worldbuilding

Top-Down Worldbuilding, and when not to

I recently noticed an issue with my worldbuilding work for Planet Kaendor that I remember having run into several times before over the years. The whole concept is to be a vast world of magical wilderness filled with strange supernatural forces, but a good amount of time I spend working on it actually ends up going on working on the half-dozen major city states, the powerful sorcerer-kings who rule many of them, and the main power groups in the region. None of which is actually supposed to come up much during actual play in an ongoing campaign. I want to have them as part of the setting, but primarily as a form of background flavor that gives a bit more context to what’s happening during play, and help maintaining the appearance of a larger world. You find that applied very well in the Dark Souls games, where you often run into mentions of the far away countries of Astora or Carim, which are given just enough background to make it seem like there’s a story to them, but which never get any actual specific information. You meet a couple of people who say they are from those places, and some item description mention that they are the typical shields of the Knights of Astora or something like that, but that’s really it.

I think part of the reason why I keep getting distracted working on places that I don’t actually mean to make any appearances is that most suggested procedures you can find on making a world larger than just a starting village and a dungeon approach the entire process top down. And also assume campaigns dealing with international affairs. First you draw your continent, then you draw the borders between kingdoms, define their governments, identify the influential power groups, and work your way down. An approach that works, but for a setting like Planet Kaendor, it’s already gone completely off target.

Many, many years ago (almost 10 now, wow) Hill Cantons had a neat little concept of defining different regions as Corelands, Borderlands, and the Weird. And the part that always stood out to me the most is that in the Hill Cantons campaign, the Corelands were considered outside of the play area. They exist, but there’s no adventures there. All adventures happen in the Borderlands, where the fringes of civilization merge with the supernatural, and in the Weird. I think it might be useful, as least for me in my situation, to take this even a bit further. How about actually leaving those city states, which the concept for the cultural level and presence of ruins requires, as blank spots. At least during the primary development of the setting. If their main role is to serve as background detail for some NPCs who are foreigners visiting the places where the actual adventures take place, the city states can be left for last.

In a wilderness campaign, the things that matter the most are what the PCs are actually seeing on the ground, at that moment. When politics and diplomacy become important in such campaigns, it concerns the village they are currently in, and its relationship to one or two neighboring settlements. When you actually look at historic examples, like the Roman wars in Gaul and Germania, you find that those barbarian tribes two thousand years ago were highly organized and very well connected, and everything only makes sense when you account for organized armies from different tribes coordinating their campaigns hundreds of miles away. But here we’re talking about fantasy wilderness, not historical antiquity. And at least in my concept, creating a sense of vastness and desolation, and of a largely unknown and untamed world takes precedent over any kind of realism.

The alternative approach to creating a setting from the top down is to work from the bottom up. You very often find this approach by people recommending to start building just one town and one or two nearby dungeon, and then expanding your map as the players start getting closer to the edges. Absolutely viable approach to having quick and easy adventures, but a side effect of this is that it automatically tends towards creating a very generic Elfgame Fantasyland. When you have to come up with something behind the next hill, you search your memory for what you’ve seen other people do in similar situations, and it’s very easy to end up doing something similar too. It becomes either generic or random, unless you have a bigger picture in mind ahead of time, which defines a different specific style for what fits into the world and what doesn’t.

Which leads to a third option, which is kind of a hybrid of the two, but not simply the middle ground. You start at the top, but instead of working your way down to the bottom step by step, you only do the very most top level stuff to define some basic parameters, and then immediately go all the way to the bottom and work your way up. For example, begin by defining what creatures exist in the setting, how magic works, what levels of technology are available, what religion is like, and how supernatural beings interact with mortals. That’s all at that point. There’s no specific countries, no cities, no rulers, and no major organizations. That’s the kind of stuff that I have developed very highly for Planet Kaendor, and created a style that I find very compelling and well suited for adventures. But it was the cities, rulers, and organizations where I got mired in the mud and found myself unable to create much content that is actually useful in play. Because that’s all stuff that isn’t actually supposed to appear during play.

Here’s my new approach to attempt creating more playable content. For now, I’ll put aside all the notes I have for the city states and their people. Some of that I might bring back, but others could very well end up on the cutting room floor. There’s some really cool ideas I really would want to use, but perhaps Planet Kaendor is just not the place to use them. Instead, my plan is to create one “starting town” for each of the primary environments that I want to be able to visit with a good amount of detail. Instead of continuing to create things abstractly, I try to go specific. Have villages with actual maps, name and describe specific NPCs and their relationships, come up with specific threats to those specific villages. Because at the end of the day, all cool settings in fictions are cool because of the things the main characters see and touch, and the people they talk to, about the things that is directly concerning these people.

My hope is that at the end, I will have six to ten such villages and small towns that each stand as a showcase and reference point for the entire region they are in. Because in practice and actual play, I mostly will need only one settlement when the players arrive in a new region. That village does not need to have a specific location on a large scale continent map, and could be wherever the party enters the region from. (I think this is where large hex maps had part in sending me down the wrong path.) We also find something very similar in Space Operas. There’s the cliche that planets in science fiction are all homogenous, but that’s highly misleading in most cases. Almost all the time, the protagonists land in only one place and stay within a few kilometers of that landing spot before returning to space. What does the rest of the planet look like? We don’t know. What of all the other planets that the protagonists don’t visit? We don’t know. And it doesn’t matter. In fiction, most of the time, all that matters is within the range of what the protagonists can see. Unless you have a story about international politics, everything beyond that range basically doesn’t exist. And even the Star Wars movies, which are about a galactic political conflict, don’t worry about it one bit. How is the empire actually run? We don’t know, because for the story at hand, it doesn’t matter.

Adventurers, Heroes, and the Endgame for high level PCs

“Excuse me, but why are we doing all of this again?”

One thing that has troubled me with fantasy adventure games for a very long time is the nebulous concept of adventurers, and how they could actually stand up to scrutiny in a fantasy setting that aims to be internally plausible and self-consistent. Something I’ve been writing about many times over the years. There have been precedents of fantasy protagonists who just wander around and happen to run into adventures long before the inception of D&D player characters. But books are a different medium than RPGs and concepts don’t generally copy over neatly between the two, especially when narrative structures are concerned.

The original RPG adventurers where people who risked live and limb to gain huge piles of treasure, because the campaigns where relatively simple and straightforward games of facing monsters and collecting treasures. The game was about the gameplay, not about creating a story that exists in a wider world outside of the current dungeon the PCs are in today. Of course, it expanded to be just that, and very quickly, but there was never a real serious overhaul of what kind of people adventurers actually are how they fit into the societies of their world. We go to fight monsters and loot dungeons because there are monsters and dungeons over there. And monsters exist to the fought, and dungeons to be raided. For the sake of gameplay, this isn’t generally questioned any further. Just do it and have fun.

But the idea of playing campaigns that are more about stories than gameplay has always had a huge appeal, and there are two main justifications, and I wouldn’t shy away from calling them excuses, for why adventurers go on these adventures they go on. The first is the plain old treasure hunter, tomb robber, or murderhobo. These characters just don’t bother with any logical explanation. Fighting is fun, getting stupidly rich is fun. But the risk that adventurers typically face in RPGs is ridiculously high, and adventuring just seems like a fast track to a horrible death. These characters make only questionable sense to begin with, but just don’t hold up at all for the wide variety of personalities players like to give their PCs. At the very end of this path lies the insanity of Shonen anime where 12 year kids end up with a happy childhood of friendship and the daily slaughter of dozens. The other common alternative are the knights in shining armor or superheroes. They do all the same things as the murderhobos, but they don’t do it for the riches. They do it out of compassion for the innocents. They are heroes; that’s what heroes do. It works as a justification for gameplay, but it also doesn’t work for stories with even a little bit of depth that aim for some amount of plausible believability.

What is needed to make the existence of adventurers plausible, is to create a concept of what adventurers actually are alongside with creating a setting in which they serve a believable function and role in society. The typical D&D solution, or you might call it the Forgotten Realms solution, is to treat adventurers as private security contractors and exterminators that deal with various trouble when the official authorities can’t be bothered right now. It’s considered a valid career choice, but don’t question how it’s so easy to get established in the business as complete newcomers when the typical contracts are stuff that the army can’t handle. It also stretches plausibility how in a world with absent official authority, roaming vagabonds get invited into communities to protect them. Yes, it worked in The Seven Samurai, but much of the three hour movie is about how unusual this is and the struggles of everyone involved to make it work. Great for a stand-alone story, but not something you want to deal with in every new village the party comes through. But there are other games where the role of PCs is tailored to a specific campaign concept and setting, like in Blades in the Dark or Band of Blades for example.

Now to finally get to some kind of point, I think I finally found some kind of concept for what kind of people player characters are and their place in society that integrates well into the kind of world that I want to create with Kaendor.

The primary vision behind Kaendor is a world dominated by wilderness and primordial powers, with small and isolated civilizations being scattered far and wide, in an environment that is constantly changing that swallows up city states just as fast as it creates them. It’s a world in a kind of perpetual apocalypse; a frontier without a heartland. One constant in this world is that there are always people looking for a new home to settle as the cities of their ancestors are swallowed by the forests and fall into the seas. As for any valley or island that becomes uninhabitable, another place opens up for farming somewhere else. But every time people leave their failing city states to begin a new life somewhere else, they are making a huge gamble. If the settlement of a new aspiring lord fails, there are often no second chances to try somewhere else. That’s where Heroes come in.

Heroes in the classical sense are not just people who did something brave, but special individuals who possess an inherent greatness. Always highly extraordinary individuals and even superhuman, and often actual demigods. Our own culture rejects such notions that some people are inherently elevated over others and destined for greatness, but in a fantastical setting drawing on elements from Antiquity and the Bronze Age, it’s a very important aspect of how those societies tick. In a fantasy adventure game, player characters are inherently special because the game is fundamentally leaning in their favor and their victory over almost all opposition they encounter pretty much a given. Working this gameplay element into the culture of the setting seems like a really fun idea. Dark Souls is a prime example of this, and it works out beautifully there, allowing you to get invested and believe in a world that exceptionally absurd as fantasy worlds go. In fantasy, you can get away with almost anything, as long as the the world as a hole makes sense in its own internal logic.

As I was saying, the special socio-environmental conditions of Kaendor create a constant demand for special people capable of extraordinary greatness to perpetuate the cycle of migrating populations and rising and falling city states. That is the social niche I see for the institution of adventurers. Adventuring is an occupation that serves to create individuals capable of being the leaders of the following generations by giving them experience about the many natural and supernatural dangers of the wilderness and testing their resilience and capacity to lead. It is to these heroes who have proven themselves and earned a reputation that has carried their names far and wide that people will look up to when they are forced from the crumbling cities that have been their homes for generations.

Not every player character has to have this lofty goal of one day raising a stronghold that will grow into a great and wondrous city. But even if only a tenth of them are pursuing this dream, it creates a society that values the kind of people who venture into the wild to face the monsters that threaten civilization, scout out potential areas for new strongholds, and recover abandoned resources and lost magic from fallen cities of the past. And it often takes more than just a single Hero to establish and defend a new strongholds. Hero kings depend on an entourage of other exceptional people to serve as their champions, providing other opportunities for those who fought besides them.

Now this is all sounding an awful lot like the classic D&D endgame of establishing a stronghold and running a domain. Which has been covered to some extend throughout various editions, but by all accounts only very rarely became part of actual play. Instead, it was much more common that ascending the throne meant effectively retiring the character from play. And in campaigns where players could have several characters of different levels (because sometimes you want to do stuff that requires a PC to be locked up in a lab for months), having one character retire while the others continue their adventures wouldn’t really be that strange. And I think making this an explicit assumption for a campaign concept might actually be a really nice idea. Domain management is a weird thing that just doesn’t really fit with the rest of fantasy adventure games. These games are group games, while running a domain is a solitary occupation, and the stuff you’d be doing would be completely different from the stuff you’d be doing up to that point. And if you really wanted to play a game like this, it should be about this stuff from the start, not at the end after you spend months doing something completely different.

Instead, introducing a campaign as being about adventurers who struggle to earn themselves a place among the hero-kings of the setting, with the possible establishing of a stronghold and settlement constituting and ultimate conclusion seems like a very interesting and compelling way to approach a game. And like the cool chap in the picture above, the actual ruling and administrating of the domain would constitute the epilogue. Yes, in three of the original stories Conan is a king. But he doesn’t do any ruling in any of them, and leads an army into battle only once. At the end of the campaign, you could have a final adventure of having to defend the new throne of one of the PCs against a rival as the final test, but after that, the campaign would be concluded.

Now one oddity about old D&D is that that the establishing of a domain was generally limited to characters of at last 9th level. Which seems rather arbitrary, as anyone who clears out a castle and has the money to hire guard could do so regardless of character level. But if you assume it’s meant to be the conclusion of a character’s career, then the whole thing makes a lot more sense. I decided a long time ago that in Kaendor, all mortals are limited to 10th level, so that magic spells cap out at 5th level and everything beyond that being the powers of the gods. The thing with maximum levels in games where much of the motivation comes from advancing to a higher level is what do you do when you actually reach the last level? By the point you reach it, there’s nothing really left to do with it. I quite like the idea that at the point characters reach 10th level, their goal changes from advancing in power claiming their domain. To have a whole final adventure in which the 10th level characters fight for their stronghold and no longer gain XP.

My thoughts on this might be changing in the future, as they always do. But as of now, this is so far the concept for the role and identity of adventurers that I liked the most.

The Realms, Spirits, and Magic

While working on barbarian wilderness settings, I’ve always been swinging back and forth between trying to create a world that is pure wilderness with civilization being something that is only heard but never seen, and city states trying to keep the encroaching Chaos of the wilderness at bay. I have a tendency to just run with whatever has caught my fancy at the moment and losing sight of the bigger picture. I feel that for the last months, I’ve been focusing far too much on the politics and hierarchies of the big cities and drifting away from an actual wilderness setting. But one aspect in particular I found to have neglected the worst is the magical and mystical element of a true primordial wilderness. To that end, I’ve picked up playing some more Dark Souls 3 again, which is just soaked into all that mythic stuff without being an Epic story of great rulers and grand battles. I’ve been inspired by that game even more so than the first back when it came out, but felt that many of my ideas would need much more transformation before they stop seeming like blatant copies of someone else’s popular work. But now I decided screw at all that! I take from Star Wars and Conan without any shame all the time, and it’s only ripping off if you imitate the form without giving it any of your own context. If anyone looks at any of this and thinks, “hey, that reminds me of Dark Souls“, I’m totally fine with it. After all, Dark Souls has Berserk plastered all over it and everyone thinks that’s awesome.

The Three Realms of Kaendor

The world of Kaendor is ancient beyond reckoning. There must have been a point were time first began, but not even the most ancient spirits remember a time before this one. As far as anyone can tell, the world has been the way it is now forever. If there ever was a time before this one, nothing remains to tell of it.

The world consists of two primary realms, which the mortals call the Wilds and the Underworld. The Wilds consist of all the forests, mountains, and islands that make up the continent of Kaendor and the unknown lands beyond. They are the world of plants and beasts, and the countless spirits and gods of the Wilds. Beneath the surface of the earth lies the Underworld, the realm of fire and demons. Both realms are primordial and eternal, controlled by supernatural forces and the inscrutable wills of spirits and demons. As the two sides of the natural world, they are neither good nor evil, but they are harsh and uncaring, no more concerned with the fates of mortals than those of beasts. And in the hierarchy of beasts and spirits in the Wilds, mortals stand far below the peak.

But at some point, or perhaps at many different points in the vastness of times, mortals discovered that the power of fire, which occasionally rises into the Wilds from the Underworld by pure chance, can be an incredible weapon and tool to deal with the many threats of the forests and the mountains. By learning to weild and control the fire, mortals gained the ability to change their environments , drive off the beasts that prey on them, and push back against the influence of the spirits that control the weather and the land. And as the power of mortals grew, the small and scattered Civilized Lands they controlled became like a third realm in their own right.

Magic and Civilization

Civilization in Kaendor is not an enduring thing. Once control of the land is gained, it must constantly be maintained to keep the Wilds at bay and keep them from reclaiming what was once theirs. Pacts and truces with the spirits of the surrounding Wilds must be honored and renewed, and the temples and priest-kings must perpetuate the rites to maintain the stability of weather and floods required to grow the food that feeds their cities. But inevitably, there are only two possible fates that await every city and civilization. Even with the powers of temples, the constant unpredictable changes of the Wilds can only be slowed but never stopped, and eventually the prosperity of even the mightiest city will start to fade. As populations decline and roads and fields are no longer maintained, the rites that ensure stability weaken in power until they fail completely. At that point, the Wilds will reclaim the land faster and faster, until their is nothing left but abandoned and overgrown stone walls, which in time will also crumble and disappear.

But all too often, people try to escape this inevitable fate, and instead of allowing their civilization to fade, they turn their gaze to the Underworld for powers much greater than simple fire. As ordinary magic draws its powers from the supernatural energies of the Wilds, Sorcery draws on the demonic powers of the Underworld. Not only can sorcery hold back the Wilds even when the power of fire and skills is failing. Sorcerers can create things undreamed of priests, sages, and craftsmen. By using the powers of the Underworld to bend the Wilds to their will, sorcerers believe that they can create civilizations much grander and more prosperous than any that came before them. But there are countless ruined cities overgrown by the forests and crumbling into the sea that stand as proof of their madness. Sorcery may prolong the inevitable end of a declining city, but instead of quietly fading out as the Wilds return, they always end up burning out and leaving nothing but charred cinders. Fire is the main tool of mortals to assert power over the wilds, but if allowed to run free, it will simply consume everything.

The Cult of Heotis

The Fenai of the Dainiva Forest worship three primary deities. Idain, the Lady of the Woods; Livas, the Lord of the Beasts, and Heotis, the Keeper of the Fire. Idain is the goddess of the fields and Livas the god of the herds. Heotis is the goddess of the home. Her role is that of the bringer of fire used for warmth, light, cooking, and smithing, without which mortals would live no different than beasts; but she is also the one who protects the house and the family from its flames. Fire is not good or evil, but it is the demon that is invited into the home, because without it there would be no home. Fire is a blessing, but it also must be respected and feared. Because otherwise it will destroy and kill everything near it.

Wilders

Not all mortals embrace civilization, and there are probably just as many people living simple lives in the forests and mountains, away from the grain fields surrounding the city states. Civilized people call them the Wilders, and look down upon them as savages and heathens. Wilders have found their own way to coexist with the spirits of the Wilds, making pacts with the spirits of the land to live as subjects within their domain and acknowledging their rule through sacrifices. Wilder settlements are small and rely largely on hunting, herding, and foraging, growing no larger than what the domains of the spirits they worship can sustain, and remaining flexible enough to adapt to the changes in their environment.

Wilders usually use fire only as much as they need for warmth and light, and never to clear land. Though most clans are not above torching the villages of the enemies, which they regard as an additional desecration and humiliation of their foes.

Corruption and the Undead

Eventually, the flames of sorcery will consume the bodies of mortals, but long before that they char their souls. The use and regular exposure to sorcery is not kind on the spirits of mortals. At first it leads to slight madness, but over time leads to the creation of ghouls. Ghouls are still more alive than undead, but as the effects of sorcery continue to gnaw on their flesh, they develop a craving for the flesh of the living to sustain their own failing bodies. Ghouls are not only found among the minions and slaves of sorcerers, but also the desperate inhabitants of old ruins and plains of ash that have been consumed by the flames of the Underworld. Ghouls who practice sorcery eventually rely entirely on the energies of the Underworld to sustain their warped existence and turn into wights, though the same fate can also await their closest servants. If the corruption progresses past this point, eventually the dead flesh with crumble into ash, leaving behind only a spirit of demonic power in the form of a wraith.

Sometimes people are killed by the powers of sorcery very quickly, completely destroying their bodies and leaving behind only a charred remnant of their soul in the form of a shade.

Skeletons and zombies in Kaendor are always deliberately created by sorcerers or demons and usually have a charred and burned appearance as their dead bodies are animated by faint spirits of flame.

Call of the Planes

When I wrapped up my 5th edition campaign last year, I was pretty fed up with the system for it just not being the kind of game that works for the kind of campaigns that I had created my setting for. It also made me throw a small pile of notes into the corner that I had scribbled down for a Planescape campaign. Last week I came across a discussions about planned campaigns we never got around to run, which reminded me of those ideas. And here I am now, picking up right where I left a year ago.

And yes, I am super pumped for Carceri. (But also Ysgard and Pandemonium.) And the factions I want to include in important roles are the Bleak Cabal, the Doomguard, the Dustmen, and the Revolutionary League.

With references like these, keeping the thing from going all grimmdark will be one of the priorities, but I think with the quirkiness of Planescape it shouldn’t be too hard to find a good balance. If everything breaks, a Solaire and Siegmeyer duo should always be able to save the say. With jolly cooperation

You used to be an Adventurer like me?

This post somewhat continues on my thoughts from two months ago.

When Dungeons & Dragons appeared and became the last common ancestor of basically all RPGs today (I know, it didn’t appear ex nihilo in a complete vaccum), it wasn’t even called a Roleplaying Game. It was labeled on the box as a “Rules for Fantastic Medieval Wargames” and later “Fantasy Adventure Game”. The PCs went to the dungeon because it was there. They looted all the treasures in the dungeon because the treasure exists to be looted. The adventurer’s life of dungeon crawling started as a game mechanic. Some kind of plausible fictional reasoning for why people would engage in an activity with such an outrageous fatality rate for the sake of collecting piles of gold they didn’t actually have any use for was tacked on later. It also followed the footsteps of Greek heros and Arthurian knight. The adventurer makes sense within the world of the dungeon, but its existence becomes much more far fetched and implausible when it is migrated into a semi-ordinary world of towns and farms, inhabited by lords and peasants who are going by their everyday lives.

Seas of ink have been spilled on how the world of the Forgotten Realms makes no sense, in which low-level adventurers have to risk their lives to save villages from deadly monsters if the local tavern owner or herbalist could wipe them all out in a matter of minutes with their legendary magic swords and awesome arcane powers. And when Fantasyland with its D&D conventions reached Japan and found its way into shonen anime aimed at 10 to 16 year old boys, we eventually ended up with stories that specifically acknowledge that the internal logic of the world runs on game mechanics. That American D&D cartoon, that I’ve never seen, probably played a big part as well. (Portal Fantasy is cancer!)

What we ended up with are fantasy world where adventurer is a common profession, with many larger settlements having a local branch of the adventurer’s guild where people come to list contracts for adventuring work like killing the rats in their basement. These worlds make no sense. And no, I’m not talking just about some juvenile anime or bad fan fiction. It’s all the way up in the most prestigious, big budget, and mass audience works of contemporary fantasy.

I feel that to have a world in which people go into ancient ruins to face terrifying beasts and deadly traps, adventuring does not make sense as a career choice for regular people. To be in any way plausible, a setting for adventures of dungeon crawling, monster killing, and treasure looting needs two main elements (and a third lesser one):

First, ordinary people must not be able to fight back against “Real Monsters”. And this also includes professional soldiers. A king can not just send 30 of his best trained and armed men to deal with monsters threatening the realm. If that were the case, there would be no need for adventurers other than cutting costs by outsourcing the work to contractors. That hardly sounds heroic. When I am talking about real monsters, I mean stuff like a basilisk or a manticore. To my knowledge there are no famous tales of Sir Lancelot and the Wolves, or how young Perseus fought eight goblins. Those stories would not be worth telling either. Sure, a fantasy world can have fictional critters. I’ve made plenty of them myself. But those are mostly background flavor, not the stuff of heroic tales.

The second thing is that PCs can’t just be adventurers who thought fighting monsters would be an interesting career choice. This goes completely against the first point that I just established. PCs need to be Heroes, with a capital H. Extraordinary people who have been gifted with exceptional powers and abilities. The heroes of ancient myths are very often descendants of gods. And even in Athurian tales, you could argue that noble knights are a unique kind of people, different by birth from the ordinary folk and granted special status by god. This is something I’ve never seen mentioned in D&D outside of Birthright. Which I guess might very well be an American thing. But then, Superheroes are also one of the most American things ever, and they all have unique superhuman powers from birth, or incredible funds from a highly privileged upbringing. Now I am a very outspoken critic of Tolkien and seeing The Lord of Rings as a big apologetic manifesto for the racial superiority of the English aristocracy, so I can fully understand if people don’t like the idea of PCs being destined to be Heroes instead of earning their merit through hard work and dedication. But a special trait that makes rare individuals capable of becoming Heroes in ways that are completely out of reach of most people does not have to be tied to specific ancestral bloodlines. You can also have something like Star Wars, where being strong in the Force is a rare inborn trait that apparently can appear in everyone completely at random. But I think it’s important that player characters are not random people, and not everyone can become a Hero. If that were the case, nothing would stop the king’s 30 best trained men from becoming 8th level fighters and deal with all the monster problems in the realm themselves.

I believe that for a good background setting designed for campaigns that center around dungeon crawling and monster slaying, having a distinction between Heroes and normal people is important. And it can even be valuable to have that distinction be consciously understood by the people who inhabit the world, and make it part of their culture. I feel that the whole life of adventurers makes so much more sense and feels so much more believable in such a cultural context. It provides a reason for why the PCs gain access to the highest ranks of society that are usually barred to common folk, and why people put all their hopes into them. It’s a relatively easy way to make the setting shape itself to the game, rather than awkwardly trying to make the game fit a setting.

Earlier I mentioned a third worldbuilding element that helps making a world of treasure filled ruins much more plausible, which is one possible most people here would already have heard about long ago. It is the idea that the implied environments of early D&D were all post-apocalyptic settings. And it certainly helps. Why are there so many dungeons everywhere, often within a relatively short walk from the nearest settlements? Why are they loaded with huge hoards of treasures and magical items? And most importantly, if they are that easy to access, why haven’t they been plundered centuries ago? It all makes a lot of sense when you assume that there was a civilization much wealthier and with much more magic than there is today. And it also used to be that way until relatively recently.

There are so many magic items in abandoned ruins and old tombs because at the time, these were not nearly as rare as they are now. The minor king who was buried with his legendary sword and ring of incredible power did not take the greatest treasure of the realm into his grave. Those were only baubles with sentimental value to him, but sacrifices his successors could afford to make to honor his memory. And why do adventurers keep breaking into these tombs to loot all these magic treasures today? Because these tombs and forgotten stashes are the only places where you can find such items now. It’s less treasure hunting than salvaging. Not to say that all the magic items used to be minor junk in the days of Atlantis, but their presence in tombs and old castles makes a lot more sense if you assume that these items were not nearly as valuable as they are today. One reason for it being people being able to make more of them. The creation of new magic items being nearly impossible is a big factor in making the looting of old ruins worthwhile and the pillaging of grave goods more justified. If your average town alchemist or blacksmith can make minor magic items, this aspect starts coming apart at the seams. Wizards being required to be 9th level to start creating magic items might seem excessively high and seem a bit implausible. But when the goal is to make the creation of new magic items exceptionally rare and difficult, it does make a lot of sense.

It all also becomes more plausible the more recent you place the fall of the previous civilization, or at least the rise of the new one. Even low-level PCs can still find great treasure in relatively easily accessible dungeons because they are among the first people who have come to raid them since treasure hunting became the primary way to gain access to such riches and items. The people in the village may know about the old ruin up on the hill, but since the founding of the village the PCs are some of the first people who have shown up and might have a shot of surviving crossing the first threshold.

So yeah, my points. Insert witty conclusion here.

The History of Planet Kaendor

An early-ish draft

The Age of the Ancients

In the ancient times long before the beginning of history, unknown beings known as the Glass Makers created numerous large structures from a nearly unbreakable, dark green, glass-like material that have been found everywhere across the continent from the mountains of Venlat to the jungles of Kemesh. Nothing is known about the Glass Makers except that someone must have created these ancient ruins at some point in the long distant past.

After the Glass Makers, a civilization appeared across Kaendor that people call the Rock Carvers. The Rock Carvers created many large cities and fortresses, which were build not from bricks or blocks of stone, but appear to have been carved entirely from the solid rock. While many of the ancient stone castles have large sections made from stacked stones, these appear to be repairs and extensions made by later inhabitants of the ruins, as they don’t match the precise angles and smoothness and often lack the sophisticated carved decorations. The ruins left behind by the Rock Carvers leave little information about their civilization, but the size and scale of rooms, doors, and windows makes it likely that they were not too unsimilar in body from the people inhabiting Kaendor today.

The age of the Rock Carvers was followed by the Tower Builders, who build their castles from large, tightly fitted blocks of stones that are dominated by tall square towers. Many shamans tell stories of having talked with the Folk of the Forests, who claim to have build these towers, but it’s not clear if they are referring to themselves or their ancestors. The square towers are found in many places in Senkand and Dainiva, and a few are known to be still standing in Venlat and even the islands of Suiad. While some of them are currently inhabited, most famously Kamir in Senkand, all known towers appear to have been abandoned by their builders for a very long time.

Eventually the Tower Builders came into conflict with the Naga from the south, who expanded their own civilization far into the woodlands of Dainiva. It is said that during this time, the Kaska fled the wrath of the Forest God Livas across the Misty Sea to the Witchfens of Venlat. Nobody knows how long the great empire of the naga lasted, or even if it was a single civilization or numerous unrelated kingdoms But there are old stories of a great winter that lasted for centuries and made the naga flee from their northern cities and retreat to the jungles of Kemesh where they are said to rule to this very day.

When the naga disappeared from the lands north of the Southern Sea, people who had been living deep in the forests mountains of Senkand moved into their deserted cities and created the first civilization of mortals. The Tulean are said to have ruled in Var Sharaz, Kamir, Ven Marhend, Hadakar, and the Gray City for over half a milennium until they too were defeated by the Murya who became the new rulers of Senkand. It is said that some of the Wilder clans high up in the Mountains of the Moon are the last descendants of the Tulean, but most other survivors have blended in with the Murya many generations ago.

The Age of Kings

After the disappearance of the Tulean, Murya culture spread north along the coast to the Fenai, and east over the mountains to the Yao, leading to a new age of great cities appearing throughout the lands of Kaendor that had been nothing but wilderness and home to small scattered clans for countless centuries.

Over 500 years ago, the golden-skinned immortal Kor-Sharazan, claiming to be the youngest of the nine children of the Moon Goddess Ashana, who are the ancestors of all mortals, founded Var-Sharaz on the ruins of an ancient naga city. To this day, it remains the oldest surviving city north of the Southern Sea.

Some 300 years ago, three nameless mystics founded the Sakaya in the Mountains of the Sun, which in the generations since then became the dominant religion of the Yao, though they count many Fenai and Murya among their ranks as well. Far to the north, the fey witch Meiv appeared among the Kuri in Venlat and led many of them to rebuild the ancient ruined city of Halva, becoming their immortal queen. Nobody knows where she came from or how old she really is, but some Kuri privately belief that she’s a daughter of the North Wind who had been banished from her home for unknown deeds.

Far away in distant Kemesh, slaves of the Naga escaped across the Southern Sea and eventually found their way to the islands of Suiad and the old abandoned naga ruins of Kelay, where they became the Suay.

Other cities followed, such as Kerlon, which grew around the ancient mountain temple of the Disciples of Temis; Kamir, under the rule of the powerful Murya sorceress Yenati; and Ven Marhend, the city of the Sorcerer Lords.

Some 40 years ago, the Sorcerer Lords fought a long and terrible war with their neighbors to the north, which ended in a great magical disaster that devastated the land, leaving behind the Gray City on the banks of the River of Ash. Most recently, the Red Sakaya left behind their kin in the Mountains of the Sun for good to seek their fortune north in Dainiva. They breached the walls of Aleya and in the terrible fighting the city was reduced to charred rubble. With the city being left uninhabitable, they continued along the shore of Lake Amara until they reached Kars and managed to take the city without a fight.