Another Valoria, WIP and Stuff of Legends draft 3

(click to embiggen)

Above is the map I've chosen to place Another Valoria on, its use gracefully allowed by Herwin Wielink. Thank you, Herwin :)

The current state of Valoria is such:

• It's populated strictly by humans, although precursor races exist and those are not dwarves, elves or any other sundry race.
• The humans are centered around several locations and the majority of the continent is wilderness. There are no mechanical differences based on where a character originates from.
• Magic is uncommon but viewed with careful acceptance.
• A crystalline element, called Varinium, is relatively plentiful and can be worked into a form that produces thrust. The use of Varinium acts as a scientific catalyst which jump-started advanced locomotion - airships are rare but functional, ships can travel more reliably and hovering vehicles are uncommon but in wide-spread use.
• The cosmology of Another Valoria places the prime material plane in the center of 7 layers of planes. 
• At the top is the Essence layer, from which all is made and where the creator god resides. 
• Below Essence is Light.
• Between Light and the prime material plane, Fire and Air share a layer.
• At the bottom is Void, where things cease to exist.
• Above Void is Darkness.
• Between Darkness and the prime material plane, Earth and Water share a layer.
• It is believed that the further up you ascend, the closer you get to Essence. In the same vein, if you descend into the earth you move closer towards Void.

It's not much, but it's progress.

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I am also working on Stuff of Legends draft 3. Slowly I write my way through character creation. When I have enough to share, I will.

Another Valoria, take 2

I was writing the third draft of Stuff of Legends, to work with the Another Valoria concept (third draft in chronological order. The second one has not been abandoned... I think). I got to writing about races and I noticed something: I couldn't figure out how to account for 2 entire races being completely wiped out - moreso by a war.

I mean, extinguishing a localized people is relatively simple, given you have the correct tools and methods. But an entire, continent-spanning race? I cannot begin to imagine how one such entire race is wiped out, deliberately, by another race, much less how two wipe each other out.

So the question I'm faced with now: what changes to enact in order to fix this lapse in the setting's narrative. Which bits do I compromise on and which do I hold onto?

Point 1: dwarves and elves evoke certain imagery and concepts, whether present as a race or as history.

Having either or both allows me to evoke certain images and concepts in players and GMs, without having to resort to sprawling descriptions and in depth analyses. This is double-edged, as it provides a familiar foundation, but it also takes away from the wonder in the world, as it sets it firmly in the well known.

Point 1 Verdict: they are both useful, but they aren't necessary. Compromise seems safe. Other races in their place?

Point 2: massive war definitely has immense casualty, but it rarely ends with complete genocide.

To push the part about not being able to imagine just how two races manage to completely wipe each other out. It takes an incredible coincidence to have 2 sides lose to the same degree. In the same vein, some force could intervene and tip the odds. Either the casualty is greater or this just doesn't work.

Point 2 Verdict: this makes little to no sense, except being "cool". Definite compromise. Exterior forces attacking? Shifting of how it ends?

Point 3: avoidance of elves and dwarves as PC races helps avoid reliance on the safest tropes.

Back to point 1: even if they aren't actively around, they still affect the world. Their general presence is a safe bet in design, which I suspect is harming the setting as a whole.

Point 3 Verdict: also back to point 1: other races as a compromise?

Point 4: the state of the continent is supposed to be bad. Disarray and massive swaths of land changed after the Event. Where kingdoms and maybe empires had been, now are city-states at most.

Points of Light is the bread and butter of many D&D-esque games. Adventure is found away from civilization and there is less civilization than there is wilderness. This is compounded by the rarity of safe wilderness, due to beasts and monsters. I want the taste of adventure.

Point 4 Verdict: if I want to achieve that, I need any kind of Event. To continue from point 2, it doesn't have to be a war, although those tend to do it.

Conclusions: It looks like compromise is the way to go here, after I give an honest look over at the original concepts. But it's not yet clear how to proceed - do I nix the elves and dwarves completely? Do I keep them but lose the war? Do I drop the war and find some other Event? Perhaps, is the Event still going on?

Going Forward

I don't really want people to see dwarves and elves in the list and say "Ah, of course!" and take some trope or other. While they are fully in the right of doing so, it feels lazy and plain to me. If I had to cobble together something right now, that takes into account all the compromises:

The Event is likely still going on and is an invasion of some sort - extraplanar or from another planet. There are ways and things. If there are elves and/or dwarves, they aren't recent. Theirs are the grand ruins where the greatest treasure lies. Maybe humans are gone too, since humans tend to be boring. Heck, maybe it's a big like Numenera, where the world now is much different than the world of a long time ago.

Heck, I might do just that.

Another Valoria

While in the shower, and shortly before it, I was thinking about Stuff of Legends - the RPG I'm writing. I've hit a rut both in the system itself and in the development of its setting, Valoria. So while in the shower, I thought about what I could do differently, or at least what bothers me so much that I'm stuck, and it hit me that I still have a pretty ordinary fantasy world, except with some palettes switched out for different ones. It took me very little to picture a different Valoria.

Base assumptions

Valoria was thought up with some certain base assumptions: there were elves and dwarves and now there weren't, there was mighty magic and now it's harder to access, there are dragons and they aren't uniformly evil nor good across certain spectrums and finally - there's little actual and true evil anywhere to be seen.

I wanted to get rid of elves and dwarves since they were becoming less interesting for me alive. Their ruins are exploitable, but actual characters are... boring to some degree. Magic has a price, as can be seen in one previous post. Dragons are more of a united race. There are no demons.

Valoria v1

Saying it's the first version is misleading. It went through a bunch of iterations, but it's the first solid version. There are 5 races, after the elves and dwarves had gone, that all stem from humans - warped in one way or another. There are conflicting political superpowers. There are mysterious things to still come to know. But overall, when I write it out like this, doesn't it seem... kitchen-sinky? Not a bad thing to be, but I suddenly find myself boring.

The rut

I've been stuck for ages on other races. A full fledged five! One did this certain type of character well, another did that other type well. In trying to sidestep a trope, I walked right into one. I feel ashamed of myself, in a way. The same goes towards the political superpowers - the same old lady but with different clothes. Their precise creeds, forms of government and cultural quirks do little to make them truly interesting. And then there's the whammy, which hit me hard - what game am I trying to make again? Why do I care so much about political superpowers spanning half a continent? I felt like I lost sight of what I was going for.

Imitation and intentions

An advice that comes up often is to try and avoid building games from scratch, not because it's hard, but because it can be redundant. It follows with trying to see which game best fits the style you're going for and hacking or imitating it to a worthwhile degree.

And so I gave that some thought: I want adventures and adventurers, but I don't want classes. I want combat but I want it to matter. I don't want social interactions to be a heavy system. I don't want spell slots. There are numerous games out there in the fantasy genre and many fall into any number of these wants and don't wants, but I haven't yet run into one which answers everything. Hacking or imitation sounds about right, though.

So what is my game supposed to be about? It's supposed to be about going out on adventures and delving into dungeons, about exploring the wilderness and the unknown, about attaining power. This sounds like D&D, but some of my don't wants stand out. So do I hack or imitate? Remains to be a question.

And what this post is really about

But I went on a really long, winding path to get to my point. This post is about another Valoria, not necessarily Stuff of Legends as much as the setting that I wish to tie the game into.

In this other Valoria, some things are different but share a common base assumption:

• The elves and dwarves did die, just not sequentially and quite recently. All out war brought the continent to its knees and the setting takes place during recovery.
• From 5 races remain 3, and they get a bigger spotlight. Instead of covering bases, I want to make choosing a race an interesting choice. More than giving you general guidelines, I want the process to give you a feel for who your character is just from the racial choice process. I'm playing favorites and nixing races that felt too out of place and redundant.
•  A multitude of disparate factions in favor of a few unified ones. Gone is the empire and other such superpowers. Spared are those who were far from the war. Points of Light all the way.
• The elves and dwarves dying out took with them more than just cultures and history - inherent parts of the world became weakened.
• The Not-Demons can be allowed to be more... unseemly.

These points still fall into many tropes, but out of them I see my vision as more fun to attain. I see a game closer to what I want to do and how I want to portray it, though this setting.

So there's a second Valoria. It isn't the new one, or the better one, just another one.

Valoria RPG - d20-like

So I've decided to take a break from Stuff of Legends (whether it stays diceless or again returns to dice, or both) and find a less confusing RPG creation sanctuary. I tend to go a bit crazy when I don't have a project to think about on demand, and Stuff of Legends has become a bit of a minefield.

So the new project is just Valoria. Despite the mechanical baggage in Stuff of Legends, I still really like the intended setting and plan on using it for this side-project too.

I've chosen to tread familiar lands and concepts and take on creating a d20-like RPG. I say "-like" since I have no intention of every touching any die aside from a d6 here. I don't like other polyhedral dice nearly enough to use them.

There are already things I'm fairly sure I'll be doing: limited amount of levels, magic points instead of daily spell slots, somewhat customizable advancement and a different class paradigm. Nothing particularly distant, but definitely away from d20-based games.

I'll keep posting about it, as things shape up.