This was my contribution to the Dark Age of Sigmar (AoS28) Facebook group's joint city project. It'll give me something else to pootle about with alongside Caliban Fell. 





When Harmid Fellhand led the fight back, it was discovered that Bleeds from the Realm of Life had followed the invaders and vast, tangled growths now choked the entire area. The defenders of the City drove the invaders back and life slowly returned to the new area.

This is part of a continuing strand of worldbuilding blogs for my nascent D&D 5th Edition game. If you're only here for the wargames, modelling and painting, feel free to skip on to the next entry. 

So, but considering money and British history, I have some details roughed out for how my world is going to work on a social level. But the big question remains - what about the dragons? This is really shorthand for how does magic effect the world.


On a metaphyscial level, D&D has always operated on the assumption that the world operates on normal physical laws with magic sort of laid over the top; it's easy to think of it in computer terms as being a back door that allows casters to hack the code of reality and do things that normal users can't. This is made more or less explicit in a little boxout in the 5th Edition PHB. I'm happy to work with this - after all, I want these new players to get a proper D&D experience.

So, how does magic work here? I'll cover this in a few sections.

Dragons

When the Fall came, some of them were left behind; and through some means that we can explore at another juncture this led to some form of interbreeding - probably some sort of cult, it usually is - which results in the dragonborn. There was probably a small number of dragons left behind which makes them rare and interesting. I'll fiddle around the edges of this concept to come up with a reason for wyverns - after all, what is my Wales analogue without a red dragon? - but this gives me a way to have them around but without taking the world too far from our basis.

Halflings and Gnomes

Yeah, I'm going to go with the Jewish Mediaeval model here. Not the purges and the discrimination - although that might produce some good story seeds if I decide to play that card - but by having them as dispersed populations without a homeland. They'll need some sort of service or goods that they can provide, analogous to the moneylending of the middle ages, but I might leave that until I've got a handle on religion. Whatever it is will be cultural rather than race-based as there's nothing in the PHB that jumps out at me as a big enough hook.

Magic Users

Yeah, this is the big one. I'll deal with clerics in another post as that requires me to get to grips with religion which is a bigger question than we have here.

The Wizard player has already mentioned in play the 'Head of [his] Order' so I know there must be more than one order of casters. Normally I could flail around for a while with that but the nice thing about working with D&D is that rules presuppose certain things about every setting. To whit:

• There are three types of arcane Spellcaster: Wizards, Sorcerers and Warlocks. So that's my orders sorted out.
• Magic items can be created - interestingly, in 5th, non-magic users can create certain potions if they are proficient in the apothecary skill. I see no reason why non-spellcasting smiths couldn't make magical weapons or armour - after all, if it's good enough for Mime in the Ring Cycle, it's good enough for me. 
• Teleportation Gates can be made permanent quite simply. This has, I think, a far reaching effect on the game world, unless it is strictly controlled. Thankfully, by skipping forward slightly in my pillaging from history, I can quite easily put in a method of social control for such power - I'll put it under the control of a Guild. I can't take full credit for this idea - after all, it's pretty much the same solution Frank Herbert came up with. 

So, for my world, I can quite comfortably add the following:

The Guild of Journeymen: controls teleportation gates in ever major city. Only Guild casters know the sigil keys for these gates and these are the main trade routes for major merchants. This had a brilliant knock on effect - it leaves the roads and rivers as the only routes affordable by minor merchants and so is ripe for smuggling and wilderness adventures. After all, if most of the King's taxes are collected at the Journeymen's Gate, he has no need to pay for expensive patrols on the roads out and about the place.

There will be three main orders of casters; the Witan (Wizards), with the name stolen from the Old English for 'to know'; the Trowe/Faithbreakers (the first being what they call themselves, as in true to Things with which they have made pacts, and the latter being the literal translation of Warlock); and finally the Scinlaecan (middle english for Sorceress). For this to work practically, we're looking at a Guild-type system again, a closed shop of magic users in which unapproved magic is frowned upon. I imagine some people employed by the Orders as witchfinders, whose job it is to find magic users and bring them 'in from the cold'. I can't imagine these being anything other than figures of fear, sweeping into villages and hauling away talented children. I've always preferred innocuous names for bad guys, so lets call them Gatherers.

Horror

I'm actually incapable of running a game without some horror elements. As I alluded to in the last post, I ran Call of Cthulhu for more years than I can comfortably count on a weekly basis. So, where can I slip in some horror? Well, we'll obviously have some Grendel-influenced trolls and other beasties in the fens and moors, but that's just a case of presentation rather than content. It's not Lovecraftian by any means.

Baked into the rules system of the Warlock is the idea of the pact with an Other - be it a fiend, an Old One or the Fey. But what is all magic was simply accessing the powers of unknowable Things From Before Time? What if, every time magic was used, the fabric of our current reality which keeps them at bay was weakened? And that pretty much gives me a cosmological reason to start introducing Arboleths, Beholders and Ithilids into the milieu. At some point, our Wizard will have to realise that every piffly little Magic Missile he casts brings the destruction of the entire world one step closer, until he realises that he has almost unlimited power but is too afraid to use it... And that's Lovecraftian horror.

That's pretty much it for the moment - the next couple of posts will be miniatures based while I wait for the next game session. By seeing how the characters play I'll gain a bit more cultural information about their races and classes.

As aways, let me know in the comments what you think and I'll nick the best ideas.

In which we continue our worldbuilding for D&D. If this has no interest to you, feel free to skip and move on to the next post which will have some undead action. 

Sticking with the philosophy that we build our world from the ground up it make sense to start by thinking about the thing which is closest to the hearts of all adventurers: cash.

Looking to history, Dark Ages money is a weird thing. There's a fairly strong historical consensus that for around a century money stopped being used for day to day activities as the roman coinage slipped into disuse. This is very interesting but probably not useful for gaming purposes - our heroes want portable cash and it's only in fairly static societies that barter can work.

In the later Anglo Saxon period, we know that Offa in Mercia started minting gold shillings - so there's my Gold Pieces. There were silver pennies, but that leaves me a bit short for coppers. So if I call the silvers farthings (which comes from fourths so doesn't really make sense but I'm going to bet my players don't know that) and I'm left with copper pennies.

This leaves me with platinum and electrum pieces to deal with; I'm going to ignore electrum as they're frankly a bit silly. But what to do with the top of the tree, the platinum piece...? Remember those roman coins that are still floating round up until the 700s? We're going to have some Siliquae floating around in our world.

But where do they come from? I'm glad you asked. The Heptarchy has a lot of little twiddly bits around the edges that only make sense when you remember that a lot of the administrative bits and pieces were left over from the Roman occupation. So do we have any advantages from having a fallen empire in our world? In a world, yes. Why? In a word, dungeons.

Ruins scattered around the landscape gives us some ruins for the adventurers to go and rob; lost treasures, ancient technology, forgotten - and forbidden - lore... Yes, a fallen empire gives us a lot of bang for our buck.

In traditional fantasy settings, Elves and Dwarves tend to be portrayed as elder races. So they were here first - our ersatz Romans. I like the idea of having the Elves being the fallen, imperialist state as it gives them a slightly different flavour to usual. This then casts the dwarves as the Greeks, scholars, philosophers and seekers after knowledge. I like that.

So where does that leave us?

The humans are the original inhabitant of our landmass, conquered several centuries ago by the Elvish empire (which will be a militaristic, slave-based society). They brought with them a few tribes of dwarves as administrators and technicians. The Empire fell, and the forces withdrew. Why did it fall? Dunno yet - I can flesh that out later. Outside invasion is the obvious analogue with actual history, but internal decay and decadence fits quite well with modern elvish tropes so I can play with that later.

We have some remnants of their forces left; the ones who 'went native' - our bardic, Celtic welsh-analogues, based in the kingdoms of the West (which tells me the direction the nearest landmass must be). So culturally, my markers for them are set Romans with Druidic overlays and welsh language. My cultural markers for the Dwarves are now set as Greek but skinned with Norse trappings. That's enough for me as GM to wing anything I need to or to start planning if I get the sense that my players want to engage with broader political stories.

More importantly, I now have a reason and a style for ruins, tombs and even deserted towns to dot the land. The remnants of a once bustling Imperial Colony which has contracted in the last few centuries as the human kingdoms have fought to establish themselves in the power vacuum.

The next update will be based around the human cultures - and weaving in some horror elements. You don't run Call of Cthulhu every week for a decade without it leaving a mark.

So a quick note about how I built my world. The biggest mistake people make is building a world that feels vast. They want the EPIC FANTASY EXPERIENCE. That's fine, but you have to ask yourself - how long are you going to play this game for? How far are the characters really going to go?

I once ran a campaign where I started with just a village and a wood; we then built the world from there as we went along, with each player contributing the history of their people. This kind of co-creation is great, but I was going to be playing this with three people who'd never played an RPG before - hence my choice of D&D 5th Edition. So I needed a framework.

Talent borrows, genius steals, we get it off the back of a lorry, no questions asked.

Realistically, I need a world that has a few kingdoms rubbing up against each other for political intrigue and the risk of war; I want some empty space for monsters and bandits and what have you; I need enough room to have some different races and cultures; and I'd like to have an area for 'noises off' - that is, an external threat that I can use for an epic threat if I need.

The solution is, therefore, this: