Ancient Lands

Supernatural Adventures

Worldbuilding is all about finding a specific theme and atmosphere that pervades everything within the setting. Places, people, magic, and technologies are all means to bring that specific mood to life and make the audience feel it. But at the same time I don’t believe it’s possible to really know the right mood for the world right at the start of the worldbuilding process. You have to start with ideas that might be cool and then experiment with them to discover which work well together in a way you enjoy and then let a more specific concept take shape through these efforts. With the Ancient Lands I originally had an idea for a pretty standard fantasy world but simply with more wilderness and elves and dwarves as the primary races and humans one of several minor ones. It’s still a good idea but over the time I discovered that there are other related concepts that I would enjoy even more pursuing.

But in practice I often tend to lose track of some of the design decisions I made over the years and find myself further developing ideas that I had previously decided to drop. This requires to constantly finding the focus again, about which I wrote in my Project Forest Moon post two weeks ago. But a bit before that I wrote a few posts about antagonists and adventure templates. Which I think are pretty good, but they are for a setting about tribal warfare. Which really isn’t what I want the Ancient Lands to be. My favorite branch of Fantasy is Sword & Sorcery, which ultimately is about encounters with supernatural forces. Which my templates for antagonists really just aren’t and most of the templates for adventures aren’t either. They work, but they are generic. They don’t really do much to evoke the atmosphere that I want the Ancient Lands to have and which is meant to make it stand out from among other settings.

Another thing is that my enthusiasm for sandbox campaigning isn’t really holding up. I’ve been working on an outline for my next campaign for the last days and a sandbox where the players are meant to freely chose which of the ongoing background conflicts and events to get involved with just doesn’t get me excited as a GM. I see the potential of the concept, but I am just not feeling it. I feel much more drawn to keep running open ended adventures that encourage players to make use of support from people they had previous dealing with. A little bit like a sandbox, but one in which I chose the quest and give it to the players and then let them do with it whatever they want. Not plotting out the adventures for the players but “just giving them a little shove out the door”, as one bearded guy with a hat once said.

Now to the good part. What kinds of adventures do I think make good templates for a setting that is about encounters with the supernatural and exploring wondrous places? Here are a few ones on my new list of quests:

Hunters report finding a ruin that was previously unknown. But being just hunters they didn’t explore it and leave that up to actual heroes. Alternatively, people have been seeing strange things from a great distance, indicating that an already known place no longer is as empty as it was believed.
Water becomes unusable or wild animals are disappearing. This means someone has to go and find the source of this problem and deal with it, or the villages might have to be abandoned. It could be the work of a rare creature or a spirit or sorcerer who wishes the village harm.
Supernatural forces prevent access to a valuable resources. It might be a mine or a well, a hunting ground full with animals, or an old pilgrimage site. But something unnatural has taken hold of the place and makes it impossible for people to use it. It could be something new that is disrupting the life of the local people, or something very old that has made the place inaccessible for a long time and recent events make the use of the site vital to the people.
A returning hunter brings a curse to the village. It could be something that he did while on the hunt, a place he stumbled on, or an object he picked up. Now some kind of magical malady spreads through the village and heroes have to deal with the source and remove the effects it caused. Both can require visiting magical places or strange spirits to find a solution.
Enemies of the clan have gained supernatural help that lets them attack the village. This supernatural influence has to be broken to save the clan from being defeated. It could be a sorcerers, a dangerous spirit, or a powerful ancient relic.
Something is threatening the guardian spirit of the village. It has to be found and stop or the village will be unable to survive without its guardian. Often its a sorcerer who wants to steal something from the spirit or an attempt to weaken the villages under the spirit’s protection.
Villages or traveling merchants have been disappearing. They have fallen victim to a spirit or wandered too close to a newly appeared or unearthed supernatural danger. The victims have to be saved and the danger stopped. They may have been made to serve the spirit or have otherwise been changed to be hostile against the heroes who come to investigate.
The village’s guardian spirit demands a task has to be fulfiled. Often it will be some form of regular tribute that has been pledged by the founders of the clan in exchange for the protection of the spirit. Or one of the sacred laws has been broken and the spirit demands that the people do something to restore the supernatural order. It’s also possible that an enemy deliberately tried to disrupt the peace between the spirit and the villagers and might perhaps have stolen or destroyed an important object that needs to be recovered or replaced.

Not everything is trying to kill you

I think the greatest thing that oldschool roleplaying brought to the attention of younger GMs like me is the whole system of wandering monsters, reaction rolls, and morale checks. When I first got into RPGs I occasionally saw mention of them, but they seemed silly and annoying for what I assumed a good adventure to be like and a good riddance in general. But after having played and run games for over 10 years, all the adventures never turned out to be anything like what I had been hoping they would. And I think it really comes down to D&D of that time having abandoned the aforementioned mechanics. Which didn’t start with 3rd edition but actually preceded even AD&D 2nd edition for a good number of years.

My first contact with RPGs was Baldur’s Gate and that set a precedent of what I expected adventures to be like and I found it confirmed by AD&D modules I’ve looked at. When you encounter a creature, one side makes a surprise attack and then the fight continues until one side has been wiped out. The characters get XP and the treasure lies where the enemy fell. Having creatures appear randomly and someimes trying to run away would be a nuisance and interrupt the plot. But videogames NPCs are still absolutely primitive compared to one controlled by a GM and I much later learned that most of the modules were not meant to be normal AD&D adventures but tournament modules for conventions where many groups would play the same dungeon simultaneously as a single session one-shot and then compare which party got the most points. Which is why The Tomb of Horrors is so awful. It’s not meant to be part of an ongoing campaign, but unfortunately fails to explain that to GMs who read it.

Wandering monsters in a dungeon have the main function of keeping the party moving and the clock ticking. They make resting in a dungeon almost impossible and that means your spells and hit points have to last you through the whole expedition. Since wandering monsters have negligible treasure and roughly 75% of XP are expected to come from collecting gold, fighting them is just a waste of resources and a risk of death with barely any reward. And as wandering monsters are encountered based on time spend in the dungeon, there’s a real incentive to be quick. Giving the majority of XP for treasure also has the effect that it is often more efficient to just steal treasure without a fight and minimize the loss of spells and hit points (and party members). Getting 75% of XP for stealing treasures without defeating the owners will get you more than getting 100% from just one creature. XP for gold seemed silly, but is actually great design.

It also makes morale checks much more interesting. An opponent who runs away may abandon its treasure. Every round you don’t have to fight saves you more hit points and spells and allows you to continue the current expedition a bit longer. Yes, they run away with their pocket change, but you still get all the XP for having defeated them.

But let’s now look at reaction rolls, which are perhaps the most intriguing element of oldschool roleplaying. A reaction roll tell you how a group of creatures or NPCs will react to encountering the PCs when their reaction is not predetermined by the adventure or obvious. I took notice of this and mentally filed it away to be used with animals encountered in dungeons or NPC parties encountered during overland travel. But what does “obvious” actually mean? A group of zombies? Yeah, obvious. A golem guarding a door? Predetermined by the adventure. But what about a group of orcs sitting around a campfire? Obvious?

Well, I always assumed it is, based on fantasy books, movies, videogames, and all the adventures published by WotC and Paizo. But this is a preconception that is not actually supported by the 1981 Moldvay Basic rules. Yes, orcs are chaotic and it says that Chaos generally means evil. But player characters can be chaotic as well and they are members of the party. Chaotic indicates breaking rules and promises when it benefits you and you can get away with it. And what benefit is there in randomly attacking groups of well armed people?

I always found it somewhat difficult to interprete the rection table. What does it mean if the result is “Hostile, possible attack” or “Uncertain, monster confused”? But with a bit of searching you can easily find a few examples from fiction. When Bilbo encounters Golum under the mountains, Golum plans to kill him and eat him. But he doesn’t have surprise and knows that frontal attack is risky so he keeps Bilbo talking in the hope of getting an opportunity where he has advantage. That fits very well with “Hostile, possible attack”. Another good example is in Return of the Jedi when Leia encounters the ewok Wicket whose reaction is just spot on “Uncertain, monster confused”. He holds up his spear but only to keep her at a safe distance, not with an intention to attack her. Because she handles the situation well she’s able to get the ewoks as allies. A bit later the others get in a similar situation but Han handles it less well ad the ewoks decide to cook them.

return-of-the-jedi-ewoks Only on a roll of 2 on a 2d6 does a reaction roll actually indicate an immediate attack and a 3 to 5 indicates hostility with a chance that the creatures might attack. This results in only a 28% chance that a fight breaks out without the players initiating it. If you start making reaction rolls for any encounter where the reaction isn’t automatically fixed, it will change the game quite a lot. Orcs and ogres are no longer monsters but people just like bndits, mercenaries, or barbarians. Their culture might be different and unappealing to many of the PCs, but if the players handle it right they can be interacted with just like people.

This affects both worldbuilding and the way that adventures play out. A dungeon in which only a third of encountered denizens are hostile and the rest could provide information, cooperate with the PCs, or even offer free help is a very different place from the common deathtrap presented in most modules in which everything including the kitchen sink tries to kill you on sight. And again, this is supported by XP being gained mostly through finding treasure. How much XP you get out of a dungeon does not depend on the number of fights. XP for gold may not be perfect, but it certainly beats XP for combat only. If you get a reward for fighting and no reward for not fighting, the message for players is clear. Kill everything. (Don’t let them run away, they take all their treasure with them which you need to buy magic items from stores.)

This encourages and supports a play style that is really about exploration and discovery of fantastic environments the PCs will find themselves in. Treasures are an incentive to poke around and find hidden rooms, but seem much less like the main purpose why you go on an adventure. The options to discover things about the environment and the greater world are very much limited when all your interactions are with statues and wall paintings. There is so much more that can be leared by interacting with other people and the knowledge you gain becomes much more useful and meaningful if it can help you with dealing with other people you’ll encounter later. Or possibly people you encountered before and who might reward you for sharing your discoveries.

Another fascinating part of the rules that had almost entirely disappeared are retainers. In 3rd edition you have to be at least 6th level and spend one of your precious few feats to get only one retainer. In Basic everyone can have around 4 at first level for free. (You have to pay wage, but that’s no limited resource.) My assumption was that you’re meant to post job offet notes at the market place and then pick one of the people who come to apply. But that’s not what the rules demand. A much more fun and interesting option is to recruit people you meet on adventures. It says retainers can be of any level or any class but not have a higher level than the PC they follow. But the Hit Dice of a monster are effectively the same as class levels in every way. Once you make it practice to befriend monsters, why not let players take them along as retainers? The GM would have to rely on making good judgement calls on what kinds of monsters might possibly be hired. A black pudding or a purple worm would be silly. But if it’s reasonably intelligent, able to integrate into society, and the player mange to get it friendly, why not?

While working on my setting and preparing for my next campaign I wanted to do something different than the average treasure hunt or assaulting the lair of a villain over and over. Instead I want to do something much more fantastic that focuses and supernatural things and discovery. I mostly failed at this with my last two campaigns and even in the last months much of my preparation once again ended up focusing on humanoid antagonists. Realizing that the 35 year old Basic rules suggest a world that is much less hostile and encouraging cooperation with dungeons denizens between the line has been a major eye opener for me. And once more makes me feel amazed that an RPG so close to what I consider perfect has been around almost from the very beginning. (There’s still negative armor class and spell preparation, but those are easily fixed and exist for the purpose of edition compatibility.)

Moving further towards perfection

With my work on the Ancient Lands I have fully embraced the paradigm that perfection is reached not when there’s nothing left to add, but nothing left to take away. And there’s always more stuff that still hangs around because I like the idea but that doesn’t really contribute to the overall quality of the setting. This is not just geographical content and world lore, but also a lot of small changes and custom additions to the rules and mechanics of B/X D&D. Some of them might actually be really good ideas, but who is really going to care? Those people who would care are most likely people who make their own extensive custom changes to the rules and the most likely to not use any material the way I have written it. And what am I really trying to sell to people? It’s not a game, it’s a world.

I think cramming too much custom rules into a setting is to be following in the steps of the Fantasy Hearbreakers from the late 70s and early 80s. They were attempts by people to make and release their own RPGs that are largely like D&D but with some improvements. Some of them might even have been quite good, but who cares? People already had thei D&D and you have to offer them something substantially different to get them to switch. It’s easier with the new options of publishing today and Kevin Crawford seems to be doing just fine with his work, but I really don’t think that there is much interest in small obscure settings with their own unique rules. But it’s going to look much more promising when you turn to settings to be used with the rules people are already using.

Some while back I mentionee working on an alternative magic system, but I’ve now decided to not pursue it any further. At least for now. The Ancient Lands are a world to be used with the rules of D&D, but not written for D&D. While I like the mechanics f B/X, I am not actually a fan of the type of settings that follow from putting the content described in the rulebooks into practice. I already replaced the vast majority of character races and creatures with my own creations and the world is written with a soft cap of 9th level for characters. (You could play at higher levels but it’s assumed that the number of such people in the world is negible.) When it comes to spells, I have decided to give the setting its own identity by simply stripping away everything from the rules that doesn’t fit. D&D magic has long been designed to offer any kind of spell players could think of so they would be able to play any kind of spellcaster they’ve seen in fiction. While this is part of the reason why magic becomes so (over)powerful at higher levels, it’s actually very convenient in this case. For all the things I want magic to do in my setting, there are already spells available. So I created the following spell list to be used wit the magic-user class.

1st Level: charm animal, detect magic, entangle, light/darkness, message, remove/cause fear, resist cold, sleep.
2nd Level: charm person, detect invisible, ESP, invisibility, obscure, resist fire, speak with animals, web.
3rd Level: dispel magic, growth of animals, gust of wind, hold person, infravision, produce fire, suggestion, water breathing.
4th Level: charm monster, fear, growth of plants, polymorph other, polymorph self, remove/bestow curse, speak with plants, wall of fire.
5th Level: animate dead, dispel evil, hold monster, insect plague, stone shape, wall of stone.

As some might have spoted, there is no direct damage, no free information gathering, no teleportation, and no healing. As I already mentioned in previous posts, healing is the domain of spirits and potions. Helpful spirits might be encountered in the wild and be persuaded to provide healing, but usually the right adress for magical healing is a village shrine where the shaman can channel the healing powers of the local god that watches over the settlement. In my last three campaigns the party did just fine by relying only on healing potions and not having any cleric around. It really depends on how generous the GM is with these being found on overpowered enemies and in treasure coffers.

Welcome to Chemnitz

After many years (is it six already?) work on my Bronze Age fantasy setting feels like having left the conceptual phase and it’s now seriously starting to take shape as an actual manuscript that people other than me could read and actually make sense of. Unfortunately, this means I have to tackle one of the most unpleasant and dreaded parts of worldbuilding: Locking in the names for things.

When I went ahead and did a serious cleanup of the messy heap of collected ideas that was the Ancient Lands a few months back, I renamed the new iteration on a completely redrawn map the Old World. But that name was always meant as just a temporary project title that would eventually be changed to a real name for the setting. Something snappy sounding that also communicates the content and catches the eye of people who might be into this stuff. Golarion or Grayhawk don’t really do that.

But coming up with names is hard. So I turned to a lesson from history. Back in 1990 the city Karl-Marx-Stadt was looking for a new name because of some political fad of that day, and in the end they just went with the simple route and named it back into Chemnitz.

Why throw away a perfectly good name and stress yourself with thinking up a new one? Welcome back to the Ancient Lands.

Project Forest Moon

While visiting my parents I recently watched all three Star Wars movies again with my mother who seemed to have forgotten most parts of The Empire Strikes Back since last seeing it. Which really is something that needs to be rectified and now we had a good opportunity. And with no kids in the house my parents have a nice movie room with a projector and 5.1 sound. I don’t think I’ve seen the movies in this big since their re-release back in 1997. And while watching Return of the Jedi I was reminded how very much of an impact Endor had on my perception of a fantasy wilderness.

When I started toying around with worldbuilding for RPGs, my first attempt was to make the High Forest from Forgotten Realms but 4,000 years in the past, which I imagined very much like Endor, and it soon turned into a setting “inspired by” the ancient High Forest. My Ancient Lands, Old World, and the preceding Wildlands are all evolutions of that initial concept. Since the Wildlands each iteration became a successively smaller world. As some French guy said, “perfection is achieved not when there is nothing left to add, but nothing left to take away”. And seeing Endor again in all its crisp green glory made me realize that there’s still some stuff I’ve been hanging on to even though it doesn’t really add to the main parts of the setting and rather distracts from and dilutes the core concept.

This led to me starting Project Forest Moon. Another directed effort of stronger increasing the focus of the setting and giving it a more unique character.

Endor

Only Forests, Mountains, and the Sea: It all started with the idea of a single huge forest and now I am returning to that paradigm twelve years later. I am linking up all the forests of the Old World and eliminating the patches of plains and deserts that were still around in some places. Open land is limited to some floodplains on the sides of major rivers and barren mountain valleys.
Scrapping Venlad: During the last focusing of the setting I had already removed humans as one of thr humanoid peoples and merged the human Suri with the elven Eylahen, which took over as the people of Venland. But while Icewind Dale, Northrend, and Forochel are all somewhat intriguing places, I don’t really have any need or purpose for an arctic tundra in a forest setting. So Venlad has to go. The northernmost part of the map is clipped off and the Rayalka Mountains become the effective edge of the known world. Yakun is already a region with heavy winters and the Rayalka Mountains on its northern border are a decent environment for anything snow and ice based.
It’s pure Fantasy: When I began worldbuilding my main reference for a very long time was Forgotten Realms, which is a very Renaissance style setting full with farming villages, market towns, and big merchant cities. And combine “German” with “RPG fan” and you get a particularly potent brew of “pedantic about realism”. It also happens that my home city was the biggest trade giant in late medieval Northen Europe and this history is still a big part of our cultural identity. (Even though with the exception of Hamburg, Northern Germany is now a total rural backwater.) The resulting attention to sound economic resource flows and historically accurate productions of food and trade goods turned out to be a weight on a chain that slowed down work on the important parts of the setting and often worked directly against the idea of a world of supernatural wonder. It’s certainly always a big asset to know about how things historically worked to avoid big blunders and major stumbling blocks in making a world believable, but it’s not helpful to get caught up in minutiae when you really want to be fantastical. I’ve not written much about these things before but put a lot of work into them. And I think a lot of it can just be ditched. What you really need to know for running a game is how a settlement could be cut off from their food and fuel sources and where they got their weapons. That’s almost always going to be the only aspect of economy that might become relevant.
Big Bad Beasts: On Earth, the human ability to use tools and coordinate tactics very quickly made them the top predator on the entire planet. With some planning, spears and arrows are sufficient to kill everything that moves and doing it repeatedly to exterminate whole local populations. Humans can kill bears, mammoths, and even whales with the clever use of pointy sticks. Wherever humans go they quickly dominate the landscape. But in a fantasy world you can have creatures much bigger and meaner than bears, mammoths, or whales. Things that won’t die if you stick them with a spear. This serves as a natural barrier to the expansion of settlements. Many regions are home to wildlife that makes them impossible to settle. You can move through with lots of armed guards but it’s just way too dangerous for farmers in the fields or let children roam around outside. Humanoids only thrive in areas where they can be at the top of the food chain, with only the occasional wandering monster showing up to cause terror.
Fortified Settlements: With a world that is all forest and forests that are full of lethal predators, the average feudal European farming village wouldn’t work. All permanent settlements need to be defensible, and it’s a good idea to chose camping grounds with the same approach. There’s a wide variety of options. Wooden palisades always work with a limitless abundance of trees. But cliffs are also very effective, as is putting settlements on islands. Fields and orchards usually have to be kept outside of the defenses, but sleeping places and stores of stores and wealth should always be in a safe and protected location. Whenever the players enter a settlement they should be aware that they are crossing a clear border by going through a gate, across a bridge, or crossing water by boat.
Tree Villages: I made the decision early on that I don’t want my elves to be cliche elves that so many people hate, since they are the most numerous group of humanoids in the setting. And so I wanted to avoid tree villages. But this is now no longer a big kitchen sink setting. This is now Project Forest Moon. Giant trees are the dominant landscape. Can’t really justify not having tree villages as one of the regular types of defensible settlement.
Pack Animals: In a world that is all forest, mountains, and water, carts and wagons aren’t really that useful. First you need to clear a wide path and then get it level, and the distances between places will often be huge. The only practical way to transport goods over land is by having them carried. By something like a droha or an oget. I actually would even go a step further and make the Old World a world without wheels. The Americans had to deal with a lot of forest and had no suitable draft animals and did very well without wheels. The loss of handcarts and wheelbarrows is not going to make a big impact on fantasy villages and I think it might give the setting some unique character. If anyone would actually notice their absence.
I’m on a Boat: I had mentally filed away a note that most settlements should be on rivers or coast to make it possible to trade goods with ships and avoid reliance on caravans slowly crawling along small forest paths. It’s clearly the ideal solution to moving large bulks, but there’s also the classic adventure tale of exploring a river with a boat and getting deeper and deeper into a strange wilderness. And if Star Wars can teach us one thing, it’s the great effectiveness of relying on classic and recognizable motives from fiction to get the audience immersed into a new and fantastic world. You could go on adventure by foot or riding heors and ogets, but I think whenever an excuse can be found to make part of the journey on water the opportunity should be taken. The oared river boat should become as ordinary a part of adventures as a horse.
Elementals with personality: I’ve always been a big fan of elementals. Or at least the idea of elementals. But their execution in Dungeons & Dragons leaves much to be desired. They have low intelligence and only speak very obscure languages and generally go straight for attack. That’s the most boring kind of encounter you can have once you get past the first joy of fighting something that is made of fire. They are just big heaps of hit points that attack with their fists. I think mechanically they are okay. Big brutes are okay. But they are also nature spirits so there should be much more interaction with them than just combat. What they need are some kind of motivations and patterns of behavior. Not sure what exactly I will do with them, but that’s one of the next things I want to work at. The older and more poweful they are, the more I’d like them to be like nymphs, treants, or elemental weirds from D&D as local guardian spirits of the land.
No satellite view map: I think I’ve wrote about my preference for point maps some months back and that I don’t like the sense of cartographic precision implied by hex maps. But for a forest world I think any kind of crisp and clean map would be a disservice. Except for mountains that rise above the forests or out on sea, there are almost no places from which you could observe the area for more than maybe a few hundred meters. And even up on a mountain you would not be able to see any landmarks that are hidden below the trees. People in such a world would not be able to make any kind of map that even roughly approximates the actual shape of the land. This would require very sophisticated surveying tools and methods and the amount of work would be incredible and unbelievably slow. Characters in the setting don’t have landscape maps, they only have landmark maps. Like in a pointcrawl map. And so the players should be limited in the same way. I believe this helps establish the notion that the wilderness is huge and people are small, and when you go beyond the familar surroundings of your home you are stumbling blindly through the forest, hoping that following a trail or a river might lead you to civilization. This probably also requires creating a system for getting lost and finding back on a point map. Not looking particularly forward to that, but it seems necessary and might hopefully add a lot to the campaign.
Nature Shrines: Instead of having religion being covered by priests and temples, I really like the idea from the D&D Companion Set of giving priest abilities to villages through relics. The idea was created as a workaround for elves, dwarves, and halflings not being able to take the cleric class, but I think this solution is even better. The elven relic is a Tree of Life and its keeper can draw on its power to cast healing spells without being a cleric. It also repells all undead in an area around it. The main change I make to this is that a relic is not a magical object, but instead a fixed location in which the local spirit of the land manifests itself to communicate with shamans. Mechanically it’s the same thing, but the god can also give advice and instructions to the shamans or withhold its magic power whenever it pleases. This natural shrine does not have to be a tree, but could also be a cave, a hill, a monolith, or a lake very close to the settlement.

Looking really good so far, I would say. Collecting these things over the last days made me once more very excited about seeing this world continuing to take shape.

The Green Hell and the Circle of Life and Death

Today someone mentioned the idea to me that most decent pulp settings appear to have some cool major distinctive feature that also works as a kind of source for all manners of conflicts within the world. For example in Dark Sun, the magical technique of defiling was what killed most life on the planet, is what gives the sorcerer kings their power, and allows them to keep the few surviving cities from being burried by the desert as well for the time being. In Star Wars the Dark Side of the Force created the Empire, drove the Jedi to extinction, and also is the main reason why the Jedi exist as an order of knights in the first place. In Morrowind the Tribunal and their belief to be living gods led to the creation of the Dunmer, their extreme conservatism and hostility towards outsiders, and the existance of the Ashlanders. And in the vast majority of stories of Conan the whole trouble comes from sorcerers desiring power. I think to make my Old World setting more pulpy than my old Ancient Lands setting, some kind of similar universal driver of tension could possibly be a great help.

A few weeks ago I read a post by someone writing about having seen a somewhat unusual nature documentary that showed life in the wilderness just how it is without overly dramaticising it. And it seemed to him to show that nature is not at all nice and pleasant, but really full of violent death. The vast majority of it being the deaths of children. Around the same time I’ve read a post by Zak S. about Lovecraft’s fear of the unknown being mostly a revulsion against life, which I found to be very convincing. Life means feeding and reproducing which in many cases, or perhaps even most, is neither pleasant not pretty.

In my years at university dealing with cultural studies I made the discovery that almost all major religions disapprove about the physical aspects of living and promote a detachment from bodily things and a focus on the purely mental. And it really made me wonder why all religions that praise and approve of living seem to promote having sex with the cult leader? I’ve been wanting to do something with a very body-positive approach in a non-creepy way in my worldbuilding for a long time but never really got around to it.

jungle3

And I think here might be the perfect opportunity to adress all these things. I had often thought of the Old World as being “a lot like Dark Sun, but with forests instead of desert”. In Dark Sun the driving force behind all conflicts is magic that drains nature of life. How about a setting in which the source of conflict is an overaboundance of life?

Life is not just life. It is also death. The Circle of Life is also a Circle of Death. To actively live all living things have to consume. In the end everything dies, and then it gets eaten. The only way a species can survive is to reproduce faster than its members are getting killed. It’s an endless breeding and feeding. Breeding is feeding. And in the center of all this killing and reproducing are people. And nature doesn’t care for them a bit. Like it does for anything else. The cycle just continues and there is nothing that one could do to stop it. People simply have to arrange themselves with this simple truth. And this process of arranging is where ultimately all conflict comes from. The desire to feed yourself and your relatives and to avoid being fed upon for as long as you can is what all conflict ultimately comes down to.

jungle2

I’m still not 100% sure if I really want to go with this. Things like these always take two or three days with me before I know how I really feel about them. But I think there’s certainly a lot of potential to give the setting it’s own distinctive character and quirks, which really is a major thing in Sword & Sorcery and pulp in general. Here are some applications I have already in mind:

Civilization is fragile: This is something I’ve had in my mind for a long time now. I don’t want to do the standard fantasy thing where the world was once great and then everything declined into some kind of post-apocalyptic world or another. Instead the Old World is a world in a constant cycle of growth and decay. Settlements are founded, grow, decline, and are eventually abandoned or destroyed to be reclaimed by the wilderness. This has happened countless times before and will happen countless times again. Abandoned and ruined settlements are found everywhere in regions that are settled by people. There are many great stone ruins as well, which had been build by the various fey folks. They are still found in many places and many of them hold magical wonders beyond the powers of mortals. But their builders were not killed by some kind of catastrophe. In truth their reign over the land came to an end when they realized that even with their great magical powers the attempts to build lasting kingdoms and empires was futile in the face of the power of nature itself. Shie, naga, raksha, and giants are still around, but they all live in the Spiritworld once more, as they did for countless eons before.

jungle1

The Green Folk: I’ve long been a fan of both treant and spriggans (duh…) and also like the idea of shambling mounds and other big beasts made from vines, branches, thorns, and moss. All these walking plant spirits are collectively known as the green folk. There are many types of them and they are literally found everywhere not covered by water or ice. In a way they might be the true masters of the world but they normally care little for either mortals or fey.

The Swarm: It’s not only plants that dominate the Old World, but also animals as well. In particular insects which though small outnumber all the larger beasts combined. Though not all insects are simple tiny bugs. Every now and then huge swarms of big insect creatures appear from seemingly nowhere and by the time they start stripping the surrounding region of all available food they have already been building their nest to raise even larger numbers of young. The swarm is a natural disaster that can happen anywhere where there is food to be found, which is almost everywhere. The immediate surroundings of a nest are soon reduced to barren wastelands but drones swarm out for many more miles to hunt for any kind of meat they can find. The only protection is to bar oneself up in a cellar and wait for the swarm to move on, which can often take several days. Once the hunting stops, the nest is soon abandoned with the creatures seemingly vanishing into thin air again. Many believe that they are not ordinary animals but instead creatures from the Spiritworld, perhaps to forrage for food for their young before they return back to their home.