I kind of want to make a roleplaying setting. My idea is that I’ll create a scrapbook of all the ideas that come to me about it that, then when I have dense nexus of material, I’ll shape it into a setting. Here goes nothing:
Post Scarcity
I want my setting to be a post-scarcity setting. It hasn’t been done before in a D&D context, to the best of my knowledge, and it is ethically and politically interesting.
The way I think this works is that everyone has a kind of limited magic. This magic is sufficient to produce food, drink and shelter.
The absence of material concerns doesn’t make politics go away though. It just makes politics much weirder, especially with the superabundance of variation in personal power typical in D&D settings (what does politics look like when a surprisingly hefty number of people can cast wish?).
Lean into D&D’s alignment grid
I want to lean into D&D’s alignment grid heavily as a basis for the cosmology not despite it being a philosophical mess that makes no sense and is a cliche but because it is a philosophical mess that makes no sense and because it is a cliche. I think the messiness, illogic, and ambiguity of these categories if used carefully, can add dramatic tensions. I think it’s cliché status can be viewed positively- as a kind of modern mythological status.
Built for extremely high level play
I think this setting is going to be built for very high level play. It will be unusual to meet an NPC that doesn’t have at least 5 class levels. Most towns will have at least one person with 15 or so class levels. It’s the ideal setting for things like gestalt characters and epic levels.
Fiends
Generally in D&D settings there are devils who represent lawful evil -Faustian bargains, tyranny etc- and there are demons who represent chaotic evil -mindless destruction and cruelty-. This leaves a problem- what to do with the neutral evil fiends?
5e and previous editions have what are called Yuggoloths. These are neutral evil fiends and their entire shtick is that they are deeply selfish and care about nothing but their own advancement.
Pathfinder has Daemons. Daemons are devoted to death, oblivion, and the extinction of all things. Whereas demons want to break and torture stuff for fun, daemons want to systematically snuff out all consciousness and devour all souls.
I think both of these capture something important about netural evil. Yuggoloths capture the aspect of neutral evil which is cold, cunning sociopathy whereas daemons capture the aspect of neutral evil which is overweening total nihilism and terrible hunger.
So I want to combine them. Neutral evil fiends in this setting will be devourers. Every devourer wants to consume (literally or metaphorically) as much as possible, preferably the whole universe. It’s not so much that they want to extinguish all consciousness, as that this is the inevitable result of what they do. They want to taste every experience, even if doing so destroys it.
I think they have another half of their nature to, which is a frantic desire to own so they have more choices in what to consume. This leads to a sort of ultra capitalist vibe- capitalism without any productivity whatsoever, with none of the good elements that distinguish it from feudalism.
Factions
I like the idea of crazy political factions defining the setting- and some political factions that are eerily cogent when you think about it.
I’m very conscious at this point that, despite never having read a Planescape sourcebook or played torment for more than half an hour, my setting is starting to sound a bit like Planescape. I’ll try to make concerns about originality in light of this a source of constructive and creative tension.
Here’s a very partial list, I imagine the full list would have scores of entries:
The Wicked Ones
My first idea for a faction is The Wicked Ones. The Wicked Ones are wholly devoted to evil, but to explain this, we must unpack it.
The Wicked Ones are by no means selfish. They’re not pursuing evil for power or personal advantage. They don’t enjoy the suffering of others either. Rather they are fundamentally and unselfishly devoted to the cause of maximising the suffering in the universe, even their own suffering. They are willing to die or suffer agony for this cause, which they ardently believe in.
Now you might be wondering “why support evil in this way”. Their response would be “why do you support good in the way you do?” Everyone has some terminal values, things they believe for no other reason. The beliefs of the wicked ones bottom out at “suffering=good”. It’s not that they think people have done something wrong and deserve to suffer, or that suffering will lead to something greater than itself, it’s just that they believe in suffering. Nor do they enjoy suffering- they are no masochists. They suffer just like everyone else. Every fibre of their body craves to escape it. But mentally, they just think it is good.
In many ways the wicked ones are quite noble. They are unselfish and brave. Wholly devoted to what they think is right. It’s just that their conception of what is right is, from our point of view, utterly warped.
It is basically unheard of for someone to become to convert to the path of the wicked ones voluntarily. Ordinary people are usually made into wicked ones through special rituals. Occasionally, very occasionally, people are just born like it. Outsiders sometimes expect that organizations of the wicked ones will be filled with backstabbing and power struggles. Actually, they are remarkably coherent. Everyone is devoted to the same end, and personal glory and leadership is not a concern.
There existence does a lot of harm to the setting, indirectly and directly. Directly of course they cause terrible suffering. Indirectly though, a lot of people rationalize their behaviour by saying “hey, at least I’m not one of them. I can’t be evil because I’m nothing like the wicked ones.”
The God Climbers
The God Climbers are not so much an organization as a philosophical current. Their argument is simple. Whatever your goals, they are best served by you becoming a God. By definition, that thing that lets you do what you want is power, hence whatever you want to change you must seek power, and what is a greater power than Godhood? Hence they seek Godhood. They are not an organization because many of them have diametrically opposed reasons for seeking Godhood.
Many have observed, cynically, that deification is a rare thing, and members of the God climbers seem not that much more likely to achieve it than anyone else. Still, they strive.
The Monos
The Monos believe that there is only one God, that the entities standardly known as Gods are simply very powerful spirits, but that only one being, whom they simply call God, is worthy of worship.
Bizarrely, many Gods are themselves Monos, maintaining that there is a higher power than themselves exists. This adds interesting layers to theology.
The Cosmists
The Cosmists believe in a universal resurrection of the dead. However, they believe it will come not from on high, but from their own efforts. They seek to return everyone who has ever died to life, even souls that were utterly annihilated. They believe only this will mean the total triumph of all that is good and right over suffering. The deepest, most primal, form of human alienation is the alienation of the living from the dead. We cannot be whole until we are all here.
To this end, they study topics as diverse as resurrection magic (of course), magic that manipulates time and philosophical questions around what it means to survive and be the same person (if your soul is destroyed and then an exact copy is made, have you survived?) and the like.
The Fustians
The Fustians go around offering deals- great power in exchange for your immortal soul, and a turn towards their goals and ideologies.
The catch? They’re good, rather than evil. They offer pacts to evil beings to try and sway them onto the path of righteousness.
A creature for our bestiary
The corpse ball is a moving ball of corpses, of gargantuan size, that attempts to grab people and add them to itself. It comes in two varieties, a standard corpse ball that rolls along the ground, pushed by the arms and legs of the bodies that make it up, and a floating corpse ball that, buoyed by its gasses in its decaying mass, can fly. Corpse balls sometimes devour assimilate entire villages. When the ball gets to a certain size, it will split, forming two new corpse balls.
Generally, corpse balls are thought to be non-sapient, but there are awful rumours of sapient corpse balls. Legend even tells of corpse-stars- corpse balls the size of planets that ravage whole worlds and add their biospheres to themselves.
Mechanic: Fate weaver
I had an idea for an optional mechanic- the fate weaver. The fate weaver is not a DM or a player. Rather they have a specific thing they want to happen each session. This thing is kind of orthogonal to what the players want- neither opposed to it, nor in line with it.
The fate weaver can change the result of D20 rolls a certain number of times per session- or maybe even an unlimited amount. However if the players ever guess what the fate weaver is aiming at for that session, the fate weaver “loses” that session, and the players get a reward.
Optionally they might also get to play a few NPCs to take a load off the DM.
Perhaps this is a silly idea, but maybe it could work with some development? Deciding d20 rolls might be a bit much, maybe they can add a d4onto any roll they like of the characters? And if the players guess their purpose they get to
I have lately been fascinated by the mythological concepts in Path of Exile; one of the scariest deities you encounter is Kitava, the Hungering One; your “devourer” creatures are similar although not necessarily identical. There are also the brother deities Innocence and Sin, the first of which sort of alternates between what in D&D alignment cliches would be called Lawful Good and Lawful Evil, depending on how arrogant his own followers are; the second is at least presently being portrayed as a humble and generally good deity, using his godly title “Thief of Virtue” to become a sort of Prometheus, although given that all deities in the setting are in some sense “god climbers” as well, this may change as the setting continues to develop.
Corpse Balls are a cool creature type. It would amuse me to see an adventure in which the concepts are introduced over time, then dropped/forgotten for a bit, only for the party to later find themselves stranded on a miserable planet covered in decayed junk, only to realize that underneath whatever layer of non-living material platform is currently protecting them, a big gassy corpse-ball is carrying them through space.
I'd be very interested to see how your setting works out. I am a big fan of more interesting mechanics, and I guess by interesting I mean those that add depth to the characters and environment. However, I find that I usually fall into the minority crowd. People seem to generally want to hit things and win for fame and glory, or gain lots of loot and experience. End of story. Maybe your setting does not toy with the general need of people to vicariously explore their own hero journey through an avatar..? So then are you simply suggesting to throw in some new monsters and concepts, but leave the game ideals as are (with the exception of the concept of a Fate weaver)?