Spread Thy Tentacles

Though it was originally conceived as a fairly by-the-numbers D&D style campaign for Castles & Crusades, the more I think about my Freed Lands setting, the more Cthulhu Mythos-influenced it becomes. I don't know if that's a byproduct of my reading a lot of Chaosium material since the BRP rulebook was released, or just a natural outgrowth of my conviction to have it be a setting more about terror and the unknown than one about magic.

I'm learning to embrace this tendency, but I think I'll stop short of going for full-on Yog-Sothothery for Freed Lands. I'm not interested in doing a fantasy Cthulhu game. I'm just reading a lot of the excellent Malleus Monstrorum, an encylopedic monster sourcebook for Call of Cthulhu, and letting some of the cooler entries influence my ideas about the place of the monstrous in my setting.

Fundamentally, though, it's still going to be a game about exploration of the unknown, rather than sanity-blasting things from beyond. Primarily, anyway: I'm not saying there's no place at all for sanity-blasting things from beyond. Just that it's not the focus of the campaign.

Yes, this is something of a vague post. More on this topic later.

Your Sorcerous Ways

Although I haven't mentioned it in quite a while, my homebrew fantasy setting, the Freed Lands, still percolates away in the back of my mind. I sometimes hesitate to post about it, since I get the impression it's largely of interest to myself alone, but this blog is too long neglected, so let me raise for discussion an idea that I hope will generate some commentary:

Fantasy without spells.

That's right - I'm coming to the conclusion that I'd be happier if my setting didn't have magic, or at least didn't have what RPGs generally describe as "spellcasting". The more I think about what turns me off about D&D-style western fantasy - a magic sword for every warrior, wizards chucking lightning bolts at their foes with impunity, priests healing the injured several times a day - I just don't like the idea of mere mortals having that kind of power, least of all on a reliable, predictable basis. I want magic to be scary and incomprehensible. I still want monsters, though.

In a lot of ways, the feel I want is what's depicted in the ultra-violent manga series Berserk, around the time of "The Golden Age" story arc. (The series ramps up the D&Disms shortly afterwards, with the main character befriending an elf and a wizard, among other things.) But early on, the world of Berserk is much like Europe during the 13th century or so, with mercenary bands doing the business of war and terrorizing the populace when work is slow. Whenever anything supernatural occurs, it's monstrously demonic in nature, and met by most of the protagonists with disbelief, confusion, and abject terror. That's more or less what I'm going for.

So, for the moment, I'm thinking of a human-dominated world, where magic is a fantasy, but horrific monsters lurk at the edges. There's still room for a sorcerer or two in this world, I suppose, but they'd be more monster than man.

You know, this concept has a lot in common with the so-called Cthulhu Mythos. I could say that's because BRP's currently the system I'm planning on using for the setting, but I think it's really just the influence of the aforementioned Berserk along with Princess Mononoke and similar films.

Freed Lands: Wheruls

Wheruls are my wild and crazy barbarian horde race. You know, the ones whose approach is heralded by a huge dust cloud on the horizon and who leave devastation in their wake.

Their origins lie in the savannah of Hafe, to the south of the Freed Lands. Wheruls had been ravaging the Morven Ghannem region for centuries before the elves of Immovenst conquered it. The elves attempted to spare their new territory from further attacks only by providing the wheruls with quality arms and armor, and encouraging the wherul raiders to demonstrate their prowess with them further south. The wherul hordes happily took the elven weaponry, but never stopped testing the borders of Morbenhann, ensuring that the elves (and their subjects) never lowered their guard.

Wheruls respect displays of power, but never bow to it for long. That power will be tested time and again until a weakness is discovered and exploited, and the wherul is once again revealed as supreme. Wherul society places might as its highest virtue. Wheruls exalt in strength of arms and personality, and believe to risk life and limb is to live. A wherul horde will rob, sack, and pillage, true, but this is an only an expression of their near-pathological need for supremacy. However, they are not a conquering race. Once that horde feels that it has established that supremacy, it returns to the wherul homelands - the sunny plains to the south that are their unquestioned domain. There, they rest, rebuild their numbers, and prepare their next demonstration.

Wheruls have no religion per se. There is a perception that they worship spirits of nature, but this is a mistaken one. They may pause to admire a waterfall or a great canyon, or to respectfully observe a tiger bringing down its prey, but they are not animists in the true sense. They are just as likely to divert the river for their needs, or to kill the great cat for food. Wheruls have no concept of agriculture or domestication, but they take pride in capturing and training wild animals, especially predatory ones (many of which they bring along on their raids).

Wheruls are reptilian in appearance, but are warm-blooded, and bear live young. They begin life as quadrupedal creatures very similar in appearance to a monitor lizard, but upon reaching adolescence, changes begin rapidly as the young males engage in violent (but non-lethal) combat for the right to breed with the wherul females.

After mating, the winners begin a rapid transformation into a massive, semi-quadrupedal form covered in iridescent scales, with a heavy tail used for balance when using the forelimbs to manipulate objects. Males are physically powerful, capable of running at high speeds for great distances, but are considerably less mentally capable than the females, and serve as hunters, warriors, and (during long-distance travel) mounts for the smaller females.

The females, after bearing young, become fully bipedal, with roughly humanoid proportions. Unlike the males, their mental faculties are not dulled by the maturing process, and thus they take up the planning and leadership of their yearly raids.

The males that lose the breeding combats become neuters - dull brown, sterile humanoids similar in appearance to females. Wherul neuters develop highly sophisticated vocal chords capable of reproducing sounds outside of the human range of hearing, which may be amplified to very high volume by their inflatable throat sacs. The wherul battle language makes use of these far-travelling frequencies, enabling them to secretly give complex orders across great distances.

The wherul mouth is designed only for biting prey and eating flesh, and thus, wheruls lack the ability to speak words in the fashion of other races. The lizard-like face of a wherul displays no emotion, and their language consists of strange barks, chirps, and hisses. When dealing with other races, wheruls rely instead on their neuters' talent for mimicry to communicate in a strange, broken syntax of words and phrases, perfectly copied from the speech of others that they have heard. The sight of a neuter wherul "speaking" in this fashion, switching voices in the middle of a sentence without moving the lips, can be unsettling.

(Much of this will be familiar to those who followed my old Freed Lands journal, but there's a good deal that has changed. It's my hope that the style of this entry gives you a better idea of the way I'm approaching races in this setting: I'm going for a sense of realism and originality without turning into a biology text or going completely off the wall. We'll see if I can do the same for some of the more typical fantasy races.)

Non-Humans In The Freed Lands

One of the things I like about Chaosium's games is that they're human-centric, but that the way monsters are written up makes it easy to use them as player characters. It's a strength of the BRP system, and it reminds me a lot of the one which, for better or worse, I still know best: the Palladium system. 10 years at least since I played a Palladium game, and I can still eyeball the stats and instantly tell what's hideously overpowered and what's even more hideously overpowered.

Anyway, before I go off an a tangent about Palladium games, the point I'm trying to make is that BRP's default treatment of non-human player characters dovetails nicely with what I intend to do in my Freed Lands campaign: start with human characters only, but keep open the option of introducing non-humans as the campaign progresses. My plan is for the initial setup to involve a group of human outlanders, probably all Brinthine, entering and exploring the newly accessible region of Morbenhann for the first time.

Part of my intent with Freed Lands is to avoid making it "D&D in another system", so I try to make setting elements at least somewhat plausible. More accurately, I don't want at any point to say "a wizard did it" to explain anything unusual present in the setting. Still, I can't shake my Palladium-bred love of having lots of intelligent species running around in a fantasy campaign. The compromise I came up with was to indulge my own tendencies towards quasi-scientific speculation, so I try to come up with ecologically and evolutionarily plausible explanations for things.

For example, instead of having your usual orcs created by an evil god rampaging across the landscape because they were born that way, I've got wheruls, a sapient, reptilian race descended from tree monitors that were forced onto the ground when a climate shift changed their habitat from forests to savannahs. Seeing over the tall grasses that subsquently covered the plains meant that they began to stand upright, freeing their front legs for other uses, and eventually you've got an exploding population of lizard men who need more food. My goal is to create similar backgrounds for the other "races" of the Freed Lands setting - dwarves, ogres, and hulderfolk. (Elves don't count, because they're magic. Yes, I realize that contradicts the whole point of this entry.)

Ultimately, I realize that this approach doesn't produce results that are especially realistic, from a scientific point of view, but I find it a satisfyingly different angle from which to attack a "classic fantasy" setup. Since worldbuilding is something personal, that's enough for me.

The Lay Of The Freed Lands

Thanks to the old and clunky Arr-Kelaan Hexmapper program, I have a (very) rough map of the region I plan on covering in my Freed Lands campaign.

Obviously, this is vastly simplified. The pass through the Black Peaks is not that big. Also, the terrain types displayed here don't really correspond to those I envision for the various realms. Hexmapper doesn't offer a huge variety of terrain hexes - here, they're chosen mostly to differentiate them visually.

Morbenhann is the "Freed Lands" region for which the setting is named, and the focus of the vast majority of what I have planned. As discussed in my earlier post, it's inaccessible from the rest of the continent of Bridion because of the massive Black Peaks mountain range to its south and east. There are a scant few eastern mountain passes, all clustered into one small area, and all under the strict control of various temperamental dwarven clans. Passage is technically possible to the south of Genthi, but that way lie the plains of Hafe, homeland of the savage, reptilian wheruls. Once a frontier province of Ghannem, Morbenhann was conquered by the elves of Immovenst several centuries ago, which has had major and lasting effects on the language, culture, and customs of its human population. It is predominantly a heavily forested region with a cool, temperate climate, though the southern reaches bordering Hafe are somewhat hotter and drier. The people of Morbenhann are known as the Hannese, and are left in confusion and turmoil now that their elven masters have inexplicably fled back to Immovenst in what is known as the Retreat, or the Ebbing of the Tide.

Ghannem is a large, landlocked empire beyond the Black Peaks. It is one of the oldest human civilizations in Bridion, and it reached its apex long ago. Ghannem has been in decline for centuries now, yet its Empress still marshals the largest and most powerful armies on the continent. Recent slave uprisings, peasant rebellions, radical schisms within their once-monolithic church, and border raids from her Genthaine rivals have thus far prevented her from retaking Morbenhann. Ghannemites often seem rigid, stodgy and out-of-touch to foreigners.

Genthi is not a nation proper, but a collection of squabbling city-states to the southeast of Morbenhann. Most have ancient rivalries against the others, but all still identify themselves as Genthaine, and there are certain unifying cultural characteristics between all of them. The Genthaine cosmology includes a bewildering array of spirits, with new ones seemingly being invented by the day. Most citizens can't be bothered to keep track of all the rites and sacrifices required by each of these small gods, so people of all cities pay their respects to the wandering recondite ascetics that do it for them. Notable city-states include Chrand, the so-called City of Companies (home to the best-trained mercenaries in Genthaine); Saughor, the City of Colleges (a place famed for its libraries, learned men, and lechery); and Reyaeri, the Kingdom City, which controls an unusually large portion of Genthi and whose ruling family has been struggling for generations to unite the region.

(Apologies to those who read a lot of this information on the old Livejournal setup.)

My Homebrew (Let Me Show You It)

Like a lot of RPG enthusiasts, I have a homebrew setting I've been working on for quite a while. Like many of those settings, it's "not done yet", which often feels like a euphemism for "never going to be finished". I call it Freed Lands, and I'm currently planning on using the BRP ruleset - if I ever get around to running it. I occasionally feel the urge to write about my setting, but not enough to devote an entire blog to it. (I tried that in the past, and didn't get far.) However, Max's recent post asking about people's personal settings got me thinking about it again, and so, here's a quick primer.

The realm that would become known as the Freed Lands lies to the west of the homelands of humanity, beyond the Black Peaks, a mountain range that is practically impassable. The first humans to settle there came from Ghannem, a nation young by the standards of the dwarves that controlled the mountain passes. Ghannem was rich in coin but overpopulated, so, they paid the dwarves for right of passage and settled in the lands beyond the mountains, which they named Morven Ghannem, or "Western Ghannem".

Humanity's development and refinement of agriculture - and their subsequent rise to supremacy - soon began to disturb the natural balance of the newly settled region. Eventually, it caused a schism in elven culture. Many elves argued that if they did not take up the new ways, they would be destroyed. Traditionalists scorned the subjugation of nature as an abomination and drove these elves to the islands of Immovenst, but were themselves soon forced into hiding by rampant human expansion, along with numerous other indigenous races. The dwarf clans sealed their mountain passes against humankind, and as decades passed, the men of Ghannem learned to forget about their western brethren beyond the Black Peaks, and instead turned to squabbling with their human neighbors - the newly ascendant Genthaine people - and each other.

Centuries later, the elves of Immovenst returned, armed and armored with steel and riding massive elk bred for war. After a brutal struggle, they conquered Morven Ghannem, and ruled for hundreds of years, reshaping it into the elf-ruled territory of Morbenhann. Eventually, a force they were unable or unwilling to identify to their subjects attacked their homelands and forced them into the Retreat. The vast majority of the elves returned to Immovenst, leaving the conquered to fend for themselves.

Now, Morbenhann has fallen into chaos - bandits and mercenaries alike declare themselves princes and prey on the weak, cults driven underground centuries ago practice their rites in the open, unknown horrors prey on travelers, and old races forced into hiding emerge once more. Ancient spirits are angered, plague sweeps across the settlements of men, elves, and even dwarves, and rumor says the once-impregnable pass is unguarded. Now, the rulers of Ghannem - and their Genthaine rivals to the south - turn their gaze to these newly Freed Lands, hoping to add them to their own.

I hope that sounds at least potentially interesting, because I intend to revisit it here on Dungeonskull Mountain.