Gentlemen, I had an idea..

[skars]

It might be just as effective to create a "living" and "breathing" collaborative campaign by simply tracking bones files like rogue and nethack. If we submit the characters that die in the setting collaboratively created, along with their inventory of items and how they died you can add a lot of depth to the game space pretty quickly.

[Deleted]

I don't think we need a "director" for this one. Between all of us, we can make this grow, and roles may well change over time.

Many have tried something like this already, though, and usually failed because they went too much into the specifics right away. Let's not do that. Let's keep things as simple as possible.

I agree that a game to set the frame for smaller stories, like Starbeard has suggested, would be great idea - but not as a first step.

As a first step, I would indeed suggest that each of you who is interested picks a deity, and a race: Very much like in the old "Populous" video games, each of us starts out as that race's primordial patron deity.

To start, I would like to pick myself to be "Mumakil", an elephant deity to an Easterling-like race of Man. These Eastern tribes live a nomadic lifestyle, and spears are their holy weapons.

- What about the rest of you?


(Elephant Men play a huge role in my home campaign, but I never really got to develop the concept all too much. I if you happened to look into any of my online games, my favorite PC or NPC, next to a human rogue named "Rowell" who is basically "Jimmy the Hand" from the Midkemia novels, is "Suru", an elephant man with a supposedly funny obsession for peanuts. Not sure what this says about my character but --- peanuts it is! )


Once everyone has picked a deity and a race, we can perhaps decide with what sort of continent (or continents, even) we want to move ahead. The idea is that we define basic relations, conventions and conditions between different nations and people before we go into the specifics.

Is this a good idea, so far?


I'm not quoting all of you specifically, but I think there is a general desire to have a project like this, and there is a great deal of amazing ideas in this thread, already, if maybe more focused on the later stages of specific roleplaying rather than on the first steps of worldbuilding. But if we can get this off the ground, I think it could become something truly special!

[Starbeard]

I would like to be Kloop, or more accurately, Klp'lp'lp, an amoeboid deity to a race of flying jellyfish who inhabit the moon. The jellyfish can float back and forth slowly between moon and earth, and are of a size and buoyancy that allows them to carry up to two man-sized creatures with them.

Edit: If it would make mapping easier, this particular moon can be on the very small side and even circle the globe at exactly the same rate as the earth's rotation—meaning that it always hovers over the same spot on the earth.

[Deleted]

Do you think amoena have consonants rather than vowels, SB?
- Like, wouldn't they need teeth and a jaw-like structure to produce them, as opposed to vowels... Thoughts beyond thoughts.

...So, does this concept still live, or did we kill it?

[rossik]

I'm Wukon, the monkey god, a natural trickster.
Thieves, con men and beggars worship me. My weapon and of my followers is a staff, used for combat, climbing, hiking and many other interactions.
I also can shapeshift, so to elude those i want. Some races of shapeshifters and even illusionists sometimes seek my favor.

[Starbeard]

Dec 19, 2018 23:16:46 GMT -6 @rafael said:

Do you think amoena have consonants rather than vowels, SB?
- Like, wouldn't they need teeth and a jaw-like structure to produce them, as opposed to vowels... Thoughts beyond thoughts.

...So, does this concept still live, or did we kill it?

I think so, yes. Or rather, they speak in gurgles, fizzes, squelches and pops, which humans have to approximate with funny lip noises, written down as consonants. But "Kloop" is a common shorthand.

I'm still in! Love the monkey god.

[Deleted]

Hehe, so we are rossik, Starbeard, and myself, so far. Who else is going to jump in?

Finarvyn, ALLFATHER, come on, grace us with your... Divine dimension!


So, we have an Easterling culture, monkeys and elephants being widely enough known in the realms of man that there is a cultist worship surrounding them, and we have flying jellyfish that live on the moon.

How is the relation between the human-like races and those jellyfish? - Are the jellies floating through the sky like clouds? Do humans hunt them? - What?

[smubee]

I'm Smubee, perceived to be the King of Dwarves who live inside a giant mountain. There are about 100 Dwarves that serve me in the mountain, but the dwarves have no idea about the outside world, and that I'm not really the "King of Dwarves".

[Deleted]

I am Crom, god of the Cimmerians. "Crom was their chief, and he lived on a great mountain, whence he sent forth dooms and death. It was useless to call on Crom, because he was a gloomy, savage god, and he hated weaklings. But he gave a man courage at birth, and the will and might to kill his enemies, which, in the Cimmerian's mind, was all any god should be expected to do."

[Starbeard]

Dec 20, 2018 19:22:32 GMT -6 @rafael said:

Hehe, so we are rossik , Starbeard , and myself, so far. Who else is going to jump in?

Finarvyn , ALLFATHER, come on, grace us with your... Divine dimension!


So, we have an Easterling culture, monkeys and elephants being widely enough known in the realms of man that there is a cultist worship surrounding them, and we have flying jellyfish that live on the moon.

How is the relation between the human-like races and those jellyfish? - Are the jellies floating through the sky like clouds? Do humans hunt them? - What?

The jellyfish are known as Sinsartians, since they inhabit the moon Sinsar. Sinsar is always facing the earth, and remains over a single spot, never moving position. However, it is small enough that it appears only as the size of a US dime in the sky. Its colour shifts by the season, from periwinkle, to goldenrod, to pear, to gold.

The Sinsartians use their tentacles to construct hive tunnels and pods within the liquid pools and craters of the moon, but they must float down to earth to breed. The descent takes but four hours, but ascending back to the moon takes four days. Once on the earth, a pod of Sinsartians will wander the earth to find or burrow tunnels streaked with rare minerals. Once located, they will lay their eggs and leave a group of worker drones to care for the batch while the rest return to Sinsar. In 3-6 months the eggs will hatch and the drones will lead the young up to the moon.

How the earth races view the Sinsarites, I'll leave up to the other gods

[Deleted]

The flying jellyfish remind me both of the works of Celia Friedman, as well as of the flying whales from the Black Company series and Final Fantasy IV. - Just throwing this idea in, more later. Very happy to see that you all like this little folly! Let's go and do this!

[Deleted]

...This is pretty much how I would say "my" deity would look like:

This toy has been standing in my bookshelf for about ten years, or so, from back in the day when my D&D campaign had its "Al Quadim", and "Aesheba" phase.

[rossik]

Wukon, the King of the Flowers and Fruit Moutain

[Deleted]

So, is he a monk, a thief, or a barbarian? Myself, I think the elephant-centered religion would probably go into the direction of Supplement-II-style monks and assassins.

[rossik]

a illusionist monk

[Starbeard]

At first I would say that the monk's abilities replicate the sorts of things you'd expect from a Sansartian pretty well, but then we'd have a game where the monk is the new fighter!

I'll make them magical by nature, that also works. Class restrictions are based on sex, of which there are four.

Drones are druids.
Males are illusionists.
Females are magic-users.
Hive Minds are able to switch between cleric, illusionist and magic-user like elves.

Edit: I might also just write them up as monsters instead, since I figure them to be largely an NPC race to be encountered during adventures.

[Deleted]

Let's take this one step further:

This is a super-rare map - of Arecrast, the continent that serves as the setting for the "Sword World RPG", a fairly popular Japanese 1980s D&D clone that also spawned "Record of the Lodoss War", by general consensus the best epic fantasy movie/TV-series ever before "The Lord of the Rings" was made. Why don't we use this map as a base for our continent? - We don't need to keep the names, of course, but maybe the basic geography serves us as a good starting point. (Those names might make sense in Japanese, but in English, they sound a bit funny, I think.) Also, personally, I amused by the "realness" of such an oldschool connection, even if it's such a obscure one.


...Myself, I'm not looking for any specific area on the map, so far; but since my deity is an elephant, and since the people that worship him are supposed to be "Easterlings", maybe a spot in the East might not be all too bad a choice.

- And you guys? Where's your kingdom?

[Starbeard]

Well obviously Sansar exists right above the big crater. It was probably formed out of the earth removed from the crater, even.

[Deleted]

I'd pick the area called "Rex, the Fallen City", then. Also, "Mead Lake" sounds like it's a place in a fantasy world that has been designed just for me.

[rossik]

Between Bykal and Myralgo, that area with forest and mountain