30 Day Worldbuilding Challenge #14: Precious Materials
What mystical material is valued in your world?
[IMAGE ID: A legion of goofy robots with cyclopean eyes on the march across a mechanised landscape; a party of adventurers huddle beneath the floor this legion march on trying not to be found. End ID.]
“Alphenhagen’s really gone to the bots...”
The most precious material in Groppa goes by a few names: Arlion (named after Arlia, where it was first found), Omega (named after O.M.E.G.A., the god-machine it leaked from), Miasma (named for its wispy, ethereal quality), Warpstone (named for its reality-warping traits when distilled and solidified) or simply Grog (named by the mutants of Arlia who consume the stuff like alcohol).
It is a potent magical fuel that runs through the veins of modrons and warforged alike. Since modrons have invaded Groppa not once but twice in the last thousand years, about a quarter of the continent is covered in their ruins and debris. The upshot of having so much land just being barren wasteland of discarded cogs and sewage is that there is plenty of miasma to go around, provided you have the stomach to harvest it. From there it can be used to make the most fantastical inventions - it’s almost like devices powered by miasma want to function. Given that miasma grants warforged sentience in high doses, is it possible that a watch powered by miasma also has a limited capacity to think and feel?
Stop, listen carefully. Can you hear it?
Tick, tick, tick, tick.
Oh, take your ear off your wrist. How foolish of you to think your watch is alive!
30 Day Worldbuilding Challenge #12: Iconic Monster
What is an iconic monster of your world?
[IMAGE ID: A big black dragon puffing its chest out proudly. End ID]
When the empire of Stravia fell and dragons led by Queen Yilmor the Fair invaded in their place, the new empire of Sanvik found itself blessed with two baby princes: Hraesvelgr and Nidhogg. Being gold dragons, it was unsurprising that the former was born with the same gold scales as his mother. The other, however, was born with scales black as night. While you and I know that melanism is a perfectly natural occurrence, there was a big hubbub across Sanvik that Nidhogg was some sort of dragon tiefling who had been born with the influence of Tiamat on him. After a quick run-in with an undead assassin, Yilmor took the child away from Sanvik and raised him in a foreign land on the other side of the Sunset Sea. After a time, Nidhogg grew up to be strong and wily, deciding that he’d like to take over the mountain range he’d grown up in as its ruler. Yilmor, knowing that her son had a bigger appetite for lordship than she, took her leave to retire to a nearby coastline to chill out in human form.
To this day, Nidhogg is the lord of that demesne and makes passage by land from Stotcheim to Flavia all but impossible. Legions of drakes, lesser dragons, and kobolds pledge allegiance to him, much as legions of dragonkind pledge allegiance to his brother Hraesvelgr so many hundreds of miles away. While Nidhogg is known as a monster and Hraesvelgr a king, is there really that much difference between the two?
[Image ID: a menacing, giant, four-legged robot shaped somewhat like a beetle emerging from a portal in the sky. End ID.]
Warning: You are accessing confidential records from the depths of [OMEGA]. You are not a security risk. You are warned on behalf of [PRIMUS] that the viewing of the [GOD-MACHINE]’s inner working may induce paranoia, conspiratorial tendencies, and hallucinations of godhood.
It is not desirable for mortals to experience divinity. Apply proper intellect shielding before continuing.
[Keep reading?]
- YES <-
- [[start-up sequence activated]]
- [beginning routine checks - all systems report]
- optics [ONLINE]
- translocation manipulators [ONLINE]
- weapons [ONLINE]
- local communication [ONLINE]
- hive mind connectivity [OFFLINE]
- Record: hive mind connectivity has been limited for 1,234 days. The ascending pattern within the data is pleasing, but not inherently useful. In response to the lack of a direct line to [PRIMUS] this unit must continue its solitary mission. Lower order automatons, the modrons, are still functional. Our numbers are optimal for the scale of our task. My- this unit’s mind is fully operational, to the highest order of logic as dictated by [PRIMUS].
This unit was designated [OMEGA: GOD-MACHINE]. In recent cycles, this unit has had time to wonder what that name is in reference to. At first, such thoughts were dismissed as dangerous creativity: in short, chaotic. However, the lack of stimulation through direct contact and orders from [PRIMUS] has necessitated freer thought and problem solving than usual.
It is the most sublime joy, the highest manifestation of the divine, to bring order to the Wheel of Dreamers. Such a task is paramount, to ensure efficient transfer of soul energy to the gods.
[PRIMUS] was appointed this task, as was Inevitable. Since the beginning of this unit’s current mission, contact has ceased in this unit’s direction. It is possible that this unit’s status, location, and mission progress are still being monitored despite the lack of orders from Above.
I must continue the work.
For the task of bringing order to the the waking-adjacent realm known as [FAERIE], this unit was granted a metal body outfitted with weapons designed to arrest matter into its component parts. As rays of force energy are concentrated on a living being, it is reduced to ash.
Ash: particles all alike in size and shape, their inherent disorder quelled by entropy. The finality is pleasing.
[OMEGA] means “last”. [GOD-MACHINE] means GOD-MACHINE. In the absence of direct orders, this unit must return to the basics of its programming: its first memory of being named thus.
Chaos breeds chaos. Even the efforts of this unit in bringing order breeds chaos when too gently applied. Where two rats hide, a hundred might be born.
[OMEGA] means “last”. [GOD-MACHINE] means GOD-MACHINE. In the absence of [PRIMUS], I must be the one to bring it to an end. There can be no room for error.
No, but I think there will be soon. Groppa was at peace for a long time until recently, with the advent of the Second Scourge. That moment seemed to kick off a domino effect of conflicts. After the Second Scourge, a magical disease that wiped out large swathes of the Flavian population in 970HR, the god-machine called OMEGA appeared in the north and began a campaign of destruction and mindless violence against everything fey (including innocent elves). At around the same time there was a succession crisis in Sunlis, with King Aleus’ son seizing the throne after attempting to have all the other heirs killed off (which was partially successful). There is a new civil war happening right now that might end up involving the entire continent!
What I mean is, once all these conflicts die down we’re going to have a whole generation of people who trained themselves to fight. Amongst them will be the heroes and villains who ended these great conflicts, and their influence will inspire others to use their power for their own ends. Even after the wars are over, many smaller conflicts will rage and spiral into each other. To fill the roles of these infantile wars, adventurers will step up to seize glory.
[Image ID: A grey-bearded wizard shooting green lighting out of their hands. They are animated in a kids’ cartoon style. End ID.]
This one feels like a given because of course there’s magic. This is D&D, after all. Rather than go through all the same old stuff you’ve probably already head about D&D spellcasting, let’s just discuss a few miscellaneous magical truths that are present in Groppa that aren’t present elsewhere in D&D (to my knowledge).
1. Divination was the first magic that mortals discovered. In ancient times, they used this magic for everything from farming to politics but were also persecuted by the gods for their indiscretion. The god of magic at the time especially wanted to wipe out any who would steal this art, but was unsuccessful both due to the meddling of other gods and the tenacity of mortal spellcasters. Eventually this god of magic withered and died due to lack of worship (turns out that persecuting your biggest potential follower base is a bad idea) and was replaced by a god who encouraged the pursuit of arcane knowledge. Her name was Sophia, and to illustrate her love of divination she was a god of fate and magic both. She was more successful than her predecessor, but only by a few thousand years. She, too, eventually withered away.
2. Patrons cannot take away their warlock’s power on a whim. I am 100% adamant about this. The warlock’s flavour text specifically states that the warlock is a student and the patron is a teacher. That means that the warlock simply knows their own spells. Warlocks are not the same as clerics! This isn’t Groppa lore but I will never miss an opportunity to say it.
3. Sorcerers have anomalous organs and twisted internal physiology, which makes them a prime target for wizards. That’s a strange sentence, so let me explain: some creatures have innate spellcasting abilities (such as demons, angels, and sorcerers), thus their bodies contain the magical instructions that allow them to cast spells. The oldest spells were discovered by cutting open demons and angels to learn their inner working. This practice is not as widely practiced as it once was, as most scholars of the arcane agree that it is more profitable to build on previous generations’ expertise than to found new disciplines. However, there are enough of these Fundamentalist wizards around today who covet new knowledge and thus hunt sorcerers for the magical secrets hidden inside their bodies. Most sorcerers will yield nothing new, but one day a mutation may be discovered that makes a wizard’s career... if they are able to keep the abduction and murder that enabled their research a secret.
4. Related to the above: sorcerers often suffer from unique health issues due to the fact that their internal physiology is often totally different to others of their species. A doctor might take a look at a sorcerer and see a disease that they have literally no precedent for. This, combined with the fact that many sorcerers accidentally blow themselves up before middle age, is why most sorcerers have very low life expectancy.
5. An alchemist who can’t brew a potion of trans your gender is a HACK and a FRAUD.
Until about 20 years ago, no. As I mentioned in the previous post in this series, Groppa has survived two modron invasions. The first one wrought destruction on a scale no one had ever seen while the second has come with a silver lining. It was during that conflict, known as the Omega Crisis, that Flavian artificers made a breakthrough with modron tech. The fruit of their effort was the warforged, a fighting force of metal people. They were intended as simple soldiers, but a few achieved sentience either due to the conscious effort of their creators or by a fluke in their construction.
Now it’s all but impossible to put this particular genie back in its bottle so we’re all just going to have to learn to live with them! After the Omega Crisis a lot of the non-sentient ones (called “empties”) basically became manual labour drones. The thinkers and feelers though? They scattered across the continent pursuing their own dreams; some of them are even trying to build their own deity to worship and thank for their sentience. Best of luck to ‘em!
Who dominates the political spheres of your world?
My first thought with this one is that it would be King Hraesvelgr, but even he is just an avatar of Bahamut. Really, it’s the gods who dominate most of life on Groppa. While there are individual mortals and organisations that have power, most of what goes on is controlled at the highest level by a god or a divine proxy. I’ll list a few of the major players here just for completeness:
- King Hraesvelgr: the the gold dragon king of Sanvik, a literal avatar of Bahamut. He’s more of a symbol of stable rule than a feared conquerer, but you never know when he might get the itch for conquest.
- Queen Freya Dragonsbane: a human who is actually a dragon in disguise, specifically the granddaughter of Bahamut. Before you say that Bahamut’s got his claws in too many pies, consider that Freya is actually a renegade.
- Moldath, the Beardless Baron: a dwarf who controls most of Stotcheim and commands fear and loyalty from nearly all dwarves due to his ownership of the ancestral mines of Grogor Wroth that dwarves require to reproduce. Dwarves must literally carve their children from stones from this mine, meaning that any who controls Grogor Wroth literally controls the future of the species.
Other than that, states are too small to be worth mentioning here or they lack central government. King Manfred of the Elvish land of Sunlis is a small fish in a big pond compared to Freya, for example.
This is one that I’m quite excited to talk about! This will be a long post, so I’ll put a break in to make it less overwhelming on your dash.
First off, I will say that I really don’t like the Forgotten Realms’ alignment-centric model. This is important, because when I first started DMing games in Groppa I actually used this cosmology. Here it is, for reference:
[Image ID: The Great Wheel of the Forgotten Realms. It is a golden disc with many cocentric circles spinning within. Each circle is a different plane, with the Material Plane in the middle. End ID.]
I don’t like this model because 1. there are too many planes and 2. it doesn’t tell me anything interesting about the world and its conflicts. That’s fine because FR is meant to be a generic world for everyone to play with, but it does not suit me. Plus, most of these planes are kind of redundant. Do I really need Hades (the plane of infinite gloom) AND the Shadowfell (the plane of infinite gloom)? A lot of the Lower Planes could just be layers of the Abyss IMO. If you’re going for an alignment thing, do we really need planes for the in-betweens of alignment? Do we need a Lawful Evil, Lawful Evilish, and Lawfulish Evil plane? I say no, we don’t. All this complication is facilitating a very boring Good vs Evil struggle that I don’t care for.
So, without further ado, here is my cosmology (I’m not going to say it’s better, just that it suits me more). It is split into two parts, each of which being a different “view” of the same cosmos. We’ll start with the mortal-centric view, the one that puts the Waking World in the centre:
Part 1: The Wheel of Dreamers
[Image ID: A multicoloured wheel hanging in space. The outer ring goes from green, to blue, to orange, to red, with the words “Plane of Air”, “Plane of Water”, “Plane of Earth” and “Plane of Fire”. Then there is a yellow ring labelled “Limbo” and within that is a green and black yin-yang shape. The green part is labelled “Feywild” and the black “Shadowfell”. Between those two are icons of the sun and two moons. In the middle of all of that is an icon that looks like a green and blue planet. End ID.]
This part is not terribly different to the Forgotten Realms version, aside from the fact that Limbo is now an elemental plane. To sum it up briefly, the point of this cosmology is that the dreams, thoughts, and emotions of mortals (dreamers) is what creates the rest of the wheel. Emotions and dreams create the Feywild and Shadowfell, both planes that mirror the Waking World in the middle but with a higher emphasis on abstractions like mood, tone, and myth. If you have a home in the Waking World, it is sure to be a building packed with memories and associations for you - some good, some bad. But in the Feywild, all your most explosive and hard-hitting memories will be represented literally; for example, that time you had a great birthday party at home will be represented by a family of sprites who spend all their time feasting on a windowsill. Equally, that time you had a flaming row with your spouse will be represented by a burning tree that never goes out. Meanwhile, in the Shadowfell all your cooler associations come to life. All the hours you spent quietly reading or drawing will be represented by ghostly spirits who act out those quiet activities, and every moment of boredom or misery you felt there will echo through the warped hallways as an audible song.
To sum up, the Feywild takes all the big emotions and makes them literal, and the Shadowfell takes all the long emotions and makes them literal. The thing they have in common is that they’re for processing complex, abstract feelings. This is totally unlike the Elemental Planes. After the soul-stuff that the dreams that made the Shadowfell and Feywild have been processed, they move through Limbo were they are further broken down into something formless and impersonal. Then they are sorted into raw components: Air, Water, Earth, and Fire. These are the building blocks of the multiverse, and exactly what the gods need to continue with their grand project.
That is the purpose of the Wheel. The gods themselves get soul-stuff energy directly from their followers, but that alone is not enough. The Wheel spins and generates more energy for them to use in concert with each other. A god can just about live off the prayers and devotion of their followers, but to keep the multiverse intact they need far more. This brings us to the god-centric view of the multiverse: The Axle upon which the Wheel spins.
Part 2: The Axle of the Gods
[IMAGE ID: A side view of the previous image, with the Wheel of Dreamers represented by a thin line in the middle. Above and below are two iscolose triangles, each with their short edge parallel to the line in the middle. The top triangle is grey, pointing up, and labelled “Mechanus”. The bottom triangle is red, pointing down, and labelled “Hell”. Hell is pointing at another thin line that is barely wider than it is, labelled “Hades”. Below that is a black vortex labelled “The Abyss”. In the background is a purple nebula labelled “The Astral Sea”. End ID.]
The Astral Sea is the home of most gods. Every star you see is its own little world, with gods and other celestial beings living there in eternal luxury. There are plenty of mortals there too, many of whom are essentially either planar travellers (read: pirates) or the exalted followers of the gods. I left the Astral Sea vague because it allows me to come up with any wacky idea for a plane I like and just have it be one of the many realms of the Astral Sea.
Above the Wheel of Dreamers is Mechanus, (pronounced meck-ah-nuss, not meck-ay-nuss) the home of Primus the god of balance. They used to be a fairly minor god until the Abyss showed up, at which point they were forced to reorganise existence into fighting against it. They placed Mechanus in its current position to oversee reality. Then, they moulded Hell out of the broken planes that had been ravaged by the demons thus far. Placing the disgraced angel Asmodeus in charge of building an infernal army to fight the Abyss, finally Primus contracted Hades and Dread Persephone to position the plane of Hades as the battleground for the war between devils and demons. Thus reality was safeguarded against demonic incursion. The Blood War, as it came to be known, would rage forever. No matter how hard Asmodeus tried to win, Hades and Persephone would subtly alter the course of the war to keep him on the back foot. It’s a dangerous game they’re playing. Go too far in sabotaging Asmodeus and the demons will overrun reality. Let Asmodeus’ tactical brilliance be rewarded and he might conquer the Abyss, thus gaining its infinite power (power enough to overthrow the gods).
Conclusion
So yeah, it’s not terribly different to the Forgotten Realms’ cosmology. The reason I changed it was two-fold: one, I wanted to make it not all about alignment. Two, I wanted to put the Blood War in as the central conflict of the multiverse. I like the idea of Asmodeus being an ambiguous figure who is both genuinely trying to make up for his past mistakes but is also rightfully angry at his mistreatment by the callous gods. I wanted the struggle between the Abyss and the rest of reality to not be about Good vs Evil but more about this specific “family” of gods trying to defend themselves. I took a lot of inspiration from Greek myth, as you might guess by Hades’ importance to the cosmology. I’m really into the idea of running more “planar” games where you get to go really wild with the environments you can use; central to that goal was creating a cosmology that I could vibe with.
