Thunder Road: Divine Instruments

This campaign brought to you by material
from The Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica,
as well as The Explorer's Guide to
Wildemount

In the midst of crisis, I fall back on what I know, and seek to entertain my family with tabletop RPGs.

While Eightfold goes on - a little irregularly, and with a mix of local and remote players - I am running a sister campaign called Thunder Road, set on a different continent of the same world, where the Thunderhead Dominion - a successful union of the martial nobility of the minotaurs, a loxodon (elephant folk) diplomatic corps and a largely human civil service bureaucracy - and the Elysian Federation - a union of twenty-six states, largely controlled by an aristocracy of earth genasi face each other over the buffer zone known as the Free Moblands - the territories of mobs(1) of minotaurs who didn't form up into larger dynasties and alliances and join the Dominion. Since all the players on this one are in lockdown together, sessions are way more regular.

Session Zero began with the PCs on the titular Thunder Road, the trade and diplomatic routes across the Moblands. Each player introduced their character in conversation with the others, and a fourth traveller, an orc named Razak who was basically there to channel my DM questions as part of the character creation process.

The questions I was putting included: "Where did you come from?" "How did you get here?"and "What did you bring with you?" so that each character ended up with a bit of backstory, a philosophy and an heirloom. Then we rolled some dice, had a brief combat and called it a night(2).

The next day, I wrote up the backstories and added some details by running through aspects of the heroic chronicle system from The Explorer's Guide to Wildemount, thus granting the PCs a few extra proficiencies, as well as some rivals and allies from their past. I added a secret fact for each PC that the player doesn't know yet, then passed the full backstory on for the players to comment and provide three goals for their character to pursue.

And then I took the three heirlooms and converted them into Divine Instruments, my homebrew world's version of Exandria's Vestiges of Divergence; magical items that get more powerful as they are used in more and more epic circumstances, and which have their origins in moments of divine conflict.

Here, I faced a bit of a challenge. The barbarian's greataxe(3) was easy; it's an axe, it gets some combative buffs. The bard's lyre was also straightforward. It has a range of elemental spell abilities that work when you play it(4).

And then there was the loxodon's tinker's tools. Now, a set of tools of any kind is not a traditional basis for a magical item, least of all the stuff of legends. I think I came up with something pretty good - basic level, it gives you mending, magical weapon every other day, and you can ritual cast tiny hut, with enhancements in theme as you go up - but as items of great moment and destiny go, it's a bit left field, and I'm not sure how well I'll be able to work in epic tinkering challenges without it seeming forced, even by heroic destiny standards. Moreover, very few divine conflicts feature much in the way of tinkering; blacksmithing, yes, but not much tinkering. Maybe the tools will turn out to have been fashioned from the parts of something bigger at some point; I'm not sure, but it will probably be fun finding out.

(1) I'm not sure why I settled on mob, if it's not in the book, since it usually applies to kangaroos or sheep, but I didn't want the minotaurs to have herds.
(2) My seven year old daughter has decided that she might join us for a D&D game when she's eight, so this was not a daytime activity.
(3) Technically a bronze axe that was swapped for her entirely mundane steel one by the minotaur mystic who led a raid on the caravan, knocked her out in one hit and thought it seemed like a good idea.
(4) Charm was too obvious, and it came through the aasimar's genasi family.

Eightfold: Monstrous People

"Orc is not man. Prick orc, you bleed."

Since James Holloway lately put up my requested episode of Monster Man ('The Things are Also People: Monstrous PCs',) it feels appropriate for this installment of 'Luke's world-building process' to focus on the integration of monstrous races into my early modern setting.

Your typical D&D monstrous humanoid race occupies the role of the barbaric, or even savage, tribal society existing on the fringes between more civilised state-level cultures. When the early states are forming into more sophisticated sociopolitical entities, it becomes more and more unlikely that there would be a tribe of brutal raiders living down the road, without someone sending the actual army that they have now - or the mercenaries that they can afford - to do something pointy and irrevocable about them. So what, in this scenario, are orcs - for example - all about?

I've tied this in with the broader process of world-building. I know that the mortal races were created by the Young Gods, a sprawling pantheon of relatively crap divinities that git gud by pooling their efforts and adopting combined personae. For each race then, I started by defining the gods that actually created them.

Actually, back up a step. I started by dividing them up into cardinal, secondary and tertiary races. Cardinal races - giants, dragons, elves, dwarfs, dragonborn, orcs and tortles - were the early successes, secondary races - including humans, halflings, goblinoids and gnomes - are the up and comers, and tertiary - including lizardfolk, gnolls and kobolds - have never been much cop, at least as social influencers.

Then each race gets a loose set of creator gods, a relationship with those gods, a potted history of the race since the Cataclysm broke the world and split the population across the continents, and a brief demographic overview. For example, those orcs:

The orcs were created by the Dark Lords, an unknown number of unnamed Young Gods with the goal of creating the perfect race, not to rule, but to serve. They are powerful and hardy, able to live where others would die, and made specifically to follow. They were the original horde, sent forth to conquer, and in the early part of the mortal age they gained a dark reputation for savagery, but in the midst of their conflict with the nascent Regime, the orcs turned on their creators and destroyed them. In the ensuing confusion they were pushed back into the barrens and the swamps, but they recovered and returned as a proud and independent people.

The culture of the orcs is tribal and shamanic, with each tribe fostering its own traditions. The one constant is that each tribe has a totem, an icon built up over generations and representing the soul of the tribe. In a similar fashion, individual orcs collect tokens from those that they meet, sewing them to their clothing. The tribes of northern Yethera maintained tribal banners, each chief adding a new panel so that they grew from simple pennants to great tapestries telling the tale of the tribe to those who could understand. Many of these were lost when the tribes were pushed south by the descent of the giants, to the anger and sorrow of the tribes, but some are still passed down in families within the Republic.

Orcs revere their ancestors, instead of gods. Having killed their creators they have never sought to replace them, although in the Republic they pay lip service to the Church. The traditional practices of the tribes touch on druidism or forms of arcane practice, and are suppressed by the church. Some continue the old ways in secret, while others have abandoned their communities for the ways of the Church, usually finding positions as enforcers.

I mention the orcs specifically because having written this, I rewrote the existing orc race profile, swapping out their -2 Intelligence hit for disadvantage on Wisdom saves (is this balanced? I DON'T KNOW! I've literally never used these rules before!) and giving them a survival-based feature as well.

The 'descent of the giants' mentioned here as causing the orcs to migrate into the Republic's territory is actually lifted from the canon write-up for giants, whose culture is in decline from the days when they lived in cloud palaces. On Aiaos, the giants inherited the titanic civilisation of Ostoria, but the cloud cities have degraded, periodically dropping populations of giants which force settled populations to move.

I've also done some work on the humans, because I don't just want them to be the 'default', so their deal is that they are socially and theologically adaptable, with a plasticity of belief that suits the plasticity of divinity. In other words, they are especially good at moulding a group of gods into a unified identity that suits them. They are also the ideas people, and have a destabilising influence on the orderly social structures around them. In addition, they don't have a great civilisation or ancient social order, but sometimes they pretend that they did in order to feel more important among races like the elves. The nearest thing they actually had was an emergent kingdom that went all snake-worship and turned into the Yuan-ti, which most of the humans in the Republic were refugees from anywhere from ten to no generations back.

Eightfold

It's been a while since I posted on this blog, but since I'm designing a new game setting and people seem interested, I thought I might expand a little.

Not incidentally inspired by streaming games including Critical Role, High Rollers and the Oxventure Guild, and thanks to moving to a larger house with space for a proper table, I'm going to have a shot at running a D&D 5e game in my own, homebrewed setting. This setting is the Sacred Republic, a major power in a smallish fantasy world, which I'll talk about as a whole in another post. I kicked off with a few basic notes: That the tech level was roughly at the Renaissance, rather than the pan-mediaevalism of the 'stock' setting; that the Republic was controlled by a powerful church; and that wizards were outlawed.

The Sacred Republic (and neighbours)

These three factors all fed into each other of course. Why is the tech level higher than in most fantasy worlds? Because there isn't as much magic. Why isn't there as much magic? Because the church has outlawed wizardry. That just left the question of why wizardry was outlawed, and so it came to be that there was a period in history when the wizards ran the whole show, before the Church overthrew them. From this, I developed the history and geography of the area, before moving on to the world and a planar system - because you have to have a planar system - and a rough approximation of the balance of trade between the provinces of the Republic, because if Catan teaches us anything it's that you can't call it world-building if you don't know who's buying sheep.

Since the church is important, of course there had to be gods. In this area, matters were greatly complicated by the influence of James Holloway's Patron Deities podcast, which has made me think even more than usual about how gods and religion work. The provinces of the Republic are mostly on a European model, because while that is a bit old hat, it's also what I know and what I can write without falling back on nothin' but stereotypes. Still, I've tried to make a bit more use of the concept, so the PCs' home province is your standard Anglo-German business, but moving out they'll encounter less familiar cultures. The real trick will be making sure that the specifically non-human cultures are actually non-human, rather than just... non-European.

Those non-human cultures?

Well, because I like to challenge myself, the Halflings of Yethera (the name of the continent; the world is called Aiaos,) are originally a travelling culture, so they mustn't be too egregiously cod-Roma.

The orcs and goliaths in this world had a somewhat less advanced culture in the north, before they were pushed out by encroaching giants, and now mostly form an immigrant workforce in the Republic.

The 'beast kingdoms' to the east are where the various animal-like humanoids live. Well, apart from the Tortles, who are another nomadic race and travel in massive, mobile fortresses, driven by subterranean lizards on treadmills.

And to the south we have the Drow, who are a major mercantile and occasionally military power bloc to the south, who control trade in and out of the Great Delta by means of a massive, fuck-off chain stretched across the mouth of the bay. There are some aspects of Constantinople/Istanbul in there of course, but so far I haven't gone into detail because I want to do something unique. I'm aware that I've kind of put the black-skinned elves in what looks like North Africa; in my defence this is actually in the shadow of the crown - the highest point on what is in fact a dome-shaped world - and it thus in shade for about half the day; I just have a limited range of coast shapes in my mind.

Finally, there are the Yuan-ti. Now, they're a particularly touchy case, because Yuan-ti are canonically humans corrupted by dark, sacrificial rites, so that has to be handled with care so you don't end up with a Peter Jackson kind of situation.

And the elves are Euro as fuck, because elves are the definition of racial privilege. Specifically, High Elves are the city builders, having been the rulers of the culture before the culture before this one, while the Wood Elves are the preservers of the wilderness and thus latterly leaning towards eco-terrorism.

There are also dwarfs and gnomes, but I haven't gone into much detail on them yet, and dragonborn in the archipelago of Ladonia, who trade with the coastal province.