History of project

In the following epistle I will try to explain to you what drove me to create this imaginary world and it will even take you on a short tour of my roleplaying history. Save to say you will find many anecdotes here about how I experienced parts of this process and how other people influenced me during this whole endeavour...

The actual setting was something that came to me about three years ago. I wanted to create a pool of ideas that was as rich and diverse as possible, but without losing too much credibility storywise. So one of the first things I produced was a pantheon that actually revolves around the idea that there is a constant struggle between all the different fantastical races that were to inhabit my new Rpg world.

Somehow I never really got around to naming the world itself though, it is always the most difficult thing to devise a name for something that encompasses everything you've created about one particular play setting. As of today, I'm still clueless about what the name for the world that I've created all those adventures in should be. For the mortal realm I've settled on using the creating God's name so that the people living there can say they're living on Iawat's belly, which is pretty original I guess. The whole world entails much more planes of existence though; the astral plane, the various celestial planes and the plane of Limbo to name but a few. It is the kind of Multiverse where you often cannot really make out where one thing starts and the other ends, in therms of experiencing its reality. So, for now, the greatest whole imaginable in my world of fiction shall remain nameless.

The setting was always met with various levels of enthusiasm by the players. Don't get me wrong, they often thought the stories were great, but the homework some of them had to do before they could understand what they were expected to do and how to behave in this setting, was often tremendous. There is the story of one player, whom I shall not name, but when he reads this he shall know who I'm talking about, had to read up to twenty pages of background information and relevant storylines in order to be able to play the role he wanted (and that through some unfortunate circumstances turned out to be a one-off adventure).

So anyway, I came to the realization, a bit later than some of my friends though, that I was a lot better at writing and telling stories than actually performing as a game master. Don't get me wrong, some of the adventures we had were awesome, and I intend to recap some of the more memorable ones for you when I get around to it. They never dared to really criticize me for it too much, but I actually liked the whole creation process a lot better than playing the game itself for a long while. I was scared even sometimes that the players would come and mess up the beautiful stories I'd worked so hard on. The fact of the matter is that I tend to overdetail everything in the long run and that leaves less room off course for good old improvisation. But we live and learn, so now I finally made up my mind and just decided to post everything on the internet, in descent sizable chunks, for anyone with an interest to digest.

I sincerely hope that people eventually will even participate in this project voluntarilly and create their own stories within the "framework" I am creating. I call it a framework because one can never imagine every single thing in a world that is so huge, so some things are left a little vague on purpose and other things that might exist in such a world I haven't even thought up yet or never will for that matter. But what I do is; I create the general outline of the world and start filling it with interesting places where the stories can happen, as well as a lot of the remarkable people who's actions make these stories what they are. My goal is to create enough detail in the setting so that it becomes a living breathing thing, but I also intend to leave enough room for new ideas that I, or those that are willing to join up, might think of in the future.

Maybe I should also tell a little more about myself as a roleplayer. I started out as a total noob to the concept of tabletop RPG at the age of fourteen, so that´s thirteen years ago. I´ve played with many different people in my roleplaying career, but a few of them have stuck around and we still play the game together regularly. The Hardcore party, as I like to call them, is starting a new campaign tomorrow even and another group I play with has been doing it for only a few years now in this form, but very regularly as well. And then there are the occasional one or few-offs I do with friends I see less often.

I can´t even begin to tell you how many characters I´ve played, but over the years I´ve developed a bad habit of ditching characters half way through a campgaign in favor of the new craze I have then. Last year´s campaing everybody´s starting character had made it through, I on the other hand had ditched two perfectly good characters and a third had died because of some good old heroics, however misplaced. The fourth had therefore become a little detached from the rest of the party, but I had fun so I didn´t think much about it at the time. I recon the character boredom is a remnant from my days as a GM, where I get to play so many different characters, which I usually spend way too much time creating, that I can´t really stick to one archetype, class or whatever you want to call it. I have good hopes for our next campaign however, because we´re going to be in a constantly changing environment (Lots of Jumping from one dimension to another) so I don't really have to fear getting bored. We also agreed that there will be a change of GMs once in a while, so I'll get my sweet chance to play whatever the whim of the moment tells me, in due time.

I think what I've tried to illustrate above is the reason why I need so much diversity in the world setting I'm sharing bits of with you guys. In the nativity story you'll find there are eigtheen different intelligent species living on the belly of Iawat. Why, you ask? The most simple awnser I can give you is there just are, but that is also not entirely the reason. I just have the feeling that a world with only humans would not suit my tastes for a true fantasy setting; where is the magic in that? I'd ask. However, once I started making up species for this setting I started out by making groups of species that have similar traits in common, for example the Greenskins, who are the only three races spawned by Omonos and are all green (except maybe for a rare few blue ones, but that's not the issue here really.) So I had to cover all major types of species I could think of and then just prune a bit, like the Gardener himself would have done if he were in my place of ultimate authority over this fantasy world. I divided the species that I thought were cool enough to cast but they also needed to be playable as PCs. This was an important factor in the choices I made about species, that I would offer no restriction on which species or race a player might choose to play in my campaign. So after some deliberation I ended up with still a rather long list, but since they had been cut into chunks of three, it could be viewed more compactly, because there where only six groups of races with three races each, which made it more or less overseeable. There are still some quirks in this system that seem a bit illogical, if you take close look at how some of the races have been divided, but it seems like the best choices have been made at that point and I feel the same way still.

Then there had to be a certain placement of said species and groups of species in the world. So I drew a map, which I'm thinking of uploading somewhere soon, but since I still don't have one clear cut final version of said map that might be a challenge. The map divided the world in different continents, seperated by bodies of water, so each major group roughly had their own territory, though not always divided in equal parts, I must admit. There are story based reasons of course as to why the Stoutfolk (as the Halflings call themselves in my world) for example have such a vast empire currently. It all has to do with the history of the world. Which is another major thing to deal with as world builder: the Timeline.

I have to admit that is another thing that can shift and scafe if you're not careful with how you create your background. I do have an outline of the major world events that happened say the last thousand to two thousand years, but it's only what is important to the story you wish to tell in your campaign that really matters and has to be chronologically fixed. You can't for example go around telling people the prophet Zhul lived approximately then and then, because those characters are just too important for the main story threads. Well, I am talking about the single most major NPC (Deity) that exists in this world, so a fixed date of birth and death, or ascension if you will, is neccesary for the sense of realism the players get from your storytelling. The flipside however is that you can't possibly expect a GM to know of all the dates those major events occured, because that would just leave too little space open for on the fly, improvised storytelling. Also with so many different societies it is hard to tell whose history books are most accurate in either their timing of events or in the validity of the choices they made on which events to cover.

All this is just a means to clarify some of the most defining choices I've made for the world. So lets go over to the topic of technology for a second, because in the introduction I talked about a post medieval world with lots of magic. Well, as Arthur C. Clarke once said: technology that is advanced enough is indistinguishable from magic. I figured this could work the other way around just as well. I would have a world that could support economies much larger than in late medieval time, even renaissance times, because of the way magic had become THE substitute for the advancement of technology. There are aircraft that fly through magical means, there are devices (usually called the Zhulite Apparati in this setting) that transfer magical energy into useful substances or even into intangible forms like kinetic or healing types of energy; often but not exclusively, using Lyrium crystals or even liquid Lyrium as fuel. Take for example the Zhulite Mecha's which are no more than walking magical metal suits operated by wizards from the inside, which run mostly on the highest grades of lyrium; or the engines they use on boats and certain overland forms of transportation, which run on certain less volatile types of lyrium, often recycled from other more advanced usages. Portals even exist that can transport wares and persons in an instant, though at a great cost in lyquid lyrium, which is degraded into a lower form of lyrium every time such an apparatus is used. The very lowest grades of lyrium, and therefore also the cheapest, might still provide a farmer with enough energy to fuel a sizable irrigation system. This way his crops won't wither and the people can be fed for another year.

So a lot of the requirements for the advancement of technology fell away, because there simply was no real need to improve much upon things. I really enjoyed myself, as well as my co-author by the way, with thinking up ways that magic replaced the need for a lot of things we take for granted today. Though the largest magical hubs are often Zhulite oriented, meaning that the church of the Wizard God has a lot to do with keeping this sorcerous system up and running.

But I'm getting into stuff that is going to be explained in much more detail elsewhere, in due time that is. I'd like to go on a bit about where I got the inspiration from. I've played many different role playing games in my life, as I've said, but a lot of those took place in different medieval fantasy settings. I remember the Earthdawn campaigns I've played, the many GURPS variants of fantasy as well as good old Dungeons and Dragons. All of these gaming systems have their own flavor, and some give the GM more freedom to generate content than others. For this setting I definetly had to choose GURPS, because frankly, it is the only system that allows an infinite amount of tweaking with just a finite amount of dice to be rolled. Its rules are pretty elaborate, but they have to be in order to combine both the magical, the divine and the technological aspects of the game. There are even rules for psionics and other meta-powers, though for this setting I chose to exclude those, because of how the fundamental principles of magic and divine energy operate, as explained in my blog in the form of a lesson on Zhul's laws of magic. For in this world it was Zhul who created the hypothesis that magical energy and divine energy originate through the same fundamental principles. What this means for the world is that wizards and priests, who are both adept in bending the laws of nature to their will, make use of the same mechanics for game purposes. So the priest might have a limited amount of spell colleges to choose from and he will pay less points to buy a certain level of power investure; as opposed to a wizard, who will have almost all the spells to choose from upon creation, but increasing his magery level will cost him dearly.

The latter is just a choice I have made to streamline character creation and to create a certain balance in the world. Though I have noticed that the tendency of this setting is that it leans towards high powered campaigns, so one hundred points would be the absolute minimum and one hundred and fifty perhaps a nice average to start from, if you choose to use GURPS, that is. For my own campaigns I have allowed players to start with even higher point totals, and often allowing grossly imbalancing traits or disadvantages, something which I would now frown upon, having studies the rules more closely.

Whichever way you want to use this world, know that most of the choices concerning game mechanics have been made to fit the story, though other decisions have been incorporated in order to created an exciting balance of power to toy with as the GM, or even just because I've improvised a certain story telling device once and it kind off stuck around during the rest of the campaign; hence ending up here.

This is all for now folks, from now on I will be working mostly on the blog section of the site as well as the background information featured in the Dawn of the World topic.

Thank you for showing an interest, I truly hope that some of you will be inspired by all of this!

Our users

Here I expect I will post some experiences from people who have enjoyed a nice tabletop adventure in the setting I have created. Don't expect anything to come soon though, because for now I need to focus on sorting out what I can use as well as generating new content. Though if you have been inspired by some of this in your story telling, game design or just in creating a character background or something, please let me know. You can find information on how to contact me through this page: Contact Me,

For direct Feedback into my mailbox you can also use the Feedback link.

If you just have a short message that you'd like everyone to see, like for instance "Keep up the good work", or "Hated the last post on your blog..." use this: Guestbook