Ancient Lands - Sword & Sorcery with Elves on Dinosaurs

[Yora]

Page 3! Another 1000 views and three more comments in the last 7 weeks. Progress.

The Ancient Sky

That's no moon. It's a gas dwarf!

I never made any secrets about how much I love the worldbuilding of Morrowind. (It’s gameplay is a different matter.) And I never let an opportunity pass by to tell everyone how much I love Star Wars. I also liked the world of the old videogame Albion and the whole old Planetary Romance genre in general. When I wrote down my Project Forest Moon concept paper to spice up the Ancient Lands with more mythic and puply atmosphere, that title was just a name referencing the visual style of Endor in The Return of the Jedi. But that phrase stuck with me until I recently decided to have the Ancient Lands be set on an actual moon. I know a fair bit about astronomy and while I think scientific accuracy is vastly overrated in fantasy worldbuilding, I think no creator likes to create stuff they know to be wrong within the rules of their fictional world. So I sat down to figure out a configuration that is at least somewhat plausible if you’re not getting too specific about the exact numbers involved. Or in other words, I feel pretty confident that planets like this can exist if you just find the right numbers for masses and distances to keep everything in semi-stable balance.

Having an Earth-sized moon orbiting a gas giant (like the Rebel base on Yavin 4 in Star Wars) would have all kinds of “interesting” effects that would make any kind of Earth-like environment on it vastly implausible. And you’d also end up with all kinds of funkiness regarding day length and daily solar eclipses lasting for hours. To keep things much simpler and more familiar, I chose to make the big ball in the sky a gas dwarf instead.

So what is a gas dwarf?

Gas dwarves are the most recently discovered type of planet that exists in other star system, which look very much like gas giants but are much smaller than those. In their center is a solid rocky core like a common terrestial planet which is then surrounded by a massive atmosphere of hydrogen and helium. Planets like Earth or Venus have not enough gravity to hold on to these very light gases in significant quantities, but if you go just a little bigger in size gravity is strong enough to keep these huge balls of gas together. The total mass of gas dwarves is between 1.7 and 4 times the mass of the Earth and it appears that they are one of the most common types of planets in the universe. It’s just a random oddity of the solar system that we ended up not having any of these. Being so much smaller than a gas giant the gravitational effects and its magnetic field would be much smaller than what you have in a behemoth like Jupiter or even Neptune.

I recently got myself Universe Sandbox 2, which I’ve been fascinated about for a very long time, and made a quick simulation of what it might look like if you take Earth and switch the Moon for smallish gas dwarf. I started by taking Neptune and changing its mass to 2 Earth masses. The program then did the recalculation of it’s actual size automatically. As expected, two bodies of such similar size would actually form a binary planet, both orbiting about a point between them instead of one going around the other, with the world if the Ancient Lands not being actually a moon. But it’s close enough. The screenshot at the top of this post is taken directly from the simulation I made with everything being at actual scale, with the gas giant being the same distance away from Earth as the Moon. But it’s a lot bigger and the little black dot next to the bigger blue ball is what the Moon would look like from this perspective. At 8.5 times the radius of the moon the gas dwarf would take up an area in the sky 72 times bigger. Hydrogen clouds would also reflect light much better than moon rocks, so the light of a full moon would likely be hundreds of times brighter than what we get here on Earth. However, human eyes are actually really amazing at automatically adjusting to light levels to give the brain the appearance that everything is normally lit. We did measurements of light levels in greenhouses in school and rooms that seem to be evenly lit actually get several times the amount of light close the sun facing windows than at the opposite side. Sunlight is obviously brighter than the light of a full moon, but human eyes adjust so well that you probably wouldn not have suspected that it is actually 400.000 times brighter. So even with a full moon being 400 times brighter than on Earth, the nights wouldn’t actually look much brighter to the eyes of people.

This is the Earth and the gas dwarf seen side on at actual scale. This shows the actual relative sizes and distances of the two bodies.

Tidal effects would obviously be much more severe as those caused by the Moon. However in practice, the actual rise and fall of the water is influenced much more significantly by the shape of coastlines than the gravitational pull of the moon. While there would be some bays experiencing absolutely astonishing tides, it should not be too dramatic for most coasts to completely change life near the sea. The time between high tide and low tide remains roughly 6 hours since the day is 24 hours in length. The orbital speed of the gas dwarf is marginal compared to the rotation of the forest planet.

Sadly, one thing that Universe Sandbox can not simulate is tidal locking. Tidal locking is when a smaller body slows down its rotation to the point where it matches its orbit around the larger body, causing it to always show the same side to the larger body, while the larger body would remain stationary in the sky of the smaller one. I think this is boring and want my wandering gas moon, which is why I gave it such a low mass to reduce this effect. In reality, the effects that cause tidal locking are working on every smaller body orbiting a larger one. The only question is how long it will take for the rotation to slow down before a true lock is reached. For the Earth and the Sun, tidal locking actually takes longer to reach than the Sun is going to live. One number I’ve found is that the Earth actually had days of only 6 hours when it first formed. So the fate of my world is sealed and it will eventually tidally lock to the gas dwarf. But the gas dwarf has only twice the mass of the forest planet while in comparison the Earth has 80 times the mass of the Moon. So I see it as completely plausible that a after three billion years the forest planet still has a nice 24 hour day and is a very far way from getting locked and the gas giant keeps moving in the sky.

Another interesting number is the length of a month. That is time from one full moon to the next full moon. In this particular configuration of masses and distances that I uses this turned out to be almost exatly 16 days. That would be 4 days from new moon to half moon and from half moon to full moon, and the same back of course. 16 is a very attractive number, being a square of an even number, so I keep that for the days in a month. For the number of months in a year, 24 would also be a very attractive number, being a multiple of 12. If a month where exactly 16.0 days and a year exactly 24.0 months, it would lead to a year of 384 days. Very close to what we think of when we are talking about “a year” as a unit of time. But such a perfect synchronisation would seem vastly implausible to me, so in the tradition of the Japanese aesthetic of wabi-sabi I am setting the length of the year at roughly 381 days, with the occasional leap day now and then. And sometimes a year happens to have only 15 months. Since I am lazy with such things and calendars show up rarely in practice in campaign, I’m not making any names for months or days of the week. It’s simply the first day of the eleventh month. With each month beginning at the new moon.

Another cool subject is solar eclipses. Because with a diameter 8 times larger than the Moon, the gas dwarf has a really easy time completely covering up the sun. In reality the Moon passes between the Earth and the Sun once every month during the new moon. However in most months it will pass actually above or below the sun in the sky since all orbits are not perfectly flat. How often you get solar eclipses depends on the tilt of the orbit, the size of the moon compared to the sun, and the length of a month, but they will be most common during spring and fall. There are 16 opportunities for an eclipse every year and a 50% chance for any place on the planet to be on the sun facing side when it happens, resulting in a total maximum of 8 if the orbits where perfectly flat. I really don’t want to worry about the exact math of this, so I am just arbitrarily setting the number of total eclipses a place experiences in a year at 1 or 2. However, I am pretty sure there is an orbital tilt that would lead to this result. I just don’t want to calculate that number as it will never come up in a game. On Earth a solar eclipse can last up to eight minutes. With the gas giant being eight times wider but it going around the planet at double the speed, this gives us eclipses of up to 30 minutes. So to streamline the numbers for practical use, a total eclipse lasts for 10 to 30 minutes.

So that’s the sky and the resulting calendar in the Ancient Lands. I actually tried to simulate each of the two planets having a small moon of their own, adding Deimos and Phobos to the system. When I ran the simulation, the Earth immediately flung its moon on a course to the sun while the gas dwarf threw its moon straight at Earth, leaving a huge crater lake in Morocco. I am pretty sure it should be possible to have two minor moons in the sky as well, but I am not going to include these into the simulation. They are just there in the sky looking pretty and not having any noticable effect on the planet below.

The Summary

• The main moon in the sky is 8 times the diameter of the Moon and 72 times its area. Two minor moons are moving through the sky in much more complex patterns that have no relevant effects on the planet below.
• The year is about 381 days in length and has 24 months of 16 days each. (Give or take the occasional leap day.)
• Calendars have the month begin in the night of the full moon and specific dates are given as the 1st day of the 11th month of the year for example.
• Total solar eclipses happen once or twice per year in most places and last for 10 to 30 minutes.
• Tides are happening on all coasts, with some bays having tides of several meters. Time between high tide and low tide is still about 6 hours (because of a 24 hour day.)

[Yora]

Calendar
I worked out a proper calendar for the Ancient Lands, based on the model of the planets. The main purpose is to track the phases of the moon and I don't count years, so it's a lunar calendar. For this purpose it's actually much easier to use than a solar calendar.

• A month has 16 days, starting at sunset after the new moon. This makes the night from the 15th to 16th a new moon and the night from the 7th to the 8th a full moon every month.
• A calendar year has 24 months, starting at sunset after the first new moon following the winter solstice, resulting in 384 days.
• A solar year between two winter solstices is 381 days. As a result every 16th year has only 23 months. These years have the winter solstice fall on a new moon at the last day of the year. It surely needs to get a highly symbolic meaning.
• Solar eclipses always happen on 16.04., 16.05., 16.06., 16.07., 16.16., 16.17., 16.18., and 16.19. There is a 50% chance that it is currently daytime in the Ancient Lands during any eclipse. Since the other planet is so much bigger than the sun, eclipses are almost always total and last 10 to 30 minutes (1d3 turns).

Not exactly sure about the details, but eclipses will be times when a lot of portals to the Spiritworld are opening. Wandering around in the dark is very dangerous.

More on Airships

As I said, airships are really cool. I am not 100% commited yet, but it really is an idea I want to explore further.

The main issue with airships is that they let players skip wilderness travel, which is a really major element of Ancient Lands campaigns. This means that they have to be extremely rare and should normally only get into the hands of players very late into a campaign. But I think when a party is at 8th level they will have little trouble with anything they encounter anyway, and by that time players will have spend a lot of campaign time on the trail already. Having an airship makes them feel like the awesome dudes they are and skips encounters that probably aren't going to be that fun for them anymore. So I am still keeping this option open and would really like to try it out if a campaign reaches higher levels.

But I don't want players to use their airship exclusively when they get one. There still should be many reasons why they would go on foot anyway.

One very good reason that came to me today is that navigation to find secret places is mostly by landmarks. And the Ancient Lands are overwhelmingly dense forests. Most trail signs won't be visible from the sky. So an airship can take them to the general area, but if the site does noy tower above the trees they will have to make the last legs on foot.

Additionally, airships have limited carrying capacity and landing might not always possible, so when they take the airship they will have to make the final legs without mounts and pack animals. Which in turn will make the same distance take longer or reduce the amount of equipment they can bring.

Another issue is that it's very difficult to land with an airship undetected. When you are circling above a ruin searching for a landing site or unload all the equipment by rope, everyone in the ruins wil know you are coming. If you wan to approach stealthily, you have to hide the airship really far away.
You can infiltrate a ruin with an airship very sneakily during the night when there is no moonlight, but that requires that you already know exactly where you want to drop the party of. Which means the players will have to have already explored it on foot before.

Then there is the issue of combat. Arrows are of little concern to a wooden hull and I clearly want airships to be lifted by magic and not by baloons, so this takes care of that. But there are a couple of giant flyers roaming the skies and they are much more maneuverable and can cause a lot of damage with their claws and teeth, while fighting back against them only with arrows will be difficult. Since airships are super valuable, it might often be a good idea to not take them to areas where this might become a problem.

I also don't want the airships to move with propellers but by using sails. I think it should be possible to sail against the wind like with a ship, but without water covering the bottom it would probably be a lot more unstable. Even in moderately stormy weather it might be necessary to take down all the sails and find a place to land. Or at the very least descend as far as possible and secure the airship with ropes to the trees.
For ships I have the speed in unfavorable weather being slower than in average or favorable weather. I think with airships I could make travel in unfavorable weather outright impossible. The result is that with bad luck an airship might be completely stuck for days while sea travel would be merely slow and land travel unaffected. This makes airships fast, but unreliable.

One more thing that I am also considering is that airships might require regular maintainance stops. Forcing the party to land and go searching for supplies on foot could be an interesting form of side quests, but I don't know yet how I would do that in practice.

But all in all, letting the players have an airship doesn't mean they never have to ride again.

[Yora]

Factions and Conflict
Early on I used to focus my work on the setting on making it an ideal world and deliberately staying clear of the cliches of Dark Lords, Demonic Invasions, and Post-Apocalypses, and not having players go on adventures because that's what good guys do to help the innocent. I still want all that, but when these intentions become unquestioned rules with time it's not exactly conductive to getting a world that makes a good setting for adventures. A world that is an ideal dream has not much reason to go on life threatening adventures. I noticed this once more when I started working on a sandbox for the next Ancient Lands campaign earlier this month. This is why playtesting is so important. What looks good on paper doesn't necessarily make for good play, even if it's pure fluff and involving no mechanics.

As nice as the world is that I have now, I think it needs more conflict. And not specific plot seeds for war scenarios, but universal conflicts that are woven into the conceptual setup of the setting itself. And going all the way back to the start, the initial idea for a primary conflict was that nature is dangerous and much more powerful than civilization. But protecting your home vilage from predatory animals and bandits is not exactly fantastic material that lends itself to the mystic awe that I want to be the main theme.

So gathering my thoughts on this again, it's really not the animals and the weather that is the main antagonist of yhe mortal people. It's the spirits that are the power behind these forces of nature. It's very easy to fall back into the old pattern of spirits = fey = good. But that's not what spirits in the Ancient Lands were originally meant to be. People make pacts with individual powerful local spirits to protect them in return for sacrifices. The vast majority of spirits sees people as inconsequential or even a nuisance. They don't care about you and often actively don't like you. It's not a world of points of light because the few people are living so far apart. It's because they are trapped in their tiny strongholds of divine protection. People don't stay close to home because there is nowhere to travel to, but because it's to dangerous to get too far away. A sandbox needs a few settlements, fields, and hunting grounds, but it also needs a lot of forbidde lands where "safety is not guaranteed".

And this also makes a good base for the social conflicts betwee the factions. While I have to admit that I find both the Jedi and the Sith a bit bland as factions, their eternal conflict is really cool. It's something I want to give a strong presence in encounters in the wilderness with potential enemie and allies. So I've been thinking about how the four big factions of the setting are approaching the threat of a dangerous and uncaring wilderness.

Druids are the mainstream group of shamans who serve as intermediaries between farming villages and the spirits of the land on which they live and work. (No longer the sorcerer hunters I treated them as previously.) In druid philosophy the current state of the world is the natural way of things and trying to fight nature can lead to no good and will always lead to premature destruction. Instead, the only way to find a life of peace and relative safety is to learn and understand the laws that govern nature and use them to your advantage instead of trying to work against them. In this regard druids are deeply conservative. This life is close to as good as it gets and any troubles are either the result of trying to defy nature or inevitable facts of the ways of the world. Accepting the limits of what mortal peoples can achive in a world in which they are not the masters and focusing on avoiding unnecessary clashes with the wilds and their spirits is the only way to a content life.

The Sakaya are a cult that accepts the dominance of natur and the greater power of spirits and gods, but rejects them as masters over their lives. Sakaya do not worship the spirits and turn for them for guidance and protection and instead draw their strength from relying on the cooperation with other people. Nominally they are a unified society of equals, though in recent decades the warrior companies on the coasts have increasingly reduced ties to the monasteries in the mountains. Sakaya will make bargains with spirits and occasionally agree to paying regular tribute, but they offer no devotions to them. Their strength comes from winthin themselves and their mutual cooperation to overcome the hardships of life. Striving for excelence in one’s skills and sharing resources for the greater good is the best way to support the community and create a peaceful life for oneself.

Wilders are generally small and remote settlements that share the belief with the druids that mortal efforts can not overcome the indomitable forces of the natural world. But they refuse to remain content with lives of hardship and permanent struggle and instead seek solace in an even greater power. Wilder cults worship the primordial gods of the earth and the sea that still rule these vast realms below the surface world as they have done since the beginning of time. Druids regard this as a worship of demons and the calling of powers into the world whose corrupting influence can only lead to disaster and suffering. In the eyes of most people, wilders are little different from sorcerers in the threat they pose to the rest of the world.

Sorcerers are witches who deny that the laws of the natural and spiritual world are unshakeable and refuse to accept that mortals can never be more than they are. They have turned to sorcery as a source of magic that is not bound to the natural laws and has the powers of primordial chaos to reshape reality itself. Sorcerers regard wilders as superstitious cults that have no understanding of the powers that they worship. The primordial gods of the deeps are simply spirits whose powers are open to mortals just as well. Sorcerers are very rare, perhaps numbering only a few hundreds in the whole world. But their attempts to reshape the world around them to their whims makes them an extremely dangerous threat in the eyes of all the other groups. Even sorcerers who seem like kind people and mean no harm to anyone warp and corrupt the world around them and leave behind areas of toxic blight in their wakes. They are all seen as madmen who risk dooming the world forever.

None of the groups are outright good or evil. Sorcerers are always destructive and wilders regularly play with very dangerous forces, but this does not mean that players can simply kill all of them and be done with it. Wilders often live in whole villages and while they may be particularly odd people they do not always directly threaten anyone else. Druids seem predestined to be good guys, but of all the groups they are the least flexible and tollerant. In their eyes the other groups are only making things worse for everyone and the Sakaya are foolishly risking their own survival at best. The monastic Sakaya are probably the ones least interested in confronting others but can be particularly stubborn against cooperating with demands that have them submit to spirits. The warrior Sakaya on the other hand are clear troublemakers, constantly looking for opportunities to improve and display their martial skills. This puts them in conflict with pretty much everyone, regardless of ideology. A sixth major group would be the naga sorcerers, who are very much like mortal sorcerers but regard all of those as inferior ursupers of their races ancient powers. Naga sorcerers never cooperate with mortal sorcerers and only tolerate them as personal thralls who are deliberately kept at a weaker power.

[Yora]

So, do people not like to hear about worlds; is crunch more interesting?

I got some more ideas on handling hit points. Maybe that will get replies.

Damage and Healing

I was never happy with hp working as meat points that determine how many arrows you can have sticking in you and characters recovering from being stabbed by a spear in two or three days without any magic involved.
Instead I always wanted to go with something more like bruises and endurance points. Normal damage does not represent any meaningful injury but rather in how well a shape a character is to continue fighting at full capacity. As long as you still have normal hit points, you are uninjured and unimpeded. Just a little bit beat up.
Once a character is out of hit points he is too battered to effectively defend himself and any further attack that gets through causes actual wounds. The number or wound points a character can take is equal to his Constitution score. If the wound points run out, the character is dead. As long as a character has any injury in the form of wound points, the hit points remain at 0.

Regaining hit points is easy. Resting for one hour recovers a number of hit points determined by rolling the characters hit die plus Constitution bonus or penalty. A fighter with Con 13 recovers 1d8+1 hp, a witch with Con 7 regains 1d4-1 hp. Resting for a full night return characters back to full hp. There are also all kinds of drugs that recover some hit points instantly after drinking them.
Healing wound points is more complicated and slower. Characters recover 1 wound point per day of full rest and no points when they are moving around much or have to work or fight. Healing wound points any faster requires considerably more powerful magic, usually restricted to gods of the land or healing springs.

This system is vastly more generous to characters than regular hit points in D&D. While there is no cure wounds spell, potions are pretty easily available and resting can get characters back to full strength quite quickly. Even if you don't get 8 hours of sleep before being interrupted, the party might already have recovered at that point.
Being wounded sucks a lot and is much harsher than losing hit points. A wounded character is almost out of action until getting a chance to recover for a week or two in a safe village. But it's still better than being dead.

I still like the idea of being permanently crippled frok multiple severe injuries, but I think that's probably too much trouble to bother with. Being stuck at low hp for the rest of the adventure is probably frightening enough for players.

[nrg89]

Wilders are generally small and remote settlements that share the belief with the druids that mortal efforts can not overcome the indomitable forces of the natural world. But they refuse to remain content with lives of hardship and permanent struggle and instead seek solace in an even greater power. Wilder cults worship the primordial gods of the earth and the sea that still rule these vast realms below the surface world as they have done since the beginning of time. Druids regard this as a worship of demons and the calling of powers into the world whose corrupting influence can only lead to disaster and suffering. In the eyes of most people, wilders are little different from sorcerers in the threat they pose to the rest of the world.

Sorcerers are witches who deny that the laws of the natural and spiritual world are unshakeable and refuse to accept that mortals can never be more than they are. They have turned to sorcery as a source of magic that is not bound to the natural laws and has the powers of primordial chaos to reshape reality itself. Sorcerers regard wilders as superstitious cults that have no understanding of the powers that they worship. The primordial gods of the deeps are simply spirits whose powers are open to mortals just as well. Sorcerers are very rare, perhaps numbering only a few hundreds in the whole world. But their attempts to reshape the world around them to their whims makes them an extremely dangerous threat in the eyes of all the other groups. Even sorcerers who seem like kind people and mean no harm to anyone warp and corrupt the world around them and leave behind areas of toxic blight in their wakes. They are all seen as madmen who risk dooming the world forever.

Are these classes still playable? In my experience, even if you tell a player multiple times that "if you play this class, you will face prejudice" they'll still get very annoyed when they discover that prejudices from NPCs limit their choices (you'd think it would be obvious).

[Yora]

They are not classes. More like religions.

My policy is always that players must play characters that work well as part of the party. Wilders should not be much of a problem as long as they don't pubically declare their allegiance to gods of the underworld. But nothing about that demands that they go around doing objectionable stuff to other people.

Sorcerers are more difficult. They don't have to be villainous and could try to use their powers for good, but their corrupting influence would always be a source of problems. I wouldn't allow them for new players to the campaign who are not familiar with the world and the way the group is playing as it's never a good idea to let new players play highly unusual players. But if a longtime player needs a new character and the party is already on friendly terms with some NPC sorcerers, I probably would allow for a sorcerer to join the party.

[Yora]

Giving the kaas more personality

The kaas are one of the six mortal humanoid peoples that live in the Ancient Lands and were one of the very first things I created for the setting. It really started all with these two creature designs:

Human/Ferai Hybrid Form (Primal)


Charr (Guild Wars 2)

From a visual design perspective I think this is a really cool style for the look of a new fantasy race that fits into a Sword & Sorcery setting. But something that I have always been pushing back all these years is to really sit down and take the time to fully develop them into a full and distinct people and culture that will be recognizable to players. With the skeyn that wasn’t much of a problem and even though I came up with the yao and sui very late in the development they came together pretty much by themselves by relying on old archetypes that feel fitting.

But with kaas I mostly knew what I don’t want. I don’t want orcs, vikings, or klingons, or any of the many other iteration of this old stereotype and I also don’t want them to be the big silent guys who glower down on everyone else in mild contempt (that’s more the basis for the yao). Kaas are big and they are strong, and having a lion/bear motif making them at least somewhat more warlike than the other peoples just comes by itself. But I want them to be more “cheerful” and less psychopatic about killing or obsessed with honor. People that clearly are dangerous, but who could still be really fun to be around.

I think this last weekend I really made some big progress again by putting together a list with various existing characters from fiction that I could also really well imagine as kaas characters in the Ancient Lands. The resulting list is this one, which I hope will make some people as enthusiastic about having them in a campaign as I am.

Spoiler: Pictures

Show

Naked Snake (Metal Gear Solid 3)


Cerys (The Witcher 3)


Sylvar (Tales of the Jedi)


Canderous (Knights of the Old Republic)


Goliath (Gargoyles)


Dax (Star Trek: DS9)


Wrex and Eve (Mass Effect)


These two cool dudes (Halo 2)


These entertaining lunatics (Bound by Flame)

If you know only half of them, I think you should agree that these guys should be a blast to have in the party. One specific trait I have decided on for the kaas, which I think makes a great base to build their cultural identity on, is that violence is usually not their first choice of a solution to deal with a problem. But generally it’s their second choice if the first one didn’t work. They also need some more calming elements to balance them, but I think I am definitly on the right track with these guys now.

[2D8HP]

...If you know only half of them...

Sadly of all of them I can only recognize Dax from dimly remembered episodes of DS9.

The rest?

[Yora]

No new actual content up to now, but three ideas I am currently tinkering with:

The Nature of the Beast
Actually a very old idea that fell to the wayside some time back. I am considering to create a whole new class of creatures somewhere between animals and spirits. Since most animals in the Ancient Lands are fictional creatures, making a clear distinction between animals and monsters requires some extra work. What I am planning is to make a clear distinction between ordinary animals and supernatural beasts. Beasts are much more intelligent but in a very nonhumanoid way and don't communicate with people the way other peoples or even spirits do. They are very cunning but their nature is one of beasts, not people. To make the distinction more clear, all beasts have to have some magical powers. Examples would be dragons and manticores, but I am also considering to move most of the really big predators I've created to this group.
One additional idea is that horns, teeth, and similar parts can be taken from beasts that count as treasures that can be used as gifts or bribes and will get characters XP when they are brought back to civilization just like silver and gold.

The Force is strong with this one
It's already a well establish aspect of my worldbuilding for this setting that only heroic characters have character classes and advance in levels. Minor NPCs who are in the background or have ordinary work never get any levels in any classes. The main reason for this was that this makes 1st level PCs already pretty badass characters and frees players from the chore of having to do rat quests and fight goblins for ages before they can actually start doing cool stuff.
But I've recently been going through a lot of Star Wars material to mine for ideas, and it got me to reconsider a concept I had been thinking about some 15 years ago. Which is that all characters who advance in level don't actually just improve their skills with experience, but actually become hugely more resilient by increasing their own supernatural power. Combining these two ideas would have all PCs and powerful NPCs being special people who have an inborn potential to greatly exceed normal mortal abilities. Since this applies to all PCs regardless of class, I think this is actually a really cool way to add more mystical elements to the setting, which have been left somewhat underdeveloped in the past years. A bit like kung fu in wuxia. It's not just about unarmed combat but actually includes a wide range of other magical powers as well.

The Ancients
Even though they are not actually that a major element in a setting called the Ancient Lands, I feel like the term Ancients is actually a much better fit for these beings than giving them an actual name. I could also call them the Old Ones, but that seems too overdone to me, And I've been referring to them with that term for so long in my own notes by now that it just feels right to keep it.
The Ancients are a group of beings similar to spirits but much older and removed from the everyday world of mortals. Over the years of working on the setting I've been changing my opinion multiple times on whether I want to have either demons or aberrations, both side by side, or a blend of the two together. Right now I am favoring of having them simply be demons and completely dropping the idea of slimy tentacle monsters beneath the earth. With the recent revisions of the setting and my focus having moved back to more mythic themes than horror, this seems to be feeling more fitting right now.
I am still not completely sure what the Ancient are and how they behave, but here's a list of elements I am currently favoring.

• Ancients have no physical form or fixed shaped of their own. In the Underworld they are simply completely incorporeal spirits.
• As beings without a body, they are completely unaffected by time.
• Ancients do not usually talk unless for some reason they feel they really have to, and instead rely on simply reading the thoughts of other beings. They can also share their thoughts with other beings nearby but for most mortals it's a completely incomprehensible mess, which can actually be used as a kind of weapon to overwhelm their minds.
• Ancients can only exist in the physical world while being bound to a material body. These are most commonly heaps of inanimate matter that has been highly warped by the corrupting influence of sorcery. When summoned into the material world or somehow slipping into it through other means, this leads to the creation of an ice demon, shadow demon, ash demon, tar demon, or rock demon. The specific shape of any such demon can be pretty much anything and their individual power vary greatly.
  Alternatively they can possess a corpse, resulting in a relatively weak dread warrior or dread beast, or possess a living person, creating an anathema that has full access to all the person's memories and behaves like a merged personality of mortal and demon.
• Ancients do not feed on mortal beings but they gain great insight and understanding of them by consuming their life force. As there are not separate souls that can exist independent of the living body in the Ancient Lands this process only works on creatures that are still alive. Corpses are completely useless to a demon that has already manifested in the physical world.
• Since magical energy is the very same thing as life energy, ancients are actually made up of conscious sorcerous chaos energy. As such their mere presence is corrupting the environment and creatures around them and causing the spread of a Blight. When this effect becomes strong enougn over time, the normal laws of physics are starting to change in usually unpredictable ways resulting in lairs that seem impossible and incomprehensible to mortal minds. Some of the more extreme cases go even beyond what experienced sorcerers can wrap their minds around.
• Most demons are absolutely indifferent to the material world and the existance of mortal creatures and completely ignore them. Even though the number of demons might well be infinite and they exist forever, it is extremely rare that any of them take any interest in the material world, or at the very least in the Ancient Lands. To most people the Ancients are merely old legends of strange spirits of destruction. The exception are the wilders, who consider them to be higher powers than the spirits of the Spiritworld and worship them as surpreme gods. Sometimes the wilder shamans actually get a response.

[Zorku]

I don't really see why the druids need to be that much weaker than the sorcerers. The sorcs have the advantage of doing their thing fairly covertly until they've managed to taint a place. It seems like when sorcery pollutes an area it isn't all that friendly towards a sorcerer anyway, so they would presumably relocate several times throughout their career, tainting a location until the risk outpaced their own power. The really powerful ones might revisit earlier sites that had or hadn't been cleansed, knowing that these had already been picked over by whatever anti-sorcery groups, and knowing that further corrupting the area would take much longer to raise red flags. They're very dynamic in this sort of way, so even with druids and demon hunters of equal or greater power hunting them down, they're difficult to actually catch, and it's so much hassle just to try and purify the tainted land they leave in their wake that there's always far more work for the forces aligned against them. You've never going to stamp that out, and there's so much wild land here that no group can scour it all. The druids waste a ton of time just investigating places sorcerers have already been.

And that sounds way more Jedi-Sith to me.

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Elementals kind of feel like what the spirits use when they're tired of inflicting famine or having beasts devour folks on the outskirts of villages. The humans (not humans, but you know,) are like a lice colony that keeps trying to spread and if they're not going to behave it's time to really show them that they only get to be here as long as we allow them to be here. Leave one out of 20 alive and maybe they'll show us a little more respect the next time around.

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So, other than sorcerous corruption, I'm wondering what keeps the civilized folk out of these dungeons, in a settlement kind of way. Some of them are weird and made for really different sorts of purposes, but it seems like if you've got huts and the fae have forgotten about this castle they built a thousand years ago, then you don't need to live in huts anymore. Any place needs to be cleared out, but that's exactly the sort of thing adventurers do (when they fail to sneak past encounters anyway,) and then you've got this big fortified structure where it's way harder for jungle cats to attack you. Folks would have to be cautious about figuring out if they were upsetting any spirits by hunkering down in those structures, but sorcerers seem to get away with it some of the time, and if a handful of people live in one of these for a year without problems then it seems safe enough to move the other hundred people in and start paying homage to whatever local spirit.

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The force: I kind of don't like the PCs all being supernatural, just in a character development sort of way. They're obviously better than the droves of nameless peasants and merchants, but you can explain a lot of that via just 'not being on the brink of starvation all of the time.' Your Sith and Jedi kind of suck when what makes them special is their midichlorian count, but they're really gripping when some small town nobody dances close to death and finds themselves kicked into the rest of the world, and they realize that they actually have some useful skills when they're given the opportunity to use them, but that they also need to learn a lot of other skills quickly to survive.

The typical city folk (not so much cities in this setting, but the somewhat larger strongholds,) being nobodies can also be explained away in two steps. The first is that children look to differentiate themselves real early on, so if somebody else comes out of the gate looking like a natural at x, a whole lot of kids are going to go ahead and not try all that hard to become amazing at x, since that niche is already taken. Secondly, the relative wealth of cities can be counterproductive if everyone spends their money on bad ideas.

We see this in our own world with most professional sports. In cities we specialize the young kids way too early, so getting into professional teams at the national level is about 200 times more likely for any particular kid if they just went to some poor school where the gym teacher let them do whatever they felt like until they got a little older. There seems to be some critical point where you want to let kids just develop generalist skills before sending them into intense specialist training... yet cities have done it all wrong for a long time now, because how else are we supposed to spend all this money?

I kind of hate the wisdom of poor rural folk narrative at the same time, but your hero stories are really about someone that takes the good from both worlds and combines it to become better than either one.

[Yora]

Elementals kind of feel like what the spirits use when they're tired of inflicting famine or having beasts devour folks on the outskirts of villages. The humans (not humans, but you know,) are like a lice colony that keeps trying to spread and if they're not going to behave it's time to really show them that they only get to be here as long as we allow them to be here. Leave one out of 20 alive and maybe they'll show us a little more respect the next time around.

I am trying to avoid the idea of people versus nature as a pair of opposites (or any pairs of opposites for that matter), but this is kind of what I am having in mind. Elementals are when the land itself starts to lash out against persistent nuisances.

So, other than sorcerous corruption, I'm wondering what keeps the civilized folk out of these dungeons, in a settlement kind of way. Some of them are weird and made for really different sorts of purposes, but it seems like if you've got huts and the fae have forgotten about this castle they built a thousand years ago, then you don't need to live in huts anymore. Any place needs to be cleared out, but that's exactly the sort of thing adventurers do (when they fail to sneak past encounters anyway,) and then you've got this big fortified structure where it's way harder for jungle cats to attack you. Folks would have to be cautious about figuring out if they were upsetting any spirits by hunkering down in those structures, but sorcerers seem to get away with it some of the time, and if a handful of people live in one of these for a year without problems then it seems safe enough to move the other hundred people in and start paying homage to whatever local spirit.

My idea is to have basically two kinds of ruins. The ones that are mystical places of supernatural power and a much larger number of ones that are simply crumbling old walls. The later type make excelent foundations for mortal settlements.

I kind of don't like the PCs all being supernatural, just in a character development sort of way. They're obviously better than the droves of nameless peasants and merchants, but you can explain a lot of that via just 'not being on the brink of starvation all of the time.' Your Sith and Jedi kind of suck when what makes them special is their midichlorian count, but they're really gripping when some small town nobody dances close to death and finds themselves kicked into the rest of the world, and they realize that they actually have some useful skills when they're given the opportunity to use them, but that they also need to learn a lot of other skills quickly to survive.

That's not quite what I meant. My idea is that everyone has the same basic connection to the energies of the world but it only happens rarely that someone really learns to draw on their full potential. In theory heroism can be taught and that's the reason why the most powerful warriors who rise to position of leadership usually are the heirs, proteges, and apprentives of the older leaders. People are not born to greatness but either raised for it or forced into it by circumstances. Gaining power has to be earned and most people simply are not in positions where they get many opportunities to challenge their limits.

[Zorku]

Hey, did you have any system for determining how much treasure gets lost during the trip home? I sort of get that goblins and such will gleefully swipe any light & loot that's left unguarded, and that an upset owlbear might run their claws through a painting, but does something else go on, and is there a clear concept of dropping loot in order to flee from a band of trolls? Presumably this setting doesn't have some noble's retinue (or bandits dressed up to look like such,) camping out on the road insisting that they collect taxes from everyone that wants to get to the other side.