the Eight Pillars of world creation are — in some weird way — literal physical out there in the world pillars that are holding up the sky. Little bit Legacy of Kain, little bit Dark Tower, little bit Golden Sun, but I am really intrigued by this idea right now. Gonna let my brain buzz some more.

Building off of what Harri said about conflicts: Did anyone see the FFXV tie-in movie, Kingsglaive? It's not without its flaws but the setting is pretty interesting. There's a long-running war between two kingdoms, one the "good" kingdom that leans more heavily on magic, and the other, the "bad" kingdom that uses more technology. The heroes are refugees who have fled smaller nearby countries that were overtaken by the bad kingdom. They've found refuge in the good kingdom and use their abilities to defend the land against the encroaching army from the bad kingdom, but they still struggle to be accepted by the general populace.

All this is to say, I find the idea of a refugee story interesting. What if the characters in our story are from refugee cultures as well? What does it mean to try to keep your cultural traditions in a different land? How hard do you try to assimilate into your new home's culture? How hard it is to fight for a place that you're simultaneously grateful to, but where you also experience prejudice daily? Exploring these themes in a non-real world setting can be interesting.

I love the idea of the soul-powered machinery - there is a definite horror element there. It dovetails perfectly with the eight pillars and made me think about the bleak and beautiful landscape in Shadow of the Colossus.

Could definitely do something with heroic refugees — but that is best saved for later on when y’all choose your Party Template. For now, best bet would be to create a world that makes that idea viable, if that’s what you want.

So just to keep this fire stoked, I am looking at the world creation random tables in the book (pg 147 onward) and the checklist of steps.

For step 1, I'm still kind of digging a flat world whose oceans fall up into the heavens once they run off the sides.

For step 2, grabbing a map, I like this one of the two pre-rendered Fabula maps:


I marked one square for one day of travel because it feels like a nice size to me. Takes about 11 days to walk from top to bottom of that big south-eastern landmass, which I'm fine with.

Which brings us to Step 3 and beyond. Just gonna throw some ideas out there.

Harri expressed an interest in souls, soul-powered machinery, souls being corrupted, souls being feasted on by demons. Argo mentioned a horror element, mentioned bleakness and desolation of Shadow of the Colossus. I mentioned some stuff about magical engineers, monsters being attracted to technology, a flat world, and the sky being held up by enormous pillars.

So, letting all of that bubble around in my head...
We haven't really talked about magic itself, but we've locked onto soul and technology so I am tempted to say that it feels like -- in our hypothetical world -- magic and technology are absolutely intertwined with one another. I am feeling a very strong academic slant to magic and alchemy and souls and all of this. I could see Universities teaching, very correctly, the idea that everything in the world is made up of a specific ratio of elemental motes and by understanding those ratios and the principles of Elemental Interaction or whatever then you will understand the way the world works. All physical laws as we know them actually just being interactions in the style of the classical elements, in the way alchemists' writings talked about metals and minerals and all of that. Taking that further, I can see (and I think really like the idea) of medicine having a very deeply developed working knowledge of the soul and its role in ailments and treatments.

This question gives examples of industrialism or renaissance type development, and if I were to point at one I suppose I am thinking more of the latter. Aqueducts, telescopes, sextants, printing presses, so on and so forth, with fun high fantasy extras like airships, maybe a high fantasy train somewhere just for fun.

I do still really like my idea of monsters/demons being drawn to technology and liking to get into it and gobble up soul juice (maybe in our setting "demon" is our word for monster, since they're all about chomping souls). And I still like my idea of, like, engineers who are half technical support and half sword guy because sometimes it's not turn it off and on again, it's oh dang a goblin got into the anima sluice let me get that out of there. Harri mentioned corruption and Argo mentioned horror, so what if this hypothetical soul-engineering job exacts a toll on the body. I'm just thinking of the idea of industrial accidents -- gouts of steam, chemical sprays, all of that stuff, except when you accidentally get exposed to processed soul-stuff (and probably just incidentally over time, it doesn't have to be one giant blast at once) you contract something like Ashitaka did in Princess Mononoke, or like Link in Tears of the Kingdom. I'm just picturing a plague of shadow or glowing lines inching up someone's body year after year on the job.

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and
Harri mentioned rival nations in tension, third party nations caught in the middle. Argo mentioned refugee stories, and the bleak landscape of Shadow of the Colossus.

I think it would make sense to have some kind of major nation that enjoys the majority of the benefits of all of this soul technology. For whatever reason, my brain keeps latching onto Roman vibes if not Roman aesthetics. I think I'm just thinking of the way Rome's roads connected the world, the way Rome's influence stretched everywhere, the way the aqueducts crossed absurd distances. That kind of thing.

And in keeping with that idea, I'm thinking of, like, tributary states. You allow the Republic to send in its archanics (arcane mechanic?) and sages to build whatever it is that people use to tap soulstuff from the world, and in return you get a bunch of benefits and also limited self-rule, you'll love it.

Argo mentioned desolate landscapes...

Preamble: Maybe the method of grinding out soul juice to power engines and lights and purify water and all of those fun anachronistic technology stuff is, for as magic as it is, still pretty basic mechanical stuff? People chop down trees and break down rocks or whatever and throw it into the big magic factory archanics build and it just straight up squeezes all the soul stuff out. So, labor intensive and all that.

Returning to "desolate landscapes" with the above thought: maybe there is a place where a different process was attempted? Something to draw soulstuff just, like, directly out of the area, ambient soulstuff, an attempt to -- like -- tap the soulstuff that exists in wind, light, the more ephemeral and complicated elements. And yeah maybe that went badly and there is an expanse of what's left and trying to recover ("The Dregs?")

An ecological disaster would absolutely get you some refugees.

For some reason I am thinking about region that wanted to break off from its nation or governing power and became a tributary of the not-romans, only to have their land or some chunk of their land be what is now The Dregs... and so now they're in the middle of these two big nations. On one side of their borders, the power they broke off from who never recognized their autonomy in the first place and views the creation of the Dregs as destruction of their lands -- and on the other side of their borders, the not-romans who have fucked up some perfectly good real estate and now have all of these refugees flooding other tributary states and the homeland.

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Mystery: if demons are drawn to soulstuff tech, why isn't the capital absolutely fuckin' overrun and frankly already devastated by monstrosities the likes of which you've never seen? As I was writing all my brain bubbles up above, this popped into my head and I was like huh... that's absolutely a JRPG-tier question isn't it.

Do the pillars holding up the sky deserve a mystery? Maybe they just are, man haha. Maybe they're just existing haha

Sorry I'm late but I love all of this!

For some reason, the idea of literal pillars holding up the sky made me wonder what happened to the places where there aren't pillars. Firstly, it makes me think of pillars as being places of importance - religion-wise? Society-wise? But what if, apart from the edge, there were literal gaps in the world which you have to fly across. The pillars are also safe because you're less likely to fall into the Great Beyond.

Interesting! I had been thinking eight pillars, but maybe there were once 9? Or 10? Maybe part of our map is totally missing because those areas were wiped out by the sky falling after something happened to those pillars.

Sounds like you have something right here, Sam. Do you see this as a Historical Event and you want to talk about now losing a chunk or two of world changed the world’s history? Or do you see it as a Mystery like "What happened to those pillars?" Or both?

So much goodness here Alfred! Not even sure where to chime in, but I do have a bunch of comments and questions and a few ideas.

◻ Really like the mix of magic, science, alchemy, etc. All the same stuff, and the study of it is academic. There are schools where you learn it, there are trades based on it, etc.

◻ That train better be soul-powered!

◻ Where are all these souls coming from, and why is it okay to 'use' them? Are they troubled spirits that otherwise cause problems for the living? Remnants of the ancients that we've put to work? What form do they take in the technology? Soulstones? Are they called something different, like some made-up JRPG word?

◻ I really like the ecological disaster being the result of a war, a country experimenting with the dark side of soul magitech... or with the cause of it being one of our big mysteries.

◻ Alt idea, feel free to ignore -- was a former civilization the true masters of this soul magitech? But there was a cataclysm, and now our main country is sort of picking up the pieces and living in the shadow of a greater culture who don't fully understand?

◻ Are the souls demon / monster souls, and that's why the critters want them back?

◻ Does the soul-powered tech run out? So can the souls get used up? Or is there a way to refresh them?

Loving this.

Love your excitement, Harri!

Where are the souls coming from / why is it okay to use them? Great question! One thought was just the idea that maybe people don't consider the impact of using souljuice to be all that significant... the stream of souls is infinite, what's the big deal if we take a little off the top? Like, souls compose everything including trees and rocks and animals and monsters, so maybe -- for many -- the soul is just another body part or element on the periodic table, or what have you. I could see widespread disinterest in something that has largely been solved and measured and categorized like the soul might be in this world.

For form, I've definitely been imagining a liquid, but that's probably just because I am connecting fuel and oil and all that. Could absolutely be something more like soulstones -- extracting all the soul goodies from rocks and trees and what have you and compact it all down into diamond-shaped magical whozits.

I think the cause of the soulstone factory disaster would be a great mystery if we wanted it to be. If there's a choice between it being a result of war versus an experiment gone wrong, I think I am interested in the latter more, but I'm not picky.

As for a former civilization being the true masters of all this shit? I am 1000000% down for that and have honestly been thinking about that this whole time. Maybe they didn't have the secret that makes demons not destroy your capital city overflowing with soul tech, whoops. I imagine that a lot of our obligatory ancient ruins and dungeons etc that cover the world are probably this first civilization's. I think This is a great option for an entry under our History / Events heading.

Your last two questions are great questions and could probably be rolled into a Mystery about the nature of souls for fuel.

Liquid is cool vs. soulstones. And what if said ancient empire mastered all this... and the concentration of all it drew the fiends, and that was the end of that.

And now, *we're* starting to master it... and concentrate it.

You see where this is going, a little doomed to repeat the past...

We love when we’re doomed to repeat the past

Ahhh I love all this!
Okay, this is brutal, and heartbreaking, and I love it. Of course they don't consider it. It's an endless well, right? There certainly won't be any repercussions to using as much as we want. Never mind how the landscape is barren in places and some flora and fauna seem to have disappeared or died off...

The TRAIN. I'm so interested in this train! What is its function/where does it go between? Is it one train or many? Does it go around the entire world, so once it comes to your city, you won't see it again for months or more? Is it kind of a Snowpiercer thing, except the rich are using it as a party boat so they don't have to deal with the bleakness, and while they enjoy their extravagant lifestyles, they are contributing to the ruin of the world by perpetuating life in this train that is gobbling up souls at a frightening rate? Is the train new or from this previous civilization, or is it something new that was made from technology found in the ruins of the previous civilization?

How big are big cities? Is there one or many? Can people still make a living out in the badlands or does everyone have to concentrate in the cities unless they're really hardcore, kind of like Cyberpunk Red?

Is the train from the bygone times, but some caretakers are keeping it rolling? And I loooooove desolate places where we’ve leeched all the souls away…

So my thought had been that the world itself isn’t a wasteland, it’s still very much pumping along, it’s a lovely place with lots of great stuff in it. If we want to go for more of a "the world is absolutely dying and the folks in the cities just don’t know it yet," that is an option, but wasn’t my vision.

As for the stretch of damaged landscape, the thing I called the Dregs, maybe you *cant* make a living there? Maybe, like, it’s not just the place being drained of souls, maybe the stream of souls is like blind to it now and so now you don’t even have people having children and you’ve got people aging quicker, dying younger and all of that. Or maybe the environment and people are adapting to a weird twilit realm where souls don’t factor into the ecology, the science, anything, like the way creatures on the oceans floor adapt to scarcity of prey and lack of light.

Dunno! Thoughts!

Gonna come back in a bit and actually start nailing down a couple of my contributions formally!

No, I'm good with a beautiful world with a stretch of damage. Makes the contrast all the more startling. And gives us a variety of places to explore!

Maybe both? I think there's definitely a Mystery around 'why did the pillars collapse/how do we stop everything else crashing?' (Maybe the former civilization also built/upkept the pillars?) But I think it's also recently enough that all the other civilisations are WTF, and trying to do something about it (even if it's ignoring it). It could also be the cause of some of the aforementioned refugees.