Phlegethon: The Haunted World
The old alliances are dead. The Hegemony of Umbra is falling apart, its Senate little more than a noisy irrelevance. The ruling House of Dormire, once unchallenged in its stranglehold on power, is all but extinct after decades of assassinations and civil war. The current Hegemon, Senekos II Dormire, is a frightened child, unfit for the Throne of High Sepulchrave.
The subject nations and client kingdoms that once groveled before Umbrian might are stirring, looking to reclaim former glory or forge a new future in their image, while Hegemony generals and warlords eye the Throne with greed. Meanwhile, the Hegemony's allies and enemies alike seek to profit from- or at least survive- the impending power vacuum.
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Welcome!
This RP is an exercise in collaborative world building and writing. It will operate a bit like a traditional NRP, with players designing nations, factions, tribes, cultures and the like, but without the IC one-player-controlling-one-nation side of things.
Our world is a world of many races, of dangerous magicks, of gods and demons and secret horrors. Societies, religions and nations strive for dominance in the ruins of a star-faring civilization destroyed millennia ago in some unimaginable cataclysm.
Together, we will build this world: populate it with strange races, create its rival myths and religions, design the nations and empires that span across its surface, detail the ruins of a once-mighty empire that spanned the stars.
The goal here is to collaboratively create a unique fantasy world, one that will serve as a shared setting that can be used in future stories and NRPs. Our setting will be weird fantasy- we will eschew or adapt the standard high fantasy fare to create something unique and strange, something that both utilizes the fantasy, post-apocalyptic and sci fi tropes we know and love and creatively reinterprets them. For the opening phases of this world building project, I will serve as a "GM" of sorts, moderating and coordinating peoples' contributions, but I hope that as we work together my leadership role will become unnecessary. My main concern will be a sortve aesthetic coherence to the setting, making sure that everyone's nations, religions, characters, histories, etc cohere with the general atmosphere we're trying to create. There will be no established 'canon' interpretation of the universe- rival IC myths, religions, philosophies and lore will be neither right nor wrong in OOC terms, and multiple IC histories and OOC theories of how the setting came to be will be encouraged. Magic will be relatively commonplace- much less common and direct than in say, the Elder Scrolls games, but more obviously relevant than in, say, Game of Thrones or low fantasy settings.
The IC
The IC here will be an important part of the worldbuilding exercise, and it is my hope that storylines people develop ICly will arise naturally from the OOC worldbuilding, and, at the same time, that the IC side of things contributes to fleshing out the world. I will be posting a central "IC" storyline that people can join or ignore at their leisure, but players will be free to develop their own subplots and narrative arcs as well.
The World Building
Our World building will happen as follows: we will be putting together the "Encyclopedia Phlegethon" (see below), for which I will serve as editor, GM and coordinator. All entries can be written as though they are encyclopedic entries for an In-Universe encyclopedia being compiled by the mage and scholar I introduce in the post below, or they can be written however you like and I will edit and incorporate them as appropriate.
Once something is posted below, it will be considered 'canon' (though of course we can edit stuff out and retcon as needed). The world building will be done mostly through pirate pads, though folks should feel free to post stuff here in the OOC as well if that's how they prefer to operate. Anyone can fill out any thing they like, and I in turn will integrate what people create into the 'canon'.
A rough brainstorming pad where folks can chat is here.
The "draft" version of the encyclopedia will be here. This will be were the world building takes place in a more organized way, and where people can post things for me then to put in the OOC.
The main categories we need filled in are:
Geography/Map: We will not have a map to start. We will design the map to fit the world we've designed, rather than the other way around. This may cause some messiness, so I may have to play this by ear. But for now, feel free to fill in geographical areas and features you'd like to see.
The Old World: The ruins scattered across Phlegethon come in two main divisions- those from what scholars call the Old Ones, clearly of human or xenian (non-human sentient) origin, and those structures(?) left behind by what the historians and loremasters call the Strangers...
Sentient Races: Let's avoid elves/dwarves/orcs, or creatively reinterpret the latter. But lets stay away from pseudo-Tolkienism.
Nations, Tribes and Factions: People can design nations and factions within those nations like they would in an NRP by filling out the NS below. One thing- multiple people working on the same faction is encouraged here, and while it is good to be polite and defer to the nation's creator while working on it, no one will "own" any of the nations exclusively. Likewise, while people are free to RP as high political figures in the IC, no one will have sole control of any one nation.
n.b. The Hegemony of Umbra, mentioned above, is at this point just a name and a vague concept, so folks are free to run with that and (former) subject nations of it.
Religion and Cosmology: NB: there will be no 'canon' cosmology for this RP. A riotous and conflicting stock of IC religions, theologies, magical theories, cosmologies, histories, etc are encouraged.
Philosophy & Magic: see note above. Likewise, there will be no OOC magic system. As GM, I will police magic a bit more carefully than other sections for obvious reasons. In general, this RP will be lowish fantasy in the IC, meaning magic will be rare and mostly off-screen, but high/weird fantasy in the OOC, since we can design as much craziness as we want.
Myths and Lore: see note above.
Flora & Fauna:
Monsters, Spirits and Preternatural Fauna:
Technology & Weapons: (all current nations will have late-Roman era technology for the most part)
Finally, some required reading.
