Setting by inches- Land of the Dawn.

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R-90-2
Worthy Tortoise
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Setting by inches- Land of the Dawn.

Post by R-90-2 »

Because I want to write up something, but don't have the patience to do it all at once before posting things. So it will be done in segments.

THE LAND OF THE DAWN

There are many worlds ruled by mystic forces, and among those there are places where great forces of good and evil clash in apocalyptic battles that reshape the face of the world, where terrible dark lords unleash their vast powers against free peoples who fight together desperately to hold back the fall of night, where mighty gods wage war against each other through their mortal proxies to prove that they are the greater and gain the allegiance of the masses. Worlds where warriors and wizards and heroes fight mighty struggles and stake the fate of the world on a single throw of the dice.

This is not one of those worlds.

Which is not to say that it's a world bereft of adventure, or heroes for that matter, or that their struggles are somehow lesser or meaningless, because they are quite meaningful, at least, to all involved. There is even a great struggle involved, but not one which can be decided entirely by feats of arms or the arcane. For the while the Land of the Dawn may seem peaceful and even placid, it has been because of the great efforts of a great many over countless generations that have made it so.

Because it is not a world at or even near the brink of armageddon, it is a world of fantasy and magic that has room for both the small stories and the large ones to exists side-by-side, where expeditions into the dark places by daring can exist alongside the day-to-day dramas of the students of the Schola Arcanis, where a dragon can range far and wide to uncover some lost and ancient lore of her own people or simply be asked by some human family to be a matchmaker for their daughter because they trust her wisdom over their own (whether the dragon is actually wise or just too polite to say no is another matter altogether), where dwarves treat facing the terrible creatures of the deep with the same resigned aggravation as labor issues and schedule disputes, and a hundred other things besides.

Origins

As to the question of where it came from, the creation of the world is somewhat shrouded in mystery- even if one were to ask the gods about it, the best you might get out of them is a "Hey, it was like this when we got here, all right?", which is why they tend to meddle in the affairs of some creatures far more than others.But what is known is that the sun did not always shine on the world, which was, for a time, illuminated only by the stars until the world was awakened by the First Dawn, bringing all creatures of those early times out of their great slumber.

That is to say, all the native creatures, anyways, as great and mighty cosmic travelers wound up on this new world and began to establish themselves as gods, of sorts, creating their own peoples and throwing them in the mix just to see how they did. Most of them managed to do well, in fact, but the gods never really intervened against the native creatures of the world, as the gods did not know who created them, why, and whether or not they might still be watching.

And so it was that the peoples of the world were largely left to find their own way in the world, communing and fighting and doing all other things with each other as time and circumstances dictated, but the various peoples would congregate into villages, towns, and even form the beginnings of what might be called nations. But even with all of this, it's a wild, wild world out there, with many places still unexplored, many creatures still undiscovered, and many monsters still unfought, and in general, there are still wonders out there which have not yet been found- plus problems that may be closer to home! the details of the nations are generally up to you all, but this is a setting that's more about the character of the world than the nitty-gritty details.

Major Peoples.

These are the sorts of peoples that dominate much of the thinking and imagination of the continent, plus they tend to be at least somewhat comfortable with each other, and adventurers can be found among all of them. These are all meant to be the sorts of beings that the players are meant to romp around the setting as. All examples are built on +15/-10, as Major characters.

DRAGONS

If you asked the gods where dragons came from, their response would be basically along the lines of: "I 'unno, they were just sorta here when we showed up." Which is one of the reasons that gods tend not to mess with them, as they don't know who made them (and if they might still be watching) or where they came from, or what role they play in the world at large. However, these enormous, reptile-adjacent creatures don't actually seem all that important to the workings of the world on the face of it, as most of them tend to live quiet, comfortable, sleepy existences in the regions which they call their own, and when dragons choose to call a place home, not many are willing to contest that.

While there are quite a few varieties of dragonkind, all of them, if you care to ask, will point to their own beginnings as being from the innocent and tender love of the firstborn dragons, known only as the True Black and the Pure White, creatures who existed at the literal dawn of time. They even all share have a song passed down those days called the Dragonsong, which is a gentle and soothing song in four verses about the earliest days of their people and how they are all brothers and sisters who should never be the undoing of each other. Where the firstborn have disappeared to is unknown even among the dragons, but they seem to have faith that they're still out there somewhere, gently nudging the wheel of fate so that it turns in their favor. And they may have good reason to believe that, as the dragons of today probably don't live too much differently from their distant ancestors: Eating, sleeping, flying, and raising their cherished children in humble caves and dens and other sorts of lairs besides, with no grave and pressing concerns of who's king of where and what countries call themselves these days.

However, all creatures have a tendency to find some way to make a nuisance of themselves, so while most dragons tend not to go too far out of their territories, they often display an intense curiosity which they inflict on any and all passers-by that stray into their lands, pestering them from the moment they arrive to the moment they leave with questions about who they were, where they came from, what their family is like, where they were born, why they are born instead of hatched, etc., with all the enthusiasm of friendly, well-meaning creatures with a skewed perception of time due to their incredible longevity. Some take it further and get it into their noggins to go on adventures, which their dragon-neighbors don't mind and rarely even notice- After all, it's not like a dozen years or so is an especially long time, in their scheme of things.

As far as Joe villager thinks about and notices things, if a dragon is outside your village, there are two possibilities.

A. They're asleep, and probably tuckered out from a long day of being a dragon. Best to just let them have their nap.

B. They want to talk about anything and everything. Be real careful about getting caught up in that quagmire, no matter how much they wag.

But the short of it is that if you ask a villager if they've been terrorized by a dragon recently, they'd probably look at you as though you had been hit on the head. This does mean, of course, that if a dragon is terrorizing a village, something ghastly must've happened to upset the beastie's apple cart and is worth checking out, and sooner rather than later.

If there is such a thing, a typical dragon one might find out and about looks something like this:

Abilities:
Armored +2
Tough +2
Strong +2
Smart or Intuitive +1
Intimidating or Beautiful or Cute! +2
Attack +2
Flight +2 (replace with Life Support +2 for the sea dragons)
Combat Expert +1
Performer (Song) +1 or Charismatic +1

Weaknesses:
Awkward Size (Pretty big, yes.)-3
Quirk (But I have SO MANY QUESTIONS) -2
Stubborn -1
Impulsive -1
Overconfident -1
Code of Conduct (Dragon Hospitality) -1
Complusion (All business is a dragon's business) -1

Attacks:
Claws: Dragons usually have sharp bits. These are some of them.
END: 0 Roll: 3, DX: 5

Breath: Dragons are known to be furnaces for all kinds of nonsense.
Ranged, Area Effect, (May choose one affinity), Armor-piercing, Ammunition (5)
END: 10 Roll: 3, DX: 3

RAWR!: Dragons are not quiet by nature, and they can really crank up the volume when needed.
Ranged, Area Effect, Stunning, No Damage
END: 0 Roll: 3 DX: 3

Defense: 2 Health: 60, END: 40


GIANTS

The gods are about as clueless about the origin of giants as they are about the origins of dragons, as they just happened to show up one day while no one was paying attention, and before anyone knew it they had built strongholds on especially cold and obnoxious pieces of real estate that no one would even consider trying to build so much as a fruit stand on. They key to their appearance might have something to do with the fact that they are the most dedicated explorers of all of the peoples of the world, so it may be just that they had managed to explore their way from one world to another. It is the most likely explanation that anyone has managed to come up with at this point, and the giants themselves aren't really sure about, nor do they really care about how they got here either.

Now, giants, being large, have their own ways about doing things, and the fact that they are very large, strong and live wild and loose tends to make the neighbors nervous, so they eventually decided to have a king more for keeping the neighbors from doing anything drastic or stupid than to actually, you know, be governed. However, giants actually don't mind being told what to do from time to time as long as they have a really strong say in who's doing the telling, and so every time a giant king annoyed too many of the other giants, they would throw him down and put up a new one. After they do this, they tend to replace the king with a new one based on what they agree is the greatest fault of the old one. For example, at one point they agreed that the old king they had overthrown was too meek in the face of bodily danger, so they chose their greatest wrestler from among themselves on the idea that he would have no trouble with coming to combat. And so on, and so forth down the line. Because they tend to throw down and replace kings at their leisure, the easiest way to mark oneself as a tourist is to bow to the king- they will just straight up laugh at you. I'm not even kidding.

Because giants are so notoriously free-living and rowdy, however, their presence tends to make people nervous. Because while dragons can be nuisances or annoyances in very predictable ways, there's no way of knowing what level of sobriety your average giant is going to be at as they blunder their way down the road towards their next adventure, or, at least, their next source of booze. Further complicating things is that giants tend to be rather well-equipped whenever they leave home, meaning you have a race of well-armed, huge, extremely strong people who may or may not have enough sense to realize that "I think you've had enough" is not an insult to them, their ancestors, and their immediate family. You can insult their king all you like, though. That's not a problem.

So as far as Joe Villager is concerned, a giant can be a nerve-wracking experience until one gets a good sense of their blood-alcohol content and how this affects their personality, but it's always a bit of a roll of the dice, and often the best solution for a sufficiently drunk giant is to give up even more booze until he passes out. However, some giants have good cause to drink- their lives tend to be ruled by the cruel whims of Fate just a bit more than other folks.

And never challenge one to a drinking contest. You will never be that tough.

If there is such a thing, a typical adventuring giant looks like this:

Abilities:
Armored +2 (Giant's Mail)
Attack +2
Tough +1
Strong +2
Combat Expert +1
Knowledge (Navigation) +4
Sixth Sense +2
Intimidating +2
Passion (Wrestling [JOTUNMANIA!!!]) +1

Weaknesses:
Awkward Size -2 (Their name means "Big")
Infamous -1
Short tempered -1
Rival (Either some other Giant, but almost certainly someone they've teed off) -2
Obsession (Personal legacy) -1
Unlucky -1
Dependency (Booze and possible supplemental substances) -2

Attacks

Two-Handed something: You have two hands. If they're not both holding a weapon, you're doing it wrong.
Weapon, Effective
END: 0 Roll: 3 DX: 6

Sack o' thowin' stuff: Whether it's iron shot or just really big rocks, these are for tossing at things you don't like.
Ranged, strength-powered, inaccurate
END: 0 Roll: 2 DX: 5

Defense: 2, Health: 50, END: 40.

NEXT: Humans and other smaller, but not lesser, beings.
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