Fate. Treasure. Dragons.
Welcome to Telrhin. A world setting for dice & paper rolepaying games. Home to my campaigns since 1984.
Content about building worlds, rules, making the soup.
This is a short piece demonstrating the mundane magic of a fantasy world. In this case a temple in a major city, and the kind of things considered impressive but expected in a world of dragons, gods, and magic.
A few thoughts on a recent one-off adventure. It was a tomb in the Lowlands in a place called the Valley of the Drowned Kings.
The adventure was meant to be easy. It was a classic "go explore the dungeon" setup for some friends, two of them new to the whole Dungeons & Dragons thing. It was set in the Lowlands, the main gateway region of the world that's easy to grasp and step into. All standard fantasy fare.
I decided to jump start the story at a campsite a half day from the tomb. They had a map. They had an NPC guide.
Wolves, bears, garden-looting rabbits: real problems for medieval villagers. They also had bandits, plagues, and feudal wars. Add in some griffons, goblins, ghosts, dire wolves, and a few heartless fairies and you wonder how normal people get through a single day in a fantasy world.
How do things work in a world with magic? In games we tend to talk about monsters in the wild, in tombs, in dungeons. What about the villages? These tiny outposts of civilization have to have some way of surviving.
These are some thoughts on how it all can work, making better sense for a world while adding layers of story, and even a few adventure hooks.
It all ended in the mining town of Pitfife near the Copper Lake in the Cairn Hills. Grimly, as expected. The final showdown with Kleg Blacklung, the man who killed their grandfather, came down to the wire. Abas and Kleg took each other down, and though not dead the brothers were bleeding out and the last of the Rahmans standing was a henchwoman named Hissie. Not that Kleg had many men left, and some of them were still on fire: but either the brothers would die there on the floor or at best find themselves chained and battered on their way to execution.
I wrote this as an adventure setup, in the style of a (long) event promo blurb:
The gorge looked a lot nicer when you weren’t running for your life. The sagging rope bridge bounces more than you’d like and you’re not making good time, what with all the loot you’re carrying.
The party's been stuck in the wilderness for months now. Winter-edge-of-nowhere wilderness. It turns out the biggest npc killer is ravines. You'd think wolves, bears, oversized spiders, bloodsucking vines, tentacled freshwater things, or the usual hordes of hostile humanoids. Angry fairies. Carniverous pandas. Nope. Ravines.
Pretty sure we've lost six party members to ravines.
The fantasy genre gets a little dull in a winter wilderness. Most things are hibernating. No farms or towns to explore or draw out the hordes of humanoids or country brigands. You're stuck with dragons. And that's if they're even warm-blooded. I found myself making up reasons why there are kobolds with catapults.
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Diagram of the Three Worlds: Prime (known world), the Embers, and the Listar (Spirit World). The Traum is its own reality, a greater embryo for the inception of the original Chimerums before the Diegesic Struggle and the Antedivisian world.
Image from Blackadder the Second
I just added a culture sidebar for the section on the Lark-Han citystate:
Fat Dragon started with my first stab at a new system for sorcery and spellcasting and then expanded back to the main rules from there.
To be clear, these things kind of happen. And it will never be for sale, these are in-house rules.
Last post mentions the de-elfing process, which led to a revisit of the world origins and the why/whats of the diegesis. The new vision rethinks the chain of events from the Dream to the Agon, which ushered in the Mythic World (Antedivisian) before the Fracture. From there it's the balancing act of the Ehtre: the struggle between the Course of Dreams and the Ascendancy.
