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Greetings all. I just finished reading the "Name My Setting" and "Name My Setting Two" threads and am terribly impressed by the campaign worlds people come up with. Y'all are way more creative than I am. If other folks wouldn't mind sharing, I'd be interested in reading more 2-3 paragraph blurbs about people's homebrew worlds, something like the little treatments movie folks use to pitch scripts. Thanks.
This particular setting was put aside when I switched to 3.5 for simplicity's sake. I went back to Greyhawk because I didn't want to create feats and prestige classes for my homebrew world, I just wanted to get my game going without fuss. I've been working on this homebrew world off and on for about 10 years and I plan to use it down the road sometime again, probably after Savage Tide.
Myranthia--asteroids captured inside the breathable atmosphere of a gas giant are inhabited. The gas giant is a brown dwarf and the lower you get in the atmosphere the hotter it gets. The asteroids are in a stable orbit around the huge planet and are usually hollowed out by the inhabitants to protect them from the storm seasons that sweep the planet every 4 (Earth years). Hurricane force winds force everyone inside or into something every year (4 Earth year equivalent), but the hurricane force winds spread water and fertile soil around the planet's asteroids, irrigating and bringing water to the asteroid inhabitants in a regular cycle.
Wingless humanoids have perfected an art of sky-surfing to get around called wing gliding, using special suits with thin membrane wings to catch updrafts and air currents.
Gargantuan air creatures are hunted for their lungs, for the lung tissue is lighter than air and is used to provide lift for the airships used by the intelligent races. The enzyme and bile is harvested as well, for the enzyme makes the lung tissue lighter than air and the bile makes them heavier than air, to give altitude control. Airships are all pretty small, made of laquered wicker and light woods, with crews of 4-15 being average. No large scale aerial combat beyond skirmishing between rivals with light missile weapons.
There are no Gods per se, the people (no elves, dwarves, halflings, just humans and some variants) all worship the planet's elementary forces and the churches are tied to their culture, not a God as usually defined in fantasy literature and D&D.
Conflicts revolve around prime hunting areas and the most protected and fertile "wind islands" as the asteroids are called. Every wind island must be protected, for raiders can strike anywhere, as there are no "borders." This has made a large central government controlling many wind islands very difficult to bring about, so virtually every wind island is politically independent, ranging from a few hundred people to several tens of thousands. Cultures tend to cluster together and aid each other if attacked by an organized force, but most conflict is low-scale and low intensity raiding. This makes adventuring parties a "normal" thing, with small military forces of squad to platoon size being very important. It justifies the existence of many adventuring parties and small teams of higher level NPCs, as opposed to large formations of lower level troops.
I share this world with another GM in our group and he's going to run a game next year where the central theme involves the emergence of a large, militaristic organized power that is going to be the main antagonist.
I've already gone way beyond a synopsis, so I'll stop now.
Thanks for reading the stuff on my thread, I really appreciate any feedback.
Anyway, you already read about my homebrew world (although I really barely scratched the surface), but I thought I might just share another little interesting tidbit about it with you.
The campaign I plan on running in about two-three months will revolve around a new form of life that has appeared during the war with Nevermore, called the On'thalgu. Though they seem at first sinister, with their ability to spontaneously shapeshift and their tendency to absorb all the light around them, they are discovered to be actually a totally nonreliant, pure form of life that was the original "blueprint" of humanity when the gods created the multiverse (Ao, or whatever creation myth your particular world has).
It'll be sort of a thing where the players are battling these seemingly evil creatures, then must side with them to defeat the true enemy.
Should be cool.
By the by, I have like thirty pages (at least) of stuff on this campaign, so if anyone wants any info at all, just post questions and comments on the "Name My Setting....Two!!!" thread I started.
I just love chatting about stuff I've written!
nam out
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I got one I'm slapping together now.
The basic campaign idea is an island that was ruled by a nigh-powerful necromancer, that was getting together a dreadful army of undead and humanoids to invade the 'continent.' The necromancer met his doom by biting off more than he could chew; agents of his killed a mature gold dragon and stole her 3 eggs. The great wyrm who was the grandfather showed up one day and took him to task.
I drew the island by looking at a picture of Iceland and drawing it while not looking at what I was drawing, just looking at the picture of Iceland; it was an old exercise I learned in an art class. Then I flipped it 90 degrees, and a few minor modifications later I had a land mass that looked kind of genuine.
I was taken with Zelazny's Amber books--a powerful noble family who constantly infights, and decided the island is divided up into 4 or 5 smaller kingdoms, each ruled by a different offspring of the dead necromancer, none of whom get along in the least. The characters can be mercenaries who have come to the island because there is a lot of craziness going on there, and they're looking for work/adventure/what have you. Undead and humanoid former army members need rounding up etc...
I also remember I think Monte Cook said, "always make sure the campaign has one good secret."
Well, this one's is that the aforementioned necromancer was really a lich, and when the gold dragon wyrm destroyed him, he didn't know anything about a phylactery; the lich was using magic to still appear living. So the lich is laying low, and up to something dreadful; not even his family knows he is still around.
My first campaign was a mediocre coastal-themed homebrew on a small island nation that was eventually overrun by two separate armies of the dead. The gods made the water around the island holy so that they should never escape. All in all, the world was nothing special, so I shall tell you of my second.
After the first campaign I wondered, if few powerful undead can ruin a nation, why hasn't the world already been overrun by the innumerable armies of demons and monsters? And if that happened, would a deity not try and sort it out? And if one deity entered the world, wouldn't the others, leading to a massive war that could, if sustained, rend the entire world into floating rubble?
This world was my setting, Rynwold.
The game could be set in one of two timeframes. In the first, demons and their monsters roamed the world, with mankind a row of fleeing pawns protected by uncommonly powerful celestials. The humans of the world, meanwhile, would bicker amongst each other over minutae of religious doctrine, all the while cowering in overcrowded squalour in underground cities on ancient hallowed ground into which outsiders could not enter even by magic. Divine magic was revered and even relied upon; arcane magic, most of which was originally taught to men who served demons or was reverse-engineered by those who studied them, was largely considered inherently evil and arcanists were executed.
In the later timeframe, the deities had long ago expunged all extraplanar outsiders from the land, and by divine consensus prohibited them from ever entering except when deliberately summoned. The deities themselves left the world and signed an ancient agreement never to return in person, for fear that a war between the gods would tear the world asunder, leaving a handful of weakened gods to rule over a dead rubble. The exception was the deity of Shadow, who by secretive methods could visit the world as long as he did not interfere with mortals. Unfortunately, rumours and prophecy predict that he would find a loophole in reality to circumvent this, and that is where the player characters come in.
The campaign in this setting is entitled The Rynwold Pantheon. The players - mostly divinely-oriented classes such as clerics, paladins, rangers and monks, and almost all human or various planetouched since the corrupt races had been cast out - search for ancient secrets and artifacts among the ruins of the old underground cities. They uncover a page of an ancient copy of The Rynwold Pantheon - the world's equivalent of a Bible - and discover that it differs from the version currently accepted by any deities. What's more, it's not a copy -- this is the original thing, and each page harbours a tiny portion of the power of the entire pantheon of gods whose immeasurable, immortal wisdom is contained within it. They set out to collect the entire book before someone else does.
Toward the end of the campaign, they have discovered that each page has its own efficacy and that simply possessing enough pages of the book gives a man power, and an immortality. What's more, all manner of men and creatures have obtained these pages, some who hide it for safety, others corrupted by the great power, and they don't want to let it go. The deity of Shadow, of course, can touch those who are no longer truly mortal.
The campaign ended with the player characters collecting the entire book, only to discover that the deity of Shadow -- who cannot take the pages of book himself -- has been waiting to seize it from them. Now as powerful as gods themselves, they must use the power of the book to defeat him -- if they fail, he takes it from them and, no longer bound by his pact with the other deities, casts the world into darkness. In exchange for returning the book to the gods, the player characters take their own seats as deities in the Rynwold Pantheon.
Hm, I seem to have rambled for more than three paragraphs. Excuse me!
I once Dmed a game in which the overall story-arc was about the rise and fall of a Lich-King and his undead legions slowly overtaking kingdom after kingdom. This story-arc lasted well over five years, and it took nearly the two first years to introduce this Lich-King. He was a royal advisor/wizard in one of the kingdoms at the beginning. His king, who was power hungry and always wanted more, told his reluctant advisor/wizard to make a pact with Orcus for him to give him an unstoppable army to vanquish his foes, a neiboring kingdom on another continent. Orcus agreed, but for a terrible price, ten million souls had to be sacrificed on the same day.
So the king ordered the bulk of his troops to spread out to supposedly seek out the enemy. He also sent out a double-agent to tell his enemies of the relatively unprotected state of the kingdom. The enemy hit the kingdom with everything they had, killing many civilians in the process, he then ordered his troops to come back and defend what was left of the kingdom. The casualties of men from both armies AND the casualties suffered by the peasants and commoners breached the ten million cap, and Orcus delivered on his deal.
The dead corpses were raised as undead and a ten million strong army was created. But there was a turn of events that the king had not anticipated. Since the advisor/wizard was the one who actually made the deal, it was he who had control of this new army. The advisor killed the former king and became undead himself, known now as the Lich King.
The characters in this campaign had SOME doing in this plot… they were part of this kingdom’s army at one point. They were even summoned by the advisor/wizard to help put a stop to this tragedy in motion. But they were obviously too late.
The main plot after this was to find a way to stop this undead army, and destroy the Lich-King, and even put a stop to Orcus who was actually planning to turn the Prime Material Plane into the 667th layer of the Abyss.
Ultradan
Wow, a lot of people seem to have campaigns worlds with undead filled history. Interesting. I'll post my world when I have more time. Probably later today.
It is in this time, the Age of Dragons, that we now face. The Dragon Kings, no longer satisfied with the wealth they have plundered in the fallen empires of the east, look hungrily to the new kingdoms of the west. It has been a thousand years since the Dragon Kings warred upon Elf and Man, and it is not known whether or not we will survive this new battle. I know the Dragon Kings have already sent their spies - spellcasters tained with the blood of these Kings, spellcasters that know not the training of the Pancaraksa.
I write this last note in haste, for my duties call yet again. Our new-found friends, the dwarves, bring an emissary to speak with us. Till now, our meetings have always been informal - the learning of cultural mores and the understanding of language have barred anything else. What little I have learned from them is truly astonishing - these workers of stone and metal are able to call upon the power of the gods they worship to work magic! Such a discovery would surely stop the hearts of the cardinals in the Pentagrad. Whether it would be because of this threat to their dominion over magic or over such a new idea - that gods can grant magic to be wielded by mortals - is debatable.
Such thoughts make me feel old, and I am barely past my fourth decade. I fear the storm that I know is coming soon. I can only hope that whatever fortunes smile upon this world that something will start to swing the balance in our favor.
— Iahrus, called the Wise
(Here's a thread about mine and my website with more details.)