Friday, April 22, 2011

Random half memories of my high school unified fantasy setting

If I'd written a heartbreaker this probably would have been the setting. The first version of it dates to 8-9th grade and the last probably to right after my senior year in HS. While technically almost all my campaigns (including a run at Rolemaster and T&T as well as D&D) used it I doubt 90% of what I wrote ever mattered in game, at least on the broad level.

Anyway, quickies of what I remember:

The world was created by two immortals who created gifts for each other: the earth by the female and the sun and moon by the male. They earth was a flat disc which they both placed inside a sphere with the sun and moon mounted opposite each each other to create the world.

The immortals then had children who were the eight gods. Their children each created their own people. The only names I remember are the Ilbani, children of Turm. Turm was an evil ice goddess modeled a bit on a smiliar character in the Greyfax Grimwald (and all the Circle of Light novels I believe...I only read the first one). The Ilbani were sorta evil elves of the ice lands whose biggest distinguishing feature was they were their own riding animals. While riders had more status than the ridden (being the main divisions of society) in some ways the king's ridden had more status than the lowest rider.

The other races were sea giants, humans, regular elves, dwarves, sea dwarves, and two I don't remember...I think bald, bronze land giants and halflings of some kind.

Over time the children fell to fighting dividing into two groups of four (gender balanced of course) of good and evil gods. Their parents were dismayed by this and left, sealing their children into the sphere of the world until they could behave.

This lead to the traditional series of ages. In the first age the good gods centered themselves in the center of the world around the One Tree (Donaldson with a touch of Tolkien, not Norse myth) and were overrun by evil which destroyed the tree. That war remade the world in terms of geography. Dragons were born of this war of the gods, the four primal dragons rising directly out of the earth itself in the far north, east, south, and west. They were huge beings whose rising left cayons still present at the end of my history.

The second age ended in another similar battle in a pseudo-England (many of my early games were in small islands north of a main continent...imaginative I'm not). What ended the age was the direct confrontation in battle between Turm and the god of the humans. While she appeared to strike him down as he dropped his guard he disappeared and she feld (only writing this do I realize, hello, Star Wars). Over time the story grew that he ascended beyond the world by giving up the battle. I had plans for something really significant philosophically in this but I can't remember most of it.

The third age is coming to an end at the go point of the setting. The gods have not walked the earth in 1000 years since the above battle but now Turm is raising an army in the north. Humans have split into two main faiths, one that still follows their original god (whose cleric still have power) and ascentionists who also have clerics with power.

Looking back I see Eddings, Glorantha, Tolkien, The First and Second Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, Star Wars, Taoism, and Christianity as the main driving ideas in all of it.

1 comment:

  1. Sounds cool to me. No reason to think about it as taken from other stuff... most settings are exactly the same way, and remain popular. You have your own imaginative touches, anyhow, and combined these ideas into something new.

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