Tag: Retro Kaendor

Creating worlds that feel ancient

In my current work to sharpen the profile of the Ancient Lands setting I am creating, I started looking deeper into the old Planetary Romance genre. In many ways it’s “Sword & Sorcery with laser guns”, but I would say it usually has a more grander scale and glamorous atmosphere to it, which I really love. The old Star Wars movies (and the most recent one) really are much more Planetary Romance than Space Opera, which is the genre of Foundation, Lensman, and Enders Game. Mass Effect, which very greatly inspired me, is both. The business with the Reapers, Cerberus, and the human Systems Alliance is classic Space Opera, while the story branches that deal with the Krogan and the Quarians feel very much like classic Planetary Romance to me. While looking for more in-depth information about the stylistic elements of Planetary Romance, I came across this interesting article adressing the feeling of ancient history that you find in the old Star Wars movies. (I am in agreement that the Expanded Universe mostly missed this aspect.) Basically, Star Wars feels ancient because even though the technology is much more advanced than ours, it is used in very antiquated ways. The Empire builds huge mechanical war elephant. Intelligent robots are treated and traded like slaves. And of course you have knights fighting with swords. There’s a princess and the big bads are adressed as Lord and as Master. Despite the technology, Star Wars really feels like its the ancient past, not the distant future.

And that got me thinking. Certainly you could use the same technique to make a relatively generic fantasy setting not feel like the late middle ages, but as being set thousands or even millions of years earlier in the history of their planet. Robert Howard set the Hyborian Age of his Conan stories in an age between the sinking of Atlantis and before the start of the Neolithic, but is often rather inconsistent in making it really feel that old. When people are trying to put Conan into pictures, they usually cheat a bit and don’t show the armor and weapons that are actually described and replace them with something more ancient Greek looking.

So I started thinking about elements that I would identify as visual clues that a story is set in an age long before the emergency of equivalents to medieval France or England. And I turned up with a surprisingly lot.

  • Giant Lizards: Reptiles today are small. Millions of years ago Reptiles could be huge. You don’t have to have actual dinosaurs, but something that looks like it could have been a dinosaur certainly should do the deed.
  • Volcanoes: Given the total age of the Earth and the amount of time between today and the dinosaurs, it seems very unlikely that volcanoes had been much more common during the time of the dinosaurs than they are now. But for over a century, all decent artists painting prehistoric animals put volcanoes in their pictures! It doesn’t make sense and it doesn’t have to make sense. Volcanoes just feel and look very prehistoric.
  • Bronze Armor: As I mentioned above, one of the big things where Conan stories feel anachronistic is armor. And it’s something that makes a big difference. Put your heroes and soldiers into bronze breastplates and give them crested helms and big round shields and you instantly have a very different feel than warriors in steel plate armor or chainmail.
  • Oracles: What knight has ever gone to an oracle? Ocasionally you have someone secretly consulting a witch in the night to gain forbidden knowledge. But making a pilgramage to a sacred oracle to recieve the wisdom of the gods is something very un-medieval.
  • Slaves: When these come up in medievalesque fantasy it’s usually in the form of organized crime. But you’ll almost never see the average noble or wealthy merchant having lots of slaves in their homes and as their workers unless the story wants to point out that they are dispicable villains.
  • Skulls: “Why skulls?!” After the great plagues of the late middle ages skeletons became a fashionable motive in art, but usually we consider skull decoration as something primitive and savage. But there isn’t any reason why you can’t have depictions of human and animal skulls in the decoration of the homes of the rich and powerful.
  • Sacrifices: For reasons I don’t know Christians and Muslims don’t do sacrifices. Which gives it a feeling of being primitive and barbaric. But during antiquity many extremely advanced civilizations sacrificed animals to their gods and of course you can also have them sacrifice people. That really sets a very different tone for a fantasy world.
  • Cannibals: Have you ever had a knight deal with people who eat people?
  • Animal Gods: Again, in western thought, humans are created in the image of god. The Greeks did it too. To my knowledge only the Egyptians had gods with Animal heads, but during the middle ages it has always been popular to depict pagan demon-gods with animal features, and we still associate animal features with deities of primitive societies. Also always fun is having your people worship Old Gods like Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth, or Shub-Niggurath. As long as it doesn’t look human it’s fair game.
  • Scrolls: Wizards and sages love their books. But there isn’t any practical reasons why you couldn’t also have them read from scrolls. An interesting alternative to parchment or papyrus is strips of bamboo sewn together with thread, so that each bamboo splint holds one line of text.
  • Clay Pots: These never disappeared and where still very common during the middle ages. But in antiquity pottery really was the way to go for all kinds of containers. Switch some wooden tankards for clay cups and some barrels for amphoras and your tavern will feel a lot more ancient.
  • Ziggurats and Pyramids: The only true way to build a giant temple or palace.
  • Halls of Pillars: Before the Romans figured out how to make a self supporting arch, it was really difficult to hold up a large ceiling. While stone is very hard when you press down on it, it actually snaps very easily when you bend it unless you make it really thick and put the support pillars very close together. (Karate chopping roof tiles and cinder blocks isn’t nearly as hard as it looks.) In Egyptian temples you often can’t see the hall for all the pillars which take up half of the floor space. The Greeks got a bit better by cheating and making the roofs out of wood (which is why the Acropolis hasn’t one anymore), but they still needed a lot of pillars and interior walls. Consider this when describing palaces and temples. At least some people might unconsciously make the association.

Ancient-Egyptian-Columns-2

Creating a world inspired by Morrowind

Morrowind is one of the truly amazing RPGs among videogames. Over the last 20 years there probably have been hundreds of fantasy videogames, but Morrowind has always been in a category of its own. Even when you look at fantasy works in other mediums, it’s still something very unusual and quite unique. Most recently Skyrim has had a huge impact as the last game of the Elder Scrolls series, but as pretty as the world of that game is, it’s still mostly pretty ordinary European-style medieval fantasy, with Vikings driving out the Roman Empire from their land and some dragons and elves for good measure. Nothing we havn’t seen a thousand times before. But Morrowind, even being set on the same planet and right next door, is a place very much unlike anything else in fantasy. The most similar setting I can think of would be the AD&D world Dark Sun, and you might also consider the venerable common ancestor of all heroic fantasy and space opera Barsoom from A Princess of Mars.

Very obviously on first glance is that Morrowind and these other settings have very unique landscapes and wildlives, as I had mentioned two weeks back. The plants look different and there are many common animals that are not seen as monsters but are completely unlike any animal we have on earth. (Or at least in Europe and North America.) And even more, there is also a noticable absence of almost any animals we are familiar with. But that is only on the very surface and only affects how the world looks. While the visuals in Morrowind look great, it is not all there is to it and this element is mostly irrelevant for stories or campaign settings. Strange looking animals and plants don’t make a difference by themselves in regards to how the world and the people in it tick.

morrowind-2013-02-02-12-33-23-55I’ve been discussing this topic with other people over the last weeks and it resulted in quite a number of very great thoughts, realizations, and discoveries about what you can do to create a world that feels similar to Morrowind without being a direct copy of it. And even if that’s not your intention, any single one of these should be useful as a starting point to making your work more unique and different from the standard medieval European fantasy.

Continue reading “Creating a world inspired by Morrowind”

Idols for Sword & Sorcery BECMI

Reading in the Dungeons & Dragons Rules Cylopedia today, I got reminded of the relics again, which had been introduced in the Companion Set. In B/X and BECMI, only humans can take the cleric and thief classes. All dwarf and halfling characters and NPCs have the abilities of fighters and all elves the abilities of both fighters and magic-users. AD&D made the concession that these demihuman races can have NPC clerics, but in the Basic and Expert sets they have no access to cleric magic at all. To get them access to healing magic and protection against undead, the Companion Set introduced the relics. For the elves, the relic is a Tree of Life, for the dwarves it’s a magic force, and for the halflings a magic fire bowl.

Each relic has a single keeper, who is a regular NPC of that race, but who has access to special powers provided by the relic. He is able to cast spells that heal wounds, cure blindness and disease, neutralize poisons, and identify magic items. In addition to that, the relic is constantly using the Turn Undead ability of a 15th level cleric with a radius of 360 feet. Which is powerful to turn everything except for lichs and instantly destroys everything up to and including vampires. The keeper can use the spells almost unlimited, but every time he does the radius of the Turn Undead area shrinks by 5 feet and only returns by 5 feet per day. So the keeper has a very strong incentive to always try to keep the power of the relic close to its maximum and not cast cure serious wounds on every little bruise.

151217For my Ancient Lands setting I’ve never been happy with clerics, as their abilities really don’t fit as stand-ins for tribal shamans at all. Keepers are a totally different story though. They recieve their powers from a specifc object tied to a specific place, which serves as a conduit for divine powers. And it has a strong resemblance to many animistic religions and traditions. In the technical terms of antropology, the relics are idols. They are physical objects in which the divine force resides and which priests and worshipers visit in person to communicate with the deity. It is a temporary or permanent home of the deity and in some cases it’s actual body. I belive even in Greek religion it was believed that the deity is actually present in the statue that represents it in its temple. In other places, these idols are natural features, like mountains, springs, or unusual large trees or rocks.

In the RC, all elven relics are Trees of Life and all dwarven relics forges, and they all grant the same spells to their keepers. But that really doesn’t have to be that way. Not only can you easily change the appearance of each relic, you can also easily add a few more spells to their reportoire. Also, the Turn Undead effect could be replaced with a different power that is permanently active. The wonderful thing about it is, that it works at every level. It works for a small village shrine that simply has an idol for the spirit of the lake that lies next to it, and you can also have an idol inside a huge temple within a large city, which channels the divine power of the sun to the high priests. By chosing different appearances and powers for each idol, every local cult becomes unique and can have quite different means to protect itself against harm. Instead of a Turn Undead aura, the keeper could be given the ability to raise ring of growth of plants with a 360 feet radius around the idol, to raise and lower an impenetrable wall of briars as it is needed. You could have a shrine in a fortress that constantly puts a bless spell on any defenders on its walls. An a deranged cult that worships a horrific entity from the Underworld might have an idol that utterly defies description. In wilderness locations, an idol could take the form of a magic spring, a waterfall, or a giant tree. Or really anything you can imagine.

I think these idols probably work best if you don’t have any cleric characters at all in the setting. I personally would allow mages to learn cure light wounds as a 2nd level spell and neutralize poison as a 4th level spell, since player characters tend to get into trouble far away from any settlement and you generally don’t want to have the party constantly commuting back and forth during adventures. But any other cleric spells, like restoration, cure blindness, and raise dead, should only be available as miracles granted by the gods if a ritual is performed before their idol. And since most of these gods would just be relatively minor spirits of the land, not even all of them might be able to perform all of these. To raise someone from death, it wouldn’t be out of place to have the party travel to visit the archdruid at the oldest tree in the heart of the forest, or to descent into the Underworld to find an ancient shrine where a powerful demon is being held imprisoned.

Anathema

Naming things in a fictional world is a terrible and most unenjoyable task. It’s bad enough when you do personal names and place names, but when it comes to more abstract things like organizations or types of creatures, finding a name that is reasonably acceptible (it’s never good) can take a very long time. I think I wanted to have a kind of creature similar to the abominations from Dragon Age from a very early point in working on the Ancient Lands, over 4 years ago. In the meanwhile, I added more ideas from other creatures, like folding the roles of both lichs and vampires into this new creation, and taking some elements from the Inspired from Eberron and the Eternal from Spears of the Dawn. But when it came to naming these things, nothing ever came close to fitting. But now I sat down and clicked my way through a thesaurus (they are actually good for something) and came on this wonderful word:

Anathema

A word that probably most people interested in fantasy have come across once or twice. Probably always refering to something blasphemous and unholy, and just the sound of it sounds ominous, even if you don’t know what it means. I had to look it up myself and it turns out to be ancient Greek meaning “offering”. (In this case, the a- at the beginning is not a prefix meaning anti.) However, in early Christianity it was used in the sense of “offered to the devil” or “devoted to evil” and referred to an early form of excommunication. Even though I made some efforts to weed out technical and religious terms that don’t really make sense in the world of the Ancient Lands, which is very different from a standard western-christian universe, anathema seems to be a word that still works.

So what is an anathema exactly? You might recognize some of these guys. That’s what you have to expect.

anathema1anathema2anathema3anathema4anathema5anathema6anathema7Anathema are mortals who have become possessed by a demon from the Underworld, their own spirit consumed in the process and all their memories, knowledge, and much of their personalty absorbed into the demons mind. While the mortals mind still exist in some way, all the ideals, values, and desires it once had become irrelevant as the demons original personalty dominates the mind of the anathema. It usually has very little interest in the good of the mortals clan or family, but may often retain some affection to people who were close to it in its previous life. Most anathema are greed, desire, or sloth demons and almost immediately set out to some ambitious plan to sate their craving. Usually  with very little reagrd to those around it, but often enough cunning to keep their new nature a secret. At least for the time being. Demons can possess any mortal whose body and spirit have been corrupted by demonic magic and all anathema are very dangerous creatures. But the most terrible ones are those created from sorcerers who willingly summoned a demon to join with it and gain immortality and great magical powers. Many anathema note that their new nature is very different from what the sorcerer expected it to be, but at that point whatever the mortal once wanted is longer of any real relevance. The demons desire to visit and explore the physical world overrides any plans the sorcerer might have had and they never feel any remorse or despair about their new nature.

So even though there are no Gods and no church in the Ancient Lands and not even true afterlives, anathema are still creatures that have turned away from mortal life and society and now exist entirely to pursue their demonic craving. They are “devoted to evil” and in the case of sorcerers “offered themselves to demons”. And they also “excommunicated” themselves from all mortal communites and their spirit will not join the clan shrine to give strength and courage to future generations. So the name fits in both its literal and proverbial meaning and it also sounds cool and ominous. What more can you want for a big bad monster?

Ancient Monsters: Ghoul & Shade

I’ve been spending some more thoughts on undead in the Ancient Lands. Since there is only a single source of natural power and energy, anything that is unnatural is a corruption of it and also comes from the same source. Sorcery, demons, and undead are all really different forms of the same thing. In that context, I’ve been doing some reworking of the common undead types so that everything fits together seamlessly and makes all sense.

I particularly like the ghouls as being some kind of insane mutants. While they look more like diseased humans, they are actually a lot like Golum in most ways. The shadows are also cool. Usually they don’t really do anything and just stand around being creepy, but that means you can use them in much larger numbers and make them a type of dangerous environment.

Ghoul

Ghouls are humans, elves, or other humanoids who have been corrupted by the dark magic of sorcery or demons. Though they have never truly died, they resemble the undead, existing in a state between life and death. They grow gaunt with pale skin and dark sunken eyes and are suffering from madness, but are also filled with unnatural vigor and are much more cunning than any beast. Their clawed fingers can crush a mans throat and leave deep rends in the flesh of their victims, and their teeth have the strength to bite through bones, as they regain their strength by feeding on the flesh of humans and beasts.

Many ghouls once were adventurers and treasure hunters who delved too deep into ancient places where the living are not meant to tread, or what remains of those who become slaves of dark sorcerers or demons.

Ghoul (Barbarians of Lemuria)

Attributes
Strength 2
Agility 1
Mind -1
Appeal -2

Combat Abilities
Attack with bite or claw +2; damage 1d6-1 plus paralysis
Defense: 2
Protection: 1
Lifeblood: 10

Any character hit by a ghouls attack must make a Moderate Strength roll (+0/TN 9) or be paralysed for one hour.

Ghoul (B/X)

No. Enc.: 1d6 (2d8)
Armor: 14
Move: Normal
Hit Dice: 2 (9 hp)
Attacks: Bite or claw
Damage: 1d4 plus paralysis
Save: F2
Morale: 9

A creature bit by a ghoul or hit by its claws must make a saving throw against paralysis or be paralysed for 2d8x10 minutes.

Shade

When people die who have been corrupted by demonic sorcery, the Corruption that wrecked their bodies can linger on, turning into Shades. With both the bodies and souls of the original person gone, shades are nearly mindless clouds of Corruption that float silently above the spot where they died. They are normally invisible, but cast dark shadows in the presence of bright lights and they can be clearly seen as shapes of darkness if any light shines upon them in the presence of dust or smoke.

Walking through a shade drains a small part of the life force of living creatures and can start the spreading of Corruption over time. While most shades stand motionless in the spot of their death and don’t seem to react to anything around them, some are aware of the presence of living beings nearby and attack when anything comes too close to them. While their insubstential clawn do not leave any physical injuries, being in prolonged contact with an attacking shade can quickly drain all the life energy of a living person and spread the Corruption through its body. People who survive the attack of a shade often show dark purple streaks on their skin that becomes ashen pale and cold, which will last for several days. Those who die will often leave behind a shade as well, joining those who killed them.

Shades are common in places where lots of people have been killed through sorcery, like the lairs of demons or the sites of sorcerous battles.

Shade (Barbarians of Lemuria)

Attributes
Strength –
Agility 3
Mind -3

Combat Abilities
Attack with touch +3; damage 1d6-1
Defense: 3
Protection: 0
Lifeblood: 5 (only harmed by magic)

When a creature is killed by a shade, a new shade appears in the spot of its death 3 rounds later.

Shade (B/X)

No. Enc.: 1d6 (2d10)
Armor: 15
Move: Normal
Hit Dice: 2 (9 hp)
Attacks: Touch
Damage: 1d4
Save: F2
Morale: 12

Shades can only be harmed by magic weapons or spells. Any living creature killed by a shade must make a saving throw against Death or Poison or a new shade will appear where it died within 1d4 rounds.