Þar sem frekar lítil hreyfing er á greinum hérna á huga þá datt mér í hug að senda inn greinar sem ég hef verið að skrifa á síðu annarstaðr (þær eru á ensku). Þetta gerði ég til að halda mér við efnið og fá álit frá fólki. Greinarnar (koma inn ein í einu) fjalla um fantasy setting sem ég er að “hanna”.

Right, I decided to take this course (posting stuff) to encourage myself to keep at it (since I have the attention span on a decade deseced goldfish). The explanation out of the way, lets get down to business.

As some of you know, I'm attempting to create not only my own roleplaying system but also a pair of roleplaying settings. One fantasy and one Sci-fi, both are supposed to work under the same d20 system. For now I will only take on the fantasy setting, since the Sci Fi one is a single city in the world we live in.

Flavor
Now the thought I set out with was “Dark and Gritty”, since its both the essence of the system and in touch with real history. I wanted dirty poor illiterate peasants and egocentric nobility. So I sat down and took a look at history (of which I'm an avid fan), choosing the approximate time refrence was easy. The fantasy setting will take place at a time roughly equalent to the 900-1200's. This will give me a few real life events to scam off and reintroduce into the setting, the crusades and religious fevor will rank high amoung those.
Which goes quite well in hand with the next point. I want religious zeal, bigotry and ignorance to reign supreme. There for magic will be rare and dangerous, probably involving deals with demons and other such nefarious acts.


Population
Now that I've fleshed out the basic concept of the world (a dark, gritty, ignorant and poor world) I need peoples to inhabit the monstrosity. Now this being fantasy, I need more than just nations, I need races! Humans are the baseline race in most fantasy worlds and mine will be no different. So from the original D&D races (this is a d20 system) I pick Dwarfs, Elves and Goblinoids to add to the mix. Now considering the pre-existing material I know that Dwarfs and Elves have always been considered elder races (heritage from Tolkien the father of fantasy). I know that I'm going to turn enough things upside down and thus leave these two as “elder” races. Goblinoids on the other hand are infact three speicies under one tag, Bugbears, hobgoblins and Goblins. I have no need for so many races so I'll meld them into one later on. The Goblin Meld will suffer the place of the least developed race, making the barbaric civilizations truely unhuman. Now that the races have been established, and their civilizational ranking its time to shake the whole thing and turn it on its head.

Now I have to pick a culture for the races, the Goblinoid meld is easy, they get the part of the barbaric slavs that populated the north east of europe. But to spice things up I'll add an element of goth's (the germaic tribe, not the self pitting idiots we have today) and celts. Humans will take up the central role of frankish/Saxon/briton nations. Dwarfs I want to fuck with a bit so I turn them into viking scandinavians. Removing them from their tradional mountain halls, and turn them into seafaring raider/traiders. Elfs on the other hand are a bit tricky, traditionally elves are highly magical and far more advanced than other races, since I'm turning magic bad this presents a problem. I even considered dropping them entirely before settling on the moorish niche for them. This in turn will estrange them from the other races. But it gives me a chance for racial wars between humans and Elves (something that rarely takes place in normal fantasy).

Religion and landscape tomorrow.