worldbuilding

The weird Demographics of Vampire populations

One thing that has always been left very unclear about Vampire: The Masquerade (maybe in part deliberately) is the question of the scale at which the vampire society of a given domain exists. To some degree, the concept of the World of Darkness is pulling in two opposing directions. On the one hand, the game has for a very long time been promoted as “a game of personal horror”. Horror is inherently dependent on a sense of isolation and vulnerability, and the rulebooks make it clear throughout all editions that vampires are generally solitary loners who usually don’t want to have much to do with each other. But on the other hand, it’s also really big on the concept of Clans as interconnected organizations in conflict both with each other and among themselves in a global struggle that spans centuries. And on top of that are even older vampires that hide in the shadows and pull the strings of hundreds of unwitting pawns who consider themselves to be the lords of the night. So what is it? Bleak isolation or tightly knit families?

The Camarilla consists of seven clans, and while not every city would need to have a strong presence of all seven, I think most players and GMs would want to have all of them represented in their campaigns to t least make them options for player characters. Then each clan also has elders of the 7th or 8th generation, while the default generation for PCs is 13th, which are the most common vampires. And there’s also a growing number of vampires of the 14th and 15th generation in recent decades. That means that clan would have members of 6 to 9 different generations. Even if you have only one vampire per generation per clan, you’re already starting with about 50 vampires. That is a pretty large community.

Population Sizes

Quite early on, a rough estimate was mentioned that the Camarilla considers 1 vampire per 100,000 humans a good number to not cause any occasional killings by vampires to raise suspicion or interest. The number is widely dismissed as not being really based on anything, but it’s the only number there is. Combine it with 50 vampires that inhabit a domain, and you would need an urban area of 5 million humans. (City borders are a human administration thing, vampires only care where the rural country side starts.) And when you look at the US, Canada, and Mexico, where most of the published material for the game is set, you get 11 urban areas that lie above that number (in the mid 2010s). For smaller vampire communities of 20 to 50 vampires, you get another 20 domains. That actually seems pretty workable.

“Europe”: The dark blue area has a similar population to the United States. The light blue area is similar to Canada and Mexico together.

However, things get wonky when you apply the same assumptions to Europe. As it turns out, the population in Europe is more evenly spread out. Even though the balance between urban and rural population is about the same (~80/20), European countries tend to have more mid-sized cities instead of a few giant ones. In an area with a comparable population of humans, there are only 5 urban areas that pass the 5 million people mark, and another 14 above the 2 million people mark. That would mean that America could maintain +50% more vampire communities of at least 20 vampires, and more than twice as many communities of at least 50 vampires. And with the Cainites having been established in Europe ten times longer than in North America, that just feels wrong. Europe should be the heart of the Western Vampire World.

However, there is another important difference. As the saying goes “In Europe, a hundred miles is a long distance. In America, a hundred years are a long time”. The area from England, through the Low Countries, Western Germany, and to Northern Italy has a population like the US East Coast but at only a third the length. Getting from one major city to another can be a lot quicker than getting from the outskirts to the city center during high traffic in a lot of places. I think for campaigns set in Europe, there needs to be a different image of what the domain of a prince looks like. Instead, you could have domains consisting of dozens of smaller cities that all can support only one or two vampires each. Or a prince who holds dominion of four cities that are each home to half a dozen vampires. In the most densely inhabited areas, there is very little empty space that could truly be considered rural by American standards.

Age Distribution

Another interesting topic is the matter of generations. As the books explain, when the vampires decided to go into hiding and disappear from the human world at the end of the Middle Ages, it became a necessity to move to the cities, where more people would be out on the streets after night, and stories of attacks and death seen as nothing that unusual. While a vampire can easily survive by feeding on just a few dozen humans, doing so without ever noticing a pattern of strange sightings and disappearances requires hiding among thousands of humans. So even while the human population in Europe increased significantly over the centuries, the number of vampires would not have risen with them and remained stagnant, if not even decline as killed vampires were not replaced in already overcrowded cities. And it was in this context that some vampires chose to try their luck with risking the highly dangerous journey to the New World.

The vampires with the most to gain by migrating to America would have been the ones with the least to loose. Which in the society of the Camarilla means the youngest one. The new Masquerade and threat of werwolves in the countryside made vampires mostly confined to cities, and the laws created by the Camarilla elders to ensure that no infighting among vampires would raise the suspicions of mortals also just happened to protect the interests of the same elders against young upstarts trying to get their own slice of the pie. Those 8th generation elders who are now princes in America would still have been neonates less than a century old when they first came to the colonies, to later be joined by a slow trickle of 9th and 10th generation vampires.

While Europe saw a significant population growth in the last two centuries, the boom in North America at the same time was on a considerably different scale. From 1870 to 2000, the population in Western Europe roughly doubled in size. In the same period, the population of the United States increased eight times. Much of it driven by new immigration. But in my own opinion, that migration of humans would not have been mirrored by an equal migration of vampires. Crossing the open ocean on a ship, crammed with hundreds of people for weeks is extremely dangerous, and even when you get to your destination you start with no contacts and no shelter. Instead, the growth of the American vampire population would have come from local vampires creating new fledglings in large numbers. Even if the oldest vampires of the 8th generation want to create new childer, they would only be 9th generation themselves. And most new vampires would be created by younger vampires who had no childers yet of their own. It’s easy to see the ranks of 11th, 12th, and 13th generation vampires explode alongside the human population.

In Europe, the situation would be different. Almost all the 6th and 7th generation vampires would have stayed in their well established domains, together with a majority of 8th generation vampires. So my view is that in Europe the total amount of Elder vampires is several times larger than in America. But since we are comparing two areas of similar human populations with similar degrees of urbanization, the total amount of all vampires would be the same. At the same time, with human population growth being only a quarter the rate as in America, the growth of the vampire population would have been much more limited as well. Quite likely Europe would have been overcrowded by old vampires at the same time as America had huge potential for growth, so the vampire population in Europe might not have grown at all. I can totally see many European princes decided that keeping the vampire population the same while the human population doubles makes maintaining the Masquerade much less stressful. The books talk about American neonates being miffed at not being able to create new fledglings any time they want. In Europe, it would be so much worse. However, at the same time, with larger numbers of old vampires of older generations, there is still much more possibility of new vampires being added to older generations. In America, the few 8th generation elders can always only create a new 9th generation vampire. In Europe, a 6th generation vampire might still get the idea to have one more 7th generation childe to raise for the next couple of decades. This of course continues further down the line, with 9th and 10th generation fledgling being just as likely as 13th or 14th generation ones.

In Summary

I think there’s a good case for approaching vampire society in Europe quite different from how vampire society in America is described. In Europe, the urban development is more conductive to spread out and decentralized domains than the monolithic metropolis surrounded by a ring of suburbs.

The idea that there are a tiny number of elders and a large majority of neonates also doesn’t have to stay true in Europe. Populations that are roughly one third elders, ancilla, and neonates each absolutely makes sense.

While it’s not necessary, and arguing demographics and sociology in a game about undead monsters is pointless, I think it would actually be quite interesting to have America and Europe be distinctively different. I already talked about how the typical urban decay with street gangs and burning cars does not really feel right for a darker and twisted Germany. Having different regions feel actually different is much more interseting and exciting than simply switching all KFCs for Nordsees.

Vampire: The Masquerade: Northeast Passage

On the Reeperbahn, late half past one
If you got a girl, or got none
You will have great fun, that’s the way it’s done
On the Reeperbahn, late half past one

Who never in one cozy night
Strolled past the Reeperbahn’s lights
Is a sorry sod, ’cause he knows you not
Oh my Saint Paul’s, my Saint Paul’s by Night

Basically as soon as I started considering working on a Vampire campaign, I decided that it would have to be set in Hamburg. The premise of the game requires that it’s set in a major city (unless your deliberately want to run a nonstandard campaign), and every time I start worldbuilding on something, I always take a few moment to think if there’s anything from the Baltic Sea region that I can use. We almost never get to see our regional history an heritage make an appearance anywhere. The only thing you ever get is Vikings, and even those seem to always be shown far away from home. Hamburg is the biggest city in Northern Europe between London and Saint Petersburg, and it also happens to be where I was born and lived as a kid for 10 years (and I still pass through there pretty regularly). So it really was the obvious choice with no other contestants. And it turns out to actually have a lot of recent history that is great material for a Vampire campaign.

Hamburg

As a major city with a metropolitan area of 5 million people, Hamburg obviously qualifies as a perfect setting for a Vampire campaign. But once I started looking up various barely remembered details from places I remember from my childhood, I rediscovered so many things that not only make it suitable but amazing for that task.

While not nearly as old as the Roman cities in southern Germany, Hamburg has a long history that stretches back over a thousand years. The city really came into its prime with the rise of the Hanseatic League in the 13th century. Merchants from many important port cities on the Baltic and North Seas formed an extensive network of relationships that eventually grew into something akin to one of the world’s earliest megacorporations. In many of these cities, the Hanse merchants formed their own aristocratic class that often came to govern the ports as independent or autonomous republics. The capital of the League was in nearby Lübeck, which with modern city growth and transportation infrastructure is now part of the Hamburg metro area. In the Holy Roman Empire, Hamburg and Lübeck were among a small number of cities that had no lords and owed allegiance only to the Emperor himself. This arrangement lasted until the 1920s, and even today the city of Hamburg is one of the 16 states of Germany, only one administrative level below the Federal Government. The merchant aristocracy of Hamburg was so proud that they would not accept any medals or join any orders of foreign powers, as they would recognize no authority other than their own. There really is no doubt: In the World of Darkness, the Hanseatic League was undisputed Ventrue territory.

Early on in the 30 Years War, Hamburg invested heavily in new massive fortifications to surround the entire city, and it was one of the few major cities in the Empire that were never besieged or pillaged, but still had the war come right to its doorsteps during Wallenstein’s campaign against the Danish king Christian, whose possessions included the northernmost parts of the Empire. Hamburg and Lübeck marked the greatest extend of Naploeon’s empire in the North at the start of the 19th century. After a great fire in 1842, the rebuilding of Hamburg led to a great industrial boom. Growing into the third largest port in Europe and becoming the gateway for emigrants to America and where exotic goods from around the world would come into Germany.

²⁴Then the Lord rained sulfur and fire out of the sky from the Lord on Sodom and Gomorrah, ²⁵overthrowing those cities, all of the plain, and everyone who lived in the cities. He also destroyed the plants that grew out of the ground.

– Genesis 19

Ruin of St. Nicholas’ Church, destroyed in 1943.

In 1943, the British Royal Air Force launched Operation Gomorrah, and for a full week they attacked Hamburg with incendiary bombs. One night the relentless bombing exceeded their wildest expectation, with the inferno turning into a giant tornado of flames that incinerated much of the city. Later the amount of destruction and deaths from the atomic bomb in Nagasaki would be rated as “not nearly as bad as Hamburg”. Along with tens of thousands of humans, the fire destroyed a majority of the city’s vampires, including many elders of many centuries. There are few things that scare ancient empires, but this night haunts those who survived to this very day. Not even 20 years later, Hamburg suffered a great flood that devastated the poorest parts of the city in the South, there the old dykes had still not been properly repaired. Since then, things have been looking upward for the city.

Hamburg by Night

The classic style of Vampire: the Masquerade is one of urban decay and street gangs. While this was a very contemporary style in 90s America, it just really doesn’t make any sense for Hamburg in the 2020s. You could do such a version of Hamburg, but it just wouldn’t reflect the character of the city, even in a darker and more twisted way. With most of the historic buildings being completely destroyed by the two fires in 1842 and 1943, most of the current city only 70 years old. And with the hastily constructed concrete blocks from the 50s now showing their age and being considered eyesores, the city is giving itself a makeover of shiny glass and gleaming lights. It just looks very modern and crisp, with a booming economy. Industrial ruins and burning cars simply don’t fit into this place.

But even with such a shining exterior, there is absolutely room to fill it with evil and corruption. There are persistent stereotypes and jokes about German society and culture, which are so persistent because they are not exactly wrong. They don’t get it quite right and miss many of the finer nuances, but there is a lot of truth to that. And even with Germany as a whole, the “Northern Lights” have a reputation for being dour, joyless, and lacking in courtesy. In my experience, “Germany” is really just a language area. Culturally, people in Schleswig-Holstein, Hamburg, and Mecklenburg are Scandinavian. When we look South and see the Rhur Area with its Karneval, and Bavaria with its Oktoberfest, we just think they are all mad and an embarrassment to the whole county. It’s not that we mean to be rude or have no sense of humor or enjoying fun, but our regional culture puts a much greater emphasis of giving other people their space and being unobtrusive. We like not being bothered and extend that common courtesy to others.

But even so, it does take very little to go from courtesy to callousness. There is only a small step between not being nosy and willful ignorance, and between not rocking the boat and complacency. It’s easy to find yourself kicked out into the freezing rain. And the 1930s were not our proudest moments. This version of Hamburg that I am going for is one of order and oppression, but not enforced by police with clubs, but by social pressure. The police is not the hand of the oppressor, but the foot of the people, put down on those trying to disrupt a good thing. Corruption is not a serious concern of the people, as you don’t see it unless you want to. It’s not the drugs that bother people, but the junkies passed out on the sidewalks. Fighting crime is not about dealing with the causes, but removing it from sight.

Hamburg is an old Ventrue city. Shaped just as much by the vampires who infest it, as they are shaped by it. It is orderly, efficient, and makes a whole lot of money. It’s running smoothly, and the masses just hovering ever so slightly above poverty is by design. People who can’t afford to lose their job don’t ask questions or make demands. With Ventrue pulling many of the leavers that control the city, “Human Resources” take on the full horrific meaning that the term implies. The city and its industry does not serve the people. The people are the fuel and the grease that make the city run.

A City of Steel and Sin

While Hamburg is generally not considered to be among the fancy global cities of Europe, like London, Paris, Berlin, or Moscow, it is still a quite impressive place of its own.

The port of Hamburg is the third largest in Europe, after Rotterdam and Antwerp. Aside from its massive container terminals, it also includes several shipyards and oil refineries on the south side of the Elbe. Hamburg is also the site of the largest copperworks in Europe, an Airbus production site, and countless machine factories. It also has a major airport and a main train station with 12 platforms inside a single 150m long and 75 meter wide hall of steel beams and glass.

Hamburg is also home to the second largest cemetery in the Old World. Most cemeteries have a but stop. Hamburg Ohlsdorf has its own two bus lines with 24 stops. Right nearby are the Fuhlsbüttel prison and the Ochsenzoll Asylum, making for a quite unique neighborhood.

The Reeperbahn in the St. Pauli neighborhood is probably the second most famous Red Light District in Europe after Amsterdam. Originally the area started as a shanty town outside the walls of the cities Hamburg and Altona and became the home to all trades that were forbidden inside the cities. In the 1920s it fancied itself to be a glitzy and glamorous entertainment district the likes of Berlin, but after the war it was never properly redeveloped and turned into a crime-infested slum. In recent decades great efforts have been made to straighten it up and return it to its glory days. But it never lost its pride in its self proclaimed title as “The most sinful mile in the world.”

Synthwave-Noir is the new Gothic-Punk

Vampire: The Masquerade was created at the start of the 90s, with the first rulebook explaining it’s stylistic and aesthetic vision as “Gothic-Punk”. Some years ago, I had a long discussion with several people about the very question if this overall dominant style dates the game so much as a product of the 90s that it would no longer work for current groups of players unless you deliberately aim for retro-nostalgia. I think it was when I saw something or another about Bloodlines 2 (a Vampire videogame currently in development), that I had the thought whether the Synthwave aesthetic of recent years could be a viable way to transform Vampire into something that evokes very similar conceits in the present day.

Synthwave is a electronic music style that came to prominence in the late 2000, which makes heavy use of synthesizer sounds that strongly evoke the sound of 80’s electronic pop, and was hugely influenced by the music from the movie Blade Runner. But it uses these references and influences as a starting point for something that is new and actually quite different rather than being actual 80s retro music. For reasons unknown to man, Synthwave also has an extremely distinctive aesthetic for album covers, dominated by abstracted vector-graphic shapes in bright pink, blue, and orange.

While I personally think it’s very cool music, it also has a strong overlap with various visual arts. Probably the two most influential places where Synthwave got mainstream exposure are in the movie Drive from 2011 and the videogame Hotline Miami in 2012, both of which combine extremely brutality with detached coldness in a world of extremely evocative colors and lighting. Again, it is a style that is very reminiscent of Blade Runner, which also just got it’s own return in 2017, again with stunning visuals and sound. A similar style was also used earlier in Collateral from 2004, and in the super successful John Wick movies.

I think Neo-Noir and Synthwave in 2020 are really the spiritual successors that Gothic and Punk where in 1990. Back then, the name of the game was radical extravagance. Clothing, hairstyles, and makeup all carefully crafted to the smallest detail to be as eye catching and provocative as possible. Punks look dirty and sit on the curb with broken beer bottles, but their outfits are as deliberately designed and customized as the most dolled-up goth. Make no mistake, goths are totally aware that their outfits with full war paint makes them look like lunatic weirdos to most people. That’s entirely the point. And I think this is something that doesn’t really translate properly into the 21st century. It no longer comes across as edgy, just silly. Street gangs are no longer the boogeymen of the middle class, and today’s youth has more serious concerns than rebellion without a plan against the establishment. Maybe society has become more open to individual expression as well, and when your outfit can no longer provoke the boomers, then what’s the point of spending all these hours on it?

But while the typical Brujah and Gangrel styles may no longer be considered the cutting edge of what is cool, I think we’re currently at a point in popular entertainment that gives the stage to Ventrue and Tremere. It’s now the time of nice suits and Mercedes. When you can’t beat them, joining them starts to become attractive. Even if you first tell yourself that it’s to beat them at their own game. You also have that look in Kingsmen and the current James Bond movies, which despite being about public servants leaving carnage across the world in service for their states, really don’t have any love for authority.

And look: It’s our old friends pink and blue again.

It’s probably not quite an aesthetic you can go for with an Anarch campaign. But for a campaign centered around Ventrue, Toreador, Tremere, and Lasombra, I think this is perfect! And when you think about it, John Wick and his pals are living in their own Camarilla. And vampire society in the World of Darkness has always been filled with endless parallels to organized crime.

But Vampire is not only a game about politics. While it often seems to be forgotten and glossed over, it also presents itself as a game of horror. Big influences on me for what I imagine horror in my campaign to feel like are True Detective (Season 1, of course), and also Twin Peaks. I’m probably not able and also have no intention to make something as funny as David Lynch, but I really like the sense of eerie wrongness and malevolent evil in that show.

Look at my Works, you Mighty, …

When I wrote my first post outlining the purpose and goal of my latest worldbuilding efforts, I got a lot of replies, including this interesting link from Oliver Simon to a great academic article about the role of the environment in Conan: Exiles. It gave me a couple of great ideas for Planet Kaendor and I made some notes for a new post, and then completely forgot about it for the next six weeks while writing other posts I had already planned. Of my three notes, I only remembered the meaning of the first one, and I had to reread both the entire article and my post that led to it being recommended to me to figure out the second. And I still have no clue what idea the third note was supposed to be about. Don’t be me! Take better notes when you get great ideas for your own work.

The article takes a look at the open world survival game Conan: Exiles as a horrifying analogy of the cruel exploitation within human economic activity. While many of these survival games have the killing of other player characters and the looting of their equipment and resources as a key gameplay element, this game uses the well established and accepted norms of the Hyborian Age to take it to a much more grotesque level. Not only can you loot the possessions of your slain foes, you can also butcher their dismembered corpses for meat and crafting materials. Nonplayer characters can be taken alive and made slaves, that are a hugely important resource for expanding your own base. And some magical powers require human sacrifice to attain. Other people are reduced to “human resources” in the most literal sense. They are commodified as tools to be exploited for your own quest for wealth and power.

Being basically a sociological paper, it’s not an easy read, and the first part is crammed full of attributed quotations of other writers that don’t really add to the topic and mostly seem to be there to pad out the references list at the end to boost academic credibility. But after that it goes into how the environment with its ruined buildings, abandoned weapons and tools, and human remains also tells a story of how economic exploitation build the fallen civilizations as well.

I didn’t expect Marx and Derrida to contribute to my worldbuilding, but I guess stranger things have happened. One passage in particular really got me thinking about how I can give the ruins that fill the environment of Kaendor a more meaningful presence in the actual game instead of being irrelevant pieces of lore in some file.

Faithful to Howard’s original Conan stories, the landscape is one which Derrida would have recognised as being distinctly hauntological; it is a world scarred by its past. This environment is shaped by forces which still have agency but no agent, generating effects which exert great power over the player’s experience of and interaction with their surroundings.

Agency without an agent. Now that’s an expression that really appeals to me. In this case, we have to treat agency as different from the concept of player agency in roleplaying games, which is the ability of players to make choices about the actions of their characters that meaningfully affect the outcome of the developing story of the game. Without an agent, there are no choices that are being made or actions that are being taken. Instead we have the idea here of choices that were made and actions that were taken long ago by the long dead builders of the ruins that led to the creation of the current environment. The choices were made many centuries ago, but their consequences still affect and constrain the options that are open to the player characters in the present. The idea is that the ruins are not simply featureless and inert stones that litter the surroundings, but active entities that challenge and threaten the intruding explorers.

(At this point I want to apologise for falling into academia speech and getting abstractly philosophical. Four years in cultural studies do this to you. It comes automatically and leaves it marks on you forever.)

As a simple example, take an ordinary arrow trap that shots an arrow when someone steps on a certain part of the floor. To quote the endlessly poetically and quotable Darkest Dungeon:

Curious is the trap-maker’s art… his efficacy unwitnessed by his own eyes.

A trap is not simply a feature of the environment, even though many games treat them like that. An actual trap is not simply just there. It is there because someone made a choice and took action to put it there. With an intent to kill. The builder of the trap does not know who will fall victim to it, and the people it injures will most likely have no idea who caused them harm. In a ruined dungeon, the builder will have died centuries before the victims were born. But still, one person exercised agency to cause serious harm to another person. The agent is long gone, but the effects of the agency are present in the present.

It is not just traps. Every artificial obstacle that characters encounter is there because someone put it there with intent. Every constructed tool or weapon they find is in its place because someone made it for a purpose and put it in its present location as a consequence of choices and actions. And this even carries over to much larger scales. Planet Kaendor is conceptualized as a world in which the natural environment is outside of the control of mortals. Whatever they do in their attempts to shape the world that surrounds them will quickly be negated once the wilderness returns. But things look very different when it comes to the marks left behind by unnatural sorcery. A charred wasteland of ash haunted by ghouls attacking careless travelers surrounding a ruined city does not exist randomly. Its existence is the consequence of choices made by a sorcerer long ago. A consequence that directly affects the characters in the present. And the natural world in Kaendor is often directly controlled by spirits, who can exercise their own agency as well. Though being essentially immortal, this does not fall under the agency without agent. They are merely agents with an invisible presence, but I think the overall effect is quite similar.

The key idea that is presented here (indirectly) to worldbuilders is to create environments for adventures that are not simply passive and interchangeable backdrops that maybe have a couple of unusual but random backgrounds in them. Instead, they should give indications that obstacles and useful finds are the result of someone’s deliberate exercising of agency. Bad things don’t exist in the present at random. They exist because someone in the past wanted it or did a careless mistake. There was a purpose behind it and it was someone’s fault. And that someone’s presence should still be felt as a malevolent force seeking the destruction of any intruders, or a shade lingering among the ruins of its crumbled dreams. Of course this might not be a universal requirement for all fantasy environments. But I had written about looking for ways to give ruins and magical places are more active role in my world, and this article provided great insights on how I could be moving closer to that goal.

All the mentions of cannibalism also got me some interesting idea for ghouls, which have been a favorite of mine since I encountered a new take on them in Dragon Age, and have held a very important position in my deliberations about the nature of the supernatural in Kaendor basically from the start. But those deserve an entire post of their own.

Planet Kaendor

I just discovered that I never actually finished writing this post that I had started five weeks ago. I guess better now than never.

So, Planet Kaendor. I used the name in several posts ~~last~~ two months ago as a tag for a new campaign I am planning, which is set in the same world as the Green Sun campaign I ran for the last half year, but with a very different approach. The world Kaendor is undergoing constant evolution, changing after every campaign to reflect what I learned from my experiences. Mostly this consists of throwing out stuff that I put into the world because I considered them regular staples of fantasy campaign settings, or I saw it somewhere and thought it is cool, but I realize as being either useless baggage or stuff that actually conflicts with the core ideas rather than add to them. The world started basically as “everything in fantasy that I like and could work in a Bronze Age setting”. But since then I moved on to the paradigm of “perfection isn’t when there is nothing left that can be added, but nothing left that can be taken away”. Better have a setting that does three closely related things very well than a dozen things that somewhat randomly sit side by side. Of course this frequently leaves gaps that need to be filled in, but that’s always also a potential to bring in great new elements.

Why Planet Kaendor?

While I always intended Kaendor to be purely a fantasy setting, many of the aesthetic influences I am aspiring to evoke come from the Planetary Romance genre and pulp stories that made little distinction between fantasy and science fiction. Going all the way back to A Princess of Mars and its world of Barsoom, and also including the Zothique stories, the movie Wizards, the visual style of Moebius, various adaptations of Dune from the 80s and 90s, and of course also The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. And I always loved reading about Planet Algol. The working title “Planet Kaendor” is meant to be a constant reminder for me for what the ultimate goal of the setting is.

Many worldbuilders really like to just head out into the unknown and see where the process leads them. But in my own experience, this approach of adding whatever feels cool and like a good fit in the moment always leads me down to follow the established generic paths of the Standard Fantasy Setting. And there are more than plenty of those already, and I am doing worldbuilding primarily because the kind of setting I really want to see doesn’t exist yet. So ending up with another version of Fantasyland would completely defeat the purpose.

The Basic Premise

Kaendor is a world inspired by the continent Pangea during the Permian period, before the age of the dinosaurs, the Bronze Age civilizations of the eastern Mediterranean Sea (Mycenaeans, Hittites, Egyptians), and the Hellenistic Period (Macedonians, Achaemenids, Mauryas, Scythians). But the focus is on “inspiration”, not “adaptation”. A fantasy version of the Persian Empire surely exist somewhere, but Planet Kaendor is nothing of that type. Instead they are references for what kinds of animals can be found in the world, what technologies are available and what forms of social organization exist, and what kinds of sounds are used in personal and place names of the different cultures.

Two fictional settings that were hugely influential for me in inspiring the tone and aesthetic I am aiming for are from the videogames Morrowind from 2002 and Albion from 1995. Morrowind is really the gold standard for me for how alien you can make a fantasy world. The one thing that I found most disappointing about it was that the Dunmer, Drakonians, and Kajiit are sharing their amazing world with Romans and Vikings who live in English villages and castles on the southern coast of the great island. Their presence always broke the spell of having a unique fantasy world that isn’t like the regular generic stuff. Not too much to say about Albion, other that it made a huge impression on me with its alien jungle world. And again, it’s actually a sci-fi story about human astronauts crashing on an alien planet, which turns out to feel a lot like a fantasy world.

“Humans” Only

In the early years when I came up with the idea for Kaendor, I had the goal to make it like a classic Sword & Sorcery world. In hindsight, I think this desire held me back by years, as many of the elements that are rightly considered “classic” are not actually things I much enjoy in games. In particular the personality and motivations of Sword & Sorcery protagonists are not exactly what I consider fun to play for prolonged time.

One of these aspects that many people adamantly insist on as being essential is that a Sword & Sorcery world must only have humans. Which I disagree on, and creating an archetypal Sword & Sorcery setting is no longer a priority for me. But after my recent experience with planning encounters for a D&D 5th edition campaign, I really see how it’s not just dwarves and halflings being tonally out of place, but also orcs, goblins, lizardmen, and githyanki becoming a real crutch to pad out content with meaningless fights. Following the D&D encounter model is also something that has stopped being relevant for the Planet Kaendor campaign, but it still had me thinking about the subject.

Now because I really like the idea of a fantasy world that also is an alien planet with its own unique life forms, there are no people on Kaendor who call themselves humans and who look like humans. But for all intends and purposes, the Kaendorians are identical to humans. In the same way that Red Martians, Arkanians, or Quarians are virtually indistinguishable from the humans of their settings, except for exotic looking colorations. I also like about this approach so that you can’t say that these guys are the Europeans of the setting, these guys are the Africans, and these guys the Asians, and so on. As with their cultures, it doesn’t make much sense that you have direct analogs to human phenotypes on a planet that is meant to have evolved completely independently from Earth.

But in the end, I decided that the Kaendorians are still just like humans in all the ways they count. I did at some point consider making them like alien species in a world with no humans, but in the end we are dealing with a medium that is entirely verbal, and where the characters are played by people who are stumbling around trying to improvise a person more or less on the spot, which does include the GM, and so they all will act like humans anyway.

Mystical Magic

To some degree it lies in the nature of roleplaying games as systems of rules and mechanics that the applications of magic become formalized and follow regular structures. As someone who really got into RPGs with D&D 3rd edition, which is quite possibly the most mechanical and structured game that ever reached the market, this has been something that’s really been bugging me for a very long time. Magic does not feel magical when it consists mostly of math and geometry. The magic that you encounter in stories (which are not based on RPGs) is much more elusive and uncertain. You rarely have spells where a beam of light shots from the finger of a wizard and a breastplate of glowing light appears on the person it hits. What you have is sorcerers mumbling strange chants and throwing powders into a fire, and there might be hints of images in the flames or the shadows surrounding the clearing, and the sorcerer says that the deed has been done and whatever had been your problem or your wish has been taken care of.

That’s magical.

Magic in Kaendor is not quick, easy, convenient, and reliable. There is no magic to fart lightning or make a lantern hovering over your shoulder and following you around. Magic in Kaendor is mostly invisible and concerns itself with knowledge, the manipulation of minds, and the control of spirits. There is limited transformation of living things, but a wizard won’t turn into a huge dragon in a puff of smoke or turn a pumpkin into a luxurious carriage.

This elusive uncertainty also extends to magical creatures. The world of Kaendor knows only one kind of supernatural creatures which are simply spirits. No complex system of opposing cosmic armies with detailed hierarchies modeled after human societies. While spirits in physical shape resemble people, animals, or even plants, in their minds they are truly alien beings with incomprehensible thoughts and unknowable reasons. They are not helpful guides or protectors to mortals or demonic slavers and conquerors, but wild forces of nature whose reasons and motives are their own, and who generally care very little for the affairs of mortals.

Ruins of the Past

Something that has always been central to the concept behind the world of Kaendor, but never really became important in any of my past campaign, is the dominant presence of ancient ruins. The final act of the Inixon campaign played out in the ruins of a naga city, but in the end it really was just a backdrop and not an actual story element in itself. Nothing was learned about the city and there wasn’t really anything to learn about it. This is perhaps the biggest element that really needs to get a very different treatment as I am going on with Planet Kaendor.

Kaendor is a world drifting in time, with no clear understanding by the people currently alive about its ancient history, and no real sense of a meaningful future that lies ahead. As the people of Kaendor are concerned, the world now is the same as it has always been, and as it always will be. Evidence for this is found everywhere with countless ruins covering the forests and islands, lining the coasts, and sitting atop mountainous peaks. In fact, almost all major cities and towns are build on the ruins of older forgotten civilizations, with even older passages and halls being found beneath them. Constant slow changes of the environment regularly force people to abandon their cities as rivers dry up and fields turn into swamps, and castles fall into the sea. But they also open up new places that become suitable for farming and habitation, and each time new settlers arrive in these places they find that they are not the first ones to make them their homes. It is impossible to say for how long this cycle has been going, and the inevitability of all mortal achievements falling into ruins and being forgotten is an accepted fact of life.

Yet even when the people abandon a place that is swallowed up by the forests or sinks beneath the waters, there are always many things that are left behind. Vaults that were sealed by lords fleeing disasters, but who never returned to claim their riches. Treasures hidden away whose secret locations died with their owners until they are revealed again by crumbling walls and eroding hills. As well as ancient evils trapped where no one would disturb or free them. Sorcerers are notoriously secretive about their arcane knowledge and rarely share their discoveries with others. Countless magical secrets were discovered and their knowledge shared only among a handful of people to be lost to the world with their death, but still exist on ancient crumbling scrolls beneath overgrown ruins in the wilds, waiting to be found by whoever stumbles into these old places that have seen no mortal feet for centuries.

Planet Kaendor is being written specifically with searchers of ancient magic in mind. Outside and beneath the major cities, ruined tunnels, castles, temples, and towers make up the majority of important places. The various factions playing major parts within the politics of the setting are all greatly invested in the rediscovery and control of lost magic. These take the center stage in the design of the world, with other elements like economics, religions, and the everyday politics of the various city states fading into the background. The politics that are important to the setting are the relationships between powerful sorcerers and high priests who have the wealth and armies of their cities at their disposal, but whose conflicts are centered around the control of magical power.

Beasts of Kaendor, Part 3

Saruma

(quality 3, scale 3)

The saruma is one of the biggest and most feared predators hunting in the jungles of Kaendor. This giant lizard can grow to a height at the shoulders as tall man and can take down most animals smaller than a burak. Not being an efficient runner, a saruma usually attacks from ambush in an attempt to land a fatal bite wound and then follow the blood trail of wounded prey. While a saruma is not particularly fast, it will often follow prey for hours or even days.

Straig

(quality 5, scale 4)

A straig is a giant winged reptile found in the mountains of Kaendor. It mostly hunts large herbivores like drohas and krats and is the only predator large enough to bring down a burak. It has a very long serpentine body and its short snout is filled with poisonous teeth that paralyze creatures of any size within minutes. As they usually hunt large animals, the bite of a straig is almost always lethal to even the largest and healthiest people.

Sural

(quality 2, scale 2)

Surals are large aquatic animals similar to fish or eels that have some resemblance to snakes. Surals are found mostly in swamps and slow flowing rivers where they have few natural enemies other than mora. Surals mostly feed on small aquatic animals but will readily attack larger creatures that are going into the water and can easily kill hunters or fishermen. If a sural can’t kill large prey quickly with its bite, it will try to kill it by drowining.

Tareg

(quality 2, scale 2)

Taregs are large arthropods that have some resemblance to a spider, crab, and preying mantis and often grow to sizes bigger than a large stag. Taregs are semi-aquatic creatures that are usually found on rocky stretches of coasts and reefs where they hunt for smaller animals, but readily attack anything that presents itself as potential food. While no more or less dangerous than other predators of its size on an open beach, they spend most of their time crawling on jagged rocks where other large creatures have a very hard time to run away or fight effectively.

Tasdar

(quality 2, scale 3)

Tasdar are large reptiles similar to a long-legged crocodile with some resemblance to tigers. They are found in many of the warmer forests and mountains and known as feared predators. While considerably smaller than the much larger sarumas, tasdards often hunt in small packs of four to six animals and pose a much greater threat to hunters or even bands of warriors than arags.

Taun

(quality 1, scale 1)

Tauns are small and stocky reptilian animals with beak-like snouts and strong claws that are found throughout all the forests of Kaendor where they feed on roots, mushrooms, and young plants. They are one of the main prey animals for arags and tasdars and one of the most widely kept farm animals after ogets. While their teeth can cause very severe injuries, tauns are usually very agreeable animals when they are kept well fed and content. They are kept primarily for their meat but taun hides also make a good leather that is considerably tougher than that of ogets.

Toba

(quality 2, scale 3)

The toba is a giant snake that is found almost everywhere in Kaendor except for the most northern lands. They come in a wide range of colorations that are usually green or brown, and as they age they can grow to enormous sizes. Unlike other large snakes, the bite of the toba is poisonous and it will attack even other large predators.

Uba

(quality 2, scale 3)

While ubas are not predators, they are very ill tempered and highly territorial, and even though they are smaller than krats, they are much more dangerous. Ubas are semi-aquatic animals and spend much of their lives in lakes and large rivers where they feed on aquatic plants. An uba resembles both a rhino and a hippo with two thich horns on its forehead that it uses both for stabbing and bludgeoning anything that provokes its anger.