This was going to be a midweek update, but I realized it was going to be a lot of reading. Like, super a lot of reading and I'm sorry. The nature of an example showcase means you're gonna have to read the whole Terra Prime setting, and THEN come back to read my developer commentary. There's not really a way around it, since I want to keep this all to one post. In addition, I wanted to make sure everyone knows that our 100 series on Setting Creation isn't going to have any sort of strict schedule, unlike Villains which all came out about the same time. Settings are a lot more deep than a single villain is, and thus advice is going to take longer to express properly.
So without further adieu, you now have to go to Pastebin to read the Terra Prime basic setting info. This is because that, until I'm a hundred percent finished with the setting, this pastebin link will always have the current version. It's much easier than having to continually post new links to the packet.
http://pastebin.com/wiNaW3ht
Hi. You back yet? Yeah, I wrote way more than I intended and it's not even done. I left out major country info(there's a LOT to write, way more than I put in the packet), only closely defined one continent, and haven't done organizations... but this is good enough to start. You could run a game with just this. I'm gonna go section by section and discuss reasons and inspirations.
Preamble: History and Basic Stuff
My primary inspiration for Terra Prime is an old 80s cartoon called Thundarr the Barbarian. It's not very good, honestly. It was pretty obviously derivative of everything around it, with a character obviously ripped right from Star Wars(Ookla the Mok? More like Ookbacca the mock Wookie) and the main character, Thundarr himself, being a pretty stock He-Man slash Conan barbarian type. Still, it's got some good ideas.
One of the show's primary tropes is that the trio will run across some ruin of the past, and Princess Ariel will explain it. Thundarr will make a really poor attempt at saying the word like he's a complete idiot(SUB.....WAY?), and they'll generally move on. Completely separated from the stock characters Thundarr uses, I love this little moment. While I'm building a fantasy game, I think it's cool for the ancient ruins and dungeons to be vestiges of the modern world instead of just places that are old. The goal is for the game to play exactly the same, though. With Thundarr as a base you could easily go into an outright sci-fi game and be more faithful to the show, but I think it's more approachable if the ruins of the "modern" world are used as a backdrop to a fantasy game.
This also gives me the right to pull things from other D20 books. Aethera when it's done, D20 Modern, Pathfinder's own cybernetics book, and Star Wars D20 can all have little tidbits and pieces of equipment to slide to the players. It's possible for a place or thing to be preserved, or even thriving. With 500 or more years since the apocalypse AND magic being introduced into the world, a GM could even be justified introducing some sort of blaster pistol or other wild technology. I like this kind of freedom.
As for Geography, I am wantonly cheating. I am not the best with map generation, and Terra Prime means I can pull real world maps into Gimp and alter them to my satisfaction. Parts of the world are wildly different geography, such as the American Southwest desert now extending as far as the southern tip of British Columbia or the rainforest reclaiming virtually all of South America. These changes can be reflected easily by manipulating a current map of Earth. I am shit with maps, and this is a positive side-effect of my setting choice.
The Apocalypse
The flashpoint of the apocalyptic event being a dimensional accident is half inspired by Rift, and half inspired by Lovecraft. I always liked the idea that our world is only boring because no outsiders or dimensional travelers have ever come here, like one little thing would call attention to us and blow the lid off everything. So in Terra Prime, that's basically what happened. A portal to the Abyss was accidentally opened, and our non-magic world basically has no way of dealing with it. Things go down hill from there: Celestials show up and see Earth simply as another battlefield, and Infernals show up to troll everyone. I'll go more into the various outsiders in their own sections.
I also wanted to give Mankind the last laugh to cement that this world isn't under anyone's thumb. Just like we had no response to magical beings, neither did these magical beings have a response to advanced science: The atomic bomb. Every nuke being launched also means a GM never has to bring these up in their game if he doesn't want to: He can simply say they're all gone, used in the war. That's a minor theme in this setting, actually: The GM shouldn't ever feel forced to drop artifacts from the past into the PC's hands. It's listed as "five hundred years, or more" so the GM can declare it's been way longer if he wants. I feel that NEVER bringing up the world's past would be a disservice to the setting, but they ought to have the freedom to do so.
The World Today
This section is super simple. It's only there to assure a reader that this is a more typical setting than they might think from reading the background. There's orcs and wizards and catoblepases and flesh golems. The setting is fantasy with a minor apocalyptic backdrop. This is also to express again that this isn't a setting under the militant thumb of outsiders. They're still kicking around, but Terra Prime isn't the valuable battlefield it was before.
The Citadels
These are pretty straightforward so I'm also going to go into some of the basic theory behind the outsiders and their influence. The citadels in general are pretty obviously the major, super-important places of the world. Major world players live inside. ANYTHING could be inside. It could be a super high level dungeon. It could be the final battlefield of the players protecting the world from another resurgence of war. They represent a lot of potential as well as show marks of the old world without having to resort to places literally being preserved everywhere. Even despite that, I DO use that trope twice. Separation will be by outsider, not individual citadel.
There's really two directions you can go with demons. The main characteristic is that they're uncaring. Here we see that taken to two logical extremes: In New York, an entire city is frozen in abyssal obsidian just to make a battlefield and defensible position against their tower. I always imagine the tower slamming down like a giant nail into the middle of Central Park and radiating evil magic outward. In Japan, the chained palace represents the OTHER side of not giving a shit: Relentlessly torturing people with their whims. Things having more than one meaning and having to keep a "public face" up in Japanese culture is taken to an extreme by the demons mocking it.
As for celestials, I really, REALLY didn't want to associate them with Christianity too much. I didn't want them to be saviors, since in a lot of other Dungeons and Dragons settings, they take a very long view of the battle between good and evil. So, they show up in response to Demons attacking Earth and their primary concern is defeating the demons...with preservation of human life being an honest but secondary goal. Rumors of manipulation come from these Celestials NOT being the same as those who were mentioned in the Bible, not from any real effort to manipulate. They'd never even heard of Jesus Christ. The Celestials kept this quiet because they reasoned that it would cause more strife than it was worth. As for the Overgrown Cathedral itself, I wanted a "Garden of Eden, but you're being watched." vibe. In addition to that...yeah, it's pretty obvious that it's the White House, isn't it?
The Devils in my setting are a lot more coquettish and trollish than usual. They showed up to profit from the war, and their propensity for Nazi symbolism was not only an easy association with real evil, but it also serves as a clue that Devils had been clued in to Earth for a lot longer than the disaster. It was a deliberate effort to mock humanity by offering themselves as saviors while wearing Nazi trappings and using the Swastika as a symbol. Their use of Alpenfestung(a real place) as their major stronghold is a metaphor that suggests their true motives are very far away from what they're really saying because of its literal remote nature. I also can't help but love the idea of devils wearing sort of a uniform and aesthetic, like Erinyes wearing tight SS uniforms and looking like Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS or lemures appearing as ill-fated, half melted foot soldiers wearing gas masks.
Inevitables and the Brilliant Vaults. Yeah, I wanted there to be some influence of the past, and at least one place the players could go to see it all in action. The Inevitables are inspired by Brainiac and his ruthless goal of cataloging everything in the universe without care for its actual content. Their "mediocre programming" is also inspired by The Borg as well as old computers. Basically, some things don't make sense because they're preserving absolutely everything inside their 'borders' without intelligent thought. Their programming only goes so far, and the vast majority of the clockworks aren't actually very intelligent. There are cars seeing routine maintenance without thought to anyone ever driving them(or even a thought to where you'd get any gasoline), and vaults full of god knows what to entice the players into a dungeon dive that feels one half like a classic casino heist. Real Inevitables would have to be converted up from 3.X, but that's okay: There's only really three of them, and none of them are going to show up very often.
Civilization
Newark is pretty obviously inspired by the current coastal people of Maine and other areas. I like the idea that each area of the world is sort of...those people who always lived there, but boiled down and condensed. I also love the idea that there's a whole people out there who are really no-nonsense about monsters. The logical progression of that means they're known for being excellent hunters, since if you're not scared of them...you'd probably hunt them for their hide. THIS means that they may not trust magic very much and it may not be a very big pursuit in their country. This is a good example of that "building upon" thing I was talking about earlier.
The Pale Mountains. Normally I want the names to be kind of similar to or reminiscent of the past, but here there's a pretty obvious "new" genesis of a name. Goblinoid races would naturally gravitate toward mountainous and rocky areas, and the Appalachian mountains are perfect for that. It makes the area very dangerous in addition to simply not being a joy to travel by itself, so it's a perfect reason that North America is split into three distinct countries. I also wanted some distinctly wild, lawless areas to the world, so this and Death Valley serve that purpose.
Augustine is obviously named for Saint Augustine, for no good reason other than maybe whoever officially founded the country was from that city. Augustine is mostly the American South, so applying my "boiled down" philosophy I could've gone two different directions: I could have gone negative and made them harshly xenophobic slave-holders. I didn't like that idea. So I went with the positive traits of being Southern and made them gregarious, brave farmers and aggressively diplomatic. This is a pretty good "Shire" style area for a low level game to start in: Lush, mostly farmlands, people are generally nice, and monsters are gonna be dotted around the landscape instead of being a huge issue.
Another reason I didn't go with negative traits is that I wanted a big dictatorship right in the middle, somewhere a GM could run a game more focused on cities and dealing with the Government. So, La Republica exists. The idea is that influence slowly pushed up from Mexico, so the state has major trappings and flavor from that country. The fact that they use necromancers and revere symbols of the dead is a pretty obvious reference to Day of the Dead, and even their leader is a reference to Day of the Dead symbolism herself. I love the idea of a whole country being run by a Lich who's not THAT evil but also remembers the Three Fingered War. You could interpret her iron fist as a strong desire to prevent something like that happening.
So now that it's obvious that I kinda wanted to present a lot of different areas to run a game in. I didn't want it to seem like Disneyland, but I think I failed a tiny bit in that. Death Valley is a lawless area full of raiders and treasure hunters that you could run a more "Wild West" style game in. I love the idea of raiders being failed treasure hunters who end up walking around Las Vegas, seeing the ads and clothing displays and things and going off to emulate them. So you can see dudes who've built fantasy style pastiche, like dudes who look like greasers riding horses, with smoked glass "sunglasses", pompadour hairstyles and leather armor looking suspiciously like biker jackets. Another tribe might be cribbing all of their style from old advertisements of Cirque du Soleil and their leftover, preserved costumes. If you can make that sound cool, that is.
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So, final thoughts. I don't know how helpful this really was, but sometimes I understand something a lot better after seeing the creator's point of view and inspirations. There's also a lot I've left out of Terra Prime: I haven't done a single organization, any custom race templates or suggestions...I could really expand on each country and give a ton of info...and in the future I likely will. As I do so hopefully I can line it up with discussing each of these things in tandem. But I'm shit at organization so, y'know. Don't hold your breath too badly.
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