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Fantasy Setting Proposal: Terra Null
Core Ethos: Trilok captures within a fantasy framework the birth of civilizations and the first fronds of philosophical speculation into the nature of the universe, mirroring the achievements of Mesopotamia and Hellenic Greece, the empires of the Mauryas and the Shin: it is a world of city-states, of terra nullia occupied by villages, nomads, and foragers without a concept of “nation,” where faith, magic, and science are saplings tended by the same hands.
Who are the Heroes? The heroes of Trilok are explorers. The very process of travel presents an exposure to the unknown beyond what most folk will ever experience. We are talking of a world without maps, without a common awareness of boundaries…for most people, a few days travel is passage beyond notional space, and a few more is a crossing into the world of myth. But the curious few move in all vectors; peasants and outlanders towards the cities that contain the sum of both material wants and intellectual stimulation, the city-dwellers into the wilds seeking forgotten treasure and ancient secrets. Whatever other alliances and ideas bind a hero to their path, their first steps are always into the new. But exploration is not merely an outward thrust: it is a revolution of the mind, collective or individual. Paired with the outward pursuit of novelty in the slow blossoming of philosophy and mysticism. Intellectual inquiry is growing, in monasteries, ashrams, temples, laboratories. The priests and hierodules, as messengers of the young gods, walk a balance between obeisance and the questioning of these beings—newcomers to the land themselves—that they serve. Students of magery—comprising dozens of styles of practice and theory—seek to find not merely efficacy within their magic but the very engines of change. Natural philosophers demand questions of the visible world and the body. Even amongst the so-called “primitives,” shamans, healers and druids seek the breadth and depth of the knowledge within nature and the spirit.
In terms of game play, all of the conventional player roles are present in Trilok—warrior, magus, priest, rogue—although these categories are interpreted through the lens of culture and experience, creating a great potential for individualization of skills and style without degeneration of the core concepts and rules.
Warriors differ in weapon training and strategy development, rogues by task specialization; magicians are divided by philosophy and theory of ritual, priests by their ritual roles and devotions. Some additional roles and hybridizations have been put forward: a class of proto-scientists and technologists, loosely termed “natural philosophers” and “constructors”; the term “shaman” indicates a ritual worker within an animist or other non-theistic framework, while “monk” and “cenobite” are roles emphasizing introspection and the cultivation of the mind (up to and including supernatural abilities?).
What do they do? Adventurers are unusual people; individuals acting upon motivations so profound that they are disposed to break from the land, kin, and customs they are acclimated to in pursuit of ideals and the unknown. It is not a coincidence that it is the young—free of a sense of obligation, rigid in theirs beliefs, prone to recklessness—that are drawn in to such a life. The swarm of culture and religion that has been imported to Trilok in waves of migration has created fertile ground for idealism and curiosity, while the blossoming of trade has insured that the desire for mammon is equally well-tended.
Villains, Threats, & Conflicts Of greatest concern to the city-states and sedentary peoples is the chaos on the continent of Otoa: the Empire of Four Shores was the most stable, if despotic, nation in Trilok, consolidated by the Alvar (akin to elves) over nine centuries ago. The fragmentation of its provinces has results in pitched battles between loyal and rebelling vassals: two years of stalemate have passed, yet the Alvar have not risen to aid their loyal (human) retainers. The trickle of refugees has become a flood into the ports of Ruah. The ideas and skills that have accompanied these migrants of many species have at once created a sort of uneasy Renaissance within the Exile Coast, precipitating the birth of the Lycaeum—the first open school and repository of philosophy and magic. Ar the same time, the fears and lusts of the various nation’s leadership have initiated military and colonial assays into the interior, disrupting the tenuous peace that the coastal nations have held with the species and tribal confederacies of the so-called “unclaimed land.”
Nature of Magic:. The process by which magic effects material change is unknown, and many schools of esoteric thought contend on the point. Magic saturates the environment, fully integrated into the larger ecology of Trilok and experiencing cycles, fluxes and disturbances comparable to a meteorological system. Think of climates of varying intensity and properties, disrupted by currents akin to wind shifts and seasonal weather, although the forces that generate flux are not understood. Magic also seems to accumulate, even flow through, solid matter, often radically altering the properties of elements and compounds. Flora and fauna manifest magical adaptations that aid survival: in vivid cases, generating new anatomical systems to accommodate their needs. Similarly, sentients exposed to particularly strong magical fields begin to manifest spell-like abilities…sometimes even physiological changes. Conversely, there exist life-forms and objects that are nonmaterial…roughly termed “spirits”…yet seem to interact with the material world through magical means. It is unclear whether this domain—perceptible to most only through magical training—is the source of magic, or merely a layer of reality with different rules. For spell-casters, the prevalence of magic is a double-edged sword—simple spells are effortless, castable by anyone, but more complicated magics pose the threat of cataclysmic backfire, even feedback on the caster. Theurges and other spirit workers rely upon their deities and allies to mitigate this…at the price of the limits and directionality placed upon their abilities, but mages risk health and sanity when they attempt to cast without careful preparation and ritual.
New & Different? The primary difference of this world design is the attempt to attack difference and character variety from an anthropological, relativistic approach. There exists in roleplaying design a tendency towards easy attributions, in a way, an echo of the strict binary thought we all have inherited from the Hellenic thinkers. The first of these is the confabulation of social traits and racial ones; the second is the pride of place given to sedentary civilization over the “nomadic” and the “barbarian.” With the terra nullia presented here, it is my hope to confabulate some of these easy liaisons, to not make a world merely populated by noble savages, amoral brutes, and unfailingly righteous heroes. I wish to paint in many shades of gray, to present the diversity of good and evil, civility and
barbarism, and the strange alchemy by which they sometimes blend and sometimes become to their opposite.
John Berland |
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