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When creating this world, I basically took all of my best ideas for campaigns from every genre and mashed them together. I'm dead serious here. Aviros began as me doodling about sky-citadels filled with kinda racist robots in my notebook one day, then forgetting about it until I got press-ganged into GMing. I was searching for an interesting setting, stumbled across my notes about these navara folk, and figured I might as well expand it into a full-on campaign setting.
It quickly spiraled out of control into an amalgamation of all of my fever dreams about cyberpunk, high adventure, science fiction, and fantasy.
The Races
There are five main races in Aviros. I say, "main," because there are many other races in the world, but these are the only ones with a human enough mind and body to be suitable player characters. For the NPC races, we have hive-minded insect people who use magic to warp the only other surviving species in the inhospitable wasteland they inhabit to create an odd type of biotechnology, plant elephants with no opposable thumbs that use mutualistic tendril-based organisms that live on their backs to manipulate objects, fungal xenophobic owl-people, and a whole host of other weird s%+* that would be in no way appropriate for a PC to play. But don't worry about them. At least for now.
Humans: Obligatory, of course, if just to give my players a nice touchstone to center their experience around. Enslaved to the navara until they lead a coalition of the other races (excluding the kransa, who were just war profiteering) to cast off the shackles of slavery. Although they succeeded, it was a Pyrrhic victory, and most of the humans have been wiped out. In the thousand years since the Liberation War, they've slowly managed to rebuild into a dozen or so small countries, and two empires big enough for the other races to consider negotiating with instead of just blowing away should conflict ever arise. Of course, nobody else is doing any better. Except maybe the navara. Those smug bastards.
Navara: The only sophisticated AI on the planet, and even they're not sure how they work. Back at the dawn of the world (which none of them can remember, since all of those memories take up a lot of space), they got a leg up on all the other races by the virtue of, well, whoever designed them granting them knowledge of advanced technology, if only to maintenance themselves and the three huge sky-citadels that they live on. They promptly enslaved the other races, not out of any sense of "synthetic superiority," (well, that was a part of it too, but not the biggest part) but because they just wanted to research magic and technology at their own pace and not have to worry about anything else. Even when they developed the ability to make animal-level AI and stick them in basic shells to do the work, they kept the slaves, mostly out of habit. For most of their existence, they didn't even notice the organics, until the organics got kinda pissed and revolted. Over the thousand years since the Liberation War, the navara have been instictually reprogramming themselves to be less alien to the other races, lest they fall into their old habits and whoops, the organics blow the other two citadels out of the sky. The navara are rooted in a soulstone, a flowing amalgamation of mindbogglingly complex nanites which each contain the computing power of a supercomputer the size of Earth, somehow. These soulstones are installed in shells in the physical world, which, until the Liberation War, the navara didn't bother with, until the organics forced them, at gunpoint, to be on the physical plane so that they would have to do their own work, dammit. The navara reproduce by taking a random seed of their personality programming and combining it with another in the core of a citadel, which produces a new soulstone for the newly-made navara through an unknown process. A common misconception about the navara is that they don't have feelings. Well, they didn't, until about a thousand years ago when a brilliant human mage unleased a Pulse (the world's magic) phage into the navara system and gave them emotions, which ended the war in a single stroke, as they were unable to adapt to emotions quickly enough to the organics to storm the citadels and negotiate peace. Forcibly.
Wow, that was a lot of text. Onto the other races!
Kransa: Rysky, if you're reading this, then you'll love this. I designed this before the 3PP supplement came out, so you can't accuse me of being derivative, but they're... wait for it... corporate murder bunnies. You read that right. The kransa, by virtue of being the last race on Aviros to gain sentience, managed to escape the navara. And they seemed harmless, at first, until they got a stranglehold on all of the raw building materials that the navara needed to build workershells and maintenance their sky citadels. And the resources that they needed to build warshells to get those resources back. And so, an uneasy truce was formed. The navara would leave the kransa alone, and in return the kransa wouldn't starve the navara out. They seemed pretty happy with this arrangement and, over the years, built a huge megacity that encompasses the southern tip of the main continent. Kransa society was shaped by this first act of pragmatism. The megacity became a steaming hive of political and corporate backstabbing, and a kransa had to learn both how to navigate the boardroom and how to wield a blade and gun if they were to survive the ruthless atmosphere. The kransa outsourced workershells from the navara to do most of the grunt work-they calculated (correctly), that the organic slaves would revolt at some point, and figured that they wanted to profit from the rebellion, not be on the receiving end of it. It was a good move on their part. They quickly became completely untouchable at the end of the Liberation War, as anybody who got ideas about "Hey, maybe we should make our own guns," quickly found themselves without working guns, armor, artillery, vehicles, or power.
Avash: I will be straight with you: the illustration of the ogre in the 5E Monster Manual is one of my favorite monster illustrations, ever. I can't explain why. So I decided to make a race out of them. Then cover them in fur and give them huge horns. The avash were the main labor race of the navara, given their massive physical strength. Despite their large size, tendency to go into a blood rage, and the ability to tear apart your average human with their bare hands, the avash are by no means stupid. Not being stupid, however, carries a lot of disadvantages, such as internal politics. When the humans started waging the Liberation War, the avash held a great debate on whether they should wait it out and side with the winners, or join the humans for a better chance at freedom. Eventually, one of the avash elders, a female known as Tafara, got fed up with all of this, and led her clan and all the others away to fight alongside the humans while the other elders were still debating. Coincidentally, avash society has been matriarchal ever since. The avash were instrumental on the ground, being the only race able to take on a warshell one-on-one without magic or experimental technology on their side. After they were freed, the avash briefly wondered by they were going to do until they remembered that Tafara united them, and unanimously named her the Great Han of the Avash. She led her people proudly into a golden age, building the one city that they were allowed under the navara into a great monument of freedom, and expanding her country's reach until it became the size of the Roman Empire at its peak, through diplomacy, economic savvy (which means knowing how to deal with the kransa), and might when necessary. However, due to her preference for other women, when she died of old age at 800 years old, she left no heirs. Which sparked a massive succession crisis. Now, the avash are divided into two groups: the nomadic wasteland avash, who barely remember how to use bolters, and the decadent city-state avash, who enslave their wasteland counterparts as their cities slowly spiral into decay, corruption, and control by all the other races. The only thing that the avash still have to be proud of is Tyhara, the great sanctum city. With two great horns at the center, representing the duality of justice and morality which the avash based their religion around, Tyhara remains a truly solemn, holy place, home to some of the best hospitals in Aviros.
Kasharn: I love games like Genius: The Transgression, where you play as brilliant scientists, more than slightly mad and able to cobble together a working Tesla coil from a fork, a battery, some gum, and copper wire. So I decided to crank the concept up to 11, set on fire, and make it a whole race. The kasharn are, physically, very buff red-skinned tieflings. Some speculate that the kasharn and the avash descend from the same origin species, but that has been probably been disproven by the kasharn, since they reportedly devolved a volunteer and a non-volunteer back about a 100,000 years and said that it was inconclusive, since they both disintegrated into slightly different-looking piles of flesh goo. The kasharn have an addiction to inventing. They always have to be working on something, building something, tweaking something. It's an instinctual drive that no-one understands, not even the kasharn. Well, they would probably understand it if they set their minds to it, but they're too concerned with SCIENCE to worry about it. And this is after puberty, when the kasharn are harshly trained to the point where they're able to slightly control their manic inventive energy, enough to go out in public, at the very least. The sole purpose of the kasharn under navara rule was to figure out how the navara and the sky-citadels worked. In the process of pursuing the goal, the kasharn blew a large chunk out of their home continent, and reduced everything aboveground on it to a smoking, volcanic wasteland. Once the revolution started, the kasharn were split down the middle on whether or not to join the humans' revolution. That is, until the humans promised them that they were going to take down a sky-citadel, and the kasharn had free rein to come in and investigate it, take it apart if they wanted to. Having only worked with secondhand parts that were essentially the equivalent of wingnuts for the sky-citadel, the kasharn readily agreed, and even manufactured the weapon that too down the third citadel. Today, the kasharn function and important role in worldwide civilization: although much of the technology they produce is too unstable to be released into the wider world, every time that they stumble across something that could, potentially, be used widely, it causes a massive spike in the overall technological level of the world.
Wow. That's a lot. And it explained pretty much everything about the world. I'll return soon with the actual dossier.
Colour me intrigued!