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fantasypictures · 5 months

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Cosmology - Demons, Devils, and the Other Guys

So, for my D&D world, I have some mutually conflicting wants:

-I don't like there being surity of an afterlife, being a place you can just pop in to with a high level spell. I like how Eberron has the land of the dead as a place souls go for a little while before vanishing - to oblivion? to a true afterlife? who knows?

-I really like tha Aesthetic of Hell and there being Fiends and such out to get people, and as stupid as it is, I've always loved D&D's concept of The Blood War.

So, a proposal for a solution, built of parts stolen from a few D&D settings and various popular media:

The Abyss / Demons

Imagine that the Universe is a room. The creator gods made it nice. They got in some comfy furniture. Tasteful wallpaper. But it's not perfect. Maybe not quite enough ventilation, maybe the wrong kind of flooring.

If you spill something, it gets under the floor and then Stuff starts Growing.

The Abyssal Realm is in the cracks at the edges of reality, and it's where demons grow - they are the mortal concept evil that has seeped through the cracks and festered into semi-sentient form. Each demon is created from some sin of mortal kind, and if they can claw their way into reality, they will do everything in their power to commit or encourage the evil they represent.

The good news is that there's not a whole heap of reality there to go around, so the demons don't have a lot of autonomy to work with - they spend most of their time not being real, so they mostly only get to do their thing when somebody summons them somewhere with more reality to work with.

(as an aside, Evil is a very mortal concept and something philosophers have argued over for aeons. Demons can spawn from anything anybody thinks is evil - everybody expects demons of murder or torment or cruelty, but smart demonologists try to track down with less power or weirdly specific purviews to summon. While a Demon of Women Being Allowed To Own And Ride Bicycles might not be terribly useful most of the time, if you're female-presenting and need a pair of wheels to get somewhere quickly, it's a lot safer than any other demonic option)

Dead souls don't end up in the Abyss unless something has gone drastically wrong.

Hell / Devils

If the Abyss is the space under the linoleum and the mould there is demonkind, then Hell is tearing up the lino and applying napalm and white phosphorus to "solve" the issue.

Whether Asmodeus was assigned this task, took it upon himself, or was banished to the Abyss and decided to make himself comfortable is unclear. Whatever the case, he hates Demons, and he hates Mortals for indirectly creating them, and he always needs more recruits.

The dead aren't supposed to end up in Hell, but if they opt in, that's where they go. Now, not many people are going to agree to exist in a literal hellscape where they must fight an eternal war against demons until their personality and dreams are slowly dissolved and they become devils. It's not a good deal. Which is why Asmodeus' minions try to influence the mortal plane - the more terrible things are up there, the more likely somebody will be desperate enough to take a deal. Failing that, convincing people they deserve to be in Hell will do.

If somebody is enough of an asshole to those around them, a devil may well lend them some magic powers purely because it will cause more suffering and indirectly lead somebody else to make a deal out of desperation.

The Shadowfell / The Other Guys

So where are dead souls supposed to go? The gods aren't to forthcoming as to whether this was the plan, but generally dead people show up in the Shadowfell, on black sands under an alien sky of unmoving stars. There is a Final Gate somewhere, and beyond that... nobody knows for sure. Some people are drawn to the gate. Some people flee, hiding among the ruins of civilizations that never existed, or escape back to the material plane to become Undead.

There are Fiends there as well. Devils are sent to the Shadowfell to coax souls away from the gate and into servitude. Demons try to claw their way there, for even if it is a plane of the dead, it has more reality than their home. And the easiest way to get there is the rivers of the underworld - at least one of which washes away memory. Sometimes the legions of Hell and the Abyss suffer boating accidents.

Some of the amnesiac fiends of the Shadowfell call themselves Yugoloths, some call themselves Daemons, a fair few don't bother calling themselves anything. They are first and foremost Mercenary - they'll work for souls, for gold, for a sandwich, anything they can be convinced they could benefit from having. They have no qualms about committing any horrible act, any violence, any betrayal, but won't do anything without a payoff.

For a summoner, they are by far among the best fiends to call up - they don't require the dangerous contracts that Devils ask for, and they don't need to constantly commit a specific evil act like a demon. They are, unfortunately, really hard to summon because none of them remember their own names.

#jarrah does an rpg blog #D&D #cosmology

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fantasypictures · 5 months

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The Beginning - Beneath Miscellanium

Not the beginning of the setting in an origin myth sense (because, honestly, I'm stealing 4th editions' "gods did a light colonialism on the primordials" thing), but how this setting started in the real world.

The blame falls on Jeff Rients (who is also on tumblr but I can't find the name right now)

back in 2017-ish, Jeff was running a dungeon-crawl game on Google+, where any adherent of the Flailsnails Conventions could turn up and take part. Living in Australia, in a household that would not support me playing D&D at 3am, I could not take part, but I read the blog posts and watched from afar with envy as Jeff's multitudionous players got up to shenanigans in the dungeons, and traded, competed and organized when outside of it (the fact that the players founded a wizard library entirely off their own initiative was particularly cool to me).

Then I got a place to live that was back near the university where I had studied. The university with RPG club I had accidentally acquired a lifetime membership of. The RPG club that was starting new games in February. The new games that always needed more GMs.

AND the place was near a bar that hosted D&D on weekends.

So I decided that if I couldn't join Jeff's game, I would make my own with blackjack and hookers with a newer ruleset.

I had liked hearing about the wild variety of characters Jeff had seen due to allowing multiple different retroclones rulesets for character creation - but knowing that none of my players were interested in OSR stuff at the time, I determined that the best way to achieve this was to allow anything actively published by Wizards of the Coast. Any books, any unearthed arcana, anything (I later walked that back a little bit - no Ravnica backgrounds and NO MYSTICS JFC)

I cobbled together a couple of levels of dungeon and a vague reason why the dungeon content was so wildly varied, named the town above the dungeon Miscellanium both in honour to Jeff's Miscellanium of Cinder and the fact it a good Roman-sounding name for a place full of diverse weridos, worked out how to use a Facebook group to keep all the people involved up to date, and got going.

============

it was amazing.

The wednesday and saturday groups were, initially, mostly seperate. They would sometimes stumble on what each other had been doing, and would vaguely be aware of each others actions - I gave out XP for after-action reports, in-character being the result of adventurers bragging in the tavern between delves. Eventually as the dungeon sprawled out to the point where many players had only seen a small portion of it, resulting in one of my fondest memories:

P1: "Right, we're going to explore past the mushroom chamber [the chamber that, on the map, looks mushroom shaped], so we should go left" P2: "No, the mushroom chamber [the chamber full of mushrooms] is straight ahead!" P3: "You're both idiots, the mushroom chamber [the SECOND chamber full of mushrooms] is to the right!"

15 minutes, much laughter on my part, and much waving around of maps on the players part, later I pointed out to them that there might in fact be multiple chambers that could be described as "the mushroom chamber". After that, the two groups started sharing their maps.

In september, 7 months (both real and game world time) after the first discovery of the dungeon, the players collected together to create the Miscellanium Adventurers' Guild. They had argued about buying property in the city above the dungeon, until my lovely and very smart partner pointed out that they had de-monstered several city blocks of real estate down in the dungeon, and with enough magic and barricades, could claim more space than the guild would ever need. Watching the players work together to set that up was great, and it was even more awesome months later when the Guild was briefly beseiged by constructs from the deep levels.

Eventually, I ran out of content ideas, and the party found the bottom of the dungeon. I made up a bullshit magic excuse for running the same boss fight twice (so I wouldn't have to have 12 players in the one fight), and they slew the demigod-dragon-devil that the dungeon had been dreamed up to contain. At that point the game had run for 18 months, and 151 sessions, and the dungeon had felt the tread of more than 30 characters.

I'd had a lot of fun, but I hadn't done a huge amount of worldbuilding, except by implication: the game had only ever taken the PCs to the dungeon and the town above it, but there had been reference to an Empire, a very-recently-turned-Matriarchal orc state, somewhere with a lot of tieflings (so many tiefling PCs!), a fallen elven Kingdom with lots of missing princesses, and mistakes made by gods in older times.

After that, I moved on to something more story focussed - a more traditional D&D game with only 5 players, a plot, some semblance of an overworld map, and all that jazz. But I put details in that game that linked it to the previous one, and started imagining what the rest of the world would be like…

#Jarrah does an RPG Blog #Miscellanium

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fantasypictures · 5 months

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I'm going to blog about my D&D setting

There are many like it, but this one is mine

I'll be tagging all my posts "Jarrah does an RPG Blog"

==========

I've run two campaigns set in the same setting now, and I have dreams of running a third. I write stuff down about it, but I don't usually show people. I would like to show people. I want those lovely endorphins.

What it is:

-A Dungeons and Dragons setting. Which is to say, there's orcs and dragons and wizards and probably dungeons to explore. While the two games I've had thus far have been in 5th edition, I'm intending to branch out (and have run other systems in the past), so it isn't automatically tied to the specific mechanics of 5e, unless the specifics of 5e did something I found very compelling or funny. Any worldbuilding should be able to slot on top of a variety of D&D-descended systems.

-Inspirations include: various editions of D&D (I quite liked the 4th ed lore in particular), some select bits of the OSR-adjacent bloggosphere, lots of funny tumblr posts, warhammer, Critical Role, Order of the Stick, Final Fantasy XIV, and the works of Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adams (not that I'm that good, but a man can dream).

-Is there a mission statement? Some unifying theme? Eeeehhhh… I'd like there to be, but the closest I can settle on is "Things don't turn out the way people intended, and sometimes that's for the best"

Whether there is emphasis on the Sometimes will vary.

What it is NOT going to be:

-terribly original

-terribly cohesive

#Jarrah does an RPG Blog #Miscellanium

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fantasypictures · 5 months

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The Elective Thelassocracy of Freehold.

Freehold had another name once- when the city was ruled by a tyrannical (and possibly hellish) monarchy, served by devotees of Erathis the goddess of law.

It had secured itself a surrounding territory with fertile farmland, several valuable mines, and non-human neighbours of relatively timid disposition. A rival kingdom had intended to invade the city and claim this for themselves, so they reached out to a pirate fleet that had been fighting the local authorities. The intention was that the pirates would attack theport as the army marched on the city, with the pirates being a distraction for the main assault.

This is not how it turned out - the army was bloodily mangled, but the pirate fleet actually took the city, slaying the ruler and claiming it for themselves.

You might have expected that the pirates would pillage the place, but the admiral declaired that the city would be treated as a captured vessel, and any crew/citizen would be welcomed to sign up to the same code of conduct the pirates held to. The Erathan devotees that handled the administration of the city were forced by the tenets of their religion that the Code was technically a set of rules and was just as valid as the oppressive rules the previous power structure had instituted.

Now a handful of generations later, the city has settled into being a trading hub with a reputation for producing swashbucklers and rules-lawyers.

(the map I used, that isn't finished, and includes a bunch of stuff complete irrelevant to outside the campaign I ran. The motto is intended to translate to "Have Fun, Don't Drown")

The Council of Sealords

Elections are held every 4 years, and any inhabitant of the city who can fulfil the requirement of having held the title of Captain (on a ship, or in a military unit), and can pay for a marked barrel to be deployed at every polling location can stand for the position. The nine people with the most votes in the city become the Council of Sealords, and must choose among themselves an Admiral to hold executive power in wartime and a tie-breaking vote in other situations.

There is a tendency for Sealords to be from hereditary merchant families, but a few make it onto the council through sheer popularity with the people.

(the council as it was immediately before the PCs showed up)

Laws of the City

The cult of Erathis still does a lot of administration in the city, and takes in any orphans or foundlings to be trained as civil servants, clerics, or watchmen - in freehold, the statement All Cops Are Bastards is literally true.

The laws handed down by the Council are, thus far, fairly liberal - many things that would be illegal in other cities are fine in Freehold. Drugs aren’t banned, but ARE taxed - a drug bust from the Watch will be due to failure to meet manufacturing standards, or due to the constant cat-and-mouse tax evasion schemes that are considered almost a national sport. Among the rich of other nations, Freehold is an enticing tourist destination, albeit one with a reputation for violence...

Brawls and battles in the streets will bring down the watch… who will forcibly enquire if both sides are taking part willingly and with set rules of engagement. If so, they will step back and act as referees.

Breaches of law can face various punishments, depending on severity: a traitor to the city might be chained up and thrown off a cliff into the sea or exiled, but most things adventurers will get up to would result in a fine, or community service, sometimes enforced with old dwarven curse-stones.

Those who do community service are paid for their time - slavery is illegal, and being forced to work without pay is slavery in the law’s eyes. For the rich who can’t pay a fine, they might be able to pay somebody to “steal” their identity and do the community service.

Worship

The cult of Erathis is not popular in the city, but her cult is powerful, in a somewhat similar situation to the devotees of Umberlee - Few people actively like the goddesses of the Law or the Sea, but they do command the city’s respect, so tithes are paid and sacrifices sunk. Everybody wants to avoid paying the taxes, but it’s widely acknowledged that somebody has to.

Tymora and Kord, conversely, have rather popular followings, with a small shrine to the lady of luck in every gambling den, and devotional statues to the god of strength adorning the city arena and gunnery school.

Demographics

The city is majority human, but only just - sizable populations of Orcs (endemic following a failed invasion centuries ago), Dwarves (displaced from the Thunderwall Mountains by the orc invasion) and Minotaurs (actually native to the area - they make good sailors and might have introduced the humans to Erathis worship in ages past) are found in the city, as well as smaller groups of visitors such as High Elves, Dragonborn, and Tritons.

Nobility

The pirate-led revolution did remove many of the rich nobility of the city, but a few generations down the line, the families that came out of the upheaval on top have become the new old money, and despite their claims of being Free Spirits, and coming from The People, they’re not much different from what they replaced.

The title of Lord is awarded by the Erathisian tax-office, based on calculations of income and assets, rather than being handed out by a ruler.

Wizardry

The city is home to two wizarding organisations, although organisation might be a bit generous as terms go

The Brotherhood of Ship-Wizards is more drinking club than university, and the members have been compared to ships cats - useful in their way, potentially territorial, and unable to be trusted to command. The members study magic that manipulates the wind and wards boats against damage more than anything else. Ship-wizards are banned from captaincy (and by extension, politics) - hubris being a common problem among the magically inclined, this might be for the best.

Most of the wizards that aren’t part of the Brotherhood are instead part of the Guild of the Arcane Eye. Closely associated with the Miscellanium University, the Guild’s handful of local members mostly specialise in gathering (and protecting) information. Magus Collix Firnath has been given guardianship of the tower that once belonged to the fallen monarchy’s pet diabolists, and is called on by the Council to provide magical advice. When the post was being assigned, the other Arcane Eye guildmembers were too busy trying to one-up each other and blackmail the Sealords’ Council - the resulting deadlock meant that the stuttering dragonborn geomancy and teleportation specialist won by being the Sealords’ second choice.

Art Sources:

0 - I did the map myself

1 - https://www.artstation.com/artwork/v1mPVx

2 - https://paizo.com/community/blog/v5748dyo5lg1o&page=4?Want-More-Adventure-Card-Game-Weve-Got-That

3 - https://twitter.com/AbsintheOTL/status/1136972404553654272

4 - https://www.artstation.com/artwork/kYdz2

5 - https://twitter.com/JasonRainville/status/1235351632705196033

6 - https://sfw.furaffinity.net/view/25386419/

7 - https://www.reddit.com/r/characterdrawing/comments/8bywk4/oc_ysarian_dragonborn_shadow_sorcerer/

8 - https://www.deviantart.com/acewest, but it's not in their gallery anymore

9 - https://tyron-art.tumblr.com/post/110151948375/salut-tout-le-monde-voici-ma-participation-au

#jarrah does an rpg blog

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fantasypictures · 5 months

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Beneath Miscellanium - what lay beneath

So, last time I explained what happened in the real world for the first game in my D&D setting. From here on out I'll be exploring things that came up in game, and from there extrapolating onwards to what I want there to be in future games. I'm gonna be focusing on the end state of the campaign, but if even one person asks for more detail there will be no stopping me providing it. Onward and downward!

The City of Miscellanium - An inland city built on a river, surrounded by farmland with some nearby forests. The city is ruled by a Dragonborn Lord Mayor (or possibly a Lord whose surname is Mayor. There was some confusion about this), has a large church devoted to the Cataloguist faith (more on that at a later juncture, hopefully), a unusually sizable public library, and a small wizarding school that probably grew out of studying the main odd thing about the town - small treasures and trinkets periodically appear around the city. Most inhabitants make a habit of giving their house a deep clean every few weeks because there's the chance some coins, a bit of jewelery, a nice vase, a very minor magic item, or something else of that nature has randomly materialized in an un-noticed corner. For centuries this was considered to be a blessing on the town, and traders and travellers would come to buy the weird random stuff.

Turned out the appearing loot was a symptom of strange things happening deep below…

The Sunken King There's a legend in this universe, akin to our King Midas. A ruler who wished for infinite treasures, and an ever-growing castle to protect them. The weight of the gold and the castle eventually became too much and the entire thing was swallowed by the earth.

The being at the bottom of the dungeon wasn't the Sunken King, but may well have been an inspiration, and was called such by many people.

In my original premise, I envisioned the King as being the devine offspring of Tiamat and Asmodeus, a devil-dragon, banished to the mortal realm, who ultimately fell to the consuming greed and evil of his parents. He had lusted after an elven princess, and waged war on all that was good in the land, killing or kidnapping her sisters and dwarven husband, until she eventually submitted to being his bride. This was a trick - she had learned some ancient magic of stonework from the dwarves, and combined with the power gifted by the King so she could stand beside him forever, she cursed him to sleep and wove the dungeon around him, forever digging deeper and drawing in treasures and curiosities to keep him satisfied in slumber for a thousand years. Until some brave heroes discovered the dungeon, and slew the Sunken King.

(This was somewhat inspired by/ripped off of Zelda and Calamity Ganon in Breath of the Wild.)

Looking back at that story, I kind of want to revise it a little. The King still has (well, had, he got killed by a bunch of PCs) divine powers. He's still a dragon. He still looks like a devilishly handsome man with great horns and glittering armour when he wants. And he still claims to be the chosen ruler, the destined some of the queen of all dragons

…but in my re-write, he's worse than a demigod laid low by bio-theo-essentialism. He's an entitled mortal empire builder who should have known better, but chose to be the way he is.

Ordelnax the Just was a gold dragon (taking inspiration from here) whose hoard was a kingdom. He had liberated land from a tyrant, and taken their place as a king, albeit it a reasonably just one. Hence the name. He had made friends and alliances with his neighbours - including a kingdom of elves. He met their many princesses (who I will probably do a post on later because they kind of have a lot of impact on some setting things). He fell in love with one of them, and was disappointed when she did not return the interest, instead marrying a dwarf (a dwarf! of all things! Why would she settle for 4 feet of hair when I have 40 feet of glorious scales?!).

So, he goes and festers a bit on that, before being visted by an angelic messenger. The gods have chosen him - the mortal realm has gotten too chaotic, there are too many tiny kingdoms fighting over too many things. He will be given power, and the duty of bringing it all to heel under one rule - his rule.

(I am currently imagining that this may have come from a cabal of gods, some of whom were 100% down for colonialist assholery, some of whom were a bit naive about how this would turn out. Bahamut is in here. As a god of justice, gotta hope he's part of the naive half)

So, we've got an empire growing under the rule of a shining beacon of justice and might, bestowed a quest from the gods themselves to bring all of creation to heel - and he's still lusting after the girl that got away. Not a healthy situation. Not helped when Asmodeus and Tiamat offer to back him. Maybe with a wager? They'll throw their divine might behind him, and if he takes all the lands, he gets to keep them and have his elven princess. If he fails, they get his soul. Or something.

So he signs up. Ordelnax ramps up the empire-building. He threatens the lands of elves and dwarves. Enemies fall before him, divine and hellish power allowing him to slay, enslave, or both, as he pleases. Until the princess has enough, comes to meet him, and curses the both of them into an eternal dream-dungeon.

But all that's in the past. What impact is this supposed to have on the setting now?

Yeah, fair point. The Sunken King was slain by adventurers, but I'm thinking that Ordelnax the Just Emperor is a figure that most in the world don't think of as the same being - few would know of his devil-dealing and nice-guy-syndrome-ing. So perhaps to some he is a Julius Ceasar - a mighty statesman laid low for the betterment of the empire he built. Or a King Arthur, who will one day return to save his subjects. A saint of the god Bahamut (who is maybe too embarassed to mention what he actually got up to). Somebody whose symbol modern asshole colonialist empire builders can rally around.

#Jarrah does an RPG blog #miscellanium

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