I've been whipping up a setting for a D&D campaign thats in the works of getting started, and i wanted to share my concept and see what people have to say about it. Lemme know what you think!
A mountainous region, as humble an origin as a people can claim. Small city-states form, with collaborative projects proposed and enacted to create sanctioned safe-travel trade route between two or more cities. A network of alliances form between these locales of civilization, and the magic of these mountains is soon explored.
In this world, a chemical reaction burns in the atmosphere that allows a semi real manifestation of desired boons (blah blah magical asteroid with Magic Properties changed the scape of the world forever this is several million years of evolution later). This aurora is known by these peoples as the Stream, resembling the rippling waters that flow from cliff to foothill and carry life on its tides.
The first recorded summoning in recent history was accidentally manifested by a top resercher's precocious daughter, asking for another stonefruit from his pouch. The gathered magic in the air folded and squeezed entropy into reality, and an entirely new breed of sweet-savory fruit took root in front of the girl. This plant, hence named Joat after the young girl who ensorceled it into being, became a bumper crop for the city it was formed in. This fruit, a gift twofold, would allow its consumers to assume the form of the wild fauna that inhabit this yet-to-be-industrious divine epicenter, and the people of this village would leverage this gift to benefit their side of trade agreements with neighbors near and far.
Joa, the young girl who changed her world in adolescence, soon let her attention be shifted to ambition and oversight of a rapidly-expanding citizenry. She became an idol of the new age of the mountains, a symbol of the empire to be formed by her people, with a coat of fur and a thick tail resembling a snow leopard's. Following her death, she was defied and her progeny became the de facto administrators of the throne of her lands. Joatai was named in her honor, the Imperatrix Eternal who moved the world through her families and chosen benefactors.
Research was still done of the Stream, of course, but several uninspiring results of manifestory attempt led a vast majority of the population to believe that the Gift of Joat was as divine a blessing as anything to be expected, and who knows how long it may take for the magical energies to surge in such a magnificent way again? It was soon considered tasteless to seek further understanding or insight into the Stream's function, with those interested in learning the process of unreal creation and its various mysteries as looking a gift miracle in the mouth. A vast majority of the efforts put into such study were quietly wound down, with the foremost experts in the field turning their attention to maximizing breeding healthy and powerful Joat.
Soon enough, the demand for this blessed stonefruit was the central pillar of the industrial strength of the billowing blanket that is civil sway. State-sanctioned oratory and debate was enhanced by raven-headed humanoids with the ability to out-squawk their opposition. Battalions of foot soldiers changed their shape to that of wooly loxodon, a fur-coated mammoth species as its primary inspiration. The ruling class, nearly all of them descendents of the Ever-Reigning Joa, chose to permanently adjust their given form to that resembling a snow leopards in one way or another, each personalizing their mutation with great zeal.
In the six generations since Joa's inheritance, Wa'moct, her home village, became a hub of industrial hustle and muscle. As the fourth-highest mountaintop of the range of Joatai, the culture of the land became deeply superstitious of the number 4. Austerity followed the trails from the heart of Wa'moct to the 4th-highest city below it, Eight Paths. This is a transport hub, and being central in the web of mountainous treachery, a great deal of bridges and foot trails originated from the city in its near-infancy. Maybe, had the Stream not broken its bank for Joa, this would be the cultural epicenter of the range. But no.
