Find Familiar

Hello again, everyone! It's been a while since I've posted my worldbuilding ideas, so I thought I'd head back to that for a bit. Today, we're gonna talk about the planes of existence. I wrote before about how there's a fairly ridiculous number of planes in "stock" D&D  worlds, and how I'd rather there be a smaller number. I've had that notion percolating in my brain for a bit, and I've got some ideas. The core of my ideas is this: what if the "material plane" was not technically a plane of its own, but rather the area of overlap between the other planes? Let's break it down. First, imagine a multiverse with only four planes. One is the Feywild, which I imagine as being full of life-force and nature magic and enchantment and so forth. I mean, it's literally named after the "fey" which is another word for faerie-type creatures. Another is sort of the dark mirror of the Feywild called the Shadowfell. This i...

When I first started this blog, I talked about how part of what I'd be using it for is as a place to "think out loud" regarding my attempts to create a campaign setting for D&D  (or other fantasy RPG systems). Ironically, I've only been posting those thoughts if I've felt like I had "enough" for a post, or felt like I could tie it all into a topic or theme — if I could make it feel coherent. But you know what? The times I need a "thinking space" the most is when it's not  coherent, when my thoughts aren't  nicely packed up into a complete and well-themed post. This is one of those times. Brain dump incoming. Tieflings! Lots of people like them. I like them. They're cool, they're fun, they're colorful. Some folks play them as edgelords, some enjoy a sort of rebellious "I'm bad but not really" vibe, some people just wanna be purple. Interestingly, they have this built-in association with fiends, but I do...

Today I'll start with a tautology: a story which takes place in a fantasy world will take place in that fantasy world. Now, let me amend it slightly: a story which takes place in a fantasy world does not take place in some other world. The point I'm so clumsily shambling toward (with an improbable overuse of colons) is this: why would a story — especially a fantasy story where the author already got to tailor-make the setting — need more than one world? If you've never stumbled into the tiny handful of fantasy stories that involve more than one world, you might not even know what I'm talking about. Usually, "the world" is a big enough setting to handle a story. Even in the works of Tolkien, in which the world of "Middle Earth" has that name for a reason, the additional realities are mostly unseen history that you don't even need to know about in order to understand what's going on in the primary narratives (four whole books' worth...