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...

Elves and dwarves are probably the two most iconic protagonist races in modern fantasy, from Tolkien to D&D and everywhere in between. In fact, that pair is so  iconic that elves and dwarves go beyond actual elves and actual dwarves, showing up (by different names) in entirely different genres. For example, elves and dwarves exist in Star Trek  in the form of vulcans and klingons, respectively. The vulcans are portrayed as high-brow, robe-wearing intellectuals with old traditions and an affinity for the finer things in life. Elves. Meanwhile, klingons are loud, drink ale that's too strong for other folk, have a warrior culture, and are generally regarded as brash and unrefined. Dwarves. Elves and dwarves even make an all-human appearance in Avatar: the Last Airbender . There's an episode early in the series where the main group needs to cross a canyon, and find themselves babysitting two tribes of displaced refugees who can't get along with each other. The Gan Jin t...

As I continue to try and put together an original fantasy world for my RPG campaigns, I keep running into problems with languages. I don't mean the terminology of the game, I mean the in-universe languages spoken by the characters, and what they imply about the game's assumptions toward the world in which our stories will take place. Let's take a look at the current setup (using D&D 5th Edition as an example, though other fantasy games have similar issues), go over the problems it creates, and then talk about possible solutions. Okay, so in D&D, the overwhelming majority of characters speak approximately two languages: "Common," and a racial language corresponding to the character's race. Certain backgrounds will give you additional languages, but those will basically be selected from among other racial languages. In other words, every language that isn't Common is a racial language. Elves speak Common and Elvish, dwarves speak Common and Dwarvi...

Something I've got on my back burner right now is an attempt to develop a fantasy setting. Unsurprisingly, one of the main ideas is for the setting to be usable in homebrew D&D games, but other fantasy games could be played there, or I could write a book, etc. Whatever the eventual usage, the point is that I want to create a new fantasy world that would be familiar to gamers while offering something of value beyond being "generic fantasy land". To be a familiar fantasy world, there are some key tropes that need to be present: prevalent magic, low tech level, and fantastic creatures — including various flavors of humanoids. That last bit is what I'm getting into today, as fantasy gaming has a bit of a history with playable races. I'm not doing a deep dive right now into the racism and sexual violence built into "classic" notions of fantasy races, as mine is not the best voice to listen to on those fronts. Suffice it to say that fantasy races need at...