New Fantasy Setting Seeds.

[SilvercatMoonpaw]

We have ones for Realities (Alternate Earths) and Sci-fi. I think it's time for a Fantasy one.

What exactly constitutes a "Fantasy" setting I'll leave up to the individual posters. At most I'll point out that there are already threads for Alternate Earths and Speculative Science, so "Fantasy" is probably something that can't fit on either of those (or needs yet another thread dedicated to it).

[David Johnston2]

The Celestial Tower is a ziggurat-styled edifice which at its base has a radius of one kilometre. Each successive "step" in the tower is 10 meters tall and has a radius 10 meters narrower than the previous step meaning the tower is also 1 kilometre tall and consists of 100 levels. Obviously the Tower was created by the gods, and each level is stocked with what are intended to be increasingly difficult challenges created by the gods to discourage ascent to the top. But if someone or a group of someones make to the very top, the stairway at the centre of the topmost level leads to a platform suspended in a liminal space where each of the victorious ascenders will find the god they sacrificed to before beginning the ascent waiting for them and favourably inclined to grant their petition.

[Astromancer]

The Chesslands

In the Realms chess boards are hexagonal. The colors are White for the Sun, Red for the Moon, and Black for the Stars.

In the Realm there is a place called the Chess Lands. It seems to be a sport of the gods. It is a region of closely packed hexagonal mesas, averaging around forty miles across. Few mesas deviate more than a mile from the average. The canyons between the mesas are between one hundred and fifty feet to eight hundred feet wide.

Due to a whim of the gods three climates are found in the Chess Lands. These are arranged like the tiles of a chessboard. Black lands are cold forests. White lands are tropical forests. Red lands have a Mediterranean climate.

In the White lands, noon is a period of Very High Mana, night is a period of Low Mana. From Dawn until Noon the Mana level rises from Normal to Very High. From Noon until Dusk it falls at the same rate.

In the Black lands the Winter Solstice is the period of Very High Mana. The Summer Solstice is the period of Low Mana. From the Summer Solstice until the Winter Solstice the mana level slowly rises. Then from the Winter Solstice until the Summer Solstice it declines.

In the Red lands, when the Moon is below the horizon or New, the Mana is Low. When the Crescent Moon or the Half Moon is above the horizon the Mana is Normal. When the Gibbous Moon is above the horizon the Mana is High. The Full Moon brings Very High Mana as long as it is above the horizon.

Every individual Mesa has its areas of aspected Mana.

The lands around these mesas are Very Low Mana (-10 to Magic Skills). They are also a harsh desert. The canyons between the mesas are also low Mana and the lands of the canyon floors are infested with Orcs.

Each mesa is a little world into itself. Obscure cults, fell beasts, powerful Mages, and strange societies, abound here.

There are many wonders in the Chesslands. Strange marvels that Mages and the learned would pay fortunes for.

[KarlKost]

Im making a Post Apocaliptic Fantasy, over 2000 survivors (300 of each of the 7 races) hand picked by the last 10 survival gods to take refugee in an isolated place after the "Twilight War" against the Gods was won by demons and Undead.

Now, the legions of Hell fight and endless war against the endless hordes of Undead over ultimate rulership of the world.

Im using the rules from Realm Management but greatly expanded - for example, each one of wheat, rice, cows, pigs, glass, wood, stone, tools - EVERYTHING has their own rating and costs (even water, the most precious of all). Also, things now have costs on resources - population has consumption needs, for animals you need "water points" and pasture points, soil has also a rating, to manufacture alchemicals you need glass etc.

Im currently thinking how to make "Exotic Resources" affect others. For example, my survivors have "Metal Tools -1", which means their tools have a -1 penalty - they carried what they could with them, and some tools were just too big to take. I have estipulated that the "average HT" for tools is 12 - and I've already rolled the first month of events. I established that each month you roll for tools HT; the first month was a 13. So, the Metal Tools lose an amount equal to MoF, so for next month they'll be at -2. Once it reaches -10 IT'S GONE, but realistic they better start manufacturing Stone Tools, Wood Tools and Bones Tools (even with the TL0 penalty). They still have no iron resource, so this loss cant be reverted for the moment.

I stablished that they took a bunch of magic stuff with them, so they have Magic Items +5, Alchemical Materials (non renewable) + 5, Alchemical Materials (renewable) -9 - those are things that can be "grown", be it bugs or resigns from bugs, plants, fungus etc. It's -9 because it's just the minimum enough to start cultivation, so they cant use it or they'll lose the resource for good. All animals and seeds are also at -9; it's for starting cultivation.
They also have Charms +5, Powerstones +5, Grimoires and Formulaires +1, High Mana Zone +1, Fetishes +5 (items with spirits inside), "Bottled Spirits" +5, Inventions +5 (many gadgets created by the gadgeteer inventors).

But I have to decide how to make those impact the rest; common resources are easy, for example, ALL water in their region is rotten (they have 0 Habitability, Infertile -100% and Hostile Climate -25%), but the Alchemists and inventors already said they can make purifiers: for each point of water produced, they'll need 1 point of glass and 1 of pulverized wood; to have glass, you need 1 point of sand and 1 point of wood (for fire). All that has to be manufactured (or collected). On top of that, each point of Water will require 1 point of Pottery, which needs to be manufactured from Clay. So, it's a lot of stuff, but all easily connected.

The exotic resources however (like "Magic Items +5" or "Talismans +5") however I'll have to think how they can influence the others

[SilvercatMoonpaw]

On Coca Island, wizards created colorful hybrid beasts, intending to sell them as pets/pit-fighters. However, the "cocamon" proved sapient, and revolted to drive the wizards from the island. Now Coca Island is inhabited by the civilization created by their descendants.

[Astromancer]

What we did on our Summer Vacation

Well, I reckon that it started when Bill and I took that Egyptian statue that his great Uncle Cyrus sent home from Egypt, when he passed through on his way to be a missionary in East Africa, to the old Indian mound. Bill's grampa says Cyrus wasn't eaten by cannibals, no one could ever stomach Cyrus. I brought the funny little idol that mom's cousin sent her from Asia. No one could ever say where it came from. We set them up in the old witch's shack she built on the mound. She's been dead twenty years but her stack is in good condition. Then we got the old hoodoo book from Chicago that Suzy found in her attic.

The gang was going to cast a spell, just to see if we could. It was summer we didn't have all that much to do. We agreed to try to summon a fairy. The girls thought it would be sweet, and the guys didn't think tiny little women with butterfly wings would be a problem.

We learned better.

Basically, it's 1946. The Mana level planet wide is now Normal. But other than some kids in an American small town, no one knows yet.

All the kids who tried to cast the spell now have Magery -5. If you have access to older GURPS materials and the advantage that allowed people to spontaneously know useful spells in survival situations, these kids could have that. Otherwise, they're just cobbling what they can out of grimoires printed in Chicago. (Note: Chicago was a major occult publishing center from the 1880s to the 1990s).

This is the Little Rascals meets Cthulhu. And Cthulhu runs for it.

[Astromancer]

The Gate of the Moon

The city had a name once. But that was when there was a vast fresh water sea rich in fish where now there is rock strewn desert and a small salt lake dead and poisonous. The priests of the moon foresaw the millennia of drought. The also saw the return of the rains and the sweetwater sea.

The priests wove a mighty wyrd. The city now only exists when the Full Moon is above the horizon. When the Moon sets the people in the city see the rising sun become the Moon. Those outside the city see only the city fade like a forgotten dream.

The nature of the wyrd is somewhat strange in that while time is sequential within the city, to those outside the city it seems the ages of the city are a random jumble. Similarly, the world beyond the city seems to be a strange whirlpool of different ages. One man who stayed in the city market past sunrise found he returned forty years late. One woman told a cadi that questioned her that she was from a thousand years into the future. It was sometimes thought she spoke the truth for she stayed young and lovely for five generations.

Basically, an exotic market city with the added bonus of random time travel. Although the reference to the Cadi (Islamic jurist) points to an earthly Arabian Nights setting, possibly linking a classic Arabian Nights setting with a Sci Fi/Arabian Nights setting, any fantasy setting with significant cultural change over time works.

Although as written the setting reflects the coming and going of the Sahara desert, the sinking and rising of Atlantis, or the coming and going of an ice age would work as well.

[David Johnston2]

I once came up with an alternate future timeline for the Champions Universe that went something like this:

1. Demon City: In the near future advanced electronics become increasingly unreliable causing a return to vacuum tube technology. Meanwhile cities become increasingly dangerous as mysterious disappearances and horrifically mangled corpses become more common. City police forces and secret societies form groups to hunt the demons coming through to prey on the city populations.
2. Time of Exile: Most cities are now abandoned demon hives. Humanity has learned that the enemy is attracted to groups of people who stay in one place for long, and so they either in isolated homesteads or as wandering nomadic tribes. But some of the heroes from the previous era triumphed and their cities still stand, protected by wards that that prevent demonic invasion and transformation. The occasional demon appears out on the countryside, but nothing that can't be dealt with...so far.
3. Rise to the Skies: Increasing levels of wild magic on the surface have driven humanity into the skies on floating chunks of land kept habitable by magic. Flying boats and dragons battle in the skies while adventurers descend to the surface to recover resources and relics of the past.
4. Solar Empires: With the help of a mixture of magic and reinvented technology humanity moves out into the solar system, using magic to reshape worlds and even planetoids into habitability, producing a rather pulpish era of space adventure.
5. The Stars Themselves: "Spaceship" have now been mostly abandoned as an ever-expanding network of magic portals link the worlds of many different stars together. Meanwhile in a nearby parallel universe they are experiencing a new era of "superheroes" and "supervillains" and contact between the two realities is becoming increasingly common in ways that cause trouble for both sides.