A Dark Fantasy World for 5e

[Shadow_in_the_Mist]

I have a long, abiding love-hate relationship with Ravenloft, specifically the D20 version produced by Swords & Sorcery. The Dark Fantasy setting, the Gothic-tinged world of sinister magics, ancient secrets, terrible monsters and antiheroes who stride with one foot in both words, it's a motif that's long fascinated me.

But... it's not one that Ravenloft really satisfies for me. There are interesting elements there, but the setting as a whole is hindered, in my opinion, by its desperate attempt to cling to a too-narrow vision of what it could be, essentially using D20s to play out Victoriana horror novels and Universal/Hammer Horror films. It's a very human-centric, low magic sort of world, and that really doesn't sell it to me: even though I've only ever played humans, I don't like the idea of a setting where the DM is give official carte blanche to passive-aggressively punish me for taking a nonhuman PC race.

My taste in Dark Fantasy is much more inspired by Castlevania, by Warhammer Fantasy and even Midnight - a D20 setting that is essentially taking D&D back to its Tolkienian roots and asking "What if Sauron won?"

A recent browse of the Ravenloft Gazetteer 1 made me start to think, and I've come to develop an idea seed for a new world. It's small and fragile at the moment, a flickering ember, but I was hoping that other users might be interested in helping me coax it into development.

The core idea, at its heart, is a GrimBright sort of setting. A place of shadows and strife, where Light and Dark have scarred the land with warring and neither Order nor Chaos is good nor evil. But, for all that, it is a place of hope, of promise, where bold souls can learn to bring peace to both forces and to let the world heal, using strength to slay the malevolent and to shepherd the good and make a real change for the better. This is a world where darkness can serve the cause of good, and light the cause of evil. It is those who can walk between who are the world's true hope.

In this world, the nonhuman races are prominent, and humans do not claim superiority by rank of their birth. Gnolls rule an empire in the mysterious east. Dhampirs proliferate, the legacy of the centuries-long reign of cruel vampire-queens over one domain. Orcs - proud and war-like, but honorable, strong and noble in their way - hail from the cold lands to the north, serving as traders, sellswords and reavers with equal ease. Shifters, the weakened remnants of the mighty man-beasts that once slaved for foul witch-kings, bear their tainted blood and live with it, same as their dhampir and tiefling kin. Devas roam the land, old as time and cold as the empty heavens from which they fell. Furtive goblins eke out a living in the shadows, using their witchcraft to ward off fiercer threats as they travel the lands in nomadic caravans. Sly kobolds turn to mastery of the machine, crafting crazed contraptions fueled by madness and magic in equal parts to serve their dreams of empire.

I can't organize my thoughts any better than this, at the moment. My mind's all a'tangle with thoughts of Chaos Champions who bear darkling arms and armor to protect those who suffocate under the choking light of the godly, and grim but noble slayers who seek to put an end to ancient horrors from the world's past.

But, I hope that this opening post has convinced you that I'm sincere about this, because I truly want to make this shine, and I could really use a helping hand or two to buff it out.

[Thunderfist12]

So the races I'm seeing in your concept and my questions/ideas.

Humans: What are they like in your setting? Are they a fading race? Do they live among other races? Do they have their own culture? Where do they live relative to other empires?

Gnolls: How much influence does gnoll culture have? Are they a militaristic nation, like gnolls of other settings, or do they value something different (ie. trading, religion, magic/knowledge)?

Dhampirs: Do they have their own nation? How do they interact with their human cousins? Maybe they worship their vampiric ancestor-queen as a goddess.

Orcs: Are these more like standard orcs, or do they have actual kingdoms? What dangers lie in their region that makes them so resilient? What kinds of gods do they have? Do they hate humans, or is their relationship less hostile? Obviously the examples you gave involve working for gold/silver/other currency, so they must have some kind of society beyond tribal.

Shifters: Perhaps this race can fit in among gnolls or humans, depending how animalistic the individual. If their tribes serve as intermediaries, maybe humans and gnolls aren't hostile.

Tieflings: Mentioned once. What are their origins? What are they like in your setting?

Devas: As angelic beings roaming, perhaps they are a new race, displaced by some great war in the Heavens. They may have chosen the wrong side in that war and fled after their loss. Perhaps the same for tieflings in the Underworld, both driven out by the legions of an ancient and unnamed god.

Goblins: To help you flesh them out: What gods do they have, or do they revere spirits? What are their traditions? Perhaps they are known to be wise and cunning. If so, making a list of goblin adages and proverbs can help reinforce this. Goblins likely live in flat lands (ie. plains, moors, prairies, deserts, and heaths) due to their travel by caravan, as moving a cart through hills, mountains, or dense woodland would be difficult.

Kobolds: Perhaps they have warring city states under the claws of powerful dragon lords along a mountainous region, where they tunnel into the walls of their master's lair, living almost exclusively underground. Or maybe they live in colonies like anthills in the hill country.

[Shadow_in_the_Mist]

So the races I'm seeing in your concept and my questions/ideas.

I'll directly answer your questions as soon as I can, I have to leave right now, but first, I wanted to thank you for taking an interest.

Secondly, if it helps, I'm kind of envisioning this as something of a patchwork world- there are distinct nations here, like in Golarion, but also continents, like Warhammer Fantasy. To keep from going mad, I intend to focus on a single "core section" of the world - some place equivalent to Warhammer's "Old World", or "The Core" in Ravenloft, if you follow me? There will be room for other nations as this progresses, adding new races where appropriate, but this first, comparatively small section of the world should help me focus on the cultures there.

Finally, again just in case it helps, these are also the "base concepts" for this "core nation's" native races.

• Dhampirs: One of the many "times of darkness" for this setting involved a centuries-long reign by vampire aristocrats. Dhampirs, humans with vampiric lineage, are the legacy of those nobles sating their lusts with human underlings.
• Vrylokas: During the "Reign of Blood", some humans tried to magically transform themselves into beings more like their vampiric masters, becoming a race of shunned and hated "living vampires".
• Tieflings: Stealing Bael Turath from the Nentir Vale; descendants of a fallen empire that made a diabolic pact for success, but fell anyway.
• Devas: Angels that forsook the heavens to shepherd humanity in the Dawn Age. Not exactly happy with how everything's gone to **** since then. Can't break the cycle of reincarnation, though.
• Dragonborn: Dragon-like humanoids literally born as embodiments of sin.
• Haglings: The larval form of hags, or the ultimate evolution of sorcerers, depending on who you ask.
• Shifters: One "time of darkness" involved a witch-king who melded man and beast together to create rampaging monsters. When he was killed, his spell unwove... mostly. Shifters are the descendants of those weakened slave-soldiers, incapable of purging the beast from their blood.
• Goblins: Woodsy little people who use ancient traditions of alchemy and witchcraft to ward off bigger threats (aka, humans). Travel the land in nomadic caravans.
• Kobolds: Inventive, arrogant and cocky little dragonlings who use mad magitek "science" to compensate for being so small and puny.
• Orcs: Proud, warlike but honorable people from the cold northern lands. Come to the "main land" as merchants, sellswords and reavers. These aren't technically a "core nation race", but they do visit the "True World" (or whatever we call this section of terrain) frequently enough. Their inspiration is one part the Orcs of Midnight, one part Medieval Rus Tribes.
• Gnolls: Rulers of their own empire in the mysterious eastern lands. Decadent and flamboyant, worshippers of strange gods and practitioners of dark magic. Again, not really a "core" race, but adventurers come from their land to the Old World for novelty, excitement, and plunder, as do traders in search of profitable markets for their exotic goods.

[Zorku]

In fantasy settings I typically see humans serving a particular purpose. They are a race on the rise, and newcomers at that. Maybe they've been building castles for a few centuries.

This contrasts against the elves and dwarves that are something of a remnant of their former glory. They once had vast empires, but they became stagnant and withdrew to smaller enclaves. Sometimes a community will take another shot at the whole growth and expansion thing, but in wars they are mostly defensive, relying on their old talents in a world that is forgetting that they used to exist. Tieflings are similar, but instead of withdrawing into enclaves they are a race that has been broken and scattered, still present in the margins, but without a source of power to fall back on.

*This notion doesn't really account for dragonborn or any of the short races, but it's kind of hard to predict where fantasy settings are going to put those guys anyway, so there's not really going to be universal symbolism there.

So, that upstart human-centric setting explains a lot of what's going on and why. There are dungeons with forgotten artifacts because the empires of old collapsed or ran out of money or generally had to withdraw fast enough that they didn't just pack up all of that stuff and take it with them. There is wealth just waiting for people to come pick it up (if they're willing to fight to get at it,) because everyone is coming out of a bleak period in their history and only just starting to re-explore what's out there, moreso the further away from the big cities you get. Monsters hide in these places because the rulers don't have an unbroken history of legitimate rule so they are still trying to become powerful enough to exert their control and expand their civilized worlds until there's nowhere left to go.

That was medieval Europe, and a number of other places throughout the centuries. When you take humans out of the equation you're usually not talking about Europe's dark ages anymore. Maybe you've got the bronze age and the Roman Empire or the city states that largely came before it, or maybe you're in more of a Renaissance setting, or any number of analogs around the rest of the world... but I get the feeling that this setting doesn't want to be a different era. Castlevania covers a wider timeline than typical D&D, but the more basic material puts us between 1200AD and 1700AD, most likely right about 1500AD, and smack dab in the middle of Western Europe (if it has a middle? It's kind of a weird blobby shape smushed by Russia, but I wanted to use a common turn of phrase.) That's technically getting into Renaissance era, but it's also basically the murky space that typical D&D settings tries to squat on top of. Maybe you want to invert the anachronistic elements that most D&D pretends all existed at the same time?

-

Had to step away from this for awhile, and you put up a new post in the middle of my writing.

The Vryloka and Dhampirs and actual Vampires have their own little elements that make them angsty in different ways, but the themes all overlap quite a bit. Do they basically constitute one 'race' with a couple of little subcultures, or is there a more meaningful distinction between them? Other than when they decide to go adventuring, do they do things that are distinct enough from each other that you would assign them different racial stat bonuses? Dhampirs might be the half elves of this setting either way, but are they something other than annoyed about their undying father figures?

[Shadow_in_the_Mist]

Humans: What are they like in your setting? Are they a fading race? Do they live among other races? Do they have their own culture? Where do they live relative to other empires?

I wouldn't precisely call them a "fading race", but they're definitely a struggling one. Like, the human empires have risen and fallen over countless generations. They've been conquerors and slaves in turn, and the cycle probably won't end any time soon. This has actually affected human cultures considerably - for example, as a rule, humans are quite cosmopolitan; thousands of years of integrating forcibly with other races has actually rubbed off a lot of the rough edges; to the average human, there's nothing any "weirder" about a shifter or tiefling than there would be about an elf or a dwarf in a more conventional D&D setting.

That's not to say there isn't racism, because there is; it's just that "you're not human? Kill it! Grab your torches and pitchforks!" isn't the default reaction you'll get everywhere you go. There are places for xenophobia, but that's often tied into history rather than race - imagine how the Germans left behind in different countries were treated after the Treaty of Versailles at the end of World War 1.

Of course, you've got your obligatory "purity-obsessed theocracy determined to burn all nonhumans from the land" and your kingdom that wants to enslave non-humans as weapons of war and conquest and the like, but they aren't the world rulers and they're definitely not in the right, if you follow me?

Gnolls: How much influence does gnoll culture have? Are they a militaristic nation, like gnolls of other settings, or do they value something different (ie. trading, religion, magic/knowledge)?

On the Known World proper? Mmm... not THAT much direct influence, but subtle influence. At a rough analogue, compare them to the effect China had on the West once the Silk Road was a thing; most people who don't live near the regions where they come in to trade have only heard stories and rumors about them. In their own land, they do have a standing military composed predominantly of undead and daemons under gnollish mage-generals, but their interests are primarily focused on obtaining luxury.

They're something of an empire in decline, in all honesty, sinking under the weight of their own decadence and sloth. They just want to party, and play their games, and that's causing everything to fall apart... although, that's not to say it couldn't be revitalised by strong, fresh blood rising to power. (Aka, unsubtle campaign hook.)

Dhampirs: Do they have their own nation? How do they interact with their human cousins? Maybe they worship their vampiric ancestor-queen as a goddess.

Dhampirs do technically have their own nation; it's what's left of the old vampire empire, which lost most of its territory to other nations after the Night-Queens fell. It's a small, Balkanized nation, more or less impotent on the world stage, and the fall has scattered dhampirs both into the new nations that gobbled up their home and beyond.

Still, their population is thickest in the "old country", to the point that there are whole towns where "dhampir" is the default race. Needless to say, the cuisine of such places tends to make heavy use of blood and rare meat.

Interactions are... well, I kind of want the Night-Queens to have fallen generations ago, long enough that even with their lifespan there are no dhampirs who directly remember the vampire counts; grandchilder or great-grandchilder whose memories are fogged by age. But, at the same time, maybe that's not fair.

Basically, there's suspicion, but it's not "grab your torch and pitchforks on sight", you know? Especially since there are parts of the world where they outnumber humans.

Orcs: Are these more like standard orcs, or do they have actual kingdoms? What dangers lie in their region that makes them so resilient? What kinds of gods do they have? Do they hate humans, or is their relationship less hostile? Obviously the examples you gave involve working for gold/silver/other currency, so they must have some kind of society beyond tribal.

The orcs of this world are inspired by a mixture of the Orcs from the Midnight Campaign Setting and my own fragmentary knowledge of the Rus Viking tribes.

In a nutshell, the orcs of this setting come from what is "Russia", whereas this core region is "Europe". In their cold and monster-infested homeland, they have their own warring kingdoms and city-states; there's no one "great empire" uniting all orcs, but it's a stable civilization, with merchants, currency printing, mining, etc.

They do glorify war, but it's in the sense of admiring warriors on a cultural level, like our own traditional respect for knights, heroes, etc.

They're pretty much neutral to humans as a whole. Some kingdoms and nations have different opinions, but neither race is inclined to kill the other on sight. Fighting can be fun, trading can be profitable, so all in all, it's probably best to say they think about them kind of fondly.

As for gods... I'm not a religious guy by nature, so I always have problems with that, but they definitely have their own distinct pantheon of gods governing what's important to them.

Shifters: Perhaps this race can fit in among gnolls or humans, depending how animalistic the individual. If their tribes serve as intermediaries, maybe humans and gnolls aren't hostile.

That's a possibility I hadn't considered. Maybe.

Tieflings: Mentioned once. What are their origins? What are they like in your setting?

I touched upon this in my last post: basically, my plan is to steal the 4e fluff for them. One of the oldest fallen empires of humanity made a pledge with daemonic powers for prosperity, inflicting a curse upon all who bore that empire's blood. Even the humble peasants found themselves warped into more fiendish forms as a result of the spiritual pollution from that pledge. With armies of fiendish power, the empire of "Bael Turath" (or whatever I name it in its place) spread across the Known World and beyond - in the most distant lands, one can find ruins raised by the tieflings of Bael Turath.

And then, all of a sudden, seemingly overnight, it ended. The reason behind "The Fall" is supposed to be one of the setting's great mysteries, but result was undeniable; a sudden mighty catastrophe devastated the tiefling empire, felling its leaders and plunging it into ruin. Some say the empire's mightiest leaders and royal families all simply vanished in the night, paving the way for widespread slave uprisings.

But whatever happened, it happened thousands of years ago. Tieflings are one of the oldest "fallen-men" races in this world, more than long enough to shake off any particular stigma. There's old tales, of course, and small, mad families or cults clinging to hopes of reviving Bael Turath, but tieflings aren't seen as inherently evil.

Indeed, their affinity for magic has actually given them a place; tiefling warlocks and wizards are useful in places that accept the use of sorcery.

Devas: As angelic beings roaming, perhaps they are a new race, displaced by some great war in the Heavens. They may have chosen the wrong side in that war and fled after their loss. Perhaps the same for tieflings in the Underworld, both driven out by the legions of an ancient and unnamed god.

Actually, I was thinking that devas represent one of the oldest races in this setting. They owe their origins to humanity's Golden Age, or the Dawn Age, when they chose to forsake their place in the heavens and serving the gods to instead shepherd over mortals, aging, dying and being reborn time and time again to serve as sages of eternal knowledge that would elevate mortals to the greatest heights.

But... that didn't work out so well. Something happened, something to end the Dawn Age, and the devas found themselves bereft of a purpose. The empire they had helped to raise had fallen, humanity had turned its back on them; what was their purpose now?

Devas are the eternal outcasts, the wanderers who will never find a home, the remnants of an age long dead and desperate to fill the void in the face of a lonely eternity.

Goblins: To help you flesh them out: What gods do they have, or do they revere spirits? What are their traditions? Perhaps they are known to be wise and cunning. If so, making a list of goblin adages and proverbs can help reinforce this. Goblins likely live in flat lands (ie. plains, moors, prairies, deserts, and heaths) due to their travel by caravan, as moving a cart through hills, mountains, or dense woodland would be difficult.

Such good questions! I have no particularly good answers for you in the future, but this is some very thought-provoking stuff.

Kobolds: Perhaps they have warring city states under the claws of powerful dragon lords along a mountainous region, where they tunnel into the walls of their master's lair, living almost exclusively underground. Or maybe they live in colonies like anthills in the hill country.

Hmm... I'm actually not sure if "true" dragons should exist in this setting.

But, regardless; my vision of kobolds is that they are something of an underpower; war-like tribal factions that most of the other nations look over or idly exploit, never realizing their true potential, for most of what they do is confined to the Underdark, and the strange, alien races that war for power in its depths.

Make sense?

[Shadow_in_the_Mist]

In fantasy settings I typically see humans serving a particular purpose. They are a race on the rise, and newcomers at that. Maybe they've been building castles for a few centuries.

This contrasts against the elves and dwarves that are something of a remnant of their former glory. They once had vast empires, but they became stagnant and withdrew to smaller enclaves. Sometimes a community will take another shot at the whole growth and expansion thing, but in wars they are mostly defensive, relying on their old talents in a world that is forgetting that they used to exist. Tieflings are similar, but instead of withdrawing into enclaves they are a race that has been broken and scattered, still present in the margins, but without a source of power to fall back on.

*This notion doesn't really account for dragonborn or any of the short races, but it's kind of hard to predict where fantasy settings are going to put those guys anyway, so there's not really going to be universal symbolism there.

So, that upstart human-centric setting explains a lot of what's going on and why. There are dungeons with forgotten artifacts because the empires of old collapsed or ran out of money or generally had to withdraw fast enough that they didn't just pack up all of that stuff and take it with them. There is wealth just waiting for people to come pick it up (if they're willing to fight to get at it,) because everyone is coming out of a bleak period in their history and only just starting to re-explore what's out there, moreso the further away from the big cities you get. Monsters hide in these places because the rulers don't have an unbroken history of legitimate rule so they are still trying to become powerful enough to exert their control and expand their civilized worlds until there's nowhere left to go.

That was medieval Europe, and a number of other places throughout the centuries. When you take humans out of the equation you're usually not talking about Europe's dark ages anymore. Maybe you've got the bronze age and the Roman Empire or the city states that largely came before it, or maybe you're in more of a Renaissance setting, or any number of analogs around the rest of the world... but I get the feeling that this setting doesn't want to be a different era. Castlevania covers a wider timeline than typical D&D, but the more basic material puts us between 1200AD and 1700AD, most likely right about 1500AD, and smack dab in the middle of Western Europe (if it has a middle? It's kind of a weird blobby shape smushed by Russia, but I wanted to use a common turn of phrase.) That's technically getting into Renaissance era, but it's also basically the murky space that typical D&D settings tries to squat on top of. Maybe you want to invert the anachronistic elements that most D&D pretends all existed at the same time?

-

Had to step away from this for awhile, and you put up a new post in the middle of my writing.

The Vryloka and Dhampirs and actual Vampires have their own little elements that make them angsty in different ways, but the themes all overlap quite a bit. Do they basically constitute one 'race' with a couple of little subcultures, or is there a more meaningful distinction between them? Other than when they decide to go adventuring, do they do things that are distinct enough from each other that you would assign them different racial stat bonuses? Dhampirs might be the half elves of this setting either way, but are they something other than annoyed about their undying father figures?

I don't want to feel like I'm ignoring you, but I have to say, with the first couple of paragraphs, I really don't get what you're telling me this for. I'm sorry, I just can't make heads or tails for it.

I'm actually contemplating whether or not I want to keep vrylokas in the setting at all. What I'm currently leaning towards is that these are the major differences between the vrylokas and the dhampirs:
1): The vrylokas are more "stable" than dhampirs; their racial abilities are much more consistent (single race stats), whilst dhampirs are more chaotic and based on which random element of vampirism actually dominates (core race with subrace stats). This reflects that vrylokas magically changed themselves into what they are, whilst dhampirs are the chaotic result of tainted breeding between humans and vampires.
2): One of the reflections of that is that dhampirs suffer from sunlight aversion (essentially sunlight allergy plus a penalty to exhaustion gain whilst in sunlight), whilst vrylokas function perfectly well in day and night.
3): Vrylokas have a much more pronounced case of vampire-worship than dhampirs do. Vrylokas, or at least their ancestors, turned themselves into creatures of blood and darkness to gain the powers of vampires for themselves; dhampirs had it forced upon them by birth. Vrylokas are far more likely to worship the Night-Queens as deities or seek to rebuild the old "Empire of Blood", whilst dhampirs generally want nothing to do with that part of their past.
4): In a nutshell, vrylokas are the "gleefully evil" vampire option, whilst dhampirs are the "reluctant monster/rejects the darkness" option.

Speaking of gods... I'm having trouble figuring out what sort of approach I should take to the deities of this world. Like... there's clearly different pantheons - but, do I go the Faerun route and have each pantheon's gods be unique, or the Dragonlance route where there's only one pantheon with its gods wearing different names in different cultures, or mix the two, so each pantheon has its own unique gods, but there are some gods that are worshipped in multiple pantheons under multiple identities?

...Religion really isn't my strong suit.

[Zorku]

Humans

There are places for xenophobia, but that's often tied into history rather than race - imagine how the Germans left behind in different countries were treated after the Treaty of Versailles at the end of World War 1.

I don't see how that's different from the racism in other settings. Keeping a lot of history in your head can be hard, so I'm sure a lot of people fail to convey that in their games, but up and down the literature that inspires these settings you've got elves and dwarves that have very specific grievances against each other, in a "violated treaties" kind of way. When those grudges are very old the actual history is lost to time and the two races remember their very self centered narratives about the events.

Tieflings are a little bit different (except maybe in the Nentir Vale?) as they're hated by humans in more of an overzealous church kind of way. This gets a lot murkier the more you switch around what kinds of gods people worship until there is no prominent church and the humans have never had any part in the great wars against the hells, but humans still get screwed over by succubi, incubi, and cambions often enough to be wary of anything that looks like them.

D&D has been moving away from wargaming since it began, but the kinds of wargaming baggage people brought with them into the game apparently did a lot of the heavy lifting for how these races treated each other.

Of course, you've got your obligatory "purity-obsessed theocracy determined to burn all nonhumans from the land" and your kingdom that wants to enslave non-humans as weapons of war and conquest and the like, but they aren't the world rulers and they're definitely not in the right, if you follow me?

That sounds a lot closer to being a bigot without any power, and there's not really much reason to intervene if some old person just yells racial slurs at their television.

In the kind of halfway mark where maybe you've got some necromancer type performing foul experiments, it makes sense for adventurers to show up and kill that jerk before looting the place and burning the remains to the ground, but it also means that this is just some isolated jerk that was pretty much acting on their own, and thus levels 1-5 fare. You can probably bump it up to a cult level phenomenon to get a few more levels out of it, but this means the party grows out of dealing with that kind of thing fairly early. Are these the kinds of stories you want to gloss over real quick and jump into without establishing who many of the players are? Just Dogs of the Vineyard rolling into town and putting a bullet into the head of the bad guy and calling it case closed? How much can someone really do this without a country's resources to back the project?

Or are those folks less quest material and more scenery, like grandpa in his recliner clutching on to his racist notions until they turn to dust and history sweeps that under a rug?

Gnolls

On the Known World proper? Mmm... not THAT much direct influence, but subtle influence. At a rough analogue, compare them to the effect China had on the West once the Silk Road was a thing; most people who don't live near the regions where they come in to trade have only heard stories and rumors about them. In their own land, they do have a standing military composed predominantly of undead and daemons under gnollish mage-generals, but their interests are primarily focused on obtaining luxury.

A little part of me is really eager to do a lot of "it takes one white man to solve the problems that are threatening to end these yellow folk's way of life" stories in reverse. I could just give that to a PC that was eager to set up trade agreements with people that weren't that interested in setting up long distance trade...
But "solving" European problems with gnoll culture would probably just become a purely humorous thing quickly...

Dhampirs

Dhampirs do technically have their own nation; it's what's left of the old vampire empire, which lost most of its territory to other nations after the Night-Queens fell. It's a small, Balkanized nation, more or less impotent on the world stage, and the fall has scattered dhampirs both into the new nations that gobbled up their home and beyond.

Still, their population is thickest in the "old country", to the point that there are whole towns where "dhampir" is the default race. Needless to say, the cuisine of such places tends to make heavy use of blood and rare meat.

Interactions are... well, I kind of want the Night-Queens to have fallen generations ago, long enough that even with their lifespan there are no dhampirs who directly remember the vampire counts; grandchilder or great-grandchilder whose memories are fogged by age. But, at the same time, maybe that's not fair.

Basically, there's suspicion, but it's not "grab your torch and pitchforks on sight", you know? Especially since there are parts of the world where they outnumber humans.

So culturally they're just humans with slightly odd tastes, and kind of a watered down counter culture to the watered down religious purists? Are they opposed to anybody else, do they have any other goals as a people? Or do they just... react to what happens to them?

Orcs

The orcs of this world are inspired by a mixture of the Orcs from the Midnight Campaign Setting and my own fragmentary knowledge of the Rus Viking tribes.

In a nutshell, the orcs of this setting come from what is "Russia", whereas this core region is "Europe". In their cold and monster-infested homeland, they have their own warring kingdoms and city-states; there's no one "great empire" uniting all orcs, but it's a stable civilization, with merchants, currency printing, mining, etc.

They do glorify war, but it's in the sense of admiring warriors on a cultural level, like our own traditional respect for knights, heroes, etc.

They're pretty much neutral to humans as a whole. Some kingdoms and nations have different opinions, but neither race is inclined to kill the other on sight. Fighting can be fun, trading can be profitable, so all in all, it's probably best to say they think about them kind of fondly.

As for gods... I'm not a religious guy by nature, so I always have problems with that, but they definitely have their own distinct pantheon of gods governing what's important to them.

Do they have the same kind of horse rider culture that's so common in in the Soviet Blok landscape, or is there something else going on there? I don't tend to picture orcs on horses, but I also don't picture them doing much of anything besides raiding. Sometimes they get some wrapped up in some other cultural concept, but settings always seem to gravitate back towards pure reaver/conquest activity.

Tieflings

I touched upon this in my last post: basically, my plan is to steal the 4e fluff for them. One of the oldest fallen empires of humanity made a pledge with daemonic powers for prosperity, inflicting a curse upon all who bore that empire's blood. Even the humble peasants found themselves warped into more fiendish forms as a result of the spiritual pollution from that pledge. With armies of fiendish power, the empire of "Bael Turath" (or whatever I name it in its place) spread across the Known World and beyond - in the most distant lands, one can find ruins raised by the tieflings of Bael Turath.

So if the empire was everywhere and everyone with the empire's blood became like that...
I'm guessing the slaves and some number of vassal states don't technically count for that purpose? Or was the collapse just so great that some fringe group of humans was able to migrate into the ruins and have enough of a population boom to become Dhampir stock during the blood queens age? Or do we have a lot of tiefling traits among the Dhampirs?

Devas

Actually, I was thinking that devas represent one of the oldest races in this setting. They owe their origins to humanity's Golden Age, or the Dawn Age, when they chose to forsake their place in the heavens and serving the gods to instead shepherd over mortals, aging, dying and being reborn time and time again to serve as sages of eternal knowledge that would elevate mortals to the greatest heights.

But... that didn't work out so well. Something happened, something to end the Dawn Age, and the devas found themselves bereft of a purpose. The empire they had helped to raise had fallen, humanity had turned its back on them; what was their purpose now?

Devas are the eternal outcasts, the wanderers who will never find a home, the remnants of an age long dead and desperate to fill the void in the face of a lonely eternity.

That works for their origin, but like, what are they up to now? A couple thousand years of reincarnation cycles without coming up with any potential answer the that purpose question seems like it would put an end to the wandering, at least until they saw some weak promise of coming up with an answer that would get them up and going again.

I don't want to feel like I'm ignoring you, but I have to say, with the first couple of paragraphs, I really don't get what you're telling me this for. I'm sorry, I just can't make heads or tails for it.

It's kind of a slow way to get at why the human kingdoms are growing, but there's not already some Elf-Rome empire ruling over the land, why the dwarves look to be about a generation or two away from a battle of Culloden followed by integration into the growing human empires, and why there's quite so much untamed wilderness around. All the crappy problems that adventurers typically solve before they get involved in some bigger picture story are things that the local authority or the nation's army (between wars,) keep tamped down... if you've got a strong government. Fantasy settings are all about weak governments that can't keep up with that stuff, otherwise the adventuring would be 9/10ths brown nosing nobles while you try to climb the ranks inside of some structured organization. You'll rarely ever see one of these settings where the PCs are involved with anything more tight knit than the Harpers, because you're looking at a setting where there's not anything much more tight knit than that.

If you go Castlevania, then the government is getting powerful (ex: Every friggin thing 'the church' does in those games.) There's not wilderness full of lost ruins where you go to get magical artifacts. Instead, the farmland has spread everywhere it can, the forests are cut back and kept thin by (trophy) hunters, the nobles that manage the land have mostly reduced that process to busy work, and people have all of the magical items and relics than anyone would be interested in having. Instead of killing a bunch of monsters to get money and magical items you fight other people to do that, and there's no room on the map for hordes of monsters so they have to be called out of portals to the hells. You never clear out a beast's den, you merely kill beasts that some beast master put in your way.

By virtue of my describing it, we know that there's some fantasy material like that, but if the world is going to make sense then you have to understand how it got to this point.

You've set up that the church is too weak to exert control, that the abusers that wish to have armies of the damned do their bidding are rinky dink nobodies, and that the actual people who wield power are... just kind of chill about it man. Hey, let's throw another party.. That doesn't actually sound very much like Castlevania to me. That sounds like the early Dark Ages if Rome never collapsed and was just always kind of small and weak but somehow got themselves put in charge anyway... which doesn't make a lot of sense.

So do adventuring parties get their arsenal of relicts out of long forgotten dungeons, buy them at the shop just like armor, or wrestle them out of the clutches of nobles? Is somebody actually in charge, and if they are, why aren't they doing anything? Do your adventurers that go off on their own gain power much faster than if they had remained in the system or do they teeter on the edge of bankruptcy in a world that doesn't really have a strong need for them?

The early campaigns in D&D all defined settings where the answers to those questions were obvious, and were a big part of why anybody accepted the premise. Right now I can't really tell what kinds of things adventurers would do in your world (besides toppling the equivalent of lone necromancers because they feel like doing so,) and I don't know why they're justified in taking up that kind of lifestyle.

I'm actually contemplating whether or not I want to keep vrylokas in the setting at all.

Merge them with the Tieflings. It's an egalitarian setting anyone that's involved in that nobility cabal doesn't have to be tiefling, but they see this is a means to bring back Bael Turath, so it's Tieflings and people that think it would be sweet to be at the top of a tiefling empire. You're in a setting where old grudges have faded, so the tieflings don't feel a need to bend and twist away from those stereotypes. Seems like a perfect time for them to take up a fresh interest in organizational pacts with demonic forces.

Speaking of gods... I'm having trouble figuring out what sort of approach I should take to the deities of this world.

Well, if you're going the strong governmental forces route, ratchet up the church power. It doesn't have to be "THE Catholic church," but it seems like you would have a church like that with power similar to a King's. If you don't want the unified stance that leads to ethnic cleaning and such just don't give that religion a hierarchical structure. That trinity business is pretty strong symbolism, so split it into 3 factions. Having branches that were more clearly focused on business, charity, or opposing evil gives room for some important member of the religion to overstep in their particular goal but have the other two arms backhanded slap them when this information comes to light, and while one person shouts that thou shalt not suffer a witch to live someone else can shout that you need to be courtesy to ALL travelers.

Without that rank system that climbs up to a singular pope, there's room to disagree without jeopardizing a life long career, and the people above you can't so easily dispose of you just because you made trouble for them.

You're probably not looking for a lot of divine intervention, but any amount of active signs from one of the three gods in this religion will pretty much stop people from aligning their religious doctrines entirely along the lines of what is good business. Plus, with 3 gods there's not automatically 1 right answer.

The Devas fall out of a unified-ish religion much better anyway imo, and a church like this gives them something they can get involved with. The world has come a long ways since they left the heavens, so maybe their knowledge seems a little more contradiction laden, and people more broadly understand that there's something good in there but that it might not be intuitive, and that if they act on it blindly that they'll probably run into new problems that they don't know how to handle.

That's one religion. It can potentially cover most humans, devas, tieflings, the dhampirs, and possibly the shifters. Everything about the gnolls screams that they wouldn't have the same church, and that they probably wouldn't have gods that quite line up with any of the 3 I suggested. For them I'm picturing 4 divine judges, with a little bit more of the pantheon "select 1 to worship," and then there's some fairly unintrusive virtue ethics that each one asks of the followers, and in death judges them based upon. Both because "China" and because "Gnoll," these virtues probably mostly have names that sound familiar enough, but look really friggin arbitrary to anybody coming at it from another culture. "How does charity mean leaving this beggar out in the rain?" "He's going to learn a lot of things while he's out in this Summer rain." Because you've described them as being interested in parties, stoicism is probably not among these 4 virtues. The kobolds mostly do their thang in the underdark, so folks will probably be less familiar with the worship those little guys do. If you're at all happy with what I've suggested so far, then we're looking at a low wilderness setting after all, and that means no true dragons... on this map. Having some blind, albino dragons tucked away in the veins of the Earth is still roughly compatible with this, but since we're talking religion, it makes more sense still to have them tucked away in another plane. Perhaps, a celestial kingdom? Although you compared the gnolls with the Chinese, I didn't give them anything that religion (unless I have a really poor understanding of Confucius, which is very possible,) so a bunch of super regal dragon kings in some soft focus spirit realm seems really appealing. They're tribal so everyone else would dismiss their claims as superstitious nonsense, and it's not like they'd be super interested in talking about their gods with these soft skins anyway.

Goblins and Orcs would depend on how closely they interact with each other, but the green skins having some slightly warped vision of the Trinity makes a lot of sense, and keeps the setting from drifting too much away from Castlevania type themes.

[Shadow_in_the_Mist]

@Zorku: Sorry for not directly quoting you entirely, but there's so much text there that I keep getting lost in it. Instead, I'm going to try and address some salient points.

Firstly, no, this is NOT a setting with "strong government forces". Nor is it a world where the human kingdoms are growing. This is an unstable world, wracked by conflicts and cataclysms.

You have centralized points of authority, yes. But you don't have any truly solid stability. There's lots of "wilderness country" that nobody's able to officially claim, which is rife with petty kingdoms, bandit lords, dark wizards, monsters and worse. Even in the hearts of nations, you face danger; this is a world where the equivalent of London not only struggles with class issues and corrupt nobility, but there are vampire prostitutes, alchemically-warped serial killers, cannibal clans in the sewers, and dark mages amongst the nobility.

Sorry... I'm rambling. Basically, this is still the classic "points of light" type fantasy setting. There are nations on the map, just as in Golarion, but just like Golarion, none of those nations are truly taming the wilderness, and they are beset from within and from without. Do you follow me?

To tackle something you specifically seemed to have misunderstood: what I was saying is that the "nasty human nations" are not THE world power. It's the difference between "The British Empire is a burn 'em at the stake theocracy" and "The psycho puritanical theocracy is the One World Government", you understand?

As an aside, can I ask how the hell you associate "strong government" with "Castlevania"? The traditional depiction of Castlevania is of a world poised on the brink of annihilation by Dracula and his monstrous legions until the Belmont clan fights back the darkness. In the first two games, you're warned outright not to trust the NPC peasants, because their ranks are full of Dracula loyalists who'll lead you astray.

I suppose it doesn't help that I mostly invoke Castlevania in terms of aesthetics...

Secondly, in regards all of the various questions you have asked about race, do keep in mind that what I've said so far are the barest bones, mere ideas and racial concepts - they're seed-stock from which I need to grow the full racial outlines. So, for example, yes, they are going to be deeper than what's here, I just need the time and inspiration to work on them.

Now, to try and answer some of your more specific queries...

Dhampir culture is distinctly its own thing, motivated by the fact that they cannot shake off their vampiric legacy. They suffer when exposed to sunlight, so they're predominantly nocturnal for starters. Their religion is different, their culture is influenced by their own array of racial powers, and they have their own social divides, from those who just want to get on with life to those who demand that they achieve independence to those who want to bring back the Reign of Eternal Night - but this time under THEIR leadership.

It makes sense that a culture that prizes strength and adventure in a landscape as vast and hostile as neo-Russia would domesticate riding beasts, so yes, the orcs of the icelands do ride. They might ride yzobu instead of horses, I'm not set on that yet, but they do ride.

The "tiefling pact" only affected the members of the original empire; you do have tieflings from vassal-states and conquered tribes and the like, but that's due to interbreeding and the taint remains bound to the original blood. ...I'm trying to think of a way to put it more clearly, but it involves referencing biological ethnicity, so I'm going to pass. I have no intentions of getting booted as an accused racist.

Figuring out what to do now is literally THE big thing facing devas as a race. Just in sweeping generalities, you have those who try to champion new cultures, those who obsessively seek to protect - or restore - their original culture, and hedonists who simply want to enjoy their eternities, and those are just some of the more common reactions to their condition.

Finally... I really don't like the idea of a single centralized religion. Doesn't feel right to me. I appreciate the suggestions, and I'll see about taking a shot at a first draft of theology. You've actually given me some polytheistic inklings already - with the "meta pantheon" being divisible between the Light, the Dark, and the Shadow.

[Thunderfist12]

I have basic ideas for "meta pantheon" if you want to use them:

GODS OF LIGHT
LN goddess of the sun, sand, time, and knowledge.
LG god of truth, stars, the skies, and writing.
LE god of fire, pain, fear, war, and paranoia.

GODS OF DARK
N god of night, the void, meditation, and memory.
NG goddess of rest, wind, and passion.
NE goddess of snow, death, the afterlife, and sorrow.

GODS OF SHADOW
CN god of the moon, laughter, stones, and revelry.
CG goddess of art, wisdom, health, and dreams.
CE god and goddess of lies, rain, thunder, and split personalities.

[Zorku]

@Zorku: Sorry for not directly quoting you entirely, but there's so much text there that I keep getting lost in it. Instead, I'm going to try and address some salient points.

I honestly think that's a better way to talk with people anyway. I just stick with heavy quote usage because I can step away from it for an hour to go work and then come back and know exactly what I was writing.

Firstly, no, this is NOT a setting with "strong government forces". Nor is it a world where the human kingdoms are growing. This is an unstable world, wracked by conflicts and cataclysms.

Strong governing forces don't mean a lack of conflict. They minimize certain conflicts while exacerbating others.

If the kingdoms are not actively falling apart then they should be growing. That growth may be stifled or otherwise very slow, but it doesn't make much sense to have a kingdom if everyone pretty much loses everything (to catastrophe,) just as fast as they gain it, all while being in a dangerous situation to begin with. The people of Wallachia are doing pretty well and gradually growing... until the cataclysm. Things seemed comparably nice and generally peaceful... before the hellfire genocide started up. The governing forces still sucked in a variety of ways, there was still conflict, and there were plenty of bad things in the world, but populations rose and leaders consolidated power. The cataclysm isn't just one of many things slowly whittling down the peoples of that nation, it's the event that reversed every positive trend. It's the tragedy that tore away the all of the things that people had been working hard to obtain.

If there isn't growth, but there are many cataclysms, then you just don't continue to have people. Instead you get to look at a generation driven mad as they've watched 95% of all of the people in their population wiped out. There are examples of that in history as well, but the obvious one gets worse with the inclusion of smallpox blankets.

There's lots of "wilderness country" that nobody's able to officially claim, which is rife with petty kingdoms, bandit lords, dark wizards, monsters and worse. Even in the hearts of nations, you face danger; this is a world where the equivalent of London not only struggles with class issues and corrupt nobility, but there are vampire prostitutes, alchemically-warped serial killers, cannibal clans in the sewers, and dark mages amongst the nobility.

Everything about that sounds like it exists in the blind spots of strong governing forces to me.

It's... basically drug crime in our world. If you have problems then you go to the police... unless you're a criminal and can't rely on the police, in which case you do all kinds of terrible things to other people that can't rely on the police, and they try to do those same things back. If you don't have to worry about incriminating yourself to such an extent that you cannot hope to live a remotely normal life, then the police mostly protect you in accordance with the law, but they're not so omniscient that they can perfectly prevent terrible and illegal things from happening to you, so mostly you try to stay the hell away from anyone that you know does terrible illegal things. Swap out the drugs with any number of arbitrary things society has prohibited throughout the ages, especially when punishments are severe, and now there's a reason for people to move deeper and deeper into the sewers as they do more and more depraved stuff, right up to (or past,) the point of cannibalism. If vampires are dangerous and illegal then they don't exactly work at the blacksmith where the guards can come in and inspect the place as they please, and if everyone is constantly in the midst of cataclysm then nobody has time to visit prostitutes (except in a "well, world's ending anyway. No reason not to go out with a bang," kind of way.) If everything is falling apart and there aren't strong governing forces then you don't call that fleshsculptor a serial killer, they're just a raider like all of the other people that are looting and pillaging in the final days before this place is properly abandoned and the survivors set up some tent city on the edge of some other town where they hope to find enough stability to pick up the pieces of the life that used to belong to them.

When the armies of hell march upon the settlements of man, you're looking at something more like Diablo. The cities slowly fall to invaders, and the broken survivors hole up in some ramshackle fortification. Terrified and cold, they know that death is coming any day now, but they hope that the legions continue to focus their attention somewhere else, and if they're naive, they hope that heroes will show up to save them.

You're going for grimbright, so that sort of moment in time can totally be about 6 months ago. Before the foreigner came through and cleared out the dens of evil, exorcised the specters that were about to wipe out the settlement, dispatched the mummy in the ruins upstream that was slowly tainting the water supply, and closed the rift that all of the corruption initially came through. Other adventurers can still deal with the countess that's willing to do anything for eternal youth, the beastfolk temple that has somehow blotted out the Sun, the creature in the swamp, and the spawn of Ungoliant that's still preying upon anyone that becomes isolated or strays too far into the woods. If you're looking for things like that then there's no strong governing forces, and people have already fled the cities. If you want serial killers, diseased prostitutes, and troglodytes, then those are things that the governing forces are too sluggish to catch, don't yet know about, or don't really understand how to put a stop to them (and probably take counterproductive measures against.) The latter sounds a lot more like the kinds of stories you seem to want to tell, but it doesn't fit this mantra of weak governing forces.

There might be a misunderstanding here. When I say that the governing forces are strong, I don't mean that they are the strongest. They don't have to be the most powerful, just more powerful than the thousand small problems that compete for their attention, but not nearly as powerful as the cataclysms that threaten them and ultimately topple them.

Does that sound more to your taste?

Basically, this is still the classic "points of light" type fantasy setting. There are nations on the map, just as in Golarion, but just like Golarion, none of those nations are truly taming the wilderness, and they are beset from within and from without. Do you follow me?

I think I kind of see what you want, but I don't really understand how an area becomes that or why it doesn't crumble immediately.

To tackle something you specifically seemed to have misunderstood: what I was saying is that the "nasty human nations" are not THE world power. It's the difference between "The British Empire is a burn 'em at the stake theocracy" and "The psycho puritanical theocracy is the One World Government", you understand?

Those are indistinguishable if your entire story is contained within Britain. Is you pull the camera back to include most of Eastern Europe then you can see the differences. Pull it further back to include all of Europe and Britain looks like a tiny blip on the radar.

As an aside, can I ask how the hell you associate "strong government" with "Castlevania"? The traditional depiction of Castlevania is of a world poised on the brink of annihilation by Dracula and his monstrous legions until the Belmont clan fights back the darkness. In the first two games, you're warned outright not to trust the NPC peasants, because their ranks are full of Dracula loyalists who'll lead you astray.

I suppose it doesn't help that I mostly invoke Castlevania in terms of aesthetics...

You know that title that tends to get spat out just preceding "Dracula"? Yeah, "Count"-Dracula. There is systematic injustice and negligence in that he ever held such a position, there is this big governing church that opposes him (even if it is an impotent effort,) and the Belmont clan's story is all strong governing forces that won't just let them do their thing.

(I rambled for a long time after this, but decided it didn't contribute a whole lot of useful thought, so now that's gone.)

And remember, vampires are lawful evil. Lawful tendencies come from structure, not an absence of it.

Secondly, in regards all of the various questions you have asked about race, do keep in mind that what I've said so far are the barest bones, mere ideas and racial concepts

I don't just sit here asking questions in some attempt to tear this down you know. I'm interested in developing things in as much as I understand what they are supposed to be.

Dhampir culture is distinctly its own thing, motivated by the fact that they cannot shake off their vampiric legacy. They suffer when exposed to sunlight, so they're predominantly nocturnal for starters. Their religion is different, their culture is influenced by their own array of racial powers, and they have their own social divides, from those who just want to get on with life to those who demand that they achieve independence to those who want to bring back the Reign of Eternal Night - but this time under THEIR leadership.

What's your vision for how those racial powers affect the culture?

It makes sense that a culture that prizes strength and adventure in a landscape as vast and hostile as neo-Russia would domesticate riding beasts, so yes, the orcs of the icelands do ride. They might ride yzobu instead of horses, I'm not set on that yet, but they do ride.

The "tiefling pact" only affected the members of the original empire; you do have tieflings from vassal-states and conquered tribes and the like, but that's due to interbreeding and the taint remains bound to the original blood. ...I'm trying to think of a way to put it more clearly, but it involves referencing biological ethnicity, so I'm going to pass. I have no intentions of getting booted as an accused racist.

So like, they became tieflings before the empire expanded to its full extent, and then just ruled over lots of lowly normal lookin humans? I've kind of been thinking of Tieflings like the Ottoman empire for awhile, which ties in nice with real life's Count Dracula...

Figuring out what to do now is literally THE big thing facing devas as a race. Just in sweeping generalities, you have those who try to champion new cultures, those who obsessively seek to protect - or restore - their original culture, and hedonists who simply want to enjoy their eternities, and those are just some of the more common reactions to their condition.

So they're an easily identifiable ethnicity, but they've been wandering for so long that there's no even a remnant of of shared cultural identity?

Finally... I really don't like the idea of a single centralized religion. Doesn't feel right to me. I appreciate the suggestions, and I'll see about taking a shot at a first draft of theology. You've actually given me some polytheistic inklings already - with the "meta pantheon" being divisible between the Light, the Dark, and the Shadow.

Well if you go with that idea of there being one true pantheon except everyone uses different names for the gods, then that's a single religion, just not a unified one.

I have a really hard time picturing gothic vampires without a bunch of stuffy clergymen that make it their business to put their nose in everyone's business. You've got about 50 vampire traditions from other cultures that you can draw from, but this one is just so damn tightly interwoven with a culture that spent a lot of time thinking that evil recoils from your holy water, cross necklace or handheld version, holy book, and any sanctified item. Everybody else is way more burn the body and mix the ashes with salt about it. Having all of that big church stuff when there are like 8 smallish unrelated faiths with a bunch of scattered shrines all over the place... just seems like a structural cheat to me.

Maybe... there used to be a big unified religion. It crumbled under the weight of a hundred small cataclysms, and largely fractured into lots of religions that differ in so many ways that nobody can even trace back to what the old one was like. Sprinkle on a short iconoclast movement and it's just not possible for anyone to go back to that. The rituals and iconography of any of these splinter religions repel evil some of the time, and don't work other times. One particular person doing the same thing that worked for them before tends to keep working, but if they change it up or if someone else tried to copy it the results are much less predictable.

[Shadow_in_the_Mist]

Strong governing forces don't mean a lack of conflict. They minimize certain conflicts while exacerbating others.

If the kingdoms are not actively falling apart then they should be growing. That growth may be stifled or otherwise very slow, but it doesn't make much sense to have a kingdom if everyone pretty much loses everything (to catastrophe,) just as fast as they gain it, all while being in a dangerous situation to begin with. The people of Wallachia are doing pretty well and gradually growing... until the cataclysm. Things seemed comparably nice and generally peaceful... before the hellfire genocide started up. The governing forces still sucked in a variety of ways, there was still conflict, and there were plenty of bad things in the world, but populations rose and leaders consolidated power. The cataclysm isn't just one of many things slowly whittling down the peoples of that nation, it's the event that reversed every positive trend. It's the tragedy that tore away the all of the things that people had been working hard to obtain.

If there isn't growth, but there are many cataclysms, then you just don't continue to have people. Instead you get to look at a generation driven mad as they've watched 95% of all of the people in their population wiped out. There are examples of that in history as well, but the obvious one gets worse with the inclusion of smallpox blankets.

Everything about that sounds like it exists in the blind spots of strong governing forces to me.

It's... basically drug crime in our world. If you have problems then you go to the police... unless you're a criminal and can't rely on the police, in which case you do all kinds of terrible things to other people that can't rely on the police, and they try to do those same things back. If you don't have to worry about incriminating yourself to such an extent that you cannot hope to live a remotely normal life, then the police mostly protect you in accordance with the law, but they're not so omniscient that they can perfectly prevent terrible and illegal things from happening to you, so mostly you try to stay the hell away from anyone that you know does terrible illegal things. Swap out the drugs with any number of arbitrary things society has prohibited throughout the ages, especially when punishments are severe, and now there's a reason for people to move deeper and deeper into the sewers as they do more and more depraved stuff, right up to (or past,) the point of cannibalism. If vampires are dangerous and illegal then they don't exactly work at the blacksmith where the guards can come in and inspect the place as they please, and if everyone is constantly in the midst of cataclysm then nobody has time to visit prostitutes (except in a "well, world's ending anyway. No reason not to go out with a bang," kind of way.) If everything is falling apart and there aren't strong governing forces then you don't call that fleshsculptor a serial killer, they're just a raider like all of the other people that are looting and pillaging in the final days before this place is properly abandoned and the survivors set up some tent city on the edge of some other town where they hope to find enough stability to pick up the pieces of the life that used to belong to them.

When the armies of hell march upon the settlements of man, you're looking at something more like Diablo. The cities slowly fall to invaders, and the broken survivors hole up in some ramshackle fortification. Terrified and cold, they know that death is coming any day now, but they hope that the legions continue to focus their attention somewhere else, and if they're naive, they hope that heroes will show up to save them.

You're going for grimbright, so that sort of moment in time can totally be about 6 months ago. Before the foreigner came through and cleared out the dens of evil, exorcised the specters that were about to wipe out the settlement, dispatched the mummy in the ruins upstream that was slowly tainting the water supply, and closed the rift that all of the corruption initially came through. Other adventurers can still deal with the countess that's willing to do anything for eternal youth, the beastfolk temple that has somehow blotted out the Sun, the creature in the swamp, and the spawn of Ungoliant that's still preying upon anyone that becomes isolated or strays too far into the woods. If you're looking for things like that then there's no strong governing forces, and people have already fled the cities. If you want serial killers, diseased prostitutes, and troglodytes, then those are things that the governing forces are too sluggish to catch, don't yet know about, or don't really understand how to put a stop to them (and probably take counterproductive measures against.) The latter sounds a lot more like the kinds of stories you seem to want to tell, but it doesn't fit this mantra of weak governing forces.

There might be a misunderstanding here. When I say that the governing forces are strong, I don't mean that they are the strongest. They don't have to be the most powerful, just more powerful than the thousand small problems that compete for their attention, but not nearly as powerful as the cataclysms that threaten them and ultimately topple them.

Does that sound more to your taste?

I'll be honest: when I tried to read these paragraphs... I just blanked out. I really could not manage to follow you along the way without getting lost here. But, I'll take a stab at responding to what I think that you're saying here.

The world's theme is Points of Light. Which itself can be something of a loaded term. I mean, would you consider a nation-state where a power-mad, xenophobic theocracy with an obsession for fire keeps the population protected from external threats, but also whipped up into a frenzy of religious hysteria, fear and internal suspicion with draconian lores and barbaric punishments, the kind of place where everybody prays at the designated time for fear of winding up burned at the stake as a heretic, to be a "Point of Light"?

There are nations. Some are young and vibrant, some are old and decrepit, and others are middle aged. None are, at the moment, about to completely collapse. But their authority is not strong enough to exert total authority over the world.

There is wilderness beyond the nations, places where monsters, renegades and outcasts lurk - and potential raise their own nations.

There are cracks within the nations; corruption, subversion, incompetence and other maladies present places for evil to fester and grow.

There are few, if any, nations that are truly, completely good. Most are no worse than neutral; they put themselves first, but they try to hold to some moral standard. Some are outright evil. The worst may think of themselves as good, but do evil in good's name.

What is an adventurer's role, you ask? It is to bring light into darkness, and to snuff out the light that burns too brightly for mortals to bear. It is to protect people from all evils, even those that wear a crown or a face of righteousness. Or it is to seek wealth and power, depending on the adventurer in question.

The armies and law enforcement have their roles. But adventurers solve the problems they can't solve, or they don't notice, or simply can't face. Hunting brigands for coin? Tracking down the necromancer serial killer bedeviling the city with a swift-spreading army of zombie prostitutes? Uncovering a fiendish cult? Slaying a mad scientist unleashing mutant monsters upon the populace? Carving a new kingdom from the wilderness? Toppling a regime?

I hope this clarifies things... basically, the nations fend for themselves enough to survive the day to day. Even prosper, in their own clumsy ways. But the darkness requires extraordinary souls to truly beat it back. Adventurers are the Exceptional Ones. They are the people who can save a nation... or destroy it, as they see fit.

I think I kind of see what you want, but I don't really understand how an area becomes that or why it doesn't crumble immediately.

Do you really need to understand it in order to accept it? Sorry if this sounds hostile, because it's not meant to be, but I personally never had any trouble "buying in" to Nentir Vale or Golarion - which are my main models for the kind of world I'm building.

What matters in this setting, first and foremost, is that it fits the "World of Adventure" trope. This is supposed to be a place where "Your PCs Are Important" is the default assumption. This is not Forgotten Realms, where people complain that the various Big Goods like Elminster, the Harpers, the Simbul, the Chosen of Mystara and all the others are already handling all of the major issues and leaving you to, realistically, run around cleaning up low-level trash quests like "kill the rats in me basement!" or "shoo the goblins out of the local cave!" and that's all you'll ever be good for.

This is something that we can address, but we need to figure out how to talk to each other, rather than talk past each other, and I fear we're doing more the latter than the former at this point.

Those are indistinguishable if your entire story is contained within Britain. Is you pull the camera back to include most of Eastern Europe then you can see the differences. Pull it further back to include all of Europe and Britain looks like a tiny blip on the radar.

And your point is?

And remember, vampires are lawful evil. Lawful tendencies come from structure, not an absence of it.

Please do not, please, refer to the 9-grid of alignment. I cannot stand that mechanic because of how much the lore on what alignment X is or isn't supposed to does not make fundamental sense to me. If I bother to use alignment at all, it will probably be closer to 4e's rendition than the 9-grid. I find that unintuitive and useful only for provoking arguments.

I don't just sit here asking questions in some attempt to tear this down you know. I'm interested in developing things in as much as I understand what they are supposed to be.

I had a suspicion this was the case, but thank you for making it explicit. And I'm sorry if I come off as aggressive; it's just that, I'm sorry, but your posts can be very hard to take in and actually understand - so many words that the meaning itself becomes lost and it just all piles up. And sometimes, as part of that, your questions feel more like demands; I understand in abstract that you're just asking for some clarifying details, but sometimes it cuts a little personally.

What's your vision for how those racial powers affect the culture?

In all honesty? I don't have one yet, because I don't yet have any solid idea what the dhampir subraces are going to be. My current inclination is to take some inspiration from Vampire: The Requiem and have the subraces correlate to the Vampire Archetypes: The Lord, The Succubus, The Predator, The Shadow, and The Terror. Each of these would have its own unique racial abilities and powers - for example, the Lord might have natural affinity with controlling animals and, to a lesser extent, humanoids, whilst the Succubus is all about the charm effects and the Predator is a very melee-focused/bestial shapeshifting sort of vampire-spawn.

Hmm... would it be helpful if I posted a draft of the Dhampir under this Archetypes basis?

So like, they became tieflings before the empire expanded to its full extent, and then just ruled over lots of lowly normal lookin humans? I've kind of been thinking of Tieflings like the Ottoman empire for awhile, which ties in nice with real life's Count Dracula...

In a nutshell, yes, that's exactly right.

So they're an easily identifiable ethnicity, but they've been wandering for so long that there's no even a remnant of of shared cultural identity?

Essentially correct. Though, there's probably only a couple-hundred of devas at any one time, so I'm not entirely sure if that counts them as an ethnicity.

Well if you go with that idea of there being one true pantheon except everyone uses different names for the gods, then that's a single religion, just not a unified one.

I have a really hard time picturing gothic vampires without a bunch of stuffy clergymen that make it their business to put their nose in everyone's business. You've got about 50 vampire traditions from other cultures that you can draw from, but this one is just so damn tightly interwoven with a culture that spent a lot of time thinking that evil recoils from your holy water, cross necklace or handheld version, holy book, and any sanctified item. Everybody else is way more burn the body and mix the ashes with salt about it. Having all of that big church stuff when there are like 8 smallish unrelated faiths with a bunch of scattered shrines all over the place... just seems like a structural cheat to me.

Maybe... there used to be a big unified religion. It crumbled under the weight of a hundred small cataclysms, and largely fractured into lots of religions that differ in so many ways that nobody can even trace back to what the old one was like. Sprinkle on a short iconoclast movement and it's just not possible for anyone to go back to that. The rituals and iconography of any of these splinter religions repel evil some of the time, and don't work other times. One particular person doing the same thing that worked for them before tends to keep working, but if they change it up or if someone else tried to copy it the results are much less predictable.

I actually struck a large burst of inspiration during this morning on terms of religion, so I can actually present a clearer picture for this now.

In a nutshell, the meta-cosmology I'm using for this setting is a mixup of 4e's World Axis, Diablo, and a D20 game called Infernum. This means two planes of note are important here: Paradiso (roughly analogous to the Shining Heavens of Diablo) and the Infernum (one part its namesake, one part the Burning Hells of Diablo).

It is these planes that are of particular influence on this world, and that informs religion.

In a nutshell, the "meta-pantheon" of Light, Dark and Shadow refers to "Gods of Paradiso", "Daemon Lords of the Infernum" and "Unaffiliated Deities" respectively.

Because of the two influences on Paradiso/Infernum, this is a case of "God & Satan Are Both Jerks", or "Order And Chaos Are Both Evil" - there is actually goodness in the Dark Gods, and evil in the Light Gods. It's true that Dark is Evil tends to hold sway the majority of the time, but the zealotry of the archangels of Paradiso means that Light Is Not Good is equally the norm.

Anyone here familiar with the Protectorate of Menhoth? From Warmachine and Hordes? Menhoth is a god of humanity, of civilization, of progress... and also, he's a huge jerk. Domineering, controlling, over-zealous, and easily prone to tyranny and brutality, with a church that's big on xenophobia and burning anyone who tries to naysay them. Perfect example of the mentality of a Light God.

I'll go into more detail in another post, because this one's gone on long enough, but the Light Gods, Shadow Gods and Dark Gods are THE religions of the "Known World". The Orcs and Gnolls both have their own pantheons, as might other races that come to be in this world, and there's also potentially "minor" pantheons, like the Blood Gods of the Dhampirs. Still, the Light, Dark and Shadow are the major religions of the "core".

[Shadow_in_the_Mist]

Alright... sadly, my lack of general interest in religion is hindering me in providing really concrete material for anything related to deities, so that's something I'll need a huge amount of help with. What concrete things I do have, I'll outline below.

Pantheon Structure: 4e Style
In "Wizards Presences: Worlds & Monsters" (I think, it could have been Races & Classes), WoTC noted that early editions of D&D tended to have huge, sprawling pantheons where many deities were of little interest except to very specific individuals, often crossing the line from "world-filling" to "unnecessary cruft". In 4th edition, they created a strict outline for the deities they wanted: gods that would either make sense to serve as patrons to adventurers, or as inspiration for malevolent cults. Lesser gods, the realistic but useless to your game as anything more than flavor filling, were delegated to the role of Exarches, and mostly left to the DM to envision.

Thus, we had, for example, Tiamat, Goddess not only of Chromatic Dragons, but also Avarice, Wealth, and Revenge amongst others. Easy fuel for evil NPCs... but also a valid patron god for a more amoral "profits-first" sort of adventurer.

That's the style I want to focus on for creating pantheons; focus on PC and Villain orientated gods, although ideally they should have some traits to make them more "NPC valuable" as well - Corellon was God of Magic, Beauty and Art, for example, whilst Erathis was Goddess of Civilization, Inventions, Progress and Laws.

This should make god-building much easier.


Gods of Light: Lords of Paradiso
The key inspiration for these guys is the Archangels of the Shining Heavens in Diablo. They're not, strictly speaking, evil - but they're not necessarily good, either. Remember, Diablo's angels were all for exterminating humanity for being half-demon. Gods of this variety should be prone to the Light Is Not Good character flaws; too uncompromising, too zealous, too strict. Not to the extent of being purely evil, but every Light God should have at least one flaw that can see them serve as an agent of "evil in the guise of self-righteous good", thus justifying malevolent Light Cults/Sects for the DM to pit against his players.


Gods of Darkness: Daemon Kings of Infernum
Rather than complicate things, the Houses of the Infernum - the great nation-clans of daemons - are treated as Gods, with the cultists and warlocks drawing their power from the House Head (essentially an Archdevil, in D&D Classic terms) or the House as a whole. Specific daemons are more Exarch territory, used to help personalize dark cults. This means that there are only nine "true" Dark Gods, one for each of the Nine Houses:

• Astyanath - Daemon King of Anguish, Suffering, Pain and Torment
• Carthenay - Daemon King of Avarice and Wealth
• Glabretch - Daemon King of Disease, Decay, Pestilence and Vermin
• Haimon - Daemon King of Undeath and Necromancy
• Lictat - Daemon King of Ambition, Theft, Usurpation and Treachery
• Oblurott - Daemon King of Gluttony, Sloth, and Beasts
• Riethii - Daemon King of Pleasure, Desire and Carnality
• Sturrach - Daemon King of War, Rage and Ruin
• Zethu - Daemon King of Science, Sorcery and Progress

Gods of Shadow: The Wild Cards
These are the gods worshipped in the Known World that don't directly tie into the Paradiso/Infernum conflict. They cover both gods that are genuinely good but "too soft" for the light - for example, Nusemnee, Goddess of Redemption - and gods that are darkish but not outright evil or daemonic; Selune, Goddess of Night, Thieves, Merchants and Trickery, for example.

Technically, one could slot the "lesser pantheons" into this covering as well, but I don't know how correct that is?


Other Pantheons
So far, there are two, maybe three, distinct "non-common" pantheons in my head.

Firstly, we have the Orcish pantheon. These are the tribal gods of the Orcs from their home in the icelands, and they're very much not Light or Dark. They're a blend of divine progenitors and ascended heroes, and in flavor probably best classify as Aesir/Rus expies. My scattered thoughts present the following Orc Gods:

• Knorr, the Old Man: the wise and grim-faced but secretly soft-hearted patriarch of the pantheon, who created the world and all that's in it, master of summer.
• Dwimga, the Mother: Matriarch of the pantheon, a fertile and luscious sort of "matured beauty" who created life and gave birth to the orcs and their gods, wife of Knorr, master of autumn.
• Khusmet, the Lover: Dwimga's young and beautiful daughter, goddess of love, lust, pride and beauty, master of spring.
• Khana, the Coldhearted: The rejected son of Knorr and Dwimga, whose strength and cunning are matched only by cruelty and arrogance, faults for which they scorn him and orcs reluctantly praise him, master of winter.

I'm not sure if I should make more Orc Gods, or if these four would be a solid pantheon on their own, with others filling in as their exarches... although, I suppose a trickster god is required...

Also, renaming is definitely an option, because having three gods with a K in their name... well, you can see the unfortunate implications there.

Secondly, we have the Blood Gods. During the Age of Eternal Night, mighty vampires ruled a vast empire and sought true immortality as gods. In pursuit of this goal, they created cults deifying them, cults that persist to this day, lurking in the shadows and tempting dhampirs (and vryloka, if they exist) into giving them praise. Beyond this... I actually don't have any solid idea. I know it should be a small pantheon, but beyond tht... no ideas. Maybe they correspond to the five vampire archetypes like the dhampir subraces do?

Thirdly, the Goblin pantheon... I'm actually drawing a big blank on these. Maybe they actually worship the "core" gods of Shadow? I've some inkling of making them use some of the old lore from Van Richten's Guide to the Vistani, but even so, that doesn't help...

Fourthly, we have kobolds... I'm actually strongly tempted to just go with the race almost monotheistically worshipping Zethu, seeing as my admittedly loose plans for the race paints them as THE resident source of warlocks and dieselpunk technology.

Finally, there's the Gnollish pantheon... I'll be honest, I don't really know what to do with these ones. I originally envisioned them as the kind of race that worships a Chaotic Neutral (if I must resort to the reference) version of Slaanesh. My self-admittedly confused efforts at refining a pantheon beyond that actually exist in another thread I have here: http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showt...Help-Requested So... yeah, more or less, I'm starting with the pantheon ideas listed there.

[Thunderfist12]

Thirdly, the Goblin pantheon... I'm actually drawing a big blank on these. Maybe they actually worship the "core" gods of Shadow? I've some inkling of making them use some of the old lore from Van Richten's Guide to the Vistani, but even so, that doesn't help...

Perhaps the template I gave above can help? The gobs might have their own gods of light, dark, and shadow. (Idk if you saw it, since it wasn't responded to)

[Shadow_in_the_Mist]

I have basic ideas for "meta pantheon" if you want to use them:

GODS OF LIGHT
LN goddess of the sun, sand, time, and knowledge.
LG god of truth, stars, the skies, and writing.
LE god of fire, pain, fear, war, and paranoia.

GODS OF DARK
N god of night, the void, meditation, and memory.
NG goddess of rest, wind, and passion.
NE goddess of snow, death, the afterlife, and sorrow.

GODS OF SHADOW
CN god of the moon, laughter, stones, and revelry.
CG goddess of art, wisdom, health, and dreams.
CE god and goddess of lies, rain, thunder, and split personalities.

Perhaps the template I gave above can help? The gobs might have their own gods of light, dark, and shadow. (Idk if you saw it, since it wasn't responded to)

Sorry for not commenting sooner. I sort of lost them in the furor of Zorku's huge post. As for the list... hmm... you'll forgive me if I excise the alignments from them, but, actually, this might be just what I needed! Thanks a lot!

Do you have any comments on the races or the stuff Zorku and I are talking about?

[Thunderfist12]

Do you have any comments on the races or the stuff Zorku and I are talking about?

I haven't read through much of it yet but from what I skimmed and a few thoughts on geography:

If the orcs are more of a rider culture than a boating culture, maybe their landmass can be connected to the central one?

Orcs, being known for their monstrous visage and sharp teeth, might have originated as a slave race in the old vampiric kingdoms. Possibly warped from goblin stock.

Since the gnolls are powerful but have limited influence, they might be outside the main cluster of landmasses. Basically an ocean twice the size of the central mass separating them. Perhaps the shifter villages are on the east coasts between the human nations and the great sea, allowing them to better serve as the intermediary race.

The central landmass could contain the humans/devas/other wherever, dhampir in its north border with the orcs (works even better with a vampiric shared origin), tieflings on the west coastline, and gobs in the flatlands.

A smaller, hotter landmass to the south across a wide channel might be home to the kobolds.

[Shadow_in_the_Mist]

I haven't read through much of it yet but from what I skimmed and a few thoughts on geography:

If the orcs are more of a rider culture than a boating culture, maybe their landmass can be connected to the central one?

Orcs, being known for their monstrous visage and sharp teeth, might have originated as a slave race in the old vampiric kingdoms. Possibly warped from goblin stock.

Since the gnolls are powerful but have limited influence, they might be outside the main cluster of landmasses. Basically an ocean twice the size of the central mass separating them. Perhaps the shifter villages are on the east coasts between the human nations and the great sea, allowing them to better serve as the intermediary race.

The central landmass could contain the humans/devas/other wherever, dhampir in its north border with the orcs (works even better with a vampiric shared origin), tieflings on the west coastline, and gobs in the flatlands.

A smaller, hotter landmass to the south across a wide channel might be home to the kobolds.

Hmm... some interesting ideas here. Definitely fuel for thought.

Now, I mentioned above I was thinking of stealing inspiration from Vampire: the Requiem for my dhampirs, so I figured I should put money to mouth and do a PC writeup draft.

Dhampir, mk 1:
Ability Score Modifiers: +1 Constitution
Size: Medium
Speed: 35 feet
Vision: Darkvision 120 feet
Child of the Dead: You have Resistance to Necrotic damage.
Spawn of the Night: You have Disadvantage on attack rolls and Perception checks based on sight made whilst you, the creature you are attacking, or the object you are studying is in direct sunlight. Additionally, for each hour you spend exposed to direct sunlight, you must make a Constitution check (DC 10 +1 per hour); on a failure, you gain one level of exhaustion. Wearing sufficiently covering clothes negates this sunlight weakness.
The Red Thirst: When you have a creature with the Humanoid, Beast or Monstrosity type Grappled, you can use a bonus action to inflict 1d4 + your Con modifier Necrotic damage on that creature.
Muddied Vitae: Your vampiric heritage manifests in the form of one particular aspect. Choose the Aspect of the Lord, Temptor, Predator, Lurker or Terror; you gain racial traits based on that subrace.

Aspect of the Lord:
Ability Score Increase: +1 Charisma, +1 Wisdom
Master of Man and Beast: You have Proficiency in Animal Handling and Persuasion.
The Ruler Eternal: You increase your maximum hitpoints by +1. At each level you gain, you increase your maximum hitpoints by +1.

Aspect of the Temptor:
Ability Score Increase: +2 Charisma
Darkling Charms: You can cast the Friends cantrip. At 3rd level, you can cast Charm Person as a 1st level spell. At 5th level, you can cast Enthrall as a 2nd level spell. When you cast Charm Person or Enthrall with this trait, you cannot do so again until you complete a long rest. All spells cast with this trait use Charisma as their spellcasting ability score.

Aspect of the Predator:
Ability Score Increase: +1 Strength, +1 Dexterity
Bred to Hunt: You have Advantage on Survival checks made to track creatures or find game.
Protean Predator: As an action, you can will your body to produce natural weapons in the form of fangs, claws or similar appendages. This causes your Unarmed Strikes to inflict 1d6 Slashing, Piercing or Bludgeoning damage, as is appropriate, rather than the normal unarmed strike damage. At 5th level, as an action, you can reshape your body to gain either the Amphibious trait and a Swim speed equal to your walking speed, or a Fly speed equal to your walking speed, or a Burrow speed equal to your walking speed. At 7th level, as an action, you can grant yourself the Incorporeal Movement trait. Your alternate movement traits are Concentration effects that last for 1 hour, and once you have used the trait in this way, you cannot use it again until you complete a long rest. Whilst you have an alternate movement trait active, you can switch to another movement trait as an action.

Aspect of the Lurker:
Ability Score Increase: +2 Dexterity
Shadow-Walker: You apply double your Proficiency bonus to Stealth checks.

Aspect of the Terror:
Ability Score Increase: +2 Strength
Herald of Nightmares: You have Proficiency in Intimidation.

[Zorku]

I'll be honest: when I tried to read these paragraphs... I just blanked out. I really could not manage to follow you along the way without getting lost here. But, I'll take a stab at responding to what I think that you're saying here.

The world's theme is Points of Light. Which itself can be something of a loaded term. I mean, would you consider a nation-state where a power-mad, xenophobic theocracy with an obsession for fire keeps the population protected from external threats, but also whipped up into a frenzy of religious hysteria, fear and internal suspicion with draconian lores and barbaric punishments, the kind of place where everybody prays at the designated time for fear of winding up burned at the stake as a heretic, to be a "Point of Light"?

I think with that you need to look at just one quality: How savage is this place? Typical forest? 2-3 on the savage scale. Cannibal blood sacrifice nation that wants to burn the party in a volcano to appease their god? 5-6 on the savage scale. Fire obsessed theocracy that burns witches at the stake? 0-0.5 savage. Heart of Africa jungle? 8 savage. Biggest trade port on the continent? 0 savage, even though it's the most wretched hive of scum and villainy in the galaxy empire.

They're not saying that these places are good, they're saying that these places are willing to deal with you on established terms.
But hey, I don't really understand points of light either.

There are nations. Some are young and vibrant, some are old and decrepit, and others are middle aged. None are, at the moment, about to completely collapse. But their authority is not strong enough to exert total authority over the world.

There are cracks within the nations; corruption, subversion, incompetence and other maladies present places for evil to fester and grow.

There are few, if any, nations that are truly, completely good. Most are no worse than neutral; they put themselves first, but they try to hold to some moral standard. Some are outright evil. The worst may think of themselves as good, but do evil in good's name.

Sounds close enough so far.

What is an adventurer's role, you ask? It is to bring light into darkness, and to snuff out the light that burns too brightly for mortals to bear. It is to protect people from all evils, even those that wear a crown or a face of righteousness. Or it is to seek wealth and power, depending on the adventurer in question.

The armies and law enforcement have their roles. But adventurers solve the problems they can't solve, or they don't notice, or simply can't face. Hunting brigands for coin? Tracking down the necromancer serial killer bedeviling the city with a swift-spreading army of zombie prostitutes? Uncovering a fiendish cult? Slaying a mad scientist unleashing mutant monsters upon the populace? Carving a new kingdom from the wilderness? Toppling a regime?

I hope this clarifies things... basically, the nations fend for themselves enough to survive the day to day. Even prosper, in their own clumsy ways. But the darkness requires extraordinary souls to truly beat it back. Adventurers are the Exceptional Ones. They are the people who can save a nation... or destroy it, as they see fit.

I might have some philosophical blips with the adventurer role stuff, but I'll go ahead and count this as close enough too.

Do you really need to understand it in order to accept it? Sorry if this sounds hostile, because it's not meant to be, but I personally never had any trouble "buying in" to Nentir Vale or Golarion - which are my main models for the kind of world I'm building.

Oh, if it's more about those than Castlevania and Midnight then it's no wonder we're coming at this from such different angles.

Um. Like, write a bunch of words on a dart board and then fling some darts at it, then call that a kingdom in either of those settings. You don't really need a ground up approach to justifying anything in those kinds of settings. Just randomize some keywords and loose themes and then justify them backwards and build on it as you go.

This is something that we can address, but we need to figure out how to talk to each other, rather than talk past each other, and I fear we're doing more the latter than the former at this point.

Yep, we have been.

And your point is?

I spelled it out clearly. Your story takes place within a certain area and stuff looks simple and absolute when that area is just the one that a single tyrant rules over. If you don't want that then pull the camera back until you've got the complexity you're looking for.

Please do not, please, refer to the 9-grid of alignment. I cannot stand that mechanic because of how much the lore on what alignment X is or isn't supposed to does not make fundamental sense to me. If I bother to use alignment at all, it will probably be closer to 4e's rendition than the 9-grid. I find that unintuitive and useful only for provoking arguments.

Ok. I try to take a philosophical approach where other people can just tell me what those terms mean to them and I can use them that way for the remainder of the discussion, but if you want nothing to do with those terms I'll just give more verbose descriptions of what I mean:

Important vampires still tend to be nobles in life, and they pretty much operate within the bounds of the station they had in life. They aren't exactly doing the job properly anymore, and that causes a lot of suffering for the people they were in charge of. If they're a king then the country is in a bad place with no real rulership, and if it's some noble below the king then they've got to keep up appearances so that their lands don't get inherited by their most legitimate successor. They obviously don't operate within the theocratic mandate, but that political struggle doesn't tend to resolve quickly, and for more important vampires it's basically a tautology to say that the religion hasn't bean able to defeat them. This isn't a savage situation, because vampires corrupt from within.

If you look at pop culture there are plenty of way more savage style vampires (think Sabbat from world of darkness, or any of the South East Asia takes on vampirism,) but those don't seem to be the kind of thing you're going for.

I had a suspicion this was the case, but thank you for making it explicit. And I'm sorry if I come off as aggressive; it's just that, I'm sorry, but your posts can be very hard to take in and actually understand - so many words that the meaning itself becomes lost and it just all piles up. And sometimes, as part of that, your questions feel more like demands; I understand in abstract that you're just asking for some clarifying details, but sometimes it cuts a little personally.

I've got kind of a brutal writing style at times. It's sort of a rebellion against the local culture that bends over backwards to be utterly passive about and disagreement or offense.

If it helps, I only ask questions in this way when I think you're capable of answering them. I keep pushing when you dismiss a question not because I think the question has some kind of power over you, but because I think that if you reflect on it you'll give me a much more involved response. I'm aware that this kind of doesn't work right, but I'm still in the process of figuring out how to do it better; a lot of famous interviewers know how to trick people into thinking that the same question they were just asked is a new one, and maybe one day I'll learn how to do that.

In all honesty? I don't have one yet, because I don't yet have any solid idea what the dhampir subraces are going to be. My current inclination is to take some inspiration from Vampire: The Requiem and have the subraces correlate to the Vampire Archetypes: The Lord, The Succubus, The Predator, The Shadow, and The Terror. Each of these would have its own unique racial abilities and powers - for example, the Lord might have natural affinity with controlling animals and, to a lesser extent, humanoids, whilst the Succubus is all about the charm effects and the Predator is a very melee-focused/bestial shapeshifting sort of vampire-spawn.

Hmm... would it be helpful if I posted a draft of the Dhampir under this Archetypes basis?

Those 3 seem like good material for subraces, but you'll have to be careful to make sure that they don't outshine the vampires of old (unless you want the halfbreeds to have hybrid vigor?)

I actually struck a large burst of inspiration during this morning on terms of religion, so I can actually present a clearer picture for this now.

In a nutshell, the meta-cosmology I'm using for this setting is a mixup of 4e's World Axis, Diablo, and a D20 game called Infernum. This means two planes of note are important here: Paradiso (roughly analogous to the Shining Heavens of Diablo) and the Infernum (one part its namesake, one part the Burning Hells of Diablo).

It is these planes that are of particular influence on this world, and that informs religion.

In a nutshell, the "meta-pantheon" of Light, Dark and Shadow refers to "Gods of Paradiso", "Daemon Lords of the Infernum" and "Unaffiliated Deities" respectively.

Because of the two influences on Paradiso/Infernum, this is a case of "God & Satan Are Both Jerks", or "Order And Chaos Are Both Evil" - there is actually goodness in the Dark Gods, and evil in the Light Gods. It's true that Dark is Evil tends to hold sway the majority of the time, but the zealotry of the archangels of Paradiso means that Light Is Not Good is equally the norm.

Ah ok, that should be a rich trope-scape you can mine.

Since I had been pushing for a mostly unified gods kind of thing I'm low on ammunition for arguing the cons of something like this. I always felt that the "light and dark are actually equally powerful,"* thing made more sense than "light is infinitely more powerful but mostly chooses not to interfere," idea.

*Yeah yeah, dark is stronger but divided in Diablo, but I almost can't take the 3rd game as canonical. I'll exercise some restraint and spare you a rant about power politics in Blizzard.

Paradiso & Infernum

Do you mind the archangels having names of saints, or are these guys gonna need some other cultural style?

shadow

I like the 3rd category, but they don't seem to have a proper plane. The Prime Material is the defined gray area between light and dark, but these guys don't sound like they hold all that much sway there. They're present and all, but you'd expect gods to be rather strong on their own plane.

Perhaps these gray gods are holdouts? Like in the primordial era there were a lot more of them, but paradiso and infernum realized that they could take this place for themselves, and perhaps even worked together to carve up the prime material plane? They're most of the way done with that at this point, and each side was convinced that they would grow faster than the other and ultimately betray them when they had a big enough lead in power, but they ended up in more of a stalemate because they both chose basically the same time to backstab each other.

Now the remaining gods of shadow have a strong interest in maintaining balance, or rather, keeping the other two planes in stalemate. Like this, these less good and less evil gods can work together purely out of self interest.

[Shadow_in_the_Mist]

I spelled it out clearly. Your story takes place within a certain area and stuff looks simple and absolute when that area is just the one that a single tyrant rules over. If you don't want that then pull the camera back until you've got the complexity you're looking for.

Here's one of those areas we've clearly been talking past each other:

See, whilst I said I'm looking at "one chunk" of the world, it's still a very large chunk of the overall setting so far - starting with generalities before getting in and moving onto specifics.

You've been asking more specifics focused-questions.

For comparison... if this was Ravenloft, I'd describe myself as focusing on the South-Eastern Core (Barovia, Kartakass, Hazlan and Forlorn) as a whole, whilst your questions indicate a focus on Forlorn.

It's not bad, it's just lead to misunderstandings of where we're standing.

Ok. I try to take a philosophical approach where other people can just tell me what those terms mean to them and I can use them that way for the remainder of the discussion, but if you want nothing to do with those terms I'll just give more verbose descriptions of what I mean:

Important vampires still tend to be nobles in life, and they pretty much operate within the bounds of the station they had in life. They aren't exactly doing the job properly anymore, and that causes a lot of suffering for the people they were in charge of. If they're a king then the country is in a bad place with no real rulership, and if it's some noble below the king then they've got to keep up appearances so that their lands don't get inherited by their most legitimate successor. They obviously don't operate within the theocratic mandate, but that political struggle doesn't tend to resolve quickly, and for more important vampires it's basically a tautology to say that the religion hasn't bean able to defeat them. This isn't a savage situation, because vampires corrupt from within.

If you look at pop culture there are plenty of way more savage style vampires (think Sabbat from world of darkness, or any of the South East Asia takes on vampirism,) but those don't seem to be the kind of thing you're going for.

Alright, I can understand this perspective. Although, if I'm going to style my dhampirs after the clans of Vampire: the Requiem, then I might be tweaking the vampire lore. I might also pull in some material from Van Richten's Guide to Vampires...

Actually, you know what? I'll just try and figure out what vampires are in this setting, so we're both on equal terms:

Vampirism is a daemonic transformation; it is a change induced by magic and which originates from the Infernum.

Vampirism is generally accepted as being the creation of a "little god" of the Infernum; (Name), an entity tied to both Haimon and either Astyanath or Riethii depending on the source (or all three, in some sources). This god is attempting to gain power by associating itself with the pursuit of pleasure unending, even through undeath, giving it some popularity with ghouls or other "mortality-feigning" undead and hedonists. It remains a little god because its portfolio is still ultimately quite niche - compare to Evening Glory, the Goddess of Undying Love from Libris Mortis.

It's...not entirely a success. Vampirism does preserve the transformed entity's body in time, unchanging and undying, but sensory input is muted, a condition that grows worse with age - blood can be used to correct this "pleasure dulling", but the older the vampire, the more blood is required to overcome the effect and sustain it.

Furthermore, drinking blood is itself highly pleasurable to vampires, in no small part because they need a constant supply of it. A vampire starved of blood flies into a mad frenzy to feed, before ultimately enter Torpor - a state in which it becomes an inert, but undecaying, corpse and which can be revived by shedding blood upon it.

Vampires are unaffected by running water and do not need invitations to enter somebody else's home. Holy symbols do not, in and of themselves, have any significance against vampires unless they are blessed or wielded by someone with True Faith (ie, the Channel Divinity feature). Holy Water works, but that's because it's imbued by its very nature with radiant energies, which neutralize the necrotic energies powering the undead. Sunlight is lethal to vampires, whose particular make up makes them especially vulnerable to the ambient radiant energy conveyed on sunlight. A stake through the heart does not kill a vampire, but forces it into Torpor. Decapitation, fire, and radiant energies can all be used to kill a vampire, which Torpor makes it particularly vulnerable to.

Vampires get stronger as they age, rather like D&D dragons. This can even eventually negate some of their weaknesses, though that takes a lot of time and/or mystical preparations.

Turning a mortal into a vampire has to be done deliberately, ala Requiem's "embrace".

Vamires, being creatures of necromantic magic, have a natural affinity for it - as a side-note, I'm going to need to make a new Sorcerous Origin for this setting that is essentially the Sorcerer's answer to the Wizard's Necromancy Tradition.

In a nutshell, vampires in this setting are one part Requiem's Clans to one part the Vampire Counts of Warhammer Fantasy.

If it helps, I only ask questions in this way when I think you're capable of answering them. I keep pushing when you dismiss a question not because I think the question has some kind of power over you, but because I think that if you reflect on it you'll give me a much more involved response.

It actually helps a lot. Thank you for saying that.

Those 3 seem like good material for subraces, but you'll have to be careful to make sure that they don't outshine the vampires of old (unless you want the halfbreeds to have hybrid vigor?)

Don't worry on that; dhampirs will be hindered by the weaknesses of PC limitations. I'll wait until you see their outline in one of the posts I made earlier.

Ah ok, that should be a rich trope-scape you can mine.

Since I had been pushing for a mostly unified gods kind of thing I'm low on ammunition for arguing the cons of something like this. I always felt that the "light and dark are actually equally powerful,"* thing made more sense than "light is infinitely more powerful but mostly chooses not to interfere," idea.

*Yeah yeah, dark is stronger but divided in Diablo, but I almost can't take the 3rd game as canonical. I'll exercise some restraint and spare you a rant about power politics in Blizzard.

So, just to be sure, you like this godly layout?

Do you mind the archangels having names of saints, or are these guys gonna need some other cultural style?

I'd prefer if they didn't have saintly names; I really start to grit my teeth when a D&D world uses recognizably real-world deities in it.

I like the 3rd category, but they don't seem to have a proper plane. The Prime Material is the defined gray area between light and dark, but these guys don't sound like they hold all that much sway there. They're present and all, but you'd expect gods to be rather strong on their own plane.

Perhaps these gray gods are holdouts? Like in the primordial era there were a lot more of them, but paradiso and infernum realized that they could take this place for themselves, and perhaps even worked together to carve up the prime material plane? They're most of the way done with that at this point, and each side was convinced that they would grow faster than the other and ultimately betray them when they had a big enough lead in power, but they ended up in more of a stalemate because they both chose basically the same time to backstab each other.

Now the remaining gods of shadow have a strong interest in maintaining balance, or rather, keeping the other two planes in stalemate. Like this, these less good and less evil gods can work together purely out of self interest.

Mmm... that's actually a really awesome idea. In fact, I think I was leaning towards "Light fights Dark, Dark fights Light, Shadow keeps them both at bay" as a cosmological thing to begin with.

Though I'll clarify that gods of the Shadow category will have their own individual dominions (divine realms, sorry if that wasn't clear) in the Feywild, Shadowfell, Elemental Chaos or the Twisting Nether (my cosmology's version of the Astral Sea), depending on the god in question.

Hmm... would you consider it hypocritical if I wanted to bring over both The Morninglord from Ravenloft D20 and Nusemnee from Nentir Vale as Shadow deities?

[Thunderfist12]

...Torpor - a state in which it (the vampire) becomes an inert, but undecaying, corpse and which can be revived by shedding blood upon it.

I see a story arc where a cult of dhampir are collecting sacrifices to pour their fresh blood onto a hidden vampire graveyard, gathering more each time to hopefully wake them from their Torpor. However, the crowning piece to this graveyard is a grand mausoleum holds the Night-Queen's rotting corpse. While she is long past the hope of awakening, the cult leader claims she speaks through him, and he lives alone in the mausoleum.

Just an idea.

[Zorku]

Alright, I can understand this perspective. Although, if I'm going to style my dhampirs after the clans of Vampire: the Requiem, then I might be tweaking the vampire lore. I might also pull in some material from Van Richten's Guide to Vampires...

Actually, you know what? I'll just try and figure out what vampires are in this setting, so we're both on equal terms:

Vampirism is a daemonic transformation; it is a change induced by magic and which originates from the Infernum.

Vampirism is generally accepted as being the creation of a "little god" of the Infernum; (Name), an entity tied to both Haimon and either Astyanath or Riethii depending on the source (or all three, in some sources). This god is attempting to gain power by associating itself with the pursuit of pleasure unending, even through undeath, giving it some popularity with ghouls or other "mortality-feigning" undead and hedonists. It remains a little god because its portfolio is still ultimately quite niche - compare to Evening Glory, the Goddess of Undying Love from Libris Mortis.

It's...not entirely a success. Vampirism does preserve the transformed entity's body in time, unchanging and undying, but sensory input is muted, a condition that grows worse with age - blood can be used to correct this "pleasure dulling", but the older the vampire, the more blood is required to overcome the effect and sustain it.

Furthermore, drinking blood is itself highly pleasurable to vampires, in no small part because they need a constant supply of it. A vampire starved of blood flies into a mad frenzy to feed, before ultimately enter Torpor - a state in which it becomes an inert, but undecaying, corpse and which can be revived by shedding blood upon it.

Vampires are unaffected by running water and do not need invitations to enter somebody else's home. Holy symbols do not, in and of themselves, have any significance against vampires unless they are blessed or wielded by someone with True Faith (ie, the Channel Divinity feature). Holy Water works, but that's because it's imbued by its very nature with radiant energies, which neutralize the necrotic energies powering the undead. Sunlight is lethal to vampires, whose particular make up makes them especially vulnerable to the ambient radiant energy conveyed on sunlight. A stake through the heart does not kill a vampire, but forces it into Torpor. Decapitation, fire, and radiant energies can all be used to kill a vampire, which Torpor makes it particularly vulnerable to.

Vampires get stronger as they age, rather like D&D dragons. This can even eventually negate some of their weaknesses, though that takes a lot of time and/or mystical preparations.

Turning a mortal into a vampire has to be done deliberately, ala Requiem's "embrace".

Vamires, being creatures of necromantic magic, have a natural affinity for it - as a side-note, I'm going to need to make a new Sorcerous Origin for this setting that is essentially the Sorcerer's answer to the Wizard's Necromancy Tradition.

In a nutshell, vampires in this setting are one part Requiem's Clans to one part the Vampire Counts of Warhammer Fantasy.

The torpor thing sounds about right for vampire lore, but also makes it seem like the rulers of old could return at any time when someone finds one hibernating and sprinkles some blood onto the withered husk. Is that something you want?

I get why players would need to cross running water, but why remove that bit of legend from vamps proper? I always took it as this kind of natural demarcation of what land was their and what was territory for someone else. I don't think I'd totally sold you on vampires being more of a corrupting force from within the social order vs being whatever kind of external opposition you picture them as to begin with, but where you don't really have vampires anymore I'm not sure I get what this really means to you.

Don't worry on that; dhampirs will be hindered by the weaknesses of PC limitations. I'll wait until you see their outline in one of the posts I made earlier.

The last two seem lackluster.

So, just to be sure, you like this godly layout?

Yeah, enough. If you can flesh out the light as much as the dark that should work well enough for fairly standard d&d play.

I'd prefer if they didn't have saintly names; I really start to grit my teeth when a D&D world uses recognizably real-world deities in it.

There's gray space between real world saints and names that sound like saints though. Saint Alphonse, St Mercurio, St Tremere, and any other modern names out of Latin-ish areas (that would also feel correct on some Ninja Turtles OC,) might be names shared by Catholic saints, but they're not ones that I know and the saints aren't required to not share names.

Moreover, if the light and dark planes were busy swallowing up this one then maybe the Paradisio crew has just already managed to get far enough that the names sound native (while the other guys have managed to put a lot of base impulses into their portfolios.)

Mmm... that's actually a really awesome idea. In fact, I think I was leaning towards "Light fights Dark, Dark fights Light, Shadow keeps them both at bay" as a cosmological thing to begin with.

Though I'll clarify that gods of the Shadow category will have their own individual dominions (divine realms, sorry if that wasn't clear) in the Feywild, Shadowfell, Elemental Chaos or the Twisting Nether (my cosmology's version of the Astral Sea), depending on the god in question.

Do all of those places have the same kind of relationship with the prime material as your light and dark planes, or are these all innately tied into the prime material plane while the light and dark are more of an alien presence here (although deeply familiar because they've been at this since the primordial era)?

The first option makes the gray gods seem bitter that they weren't invited to the party and missed out on the opportunity; the latter makes them seem like the strong ones after all the weak gods were weeded out, and now expert (one might say, god tier,) manipulators that manage to avoid ever drawing enough ire that the stalemate agrees to a short cease fire in order to end the gray gods.

Hmm... would you consider it hypocritical if I wanted to bring over both The Morninglord from Ravenloft D20 and Nusemnee from Nentir Vale as Shadow deities?

My perception of Amaunator is a little too strong to suppress while considering his Morninglord career, but just bringing those in seems fine. A lot of this project seems to be about removing elements you hate from existing settings, so when there are things you actually like I don't see a strong reason not to import them.

[Shadow_in_the_Mist]

I see a story arc where a cult of dhampir are collecting sacrifices to pour their fresh blood onto a hidden vampire graveyard, gathering more each time to hopefully wake them from their Torpor. However, the crowning piece to this graveyard is a grand mausoleum holds the Night-Queen's rotting corpse. While she is long past the hope of awakening, the cult leader claims she speaks through him, and he lives alone in the mausoleum.

Just an idea.

An awesome one, thanks for sharing.

The torpor thing sounds about right for vampire lore, but also makes it seem like the rulers of old could return at any time when someone finds one hibernating and sprinkles some blood onto the withered husk. Is that something you want?

Yes, it is. It's not going to happen because a combination of Plot and History - that is, the Blood-Gods and the most powerful underling lords were generally rendered Deader Than Dead, but there's always the possibility that one might find the torporing corpse of an elder. You know, plot hooks for DMs?

I get why players would need to cross running water, but why remove that bit of legend from vamps proper? I always took it as this kind of natural demarcation of what land was their and what was territory for someone else. I don't think I'd totally sold you on vampires being more of a corrupting force from within the social order vs being whatever kind of external opposition you picture them as to begin with, but where you don't really have vampires anymore I'm not sure I get what this really means to you.

The Requiem 1e sourcebook articulated this so much more elegantly than I... in a nutshell, it's because, RAW, that weakness renders vampires incapable of functioning in any city that isn't Dark Ages style "throw your chamberpot into the street and wait for the rains to wash all the filth into the river" primitive.

Any city that has running water, or even decent sewerage systems, should by logic be an impassable obstacle course for vampires, who would at best be constantly roiling and squirming as if drunk because they can feel all the water running mere feet below them under the streets - even inside the houses of the wealthy. At worst, they'd be paralyzed, because that's essentially filling the entire city (or least the wealthy parts of it) with rivers and hiding them from view.

I'm sorry if this bothers you, I really am, but I find the idea of vampires being restricted to the most squalid slums or the rural regions and incapable of operating in and amongst urbanized centers of power to be ridiculous and limiting. I'm not having it. Plain and simple.

The last two seem lackluster.

Yeah, I'm actually really disappointed with the Lurker and the Terror archetypes myself; I ran out of ideas on those and I really need somebody to talk to so I can brainstorm a better rendition.

Yeah, enough. If you can flesh out the light as much as the dark that should work well enough for fairly standard d&d play.

That all depends on me either getting god ideas or having folks be willing to help me create gods. Like I've said, I actually don't care for religion in D&D normally, so creating a pantheon is inherently hard for me.

There's gray space between real world saints and names that sound like saints though. Saint Alphonse, St Mercurio, St Tremere, and any other modern names out of Latin-ish areas (that would also feel correct on some Ninja Turtles OC,) might be names shared by Catholic saints, but they're not ones that I know and the saints aren't required to not share names.

Moreover, if the light and dark planes were busy swallowing up this one then maybe the Paradisio crew has just already managed to get far enough that the names sound native (while the other guys have managed to put a lot of base impulses into their portfolios.)

Huh, true. And Infernum actually does contain some pseudo-Latin "Angelic" names that could be used for archangels/Light Gods, and there's always the idea of stealing naming ideas from Diablo.

Do all of those places have the same kind of relationship with the prime material as your light and dark planes, or are these all innately tied into the prime material plane while the light and dark are more of an alien presence here (although deeply familiar because they've been at this since the primordial era)?

The first option makes the gray gods seem bitter that they weren't invited to the party and missed out on the opportunity; the latter makes them seem like the strong ones after all the weak gods were weeded out, and now expert (one might say, god tier,) manipulators that manage to avoid ever drawing enough ire that the stalemate agrees to a short cease fire in order to end the gray gods.

To be accurate, Paradiso and Infernum are themselves "dominions" - they exist within the Twisting Nether (sort of - the best analogy I can give you from past editions is that Dominions are Crystal Spheres and the Nether is Wildspace).

Anyway, in the planar cosmology, Feywild and Shadowfell are intimately tied into the materium - they're reflections of it in a specific light. The Dominions are "far realms", separated from the materium by the Nether. The Nether itself, and the Elemental Chaos, are distinctly apart from the materium; they touch upon it in places, but the three planes are technically independent of each other.

Does that help?

My perception of Amaunator is a little too strong to suppress while considering his Morninglord career, but just bringing those in seems fine. A lot of this project seems to be about removing elements you hate from existing settings, so when there are things you actually like I don't see a strong reason not to import them.

Alright then. I'll see if I can find some time to try and draft concepts for Shadow & Light Gods, in that case.

[Thunderfist12]

Aspect of the Lurker:
Ability Score Increase: +2 Dexterity
Shadow-Walker: You apply double your Proficiency bonus to Stealth checks.

Aspect of the Terror:
Ability Score Increase: +2 Strength
Herald of Nightmares: You have Proficiency in Intimidation.

You said you needed ideas? That they're lackluster? I have an idea.

LURKER
Vanish: You can cast "invisibility" at will.

TERROR
Frightful Utterance: You can turn living, mortal creatures as a cleric of your level minus 2 (min 1) would turn undead. The creature must have some measure of sentience. Therefore, you can turn a wolf, but not a rosebush. (Nice try though.)

[Shadow_in_the_Mist]

You said you needed ideas? That they're lackluster? I have an idea.

LURKER
Vanish: You can cast "invisibility" at will.

TERROR
Frightful Utterance: You can turn living, mortal creatures as a cleric of your level minus 2 (min 1) would turn undead. The creature must have some measure of sentience. Therefore, you can turn a wolf, but not a rosebush. (Nice try though.)

Hm. Appreciate the intentions, but both look too powerful for racial classes. Let's try another shot...

Aspect of the Lurker, mk2:
Ability Score Increase: +2 Dexterity
Shadow-Walker: You have Advantage on Stealth checks. If you successfully hide from a creature in an area of dim light or darkness, you can approach that creature without revealing yourself, although you are automatically revealed if you make an attack against that creature.
Whispers in the Dark: You have Proficiency in one Intelligence skill of your choice.

Aspect of the Terror, mk2:
Ability Score Increase: +2 Strength
Herald of Nightmares: You have Advantage on Intimidation checks and on magical attacks that inflict the Frightened condition.
Numb to Horror: You have Advantage on saving throws against the Frightened condition.
Visceral Dread: When making Intimidation checks, you can use the higher of your Strength modifier or your Charisma modifer.

[Zorku]

The Requiem 1e sourcebook articulated this so much more elegantly than I... in a nutshell, it's because, RAW, that weakness renders vampires incapable of functioning in any city that isn't Dark Ages style "throw your chamberpot into the street and wait for the rains to wash all the filth into the river" primitive.

Any city that has running water, or even decent sewerage systems, should by logic be an impassable obstacle course for vampires, who would at best be constantly roiling and squirming as if drunk because they can feel all the water running mere feet below them under the streets - even inside the houses of the wealthy. At worst, they'd be paralyzed, because that's essentially filling the entire city (or least the wealthy parts of it) with rivers and hiding them from view.

Oh, I just threshold it. Doesn't matter if some 2 inch wide pipe has water flowing through it, this has got to be a fairly large river that's mostly exposed to the air, like the kind of thing that actually establishes the boundary between regions.

I can see how not viewing that through the lens of these vampires literally being the local rulers of some city and surrounding towns would make a mess of vampires anywhere you had hot and cold running water. The 5e entry for vampires gives a pretty watered down version of it already, where the vamp has to be standing in running water in order to take damage from it. Perhaps that would suit your purposes?

Yeah, I'm actually really disappointed with the Lurker and the Terror archetypes myself; I ran out of ideas on those and I really need somebody to talk to so I can brainstorm a better rendition.

3 archetypes is probably plenty. If people wanna be any number of shadow dwelling serial killer concepts then they can just use background and class features to put that together. Say that these guys have a tendency towards being assassins or something and consider it taken care of.

That all depends on me either getting god ideas or having folks be willing to help me create gods. Like I've said, I actually don't care for religion in D&D normally, so creating a pantheon is inherently hard for me.

You had to wait for good ideas for the infernal ones? Don't you just pick a trait or three and slap a name on it with that stuff?

To be accurate, Paradiso and Infernum are themselves "dominions" - they exist within the Twisting Nether (sort of - the best analogy I can give you from past editions is that Dominions are Crystal Spheres and the Nether is Wildspace).

Anyway, in the planar cosmology, Feywild and Shadowfell are intimately tied into the materium - they're reflections of it in a specific light. The Dominions are "far realms", separated from the materium by the Nether. The Nether itself, and the Elemental Chaos, are distinctly apart from the materium; they touch upon it in places, but the three planes are technically independent of each other.

Does that help?

Yeah. So the light and dark deities are all basically obyriths, except that they didn't deplete their planar system and have to abandon ship so much as they're just hungry enough to keep expanding beyond those bounds. They've got they own feywild and shadowfell equivalents (and maybe some slightly more satellite-like planes,) but because of what they are as a dominion, the distinction is maybe a little bit lost on us prime material types.

Do you have a notion of what it would be like if either dominion managed to fully take over the prime material? Like does it literally merge with the original, or do the magic-physics get adjusted so that it's more like a copy of the dominion, or something else? I presume that after some tipping point the one dominion can't be held back by the second dominion and the war shifts away from the prime material to the other dominion until the victor controls all three.
-Not that this should ever happen, mind you. Just, it helps to know what those dominions thought they were going to get out of all this struggle.

[Shadow_in_the_Mist]

Oh, I just threshold it. Doesn't matter if some 2 inch wide pipe has water flowing through it, this has got to be a fairly large river that's mostly exposed to the air, like the kind of thing that actually establishes the boundary between regions.

I can see how not viewing that through the lens of these vampires literally being the local rulers of some city and surrounding towns would make a mess of vampires anywhere you had hot and cold running water. The 5e entry for vampires gives a pretty watered down version of it already, where the vamp has to be standing in running water in order to take damage from it. Perhaps that would suit your purposes?

I'll be honest, I just don't like the mental image of vampires being killed with squirt guns. No. Sorry, but no.

Also, were you apologizing for that pun? Because it wasn't that bad.

3 archetypes is probably plenty. If people wanna be any number of shadow dwelling serial killer concepts then they can just use background and class features to put that together. Say that these guys have a tendency towards being assassins or something and consider it taken care of.

But I'm sure that all 5 can be made to work, I just need some help refining them

You had to wait for good ideas for the infernal ones? Don't you just pick a trait or three and slap a name on it with that stuff?

Well, technically I did have to wait; it was a bolt of pure inspiration that made me realize I could just have ignorant mortals deify the Nine Houses of Hell.

Yeah. So the light and dark deities are all basically obyriths, except that they didn't deplete their planar system and have to abandon ship so much as they're just hungry enough to keep expanding beyond those bounds. They've got they own feywild and shadowfell equivalents (and maybe some slightly more satellite-like planes,) but because of what they are as a dominion, the distinction is maybe a little bit lost on us prime material types.

Do you have a notion of what it would be like if either dominion managed to fully take over the prime material? Like does it literally merge with the original, or do the magic-physics get adjusted so that it's more like a copy of the dominion, or something else? I presume that after some tipping point the one dominion can't be held back by the second dominion and the war shifts away from the prime material to the other dominion until the victor controls all three.
-Not that this should ever happen, mind you. Just, it helps to know what those dominions thought they were going to get out of all this struggle.

Yes, I have some notions. In a nutshell, adjusting the "local physics" to be more like the dominion is actually a start of the synchronization - the more pronounced this gets, the more aligned the two are getting. Sort of like the rules for increasing Fear Levels in Deadlands. However, when the realm is aligned enough, it will be assimilated physically into the Dominion. If Paradiso wins, then this world will be absorbed into its crystalline realm and made part of it - which won't necessarily be a good thing for the mortals inhabiting it. Likewise, if the Infernum wins, this world will be swallowed entirely into hell.

Does that answer your question?

[Zorku]

I'll be honest, I just don't like the mental image of vampires being killed with squirt guns. No. Sorry, but no.

That's never what running water has meant in any conception of vampire, but I don't think it's really worth fixating on the water part this much. Is there any room in your concept of vampires for difficulty crossing regional/kingdom borders? Not even inability, just... difficulty.

But I'm sure that all 5 can be made to work, I just need some help refining them

What's the motivation in aiming for five? Source material, sure, but D&D doesn't work the same way as WoD so these options might not really fill necessary niches.

But hey, it's not like I'm having much success talking you in or out of concepts. A quick summary of the 3 we like: Everyone has sunlight sensitivity, does a bonus action bite, and is resistant to necrotic damage; Lords command man and beast, and are tough to take down; Temptors do the succubus shtick; Predators are doing the savage ranger thing, and frankly, a lot of shapechange abilities.

If you want to level the playing field, predators need to be a little more muted. Instead, they retain the natural weapons stuff, but instead of having whatever movement type they please any time they have six seconds to adjust, how about they need to feed on a creature via The Red Thirst to undergo that transformation, and at this time they mark some target as their prey. If they do not drink the blood of their prey before the hour is up then their maxhp is reduced by their character level until they complete a long rest.
This narrows their role quite a bit so that they're not just flying and burrowing at the whims of the party, but rather as a part of their hunt.

Lurker and Terror both suffered from the hunter being too good at getting everywhere, but we can bump incorporeal movement over to the lurker. The lurker doesn't so much need to be better at stealth (there are class options for that,) but to have cool extra things they can do with stealth. Shadow monks have this cool ability where they can become invisible while in shadow. This doesn't come with explicit statement that they lose that invisibility if somebody turns on the lights. Most DMs are probably going to decide that this won't hold up to much more light than a torch, but maybe we can give the more munchkin interpretation to the lurker. The shadow meld thing already overlaps with a class feature and I hate invalidating a class like that, so how about they just stop feeling like they're there if they press up against a wall and remain still? This would be a lot like the variant ranger ability to slap a bunch of mud and tree bark on and be undetectable until they spring an ambush, but this is more like they obscure their face and you no longer feel like you're being watched, and they just don't stand out against the wallpaper in the way you'd expect. Maybe they literally flatten against the wall (or do some extradimensional space shenanigans,) and your standard lowly peasant will walk right by them in a hallway none the wiser. This starts to sound more like the elf subrace ability to hide in light rain, but it probably needs a little tighter definition. Since these guys are Mehket it becomes something about them seeming less interesting in general, and being able to do this plain sight hiding act on man-made walls.

The terror is harder. Social interaction is a key pillar of D&D play so the whole unnerving appearance, supernatural strength, and relentless serial killer vibe doesn't have great analogues to draw from. The Duergar ability to enlarge themselves touches on a couple of these points, but isn't very vampire-like. The spell Phantasmal Killer is way more up the right alley, but trying to define a racial option on the basis of a single spell isn't really a broad enough concept. Still, phantasms might be the way to go here. These guys can still be strong, but the seem far stronger than that once they get into someone's head. Instead of the succubus charm they're very much working with fear, and that fear exaggerates what's really there or fabricates nightmares that shouldn't be there at all. We're looking at all of the confusion of illusion magic, but with none of the beauty or invisibility. Well, maybe a pinch of invisibility in some limited fashion.

Yes, I have some notions. In a nutshell, adjusting the "local physics" to be more like the dominion is actually a start of the synchronization - the more pronounced this gets, the more aligned the two are getting. Sort of like the rules for increasing Fear Levels in Deadlands. However, when the realm is aligned enough, it will be assimilated physically into the Dominion. If Paradiso wins, then this world will be absorbed into its crystalline realm and made part of it - which won't necessarily be a good thing for the mortals inhabiting it. Likewise, if the Infernum wins, this world will be swallowed entirely into hell.

Does that answer your question?

Yes, except for the question of what happens after that. Does Paradiso or the Infernum go on to consume the other dominion if they get the prime material plane? This doesn't matter so much because the game is well and truly over for the prime material at that point, but knowing what is to come might be something you could see faintly in the current actions of either dominion.

[Stadge]

I really like the glimpses I'm getting into this setting.

Sadly it's almost 3am here so I'm starting to lose track of things (I'll look back tomorrow)

One thought I've had (and it might actually go without saying) on the Deva front, to justify your hundred or few hundred Devas not banding together, maybe when they die there is a time gap before reincarnation (50 years?) And they are reincarnated at a random location?
So even if they retain memories of past lives, they have gaps in them, and even if they all managed to gather together it couldn't be effective for long?
Maybe they did gather once?

Sorry, that's all I have for now, it's kinda late...

[Shadow_in_the_Mist]

Sorry for taking so long to reply here, things have been distracting on my end.

That's never what running water has meant in any conception of vampire, but I don't think it's really worth fixating on the water part this much. Is there any room in your concept of vampires for difficulty crossing regional/kingdom borders? Not even inability, just... difficulty.

You've never played RIFTS, then, where the running water weakness is literally and canonically weaponized to fight the vampire hordes roaming Mexico, with what amounts to squirt pistols killing vampires and "anti-vampire shields" which are basically portable showers? Or seen D&D players use Decanters of Endless Water or Control Weather (Rainstorm) to kill vampires? Because I have.

But to answer your question... no, there's not, at least not from the angle I think you're wanting. I'm sorry, but this is D&D, not Perfectly Accurate Mythology Recreation, and there are reasons for that.

What's the motivation in aiming for five? Source material, sure, but D&D doesn't work the same way as WoD so these options might not really fill necessary niches.

Mostly because these are very good archetypes, and I like what says about the vampires in this setting.

Another dark fantasy setting with good, solid vampire archetypes is Warhammer Fantasy. There, we have the Blood Dragons (dark warriors, proud black knights, antipaladins), the Von Carsteins (Draculas, essentially the same as Ventrue), the Lahmians (seductive manipulators and female dominated), the Necrarchs (oft-mad masters of necromancy) and the Strigoi (corrupted, fallen, ghoul-like scavengers and beasts). Do you think maybe that'd be a better model to stem from?

But hey, it's not like I'm having much success talking you in or out of concepts. A quick summary of the 3 we like: Everyone has sunlight sensitivity, does a bonus action bite, and is resistant to necrotic damage; Lords command man and beast, and are tough to take down; Temptors do the succubus shtick; Predators are doing the savage ranger thing, and frankly, a lot of shapechange abilities.

If you want to level the playing field, predators need to be a little more muted. Instead, they retain the natural weapons stuff, but instead of having whatever movement type they please any time they have six seconds to adjust, how about they need to feed on a creature via The Red Thirst to undergo that transformation, and at this time they mark some target as their prey. If they do not drink the blood of their prey before the hour is up then their maxhp is reduced by their character level until they complete a long rest.

This narrows their role quite a bit so that they're not just flying and burrowing at the whims of the party, but rather as a part of their hunt.

Hmm... you're right, Predators do have a little too much going for them. Maybe cut the movement thing out entirely; they're only dhampyrs, it makes sense that their protean is restricted to the natural weapons stuff.

Lurker and Terror both suffered from the hunter being too good at getting everywhere, but we can bump incorporeal movement over to the lurker.

The lurker doesn't so much need to be better at stealth (there are class options for that,) but to have cool extra things they can do with stealth. Shadow monks have this cool ability where they can become invisible while in shadow. This doesn't come with explicit statement that they lose that invisibility if somebody turns on the lights.

Most DMs are probably going to decide that this won't hold up to much more light than a torch, but maybe we can give the more munchkin interpretation to the lurker. The shadow meld thing already overlaps with a class feature and I hate invalidating a class like that, so how about they just stop feeling like they're there if they press up against a wall and remain still? This would be a lot like the variant ranger ability to slap a bunch of mud and tree bark on and be undetectable until they spring an ambush, but this is more like they obscure their face and you no longer feel like you're being watched, and they just don't stand out against the wallpaper in the way you'd expect. Maybe they literally flatten against the wall (or do some extradimensional space shenanigans,) and your standard lowly peasant will walk right by them in a hallway none the wiser. This starts to sound more like the elf subrace ability to hide in light rain, but it probably needs a little tighter definition. Since these guys are Mehket it becomes something about them seeming less interesting in general, and being able to do this plain sight hiding act on man-made walls.

Interesting ideas about the Lurker archetype. I definitely approve of the incorporeal movement thing. Hmm... starting to think, will post seperately when I have ideas...

The terror is harder. Social interaction is a key pillar of D&D play so the whole unnerving appearance, supernatural strength, and relentless serial killer vibe doesn't have great analogues to draw from. The Duergar ability to enlarge themselves touches on a couple of these points, but isn't very vampire-like. The spell Phantasmal Killer is way more up the right alley, but trying to define a racial option on the basis of a single spell isn't really a broad enough concept. Still, phantasms might be the way to go here. These guys can still be strong, but the seem far stronger than that once they get into someone's head. Instead of the succubus charm they're very much working with fear, and that fear exaggerates what's really there or fabricates nightmares that shouldn't be there at all. We're looking at all of the confusion of illusion magic, but with none of the beauty or invisibility. Well, maybe a pinch of invisibility in some limited fashion.

I'm presuming you mean "social interaction isn't a key pillar of D&D play", but yeah, very good points. Maybe we should take a step back: what is it about the Nosferatu that makes them scary? Not just the whole "aura of unease thing", but what about their powers; what does the blend of Nightmare, Obfuscate and Vigor do to say "this is a terrible thing lurking just out of the corner of your eye, this is the nightmare that wakes you screaming"?

Yes, except for the question of what happens after that. Does Paradiso or the Infernum go on to consume the other dominion if they get the prime material plane? This doesn't matter so much because the game is well and truly over for the prime material at that point, but knowing what is to come might be something you could see faintly in the current actions of either dominion.

If this world is consumed, that dominion will get larger and stronger. It will be a key strategic edge... but it won't end the war. If they consumed the entire Prime Material Plane, that'd be victory for them, but consuming one world is like basically gaining a significant strategic location - more resources to tap, more grist for the mill, if you follow?

Basically, the winning side has won a big victory, and so the losing side will be hard-pressed for a time, but once the initial advance is fought off, the losers will redouble their efforts to secure their own new victory and rebalance the playing field.

I really like the glimpses I'm getting into this setting.

Sadly it's almost 3am here so I'm starting to lose track of things (I'll look back tomorrow)

One thought I've had (and it might actually go without saying) on the Deva front, to justify your hundred or few hundred Devas not banding together, maybe when they die there is a time gap before reincarnation (50 years?) And they are reincarnated at a random location?
So even if they retain memories of past lives, they have gaps in them, and even if they all managed to gather together it couldn't be effective for long?
Maybe they did gather once?

Sorry, that's all I have for now, it's kinda late...

Hey, many thanks for the pleasant words. As for what you're suggesting... well, it's actually deva canon from 4e that A) reincarnation occurs at a random place after a random amount of time, and B) they don't have perfect memories of their past lives, so that's definitely one of the things that's giving them anti-motivation to give a damn about the world around them.

[Zorku]

Sorry for taking so long to reply here, things have been distracting on my end.


You've never played RIFTS, then, where the running water weakness is literally and canonically weaponized to fight the vampire hordes roaming Mexico, with what amounts to squirt pistols killing vampires and "anti-vampire shields" which are basically portable showers? Or seen D&D players use Decanters of Endless Water or Control Weather (Rainstorm) to kill vampires? Because I have.

Yeah, RIFTS sounds like a silly place I have no interest in going to.

As for the D&D players abuses, I can't say a whole lot more than that it wouldn't work at my table. Whoever gave the green light to that had a really different understanding of wtf running water is supposed to mean to a vampire.

But to answer your question... no, there's not, at least not from the angle I think you're wanting. I'm sorry, but this is D&D, not Perfectly Accurate Mythology Recreation, and there are reasons for that.

Seems weird to deny NPC nobles the recognition of political boundaries, even as a fluff thing, but I guess I don't blame you after whatever trauma RIFTS seems to have inflicted.

Mostly because these are very good archetypes, and I like what says about the vampires in this setting.

Another dark fantasy setting with good, solid vampire archetypes is Warhammer Fantasy. There, we have the Blood Dragons (dark warriors, proud black knights, antipaladins), the Von Carsteins (Draculas, essentially the same as Ventrue), the Lahmians (seductive manipulators and female dominated), the Necrarchs (oft-mad masters of necromancy) and the Strigoi (corrupted, fallen, ghoul-like scavengers and beasts). Do you think maybe that'd be a better model to stem from?

Well that one's still got the lord and the succubus concepts in it, but the hunter becomes more of a mogrel, and then the other two go back to conflicting with what classes are supposed to be in D&D.

The Necrarch could still probably work nicely with some little feature similar to turn undead, except that it permanently asserts your will over the creature. Once per long rest, total CR of controlled undead cannot exceed your character level, or whatever similar limits.

Player controlled minions are kind of a pain in the ass in the little tactical combats and tight spaces that are meant to challenge a party of 4 PCs, so I'm tempted to go with much weirder homebrew mechanics than that, but this vanilla-esque concept should be easy to balance.

I'm presuming you mean "social interaction isn't a key pillar of D&D play", but yeah, very good points. Maybe we should take a step back: what is it about the Nosferatu that makes them scary? Not just the whole "aura of unease thing", but what about their powers; what does the blend of Nightmare, Obfuscate and Vigor do to say "this is a terrible thing lurking just out of the corner of your eye, this is the nightmare that wakes you screaming"?

I meant:
3 pillars; combat, social interaction, exploration. You can do the Noferatu thing when you've got lots of sewers and dark alleys and all that, but it's kind of hard to bundle up like desert punk so that you can walk around a town in the middle of the day and the aura of terror you exude is going to get in the way of your Ventrue and Daeva pals so you've got to go to time out in some cess pit on the edge of town while they take care of business.

I got thinking very Freddy Kruger, once my mind got on the phantasm spells. D&D doesn't generally have any qualms about just declaring that your character is experiencing magical levels of fear, or even drawing much of a distinction between magical and non-magical fear (except that you can dispel the magical variety.) Creatures just kind of inflict fear on another creature, a cone of creatures, or just friggin everywhere around them. That they can do this kind of tells you that they are terrifying, but it doesn't really include any of the details of how this works or why... and it might be a smart move to leave it up to the players to understand or describe why a thing is terrifying.

Actually detailing fear yourself is a little bit trickier. A splash of uncanny valley, risk of bodily harm, but most importantly: someone (or something,) that goes against the natural order. There's something wrong there, and it's going to do something wrong to you. This should not happen, is not meant to be, and your usual guardians are not there to stop it. Unfortunately for us, all of the vampires are already supposed to fit this bill, and we don't just want to say that these guys are doing it harder, but that they have some special quality.

Alternatively, we scratch out that assumption, because these guys are dhampir, and it would make a lot of sense for most adventurer characters to not radiate supernatural horror. A lot of them are still doing things that aren't supposed to happen, but none of them quite have that combination of hunting you down like an animal in the place where that is not supposed to happen, and even the hunter is probably going to kill you quickly instead of torturing you to death and using your entrails to paint a message about who's next.

I'm gradually painting this into a psionic-barbarian corner, and I'm not entirely sure that's a good position for The Terror to occupy... so its probably time for some external input.

If this world is consumed, that dominion will get larger and stronger. It will be a key strategic edge... but it won't end the war. If they consumed the entire Prime Material Plane, that'd be victory for them, but consuming one world is like basically gaining a significant strategic location - more resources to tap, more grist for the mill, if you follow?

Well, I had been picturing the prime material plane (and feywild and shadowfell,) as the extent of a dominion. If you're got one production center making troops and weapons and what have you, and you're in a stalemate with an enemy that also has one production center, then it seems like the moment* that you have 2 production centers at your disposal is also right when you can decisively move to take a 3rd production center.
*There may be some consolidation period for preparing the newly acquired production center to operate in accordance with your standards, but you're in a stalemate so conditions should remain stable until the production center is ready.

Instead of that, it sounds like these dominions are much bigger than the prime material, and had little to no need to cooperate with each other in order to ensure victory over the prime material plane. If that's the case then the stalemate doesn't make a whole lot of sense without multiplying factors. Are they perhaps fighting each other in many almost-defeated dominions similar to the prime material? Are there other afterlife-themed dominions out there that they are contending with in very different sorts of wars?

[Shadow_in_the_Mist]

Sorry for not quoting the rest of your post, but I just didn't really have anything intelligent to say about the things you've raised.

Well, I had been picturing the prime material plane (and feywild and shadowfell,) as the extent of a dominion. If you're got one production center making troops and weapons and what have you, and you're in a stalemate with an enemy that also has one production center, then it seems like the moment* that you have 2 production centers at your disposal is also right when you can decisively move to take a 3rd production center.
*There may be some consolidation period for preparing the newly acquired production center to operate in accordance with your standards, but you're in a stalemate so conditions should remain stable until the production center is ready.

Instead of that, it sounds like these dominions are much bigger than the prime material, and had little to no need to cooperate with each other in order to ensure victory over the prime material plane. If that's the case then the stalemate doesn't make a whole lot of sense without multiplying factors. Are they perhaps fighting each other in many almost-defeated dominions similar to the prime material? Are there other afterlife-themed dominions out there that they are contending with in very different sorts of wars?

Essentially, your problem is that you're conflating "Prime Material" with "Campaign World", and that's not a completely accurate comparison.

"The World" is the setting of the game - it's a single planet. "The Prime Material Plane" is the entire universe in which that planet resides. Conquering the world does not mean you're conquering the universe, do you follow me?

But, that said, you have stumbled across the right of it: this world is one front in a vast, plane-spanning, multi-planet-involving conflict. If the Paradiso/Infernum is WW2, then this entire planet is just the African Front; strategically important, but not "Siege of Berlin" important, if you understand me?