Zakkarii Aarlen

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.