I'm back at it again with some snippets for a thing-that-may-happen. But this time, I utilized the Game Master Apprentice's card decks!

Relic Ideas

Family Memento + Restless Spirit + Concealed Pistol

A pistol considered to be a family heirloom or memento is revealed to be attached to a restless spirit. Instead of firing bullets, it fires the equivalent of spirit or magical energy that matches the entity possessing it. It will only fire if the spirit feels like helping you, though.

Tiny metal figurines + Ancient Power + Pride

A game set similar or equivalent to chess includes tiny metal figurines and looks innocent enough. However, it is a relic belonging to a deity, demon, or entity related to pride. If a player gives into the ancient sin of pride while playing, their soul becomes trapped inside one of the figurines.

Villain Ideas

Proving a legend true + Treachery + Murder

A villain was led to believe they were the chosen one; however, they were betrayed by the person, people, or faction that encouraged this belief. It was revealed that the chosen one was someone else all along. In their rage, the villain murders who was responsible for this treachery, and seeks to prove they're the chosen. What is this "chosen one" destined to do, and is the "real" chosen one actually the destined person, or was it actually the villain as they believe?

Offer you can't refuse + Prayer book + Fortress + Burdened

A deity has made this villain an offer they cannot refuse in exchange for carrying out their desires. They frequently consult a prayer book, which is how the deity converses with them, and their base is a fortress of devout believers. The villain, however, feels burdened by this partnership; what do they have at stake?

I had an idea for something that I won't talk about just yet, and used my Story Engine decks to help craft some things for it. These are just little idea snippets.

Relic Ideas

Overlooked + Statue + Tusk + Used in making a tool or musical instrument + Sluggish

An easily overlooked statuette of a popular deity that was carved out of an animal's tusk that is normally a popular material for flutes and pipes. When the wind blows through the statuette, an enchanted lullaby plays, making people within listening vicinity sluggish and prone to narcolepsy.

Noble + Mage

A Bag + Fur + Camouflaging Properties

Circlet + Jewel + Glowing

A bag made out of fur from a creature with camouflaging properties. While the bag itself is remarkable, what is special is the circlet inside, which was once owned by a mage with a title of nobility. It features a jewel that glows softly, though the enchantment upon it would require specialized study to understand.

Villain Ideas

An Idol + (Agenda) Heist an Object + Bearers of a Religious Object

Sword + Ephemeral

Javelin + Poisonous

A member of a cult has gained a large following of worshippers. The fighters of the group use javelins that they claim to be blessed by their leader to curse any non-believer it touches, but the truth is that they are coated in a toxic and rare poison. The cult leader's agenda is to commit a heist to steal a legendary ephemeral sword from a safeguarded location.

A Ghoul + Scholar + Seemingly Endless Energy + Caused the destruction of a location

Wasteland + Keep + Famous of its unusual hue of soil or stone + Polluted

(Agenda) Capture a god-beast + Radiates an aura + Pleasant

A scholar in pursuit of unlocking endless energy caused the destruction of a region that is now a wasteland. The scholar, now a ghoul, has been building an undead army in a keep located in the center of the polluted wasteland. Their goal is to capture a god-beast that emits a healing aura.

I had fun crossing the decks together and will do more of these. But what these are for, well, you'll find out, if I decide to go all the way with it. :D

It's that time again: Can Zakkarii quickly do some worldbuilding before Sunday ends?!

Otherwise known as "Zakkarii got tied up in some things and needed to write this blog post REALLY FAST." So let's get to it.

The Need

I'm going to try a new TTRPG and had the idea of setting it in within the world of my Greenhill Adventurers novels. It's a light fantasy setting with the usual vaguely-European inspired flavoring. The setting was never meant to get very detailed or grand, as the novel series itself is a short and breezy romance trilogy. Readers will pick it up to see two men kiss (and more), not to read the next Brandon Sanderson.

But that doesn't mean I can't play around in my own setting and give it some more life. Currently, the setting only has two non-human peoples, dragonkin and harekin. Harekin are similar to Viera from Final Fantasy, but with furred legs and hare feet, tails, and they have fangs, as they're not herbivores. Dragonkin are dragons that can adopt a human-like form with varying degrees of feature-mixing. You may see some with wings out, you may see some with no wings but with scales. It's up to each person's own tastes on presentation.

For this TTRPG game, I thought, hey, why not make a third non-human people. So here I am, doing just that, but speedrunning it before my brain decides it needs sleep.

Common Physical Features

First, what features do they commonly have across the board? They can have some variances, like differences in fur colors or scale patches, but generally, what do you often see? I whipped out my character design deck and rolled on my non-human traits table.

Results:

• Tentacles/Eldritch
• Fangs
• Horns

I can't remember at the moment nor do I have time to open my book draft up, but there's a void-like plane that some creatures will pop out of sometimes. I'm thinking, perhaps a group of creatures came out of the plane, but instead of trying to do things like, say, eat people, they settled down and integrated into society instead. They have "true forms" that are on the cosmic horror side of things, but adopt human-like forms for convenience or preference. Like the dragons, how human they look varies per person.

Often you will see them with tentacles that appear from their back. These can vary in number and appearance—some look like octopus arms with suction cups to grab things, others are smooth and sleek. They can be controlled individually but may sway or move without the person thinking about it, similar to how someone may not notice they're bouncing a leg or fidgeting. Their length and coloring also varies, though shades of dark blue, dark purple, and black are more common.

Other features include sharp canines that are long enough to poke out of the mouth if the person is comfortable like that. They also have horns, though these vary the most in appearance and quantity. They can have up to eight horns that can look like antlers, "demon" horns, goat horns, etc. Since they adopt a human-like form, their hair and skin colors vary just as much, though you may occasionally see someone with a unique shade, such as green or purple.

Their true forms used to be seen as frightening at first, but are now seen as mundane. These range from being misshapen blobs that seem impossible to function, a writhing mass of tentacles, to multiple eyes staring from a moving and shifting void.

Culture

I grabbed a few cards from my Story Engine Lore Deck for this one. I don't have time for a full dive into lore, so I aimed for a couple of bullet points, enough to give me something to work with for a character.

Results:

• Lovers of food or drink
• Notable library of text or documents
• Utopian

These people originally hailed from a shadow or void plane, and the first to migrate to this plane thought it to be a utopia in comparison. They became enthusiastic about food and drink, which was incredibly different from what they consumed in their original realm, and this love has carried through generations in the form of taverns, bakeries, and food-related guilds.

A large library was created by one of the first immigrants, who made it their life's work to study this plane/realm. They worked to compile as many texts and books as they could on a variety of different subjects, from wildlife to rocks. This library is the largest, most comprehensive collection of books when it comes to topic variety. If there's an uncommon or niche subject you're interested in, you'll probably find it in this library. While the founder has passed on, their legacy continues as scholars and enthusiasts continue to grow the collection.

Conclusion

Not bad for a quick 30-minute session. All that's left is a name for the group as a whole, but I can mull that over later. For now, I think I have enough visual details and context to create a character for a solo TTRPG session.

Haha, you thought I was done with worldbuilding entries for my Ballads of Dawn game, huh? (So did I. Oops.) Well, it's Sunday again, and guess who's in need of yet another quick worldbuilding session? Me!! Not that I'm complaining. Once I had the idea, I knew I had to.

Today, I'm creating the Abyssal King.

Utilizing Existing Lore

In my last post, I wrote that the capital of Vilderine, Tarrenburgh, had been attacked by a "boss-level" monster that was defeated. After the defeat, the appearances of monsters decreased. A common villain of such description in webtoons and manga/anime are demon kings. This sounded perfect. However, the people of this world also theorize that the Abyssal Border is where demi-gods that are cursed or punished are sent by the gods. What would make them think that?

The pantheon offered in BoD contains 6 deities, each with a listed domain and who they're a patron of. There is divine magic, which is separate from natural magic, and holy orders that serve their deities. What if the reason that people think the monsters are related to demi-gods is because they resemble demi-gods, but the truth is that they are the other side of the coin? What if the deities represent what is the good and virtuous of their domain, while the creatures of the Abyssal Border are the worst features?

Take Oenar, who's domain is the Light and the Sky. Light brings hope, makes things grow. But anyone who's played Final Fantasy XIV knows that too much light can bring harm. It can blind, burn, alter your perception of time. Songbirds fly in the sky, but so do birds of prey. Where a demi-god from Oenar's domain may appear as an angel with beautiful white wings and divine light, a monster of the domain may appear with hideous feathers, a scouring beam attack, and an increase in perceptive abilities that makes hiding from them difficult.

And if the gods have a pantheon, some semblance of a hierarchy or power structure, then of course, the Abyss would have one as well, and on the throne would be the Abyssal King.

All Hail the King

The "King" is just a title and doesn't reflect a gender. And, while I mentioned the different domains earlier, I think it would be natural to have some crossovers between them, but perhaps stable creatures of more than one domain would be rare. The Abyssal King could be a mix of all of the domains, a rare and extraordinarily powerful being. While Vilderine's monarchy doesn't choose heirs based on birth order, this monarch would, and would be strict about keeping their bloodline as strong as possible.

Oh, and this is a sentient king. This is no mindless monster. In fact, I'm thinking that for the most part, they're fairly humanoid, though still pretty monstrous in size and shape. They're cunning, ruthless, and hungry—they see the bright glory of the world on the other side of the Border, and crave it for themselves.

Maintaining an even balance of six different domains may be hard to do realistically, though, so I rolled 4d6 to determine which of the domains are presenting the strongest in the current Abyssal King. The results are:

• Light and Sky (Blinding, flight, all-seeing)
• Life and Death (Overgrowth, decay, poison)
• Love and War (Lust, wrath, vengeance)
• Knowledge and Wealth (Arrogance, greed, vanity)

And, just to make things saucy, the current king is really a queen. But I wouldn't call her that, she much prefers the other title.

Magic and Magic

Let us assume that the Abyssal Border is similar to a tear in a veil between two planes and let's pull from Final Fantasy XIV again. In the game, there's a "Void" and the bigger or more powerful a Voidsent is, the bigger the hole in between the worlds has to be in order to let it through. I'll apply similar logic to this setting, but while leveraging the power of the deities. They utilize "divine magic" while these residents of the Abyss utilize "anti-divine" magic.

Or at least, that is how the people perceive it. As more is learned about these creatures, people may eventually work out that they are not demi-gods, but a separate thing entirely. But I think what would be a greater twist would be if the Abyss's magic wasn't "anti-divinity" but natural magic, blown out of proportion and then skewed to match the domains they were born in.

The rulebook says that everyone is born with some degree of natural magic, which falls under one of the four major elements, and they usually specialize in one element. Natural magic is hereditary—which would track with what I described earlier for the Abyss—and it is weaker than divine magic. Natural magic is derived from the caster's mana, while divine magic is bequeathed from a deity. Therefore, it makes sense that what people are used to viewing as natural magic would be "weaker". But the creatures of the Abyssal domains would be on par with deities and demi-gods, which is why they are harder to kill and are more dangerous to deal with.

At this point, I'll recognize there's 4 elements and 6 domains, which isn't a 1:1 equivalent. But if you add Light and Darkness as elements, that results in 6! So I'm still covered. :D

The Battle at Tarrenburgh

So, what happened during the battle in the capital city? Well, perhaps it wasn't the Abyssal King that was attempting to take over, but a general or an upper echelon of one of the six domains. I rolled to determine which one it was, based on the following list:

1. Light
2. Darkness
3. Earth
4. Fire
5. Water
6. Air

The result was Darkness, which would likely further push the misassumption that the Abyss is full of doomed and cursed entities that were cast aside by divinity. The attacks from the Abyssal Border are a recent event that started around the time when Vilderine's monarch was a child, around 70-80 years ago, and while the Border was beginning to be studied, the presence of monsters makes doing so difficult. Therefore, misassumptions based on what is seen and defeated are perfectly reasonable.

Since this "general" was a domain master of Darkness ("domain master" may get a specific name later), the equivalent opposing deity would be Oenar, who's domain is Light and Sky. The lore in the book doesn't mention a hierarchy or who's the ruler of them all, but generally it's the deity in charge of light or the sun. I'm not really seeking to be unique in all of this, so we'll deem Oenar the leader of the divinity and probably the one that is considered the "purest" and most powerful.

Since divine magic of this domain of light would be the opposite of the natural magic of darkness as an element, the general and their armies were defeated with the aid of Oenar's holy order. This event further pushes that assumption that the Abyss is just the same kind of magic but cursed, since all the people saw was the purest divine power pushing back twisted "demons".

ASS-U-ME

Assumptions are powerful things. They can lure you into a false sense of security, making you think the world is one way when it may not be the case. So far, here are the facts and assumptions I've come up with regarding the Abyss:

• The denizens are cursed demi-gods punished by the deities (ASSUMPTION)
• The denizens are their own type of entity (FACT)
• Their magic is divine magic, just twisted and cursed (ASSUMPTION)
• Their magic is natural magic, but pushed beyond the boundaries of mortal mana pools' capacities (FACT)
• The powerful being that attacked Tarrenburgh was defeated because divine power was stronger (ASSUMPTION)
• The being was defeated because their element, darkness, was weak to the domain of the holy order that responded in greater strength, which was the domain of light and sky (FACT)

And, unbeknownst to anyone in Vilderine, there are more beings of that same power and one who sits above them all, the Abyssal King.

With all of that, I have even more plot devices I can utilize for my game. Which I will play. At some point. For real.

P.S.: Just to throw another fun idea in at the end: Imagine sexy children of the Abyssal King who may not be all evil...and may be single. :)