Dark Forests and Misty Swamps - Eldritch Secrets inspired by Northeast Europe

[Yora]

Groups and Factions (First Draft)

Factions are the fuel that makes a setting run. The map is not the territory, and the geography does not make a setting. Think of any setting from fiction you find really memorable and which makes you want to see other adventures of other heroes in it, or even play your own heroes in it. It's not because of the places, the monsters, or the magic that it seems like a great place to revisit again and again, but because of the various different groups that populate it, and most importantly fight over it.
So far I got a couple of general ideas who the main factions of the setting will be, but as you see they aren't far from finished yet. I also always want to have some more, but 8 is actually more than you'll find in most worlds from books, movies, and videogames, so I don't think it would be bad if it stays at this for the time being.

Southern Church
The priests of the nine gods are a very powerful group in the Southlands. Most
Ash People and Stone People follow this faith and all the larger cities in the south have a high priest who is among the most powerful political leaders, or even the lord of an entire rural domain. In theory, the group is rules by a council of high priests that meets irregularly, but in practice their loyalty lies with their cities (though not necessarily their leaders) and it's not uncommon for priests to be fighting on both sides in a war. The high priests each maintain very well trained armies of both warrior monks and regular soldiers.

Northern Church
Unlike the priests in the south, the priests of the Northlands have no strict hierarchy and have no true overall organization. Priests of a city or domain are often well connected with each other, but officially there are no high priests who have authority over other temples within a region. The head priest of each temple is mostly independent in their clerical role, but is in many ways an ordinary subject of the local lord. In practice most priests enjoy great previleges, and some temples hold large stretches of land that make them equal to nobles of lower ranks.

Moon Knights
The Moon Knights are an order of monks who follow the northern faith and as such are a fully independent organization. The actual monks make up only a tenth of their forces who mostly consist of common soldiers from the lands owned by the order. Monasteries of the order are treated very similar to small baronies by the lords in whose domain they are located, as they are widely scattered throughout most of the Northlands. While the knights do swear loyalty to their local lords, they are also ruled by the grand master, a fact that sits quite uneasy with most lords.
The order is dedicated to the protection of the common people from evil magic and they fight sorcerers and evil spirits and seek to find dangerous artifacts and destroy them. This makes them quite unpopular with witches and wilders, though most of them are quite reasonable in their judgement of what magic poses a real threat.

Wilders
Wilders are the worshippers of powerful gods of the land they live on and who generally care little for the nine gods. In their view the nine gods are too distant and unresponsive to be any real help, while the gods of the land can be visited in their lairs and appealed to directly, and they take immediate action if so inclined. Wilder priests are witches, which makes their magic quite different to that of the priests of the nine. Wilders are commonly found in the borderlands where powerful spirits have a much greater presence and staying on good terms with them is a very pressing concern.
They are generally not on good terms with the Moon Knights and the Southern Church, who are regularly suspecting them of evil magic. The Deer People are one very prominent group of wilders, though many of them still revere the nine gods alongside the wild spirits.

Fog Witches
Among the Fog People, the witches form a very powerful priesthood that is organized more like the priests of the nine than the usually fully independent wilder priests. In most clans the witches are more powerful than the chiefs, though generally they keep out of everyday affairs and raids for treasure. However, when a witch demands an end to fighting or raids, they overrule the chiefs and can command them to send warriors on missions for them.

Sorcerers
The Sorcerers are not a formal organization but rather arcanists from the various noble families of one of the southern cities. Sorcery is not commonly practice openly, but within the city they are established well enough to be out of reach of the Southern Church. Their loyalties lie with their families and some of them are lords themselves, but all of them are connected in a very complex web of alliances and conspiracies. Most of them leave the everyday business and political work to other members of their families while they are focusing their own effort on the search of arcane tomes and artifacts all over the continent. While they rarely go after them in person, their agent can be found almost anywhere, often in the company of bodyguards and mercenaries. For the sorcerers, money is not an issue when it comes to the pursuit of magical knowledge. As generally is moral reservations.

Merchant Lords
The Merchant Lords are a loose organization of merchants from the northern port cities that is much more an informal network of contacts than any kind of real guild. Almost all of the wealthiest merchants belong to the group and most of the smallet ones are closely connected and dependant on one of them. They often band together to keep newcomers from entering the very lucrative markets under their almost complete control, but they are still very competitive towards each other, though it often is on friendly terms.
The merchant lords don't spend all their days in their kontors and council halls pouring over ledgers and counting their coins. They also take a very active role when it comes to protecting their business interests. If needed with steel. To most people, merchant lords are set apart from regular small merchants by maintaining their own permanent mercenary armies. While these are good enough for guarding kontors and dealing with brigands and pirates, merchant lords are often looking out further when they need to deal with witches and spirits that interfere with their business.

Underworld Lords
While the power and influence of the merchant lords is much smaller in the Southlands, where trade is mostly in the hands of noble families, there exist another network of much darker reputation. Where there is little money to be made as an independant merchants, commoners looking for great wealth often turn towards smuggling. While smuggling only hurts the purses of the nobles, the dangerous work tends to attract mostly people of the ruthless kind and many of them are also involved in many other criminal activities. Publically most underworld lords present themselves as merchants of modest wealth, though a good number of the also comes from the lower ranks of the nobility. As expert smugglers, the underworld lords are often in contact with sorcerers and wilders, which puts them in direct conflict with the Southern Church and the Moon Knights.

[Yora]

I've realized that recently I have not been feeling really enthusiastic about working on the setting and looking forward to seeing it in action. The last really cool thing where the 50 Cool Things two weeks ago.
I think I found out why that is and how to fix that.

The Problems
The first thing is that I took the idea of using a lot of elements from medieval Northeast Europe and it turned into something more like taking medieval Northwest Europe and adding fantasy elements to it. While I am a huge fan of The Witcher and Dark Souls, the medieval design isn't really one of the things I love about them. The style that I really love is that of Planescape, Dark Sun, Morrowind, Star Wars, and evrything deawn by Moebius. Worlds that feel very alien and often somewhat surreal. Worlds that are more about representing ideals instead of realism.

The other thing is that I'm not really a fan of treasure hunting. What I really love is exploring magical places, but the material stuff you carry out of them doesn't do much for me. It's just such a central element in Sword & Sorcery and wuxia and a standard assumption in most RPGs, but the whole point of starting a new setting was to make something suited for more noir-style stories and adventures. Changing from gold to artifacts didn't really do the trick.

How to fix it
With that in mind, I think I want to take the setting into a more alien and high magic direction instead of making it Earth-like and low magic. This mostly doesn't actually change the things that I've already described here. The map remains the same, the people remain the same, and the factions remain the same. The magic system of priests, witches, and sorcerers and magical knowledge leading to loss of humanity probably will also remain the same. I will also stick to my plan on using Baltic, Finnish, Mongol, and Greek sounding names and have the trade networks be modeled after the Baltic Sea. And of course, it remains a temperate to cold region of forests with lots of swamps and heaths, full with dangerous and powerful spirits.

What changes will probably be the nature of the eldritch wilderness and also of the civilized lands. So far I had been working with the concept of Corelands, Borderlands, and the Weird, based on the assumption of a very medieval Earth-like setting. But it doesn't make much sense in an alien high magic world. Instead, I found some good guidance looking back into the introduction of the Planescape setting. Planescape is also about exploring wonderous places and collecting valuable stuff there, but it is meant to be so much more than a dungeon crawl treasure hunt. In Planescape, things are intended to get a much deeper meaning and provide more complex motivations by relying on the central theme that belief changes the environment. The factions have their ideological conflicts because each of them tries to make the universe work the way they think it should work and the only reason it doesn't is because other people still believe that it works differently. This reminded me of my earlier but then discarded idea of powerful immortal sorcerer kings using their supernatural powers to create areas within the otherwise chaotic and dangerous wilderness where advanced civilization can develop and be sustained, protected from the wims of spirits and wild gods.

Now instead of giving this power to immortal sorcerer kings, I want to adapt the idea from planescape that belief can change the environment. Not so much that reality fundamentally changes because people believe it, but to make it so that magic can have meaningful effects over large areas that will affect the environment in a wide range of ways. Usually an area is influenced by the gods of the land, but many priests, witches, and sorcerers working together can subtly change it through complex rituals and the construction of great magical monuments. These are the occult societies like the Sorcerer Lords, the Moon Knights, or the Fog Witches, and of course the Northern and Southern Churches. All their plotting and hunting for magical tomes is not just for knowledge or for power, but it's a permanent struggle to preserve and strengthen the societies of their homelands, and there are always those who wish to change them to be closer to their own ideals. Ultimately, all the plots and fights are about protecting their way of life or creating a better world. It's not the ulta-lowest common denominator of the entire existance of the world being threatened by a great evil that wants only to end all life. But it's still as important a long-term motivation for the factions as it can get. The players' involvement in their affairs will matter a great deal to large numbers of people.

What is very important to me with this idea is to keep it all very subtle and mystical. The supernatural world is not a machine with dials to be turned and leavers to be switched. The goal is to weaken the influence of some spirit and to manipulate others. Magical constructions are not about building magitech devices, but about building temples from which priests project their divine powers, errecting shrines to claim spiritual ownership over a place, and to slowly enchant the waters of a lake to become a source of magical power that increases the strength of sorcerers near its shores.

Adding Theme
Another thing that seems appropriate to mention here, as it's closely related and derives from these thoughts, is the subject of theme. A problem with my Sword & Sorcery setting was that I always had difficulties with making things feel meaningful and not just simple action fun. I really like Conan and Kane, but their philosophical concerns never felt like they could be applicable to a game of people playing together with limited time. They are much too brooding and inside looking. All my favorite stories that seem meaningful to me and where the problem requires direct action fall more into the Neo-Noir style. Stories that I find the most interesting are about failure and defeat, and comin to terms with the truth that in reality people are not heroe who can accomplish everything they want because they are determined. The most important questions are always how much you feel you need to accomplish and how much you are willing to give to accomplish it. And not the cliche of "I would give everything and will do anything it takes!" and then winning without actually having to pay anything for it.
I also have a bit of a fascination with prophecies, but really don't like it when it predetermines the outcome and removes all tension, or when the meaning can only be deciphered after it already happened. A nice solution I found for this is to have divinations only tell the characters whose paths they will cross if they stay on the path they are currently on, and whether this fated meeting will lead to valuable help or to a confrontation. It can predict when a decisive moment will happen, but not determine the specific outcome. Yoda tells Luke Skywalker that he will have to face Darth Vader, and he already knows this to be true. But neither of them can tell what will happen when he does.
Now when you combine these two things with a setting in which powerful factions try to subtly alter the fate of whole region, a very strong theme emerges: Considering the consequences of your actions. Which is an important element in Noir. And which also happens to be a central theme in The Witcher. When you are a poweful warrior or sorcerer, your actions can have very large consequences. You can not simply charge into a place and destroy the evil and except that this nicely wraps everything up and will be happy ever after. This is what happens in a simple adventure story, but it's not how things work in reality. Not ignoring the fact that sometimes things don't go as planned and then having to find ways to deal with the consequences as best as they can is something that I feel adds a great deal of depth and meaning to a story.

[Yora]

The Magical Environment
My original idea was to have the strength of magical forces change over time in different areas, so that the people living in them often have to move every several hundred years as some places become ininhabitable while others open up for settlement. Which is a fun idea, but the various competing occult societies that I want to include get a lot more room to actually do things when the changes in the magical environment are not inevitable but can be controlled through magic, at least to some extend. Now their arcane and esoteric searches are no longer a simple quest for knowledge or personal power, but become a very important part in preserving the lands and societies in which they live and to spread the influence of their ideals and values.

The main way to maintain or change the effects of supernatural forces on the environment and the people is to control or manipulate the spirits that are inhabiting the land. This can be done through building temples and shrines to the faith of the Nine Gods, by bringing offerings and sacrifices to the Gods of the Land, by taking control of sites that form natural conduits of magical energies, or by binding and enslaving powerful spirits.

The resulting effects on the environment are somewhat different from place to place, but generally the environment falls into a handful of quite distinct categories:
Settled Lands are regions where the influence of spirits is greatly reduced and they rarely appear to people and mostly leave them alone. Instead the weather and the health of the fields and animals is made favorable for farmers through the influence of high priests and sorcerer kings.
Wild Lands are places where the spirits are at their full power and do entirely as they please. These are by far the most widespread and are considered by many the natural state of the world. Weather can be quite unpredictable and wild animals more agressive or abundant, and floods and earthquakes are much more common. But wild Lands also have many places of great magical power, such as caves that grant visions of the past or future or springs with healing waters.
In addition to these, there are also Dark Lands where the spirits have been corrupted by chaotic energies from Beyond and the animals are sickly and the land dying. Some are haunted by the undead while others are covered in patches of life draining energies or horrific visions that destroy the mind. Many suspect that Dark Lands are caused only by great sorcerous rituals and don't occure naturally.

Factions (Second Draft)

Southern Temples
The Southern Temples worship the Nine Gods and have very great influence over the Southlands south of the mountains. They are a very hierarchical organization led by three archbishops in the largest cities and dozens of bishops in the rural areas surrounding them. In the lands controlled by the Southern Temples, spirits tend to be rare and stay out of sight of the people, being found mostly in remote woodlands and hills. The society that the bishops promote consists of priests at the top, who also serve as the ruling class, with numerous noble families below them that each own large stretches of farmlands that is worked by their serfs. Most nobles live in great villas in the center of the land from which they administrate their holdings, but many families whose lands lie near cities also have city mansions that serve as their real seats of power for those who are active in trading. Anyone can become a priest, but only nobles ever get elected to be bishops.
(This is losely based on medieval Italy.)

Northern Temples
The Northern Temples also worship the Nine Gods, but are very differently organized and preach a much different form of society. Priests of the Northern Temples are very independent and have no official leadership governing them. In the same way, the lands controlled by them consists mostly of countless small farming villages and market towns. In theory, all men are free, but in practice there exists a great difference in wealth and power between the smallholder and the great landowners. Smallholders often rent much or all of their land from the great landowners who get some of their crops in return and usually get very wealthy that way. While everyone is allowed to vote for leaders in an assembly, positions always go to great landowners who effectively constitute the nobility of the north. The nobles have a great interest in protecting their lands and their rent paying tennants and they also have the means to equip considerable numbers of soldiers in addition to the common militias. Very often the nobles of a region band together in an alliance to protect their shared lands from outside threats, forming considerable domains led by elected leaders. The same kind of organization is found in cities and many large towns, though here the power usually lies with the wealthy merchants. Temples often own some land as well, which in some cases can be quite substential. They largely support themselves trough rent paid by the farmers who work their land but also frequently recieve great donations from noble families.
Priests of the Northern Temples attempt to maintain peace and harmony with the spirits that inhabit the land. While the Nine Gods are worshiped as protectors and guides, the minor spirits of the land are often aknowledged with little offerings or small gestures of gratitude for not causing any mischief. Priests try to avoid causing conflict with spirits and aim to calm their anger rather than defeating and subjugating those that are causing trouble.
(This society takes concepts from Iceland and Switzerland.)

Moon Knights
The Moon Knights consider themselves to be part of the Northern Temples and their shrines and rituals are very much the same. However, they have taken to a much more strong handed approach to deal with troublesome spirits and members from rival factions that are trying to spread their influence in their lands. While the full knights are all priests of the Nine Gods, most of them see themselves as soldiers first, just like the much larger numbers of men at arms who are serving under them. They are much more likely to try to forcefully subjugate troublesome spirits and sometimes declare war on rival factions that are trying to gain influence within their territories. Many consider the Moon Knights to be much more similar to the Southern Temples in their approach to the supernatural.
Landmasters of the Moon Knights never swear allegiance to any confederation of landowners and consider their monasteries and lands part of a distinct domain that is scattered in small territories throughout the Northlands. Their only lord is the High Master in the Great Monastery,
(Obviously modeled after the Teutonic Order.)

Independent Sorcerers
Sorcerers are studying the arcane powers of the chaos from the Beyond, which they regard as a source of much greater potential than the natural spirit energies of the land that witches and priests draw from. Sorcery is capable of much greater things and can take control of the surrounding environment at a much greater degree. However, it also has the potential to cause incredible damage and led to the creation of many Dark Lands. Sorcerers are opposed by almost all the other factions and as such practice their studies mostly in remote places hidden from sight.

Sorcerer Lords
The Sorcerer Lords control one of the three great citires of the Southlands, even though it is nominally the domain of an archbishop of the Southern Temples. Most of the sorcerers are fairly independent, but the most powerful of them are cooperating to increase the strength of a very powerful nexus of magical energies that is located within a lake on top of the cliffs that rise over the city. Their common goal is to establish complete control over the environment surrounding the city to greatly benefit the noble families from which almost all of them come and in which they hold various position of great power and influence.

Spirit Cults
Spirit Cults are numerous small communities that don't follow the Nine Gods and instead worship the various gods of the lands they live on. They are as diverse as the minor gods they worship, but none of them appprove of any of the other factions' attempts to ursup the rule of the lands from the spirits. They value a simple life of subsistence farming in small clearings in the forests and are most commonly organized in clans. Many of them are truly independent and freely live their lives as they wish to, but a large number of cults can also be found on the borders of lands that are nominally claimed by the Temples of the Nine Gods or the Sorcerer Lords. Some cults also exist in some of the less densely populated and more forested areas deep inside their territories where the worshipers practice their religion entirely in secret. The Southern Temples and the Moon Knights look very unkindly on such practices and regard them as attempts to destroy their society.

Fog Witches
The Fog Witches are a spirit cult that has almost complete control over the barbarian tribes of the Fog People in the far Northwest. Their main concern appears to be primarily to protect their own interest and maintain their near unlimited power within the tribes. The marshes are a rather inhospitable place but the witches have very little interest in changing that. The current situation benefits them greatly and they would very much want to keep it that way. The spirits of the marshes are quite agressive to outsiders and it's only the power of the witches that keeps their own people safe from them.

Wild Monks
The Wild Monks are a relatively small and widely scattered order of mystics who have devoted themselves to protecting the common people from hostile spirits and harmful magic. In many ways their goals are smiliar to those of the Northern Temples but worship of the Nine Gods plays no role in their ideals. Their central virtue is a universal respect and compassion for all people and things. Quite importantly, the monks own no lands or have any allegiances to any lords, which allows them a much greater degree of freedom in their actions than even the most compassionate priests of the Nine Gods can afford. As a result, wild monks are often seen as troublemakers, particularly by nobles and landowners who often benefit from conditions that are disadvantageous to their tennants. They also have very little hesitance to interfere with anyone's attempt to manipulate spirits for ulterior motives. Wild monks often travel the lands as poor wanderers, but many of them are skilled fighters and all of them have magical knowledge.

In theory, PCs could belong to any of these factions, though in practice many of them wouldn't cooperate well in the same party.

[Yora]

A New Draft for Magic and Religion

I always want to do more with magic than it simply being there and wizards casting spells as if it's a simple science. For me it also needs a mystical element that waves it into the nature and origin of all reality. To come up with something for this setting, I looked at what the primary role of supernatural forces in the world would be. Which clearly is the effect of different regions becoming more or less magical or magically corrupted and this affecting how civilizations develop and decline. There are also gods of the land that have some control over it, and priests and sorcerers who want to take that control for themselves. The casting of spells by mages as a weapon or to do useful things is still very much a secondary thing in the worldbuilding and I don't have any real plans for how that should look yet. So I've been looking at magic as a divine and natural force first and build a metaphysic model for the world first.

Magical energy is both the source of the life force in all living things and the power behind all natural forces. It's the energy of earthquakes, volcanoes, and storms, and as such also governs flooding, droughts, avalanches, and wildfires. In its primordial state the world is raw Chaos, just the basic elements without any structure and order. It is the will of spirits that makes the primordial chaos take form and give it structure. All the lands exist because they are given shape by the Gods of the Land. There are countless spirits of greatly different power, but they all together form the environment that exists around them.

In the natural order of things, mortals are not the masters of the world, not do they have any preferential position in it compared to all the animals they share it with. The untamed wilds are a place that is harsh and dangerous and full of things much more powrful than people. But mortals always have the desire to shape the environment around them to be less dangerous for them and provide them with more prosperity. The oldest form of such attempts is Witchcraft, the practice of appealing directly to individual spirits of great power whose influence over the land can make an important difference to the farmers and hunters and their villages.

At some point Witchcraft was surpassed in many places by Theurgy. Instead of appealing directly to numerous indivdual spirits of the land, priests began to pray to greater gods of much greater power and far wider influence. In the End, two cults became dominant that worship gods that have become known to be sympathetic to the plights of mortals and responsive to their pleas. Nine in the North and Seven in the South. (Six of which are identical.) Their ability to influence the natural world is tied to the faith of the people who inhabit the lands and as such the building of temples and the performance of rituals is a very important element of society. The true power of the gods is found only where the faithful take it, while at the same time abandonment of the Gods of the Land diminishes their influence and power to cause disasters and other calamities that are cause of suffering for mortals.

But it is the nature of mortals to always seek to improve their lot and gain power that rivals that of the gods. All the prayers and rituals of the priests have their limitations and they are unable to make all the beneficial changes to the environment that are possible. Some think they know better than the gods what mortals really need and developed the art of Sorcery. Sorcery attempts to gain the powers of the spirits and reshape the surrounding world to provide greater prosperity, wealth, and security. However, the natural world is a fragile thing and witches and priests are both in full agreement that it should be left in the hands of the gods to reshape the lands to the greater benefit of their worshippers. Sorcery has achieved a number of marvelous wonders, but much more prominent in the minds of most people are the many disastrous catastrophies that turned whole lands into barren wastelands or regions haunted by nightmares. Except for a few places, Sorcery is feared in all lands, and in many places ruthlessly exterminanted by both priests and witches where discovered.

In the present day, worship of the Nine Gods and the Seven Gods is the dominant religion in allmost all settled lands. But Witchcraft snd the worship of Gods of the Land is still practiced in many border regions and isolated settlements that have almost no contact with the great cities that are the centers of Theurgy.

[Max_Killjoy]

I'm loving this so far, having done a quick read-through.

Seeing some elements that remind me of one or the other of the fantasy settings I'm working on. Interesting note -- by complete coincidence, in one of my settings (the one I've pretty much not posted about here until the thread I just put up), the various "races" are called "Peoples" in at least one of the languages. The Storm People, The Sun People, The Moon People, etc.

I will try to dig into the posts you've made so far, do a detailed read, and see if I can offer anything constructive.

(Admitted worldbuilding addict here.)

[Yora]

I got quite a long list of pretty clear ideas for cities and major dungeons. But without proper names for them I always feel like listing them with placeholder names gets too confusing to all at once, and it becomes further confused when I later give them names.
Think I will have to sit down and tackle this during the weekend.

[Max_Killjoy]

One of the ways I come up with place names is to pick a real language that feels right for the area or culture, and then put words that fit the place into Google translate from English to that language, until I find something that I like the sound of, sometimes tweaking it to my liking.

The "feel" of the name as a word fits the area and culture, you get consistent-sounding names for the area and culture, and fits the way that many names in foreign languages have meanings that are quite straightforward once translated.

[Yora]

I already made a list of Finnish, Estonian, Lithuanian, and Greek names to have a reference for how actual names from the same origin sound like. I plan to do Mongol and Slavic as well.
Doing the same thing for place names is an interesting option. Maybe not necessary for just twelve cities, but it should pay off in the long run when you have to come up with village names regularly and often at short notice.

Though I always think the results are somewhat hilarious when people try to do it with German sounding names.