- Hedningen
- May 4, 2013
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Enough sideburns to last a lifetime.
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Do general “game settings” count? Because I’m in the process of fleshing out background for a homebrewed skirmish game, and I would love to get ideas to make it suck less.
The Setting
Game is a Mordheim-inspired skirmish game, so obviously, the best place is a city after poo poo Has Gone Down. Because deciding on a single compelling event is hard, I decided that - due to the original purpose of major industrializing cities being a method to kill the original Elf-analog gods - the city itself exists as a fixed point in a number of divergent histories where apocalypses have happened, but it continues to primarily be in its “complete” state unless you take a wrong turn and end up wandering into one of the alternate possibilities. This has created a bit of an industry around looting these alternate versions of the city for material wealth, as well as dangerous overcrowding from refugees from these mixed-up realities and the occasional destabilized district flickering from a different reality.
It’s early Renaissance inspired - some industrialization and mass production, and capital is beginning to come into conflict with labor now that power structures are solidifying.
Species
Trying to avoid using “Race” because I think it’s a bit more accurate. These are a bit rough at the moment, especially in terms of names.
- Aelf-erdu: The long-lived, nature-aligned species that used to terrorize villages and kidnap children. As the other species began building cities, the Aelf-erdu noticed that their former divine protection from their bloodthirsty gods was gone, and retreated to the edges of civilization. Then, they found the corpse of one of their gods beneath a city that was destroyed in a war, ate the bits of essence remaining, and found some shreds of their former glory. So, now they’re city-destroying terrorists hoping to break civilization.
- Versyll: Rat-people. Like actual rats, they’re really social, and thanks to natural dexterity and curiosity, wound up exploited as workers. Then, they figured out that the labor practices of the human factory owners were exploiting them, started organizing, and are essentially highly-social labor unions that are also necessarily militant given the conditions in Adelav.
- Ironbloods: Basically Chaos Dwarfs - industrious, originally made by their gods to build and live, but discovered that said gods made for excellent building material for thaumaturgical weapons. Were driven underground, found demons, ended up enslaving the demons, built a vast underground slave empire that necessarily needed to keep expanding, kinda became demon-y thanks to extended exploitation of demon resources, and are now trying to grab slaves from Adelav now that anti-demon wards are failing.
- Mouldering Mortuary: A long time ago, a necromancer was interested in the mechanics of life and death. She figured out that fungus was a good bridge, and then caused a giant magical explosion that let fungus become sentient and animate corpses. They now tend graveyards and the vast mycelium network beneath them, collect corpses, and violently attack anyone who steals anything from graveyards.
- Gobs: Cities are basically living things, and gobs are their immune system. They are difficult to understand, as they follow a shamanistic religion based around the movement of the city and the flow of crowds.
- Clockworks: Sentient automatons created by random chance that formed a subtle revolution and whose leaders are a massive calculating network hidden in the sewers. Depending on their affiliations with the shifting political arguments of their mechanical leaders, they’re either trying to exterminate organic life or quietly take over the city.
Things I need to work on - avoiding cliches and dangerous cultural parallels, especially with the dwarf analogues: I know they get coded as Semitic frequently enough, so I really need to clearly differentiate them.
Any thoughts on my kinda lovely setting so far?
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May 16, 2019 00:24
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May 21, 2024 01:57
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- Hedningen
- May 4, 2013
-
Enough sideburns to last a lifetime.
|
It's especially important the you avoid semitic implications with your version of dwarves given the parallel of Nazi propaganda to, well, semitic peoples.
It's interesting that you classify this as a sort of renaissance style setting, although the situation of it is very much in tune with the historical renaissance, with the church beginning to lose some of its power politically. Obviously the elves sort of stand in for the church, as they are, albeit in a much diminished capacity.
I guess a large question is, who are the nobles? I am not a historian, but my pop culture knowledge of the renaissance leads me to the conclusion that there is some form of nobility that would be interested in humanist philosophy, the artistic thrust of the time with its politicking and patronage. Also guilds, which neatly sidestep the species element entirely, if you're looking into that.
On a related note, Tolkien's portrayal of dwarves was obviously Semitic in nature, and carried through to a number of fantasy books, notably Terry Pratchett's, but where did the pop culture trope of dwarves being Scottish originate?
Absolutely agreed on these points, and worth developing. As far as the points brought up that I’m navigating through, I have a few thoughts.
To start, the dwarfs started out because I’m a huge fan of Chaos Dwarfs and love those huge-hat wearing beardos, but as I’m writing, I keep moving further from the idea. As much as allegory is possible in designing a game about miniatures, the central idea was to set them as a menace of capital and labor exploitation, with individuals looking to claim any resources and move them into “productive” ends. Changing them from a species to a philosophical background might make it easier: they went to exploit resources beneath the world, became further and further radicalized in ideals due to the conditions and occasional integration of other similar folks seeking resources, and eventually came to the conclusion of “all things are resources, thus all things can be owned and used in acquisition of resources and advancement, and thus all things must be so.”
Reading the above, and comparing to fash ideas and the hypothetical neckbeard who is “just asking questions”, it would be really dumb to use dwarfs because of the history of semitic coding in the genre. Pointing to an established connection to the above city and making it clear that this is not an inherent aspect, but rather something people signed up for and which is really, viscerally wrong can work. At the moment, they’re shelved beyond mechanic testing.
Nobility, at least in the context of this weird city, is handled both by hereditary wealth and the new exploitative capitalist class. A noble title is nothing more than a certain amount of wealth and recognition by peers - to give them a role, I think the philosophical argument aspect of powerful individuals in place of religion is my current direction. In a city where alternate times and historical city-ending events both have to have occurred (Because ”the Ruined City” implies both that it must be an existing city and that it must have experienced ruination), the nobility and governance exist primarily to push their version of history (and thus, reality) onto the populace.
Organization-wise, there’s a few major players that I’ve detailed out.
- The Watch is how the City keeps working. As a bit of a riff on misunderstandings of quantum theory, they keep the city stable by patrolling under the light of special lanterns designed to trace out paths, but refuse to acknowledge that their actions do as much to keep the city as it is as the lanterns. So, you can have districts that have waned into brutal enclaves because of a few bad guards while allowing for others to be heroic, because their job is patrolling and enforcing Law, which isn’t going to stay consistent when historical events and disasters may not be the same all the time.
- Cults are based around worship of anything that isn’t a mainstream religion. Sure, they deal with extraplanar entities and have provable codes of conduct, but so do all (non-elf) religions. Again, the option of benign groups or evil cultists resting entirely with choice, rather than being inherent.
- Purgitators are the remnants of a secret police set up in several (doomed) versions of the City. Essentially a conspiracy to determine a reason behind why these things happen, it’s turned into fanatics following a creed cobbled together from fragmented understanding and endlessly recycled and re-transmitted instructions in code. Think Witch Hunters in the inspiration, only explicitly a conspiracy that exists based on secondhand conspiracies.
- The Hunt is really just because one of my players thought Bloodborne was sick as hell, so it’s kind of badly developed, but are basically your standard apocalyptic mob hoping to figure out the next disaster. Rather than being organized, they pop up randomly and very visibly, and hope to speed along the end with bloodshed.
- Adventurers are what you’d expect: the kind of people who think that violence is acceptable against an ill-defined other so long as they can justify it to themselves and get money for it. Imagine adventuring parties (with obligatory hirelings and henchmen) and you have the idea.
As far as the unique challenges of minis games and worldbuilding: I’m restricted in terms of what exists and what I can sculpt, especially if I ever release it. Bearing in mind what exists commercially - as well as what I can get rights for in any pictures I take - is a major hurdle. The fungal undead have all either been hand-sculpted or done via major conversion work, for example, and I have queries out to numerous companies for permission to use models.
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May 21, 2019 04:02
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May 16, 2019 00:24
