Urban Dungeon Delving On An Abandoned Continent

[Jonagel]

At a glance, I think your explanation holds up -- especially as it addresses the "Why" from Lleban's post from so many perspectives. It gives you flexibility to lean more towards one explanation or another depending on questions from the PCs (or depending on how you want other continents/nations to have developed).

The only worry I have, is it makes it sound like the Humans (like always?) were the best, most efficient, most powerful, etc. That said, it clearly didn't work out for them given they're all gone!

Something worth considering:
- If city states had banned together, they sound like they could have waged very successful wars against nations on other continents.
- Clearly, other city state groups would oppose this to keep a balance of power on Euborea
- Eventually, a network of at least 50% of the city states should have formed though...they could conquer the other city states or they could conquer a kingdom across the seas without repercussion
- To counter all of the above, I would think major interest groups (Religions, Nations, Kingdoms, etc.) would have allied themselves with different city states in a bid to ensure the city states never really could unify. Kind of like keeping the Holy Roman Empire's states broken up because fully unified as Germany they became extremely powerful? This could have been mundane alliance weaving, or a more global secretive web among foreign kings and patriarchs to keep humanity from reforming that ancient Magic Kingdom again?

More food for thought! =D

[Steel Mirror]

The only worry I have, is it makes it sound like the Humans (like always?) were the best, most efficient, most powerful, etc. That said, it clearly didn't work out for them given they're all gone!

Yeah, I don't intend that to be the case, but I can see that being the impression. Part of it I'm sure is that I haven't really said much of anything about the other nations.

The giant nation, for instance, is going to be extremely regimented and stratified. I'm going with inspiration based on the Roman/Chinese Empires, with a heavy dash of a caste system based on being a fire, hill, storm giant etc. The more magical the giant subtype, the higher up the caste, with Hill giants being essentially the Untouchables/slave caste. The highest caste (storm giants) are believed to be gods walking the earth, and their magic is divine power granted by destiny or karma. More powerful mages are powerful because they deserve to rule, and those without magic are simply paying off some karmic debt from a previous life. Some of these giants are powerful enough that they practically seem like forces of nature themselves, and for them crafting scrolls or magic clothes for those who can't use magic is just an alien concept.

The forest/fey nation is a crazy cosmopolitan melting pot of a dozen very different species who have integrated into a highly pluralistic ecotopian kind of republic. There, mages are seen kind of like a cross between doctors, astronauts, and pop stars. They are celebrities, they enjoy a lot of prestige, and they are also vital to the functioning of society. They are also very rare, and many more people train to be mages than ever turn out to be able to make a living at it. While they participate in lots of public works, defense, and research, there is always far more demand for their time than there is supply, so making magical trinkets, even magical weapons or armor, just isn't as economical as employing their talents to address a problem directly. Their magic is also more naturalistic, even the wizards, so if they do make a magic item it's more likely to be magical living wood boat that can steer itself through a city's canals, a bioluminescent tree that can double as a street lamp, or something like that. In any case, items that are a marked contrast to the consumerist type of commodity magic items produced in Euborea. And that's not to say either side is superior, too. Euborea probably would love to know more about how they create living wood vessels, while I can imagine that warriors of the republic appreciate how green and groovy their mages are but also wouldn't mind an enchanted sword or bow to take into battle.

I'll keep this simmering in the back of my mind for when I get around to writing blurbs on some of the other nations. I definitely want to avoid the human nation being just superior in magic to other nations, but I do want them to have a style and approach to magic that makes the other nations salivate at the chance to loot their cities.

- To counter all of the above, I would think major interest groups (Religions, Nations, Kingdoms, etc.) would have allied themselves with different city states in a bid to ensure the city states never really could unify. Kind of like keeping the Holy Roman Empire's states broken up because fully unified as Germany they became extremely powerful? This could have been mundane alliance weaving, or a more global secretive web among foreign kings and patriarchs to keep humanity from reforming that ancient Magic Kingdom again?

More food for thought! =D

Definitely all good food for thought. In fact, I can imagine that many humans would naturally jump to that sort of explanation for the Rapture: clearly the rest of the world feared how strong we would be united, and somehow they caused the Rapture to deal with it. Would certainly help feed the paranoia and extremism that I want to be festering in the Rekindlers' ranks. And now that you mention it, there probably would be enough surviving naval vessels from the various cities to form a formidable military force in its own right. Maybe they ended up as some of the good old fashioned pirates you mentioned earlier upthread?

[Lleban]

Interesting, so how much humanity was on the continent at the time of rapture. Depending on how dramatic you want the campaign to be you could easily have 2/3 or more of the human population vanished. That may be too dark though, but it will make the world feel more alien.

[Steel Mirror]

Interesting, so how much humanity was on the continent at the time of rapture. Depending on how dramatic you want the campaign to be you could easily have 2/3 or more of the human population vanished. That may be too dark though, but it will make the world feel more alien.

Yeah the operating number I was working with was closer to 90% of humans gone. That may come down somewhat, I'm probably not going to set it in stone, because I want to leave lots of wiggle room as to what the other realms are, and some of them may have significant human populations. But they would be serious minorities in any other country they are in, Euborea was the only continent where humans were the dominant race either by numbers or by culture.

[Steel Mirror]

The Fair Folk

"Not much to worry about from the Sidhe-oh shut up Lana, that's an old wive's tale, you can call 'em whatever you like. Anyway, the Sidhe are pushovers, they hate salt and iron, they can't lie, damn they can't even walk into a house 'less someone invites them in. And what kind of monumental moron would willingly ask one of those bloody creepshows to come 'round?"
- Elshra, Dragonborn Ranger

"Daddy, my friend says to tell you he can prove that he's real."
- Twyla, 6 years old



So as I was writing up some more ideas on the setting, I kept thinking that I should add some kind of ancient evil to the world. Basically, the boogeymen of the setting. So I thought, why not literal boogeymen?

In this setting, the Sidhe take on the space often filled by demons and devils in D&D games. They are alien creatures who hunger for mortal souls, and the capital E Evil of at least one major world religion. Their one way into our world is to make deals with a mortal, which they are constantly trying to do; and all it takes to let one in is an invitation. Once they do cross over, the consequences tend to be nightmarish.

The Sidhe (or the Fair Folk, or the Old Ones) are NOT the same thing as faeries and fey in this world. If they are related, it's distantly and the two groups do NOT get along. The Fair Folk are alien, from Outside, and they want to subvert or possibly rule or perhaps simply eat all of Creation. They're the monster in the closet, the shadow at the end of the street, the figure smiling at the edge of your mirror that isn't there when you turn around.



The fey/faeries are nature spirits that embody and preserve nature. They might clash with mortals from time to time, may occasionally seem more like predators or forces of nature than fellow sapient beings, but at the end of the day the faeries fit into the same natural world the mortal races inhabit. The Fair Folk simply don't.

Just like in a lot of mythology, there is a link between elves and the Fair Folk. Legend has it that the elves are responsible for letting the first of the Fair Folk into the World through some ancient meddling with occult experiments into other planes of existence. Some even blame the collapse of the ancient elven empires on a deal with the Queen of the Sidhe. Regardless of the truth of these legends, the more intelligent (at least the more comprehensible to mortal thought) of the Sidhe tend to wear guises that appear elven (though always a bit "off"), possibly due to this ancient history.



It is at least true that Sidhe are found more often in elven lands than most anywhere else, and that the religion of the elves names the Sidhe as deceivers and irredeemable monsters that are to be fought at every turn. Paladins and clerics of the elves wear iron armor, carry iron weapons, and are trained in Sidhe's abilities and weaknesses. At times the elves have declared crusades in order to cleanse a region where the Sidhe have somehow gained a foothold by being invited in by foolish residents. Some of these crusades have killed far more of those residents than they have killed Sidhe.

So if you're still reading, thanks for sticking with me! To bring this all back to Euborea, I'm going to have the Sidhe moving in on the Euborea for some reason, not quite occupying the land because they aren't organized in that way, but having rumors of lots of the lesser types moving through the abandoned cities and dark shadows of the continent. They may be looking for something, or attracted to something, or maybe they had something to do with the Rapture. It's hard to tell with the Sidhe, but one thing that is obvious is the the elves have noticed and have begun landing holy warriors on the west side of the continent to combat them. The local Cardinal in charge is teetering on the edge of declaring another Crusade to root out the Sidhe, even though the rest of the nations are convinced it's just a power grab by the church to gain a foothold on the continent.

I'll be making a few sample monsters for some of the Sidhe pretty soon, since though they follow closely some pretty common archetypes for creatures that have inspired several other entries in the MM, I want to try something a little different for these guys and see how it turns out. In the meantime, if you have any thoughts at all, I'm always happy to hear them!

[Steel Mirror]

So my first post on the Sidhe was mostly things that your average person in the gameworld would know. I also want to mention some of the things going on with them behind the scenes to get some feedback from you friendly forum folk on what I have planned for some of the 'secrets' of the setting, which players will have the chance to uncover during the game.

Oh also I've decided to give up and let both the Sidhe and the various types of nature fey be called fey, to help limit confusion. Distinguishing between them is usually done by calling them Seelie and Unseelie, though the Sidhe still always refers to the creepy crawlie boogeymen variety. People stll call the natural kind fey or faeries or pixies or whatever.

Spoiler: I don't know why I'm spoilering this, I'm just weird about talking about things that are supposed to be in-game secrets

Show

The Ancient Elves & The Schism

So the elves really did cause the whole Sidhe problem, and they really are related to them. Back in the day, the elves had a very advanced empire which thrived using planar magic. They got mineral resources from earth planes, used planes of fire for energy, dumped their trash on uninhabited limbo type planes, etc.

As their empire grew in power and arrogance, some of their researchers theorized that time itself could be harnessed, crossed, even controlled using planar magic. Basically, by taking advantage of different rates of time flow in different planar demesnes, they could cobble together a time machine (think about all those internet discussions about how you can use relativity and FTL to send messages or people back in time).


So they decided to do just that, and created a vast interplanar mechanism that would make them masters over time itself. And it worked-sort of. The problem was, they never really solved the problem of paradoxes. The first trip back into the past changed something, which began propagating through time and threatened to undo the present. So the elves shut off the machine, stranding the researchers in the distant past, and thought that fixed the problem.

The Birth of the Sidhe

Unfortunately, instead of preventing the paradox, all they did was spin off an unstable parallel reality. Trapped in the past on a different leg of the trousers of time, the abandoned research team tried to find a way home. Over centuries (and elves do have such long lives), they lived among the locals and eventually shared their story, along with the knowledge that soon their reality would come to an end. Meanwhile the sun began to fade, the natural world began to wither and die, and the very laws of reality began to break down. The descendants of the researchers took on the family name of the head researcher, Sidhe. They were forced to adapt their forms to survive in their twilight reality (ancient elves were also quite the biomancers, and bred many of the magical creatures present in the world today), and the creatures of the fey around them warped and mutated as well.


Enemies of Reality

The Sidhe eventually realized that causality requires that one of the timelines be destroyed, but that they could save their own reality by destroying the prime timeline first. But with the time machine cut off, they couldn't cross over to the prime easily. So they were forced to infiltrate and insinuate, relying on invitations from unwary mortals in the prime to make the crossing.

There are some places where this Crossing is easiest. Mirrors are good, as those are places where people naturally are able to catch a glimpse of a reality that is ours, and yet isn't quite. Other places where reality is weak include places where mortals have frayed the edges of existence, for instance with repeated use of planar, teleportation, or summoning magic, and even places where misguided mortals have deliberately made sacrifices to catch the attention of the Fair Folk. Even then, crossing in such a way obliterates all but the most powerful minds, leaving most of the Sidhe who manage to enter the prime insane and prone to fixation on some specific warped version of the task they originally set out to accomplish.

The few Sidhe who manage the Crossing mostly sane, or who survive long enough on the Prime to recover their wits, form the nobility of the Unseelie Court. They do their best to marshal their forces on the prime, with the end goal of destabilizing reality enough to leave their timeline as the sole survivor. Because of the nature of their reality and its birth by paradox feedback in a time machine, time doesn't move in their reality as it does in the prime, and for some Sidhe it's been untold eons since the Schism while other Sidhe nobles recall the event as though it were fresh in their past.

The Modern Elven Church

Most elves have no inkling of this history. A version of the story survives in the highest echelons of the Church, but even there the truth of the tale has been twisted and massaged to cast the Sidhe and their kind as the unmistakable aggressors. The Church sees the Sidhe as both an implacable enemy of all Creation as well as a punishment for mortal hubris, and is downright fanatical about purging all the Sidhe from reality. They ruthlessly suppress any information about the Sidhe carrying bloodlines from ancient elven archmages as well, as the elven church also venerates their ancestors and would be shaken to its core if that link were ever to be proven. So to elves at large, the Sidhe are simply demons who want nothing but evil, and were simply created by the elven creator deities as the necessary darkness against which the forces of light must prove their worthiness.

So that's another dump of info for you, thanks a ton for reading. I'm really hoping for some feedback on these ideas, they are still only partially baked but I'm liking what I have so far. I'm not necessarily going to have these guys be the main Big Bads for the game, if it even ends up having an epic Big Bad type structure, but it certainly seems like it could be an interesting enemy to cross paths with a few times, and one with more going on behind their insane evil trickster/boogeymen appearance than it might seem at first.

[Lleban]

So the Sidhe /(unseliee Fey) are gonna be recurring baddies coming to the continent. Since they seem so linked to the elves do you think there may be a wider Human/elf conflict to reclaim Euborea. I'd really be interested in seeing some monster concepts though.

[Jonagel]

Hey Steel Mirror! 5 months later, and I think I'm going to try my hand at a campaign based loosely on this idea.

If you've had any progress, new ideas, etc. in the meantime, it'd be great to hear about them!