Interest expressed. Very neat concept Dark.

Cordi said
Interest expressed. Very neat concept Dark.

Thanks Cordi both for the interest and what I am irrefutably taking as a compliment

Anyways, got any ideas you'd like to toss out?

Plenty, ones I will express when I am back the office (couch) and not on my phone. ;p

Cordi said
Plenty, ones I will express when I am back the office (couch) and not on my phone. ;p

Haha, no problem buddy, take your time.

i have already fallen in love with this setting

guyvolk said
i have already fallen in love with this setting

You know what guys, I've been getting compliments about the setting and I just want to say I'm just delighted I've written something that others are getting excited about

Welcome guyvolk :D
Any ideas you wanna shout out off the bat?

Could you post up the bit detailing the dragons, so I can help create some lore?

EDIT: Or better include me in the PM? good time to test out the new system.

I'll include you, it was mostly chit chat about a specific character.

So everyone is on the same page, the conversation I had with Dead Cruiser.

Darkmatter and Dead Cruiser said

Darkmatter: Ok so basically I came up with what I thought is a pretty cool way of doing/explaining magic enduwin.
So all the creatures were fashioned out of Trayig's, one of the gods, very body and essence.
Therefore magic was passed into life like that. However, it would have only been the orignals of each species that were directly made from Trayig's sand and so with each generation that passes the magical ability wanes. Therefore in a creature like a human, who lives relatively short lifespans and therefore has had many generations, magic has waned significantly. For most races it would be like this but with some variation obviously, with many many people knowing a simple trick or too but real wizards/witches/warlocks being very few and far between. True magical ability would no longer come from the sand directly that would have waned significantly, but through a secondary connection to a god with the sand as a conduit if that makes sense? A rare occurrence.

But dragons can live exceptionally long, hundreds if not thousands of years. meaning they've had less generations and are considerably more magically active than other species.

Just the idea i was tossing around. They could still be innately magical themselves but then they would more likely be very few in number.

Thoughts?

Cruiser: That all sounds fine to me. Perhaps the waning magical essence within the mortal races leads them to require magical implements. Wands, staves, grimoires and all of that sort of thing. I would think that the actual magical difference between generations is not an especially noticeable one, but has none the less mounted to the populace being almost entirely mundane. It makes one think that history would be full of legendary heroes and monsters and whatnot, and such tales have declined only because magic no longer supports such grandiosity.

But it meshes fine with what I'm offering, since it's all just stories, after all.

And yes, I figure that dragons breed very slowly, and there are only a handful of them in the world for quite a few reasons. The foremost being that dragons simply don't like each other, in general, and getting a pair to couple is a rare event in and of itself. Then consider that every dragon considers every other dragon to be a major rival, and you'll have a lot of infanticide going on.

My character that I'm planning would actually be a relatively old dragon, though wiser than most, in possession of a rather fickle temper. After one too many times he took his aggravation out on the local populace, a band of wizards took it upon themselves to subdue him. Considering killing him to be out of the question, they instead polymorphed him into a human shape, sealing away most of his magical power. He has since spent the last couple of centuries wandering the lands under the guise of a powerful sorcerer in search of a means to return himself to his true form and power.

Darkmatter: Yeah wizards, those left, would definitely be looking for objects that have retained power. Yes it is a gradual process. You wouldn't notice much from grandfather to grandson but go back a few hundred years and the difference is apparent. Now of course not everyone knows that it is waning or that it once was so mighty or why it is waning etc. People know this but not everyone.

Well the kind of power to trap a dragon in a human body would only have existed nearly a thousand years ago by my reckoning but if you want it to be more recent than that, say a few hundred years I am good with that too.

Cruiser: I figured that it would be quite a feat to accomplish in the first place, much less have it so effective that the dragon is having such great trouble undoing it. Thus why I mentioned that it was the work of several wizards. All the more reason that he can't just track down the wizard to have it undone; they would need to be together again to do so.

Maybe I could write in some sort of artifact being used as a part of the ritual. I don't want to clash with your perception of the state of magic, but having him in human form for a thousand years makes you think that he's gotten used to it or something. As it is, I kind of picture him as Clint Eastwood cast in the role of Gandalf.

I do have other character ideas, though. Perhaps a very young dragon, practically a hatchling by their standards, living among humans after being orphaned.

Darkmatter: Tbh I really like this idea for a character and Eastwood as gandalf is a great image.
See I would say that even after a thousand years he wouldn't be used to it. It may be cliched but perhaps part of the spell kept him inactive for a few hundred years so he hasn't actually been toiling for a millenia. Just a thought.

Cruiser: Hm. I'm still thinking that a thousand years would be "too damn long" even by dragon standards. I figure that the very oldest dragons would be, what, maybe five thousand years old? Two hundred years is long enough to be "frustratingly long" by dragon standards. I think he'd just start to go crazy after the 700 mark, especially considering that he'd be forced to adapt to a mortal sense of time.

The sort of hibernation isn't a bad idea, but it reminds me a lot of another character concept I came up with for a different RP, which was a nightmare from beginning to end. Perhaps some "old magicks" are at work or something?

Darkmatter: Say he was youngish when it happened so we can stretch. Maybe 300 years at a push? Maybe it was more than a couple mages, maybe it was a large thing involving a lot of people pooling small amounts of magic together, Dozens of wizards, apprentices and even some gifted common folk from a large area that he was terrorizing.

Cruiser: That could work, but then if there's so many people involved, there develops a plot hole of "if you had this much manpower, why isn't you couldn't just kill him?"

Darkmatter: He's an evil magical dragon. Plus it could/would have become a myth in the area blurring some of the details as it is exaggerated. Maybe the entrapment was an on the spot call when they couldn't kill him.

Thanks.
This doesn't really effect my idea at all, I had in my mind that the people I would create would serve the god most likely to have something against dragons and each one slain would somehow help the town, either by a magical gift or just the riches or both.
Maybe the dragons' magical power, or a portion of it is given to the slayer?
Now that I've written it out sounds a bit too Skyrim. Of course it wouldn't be as common as dragon killing in that but if someone managed it they could possibly be the most powerful of the age.

Zran said
Thanks. This doesn't really effect my idea at all, I had in my mind that the people I would create would serve the god most likely to have something against dragons and each one slain would somehow help the town, either by a magical gift or just the riches or both. Maybe the dragons' magical power, or a portion of it is given to the slayer? Now that I've written it out sounds a bit too Skyrim. Of course it wouldn't be as common as dragon killing in that but if someone managed it they could possibly be the most powerful of the age.

Well I don't see the gods as being that directly involved and/or concerned with the dragons. They created all life.
But, if your people believed that slaying them is what a/the gods want then that's realistic, People make all kinds of interpretations out of myths and scripture and live their life based on it.
More realistically, that dragon would have gold. Enough gold to have a night with every elven whore from Oiyaer to Bolecawn.

I was thinking that there might be a small organization dedicated to hunting dragons. Maybe they started out a group of noble knights dedicated to protecting the weak but have since over the years become closed minded and greedy living off of stories of the past and coffers stuffed with dragons gold

guyvolk said
I was thinking that there might be a small organization dedicated to hunting dragons

Sounds like something you and Zran could collaborate on :D

(From the peanut gallery) Rename the RP to Chronicles of Dragenduwin.

I was thinking more like a viking-esque dwarven city, which could still work, they've actually managed to grow fairly poor over the years, having to rely on fishing and mining rather than dragon slaying, since dragons are few and far between. Doesn't mean there couldn't be knights though. Competition!

Dark, I'm thinking there should be a Lore/Region sheet as well as CS something along the lines of:

Name of Region: Blargghh
Affiliated Races: (Dwarves, Humans, Elves)
Significant figures: (King, Queen, Generals, Heroes)
Significant Organisations: (Dragon Slayers of Death, Knights of Ni! Magi of The Circle)
Number of Cities: (If more than one)
Economy: (What makes the people stay here, Fishing, Dragon-slaying, Magic Wells?)
Dieties: (Do the people have a favorite god or more than one, tell us whom and why)
History: (What has happened to make this place so great or not so)
Other: (Anything else we should know?)

oohhh and in their kings hall is the skulls of the great dragons they've slain
and one can have a battleaxe still sticking out of its forehead
i can already imagine a dwarven king describing the legends behind each skull

I have some reading to do through this thread to see what has been suggested

@Zran, Arguably a great idea depending on how in depth the OP wants to go with this, World building is a lot of fun, it's great fun actually- but for a one-time thread it can be overwhelming to work on all of that. However, if Dark wants to go for an Allaria/Apocalyptica-esque type deal where it's continually rebooted (and if we appeal to the almighty Mahz) it can eventually become a sub forum for a world to play in.

I was wondering if there was room for an evil character?

Ideas: I have an idea for a race- Shape shifters- name pending, cousin of the Fae. They're typically small 5'ish but there's always exceptions of course. As children they cycle through several different forms of their choosing but once they reach maturity they settle on their true form that they can shift into. One I'm eager to play of course. This of course is pending the answer to my first question.

Pertaining to Deities, I was thinking of an "avatar" system for a character or two depending on your thoughts. An avatar of one of the chosen deities cannot change their allegiance once they've become an avatar, they're absolutely devout. They are gifted with certain abilities from their chosen god, respectively- nothing player responsibility would deem overpowered, and I think it would make for an interesting twist in the game. Hence my question about evil characters =P

@cordi a morally bankrupt character would be a nice change of pace but if we're doing a sort of party based adventure it could be disruptive. (not necessarily a bad thing)

guyvolk said
@cordi a morally bankrupt character would be a nice change of pace but if we're doing a sort of party based adventure it could be disruptive. (not necessarily a bad thing)

In the grand scheme of things, not necessarily. I tend to favor the delusional villain. The kind that does evil because they're absolutely convinced they're truly doing good. A character like that would be able to pretend to be good, while being evil, while believing they're good =P

Wow, that's a lot of text. Indeed, let us rename this the Chronicles of Dragoneduwin. (Kidding.)

Darkmatter, I just reached home an hour ago. I'm currently unpacking, and I think I can get to making the map in another hour or two.

About the viera, I was thinking of making them ultra-superstitious. Paranoid, even. Since they were made from the essence of Life and Nature, the very forests that humans mercilessly cut down, it wouldn't be too far fetched to say that they (the viera) could hate the humans with a passion. They believe the humans to be "barbaric, ungraceful blundering fools" who have "no respect for their roots, or for their lifesource, or for what feeds them, shelters them, and ultimately, what they return to after death; that is, Nature."

Physically, some tweaking must be done. Differing from the original concept from Final Fantasy, viera can be a mix of any animal (i.e., you're not limited to just bunny ears), they're generally six feet tall, they have long, black claws, and their lifespan is double the amount of a human's.

For example, if a human is 20, a viera will be 40; she will be the same, physically, but mentally, she will be more mature. This is because viera develop very slowly, leading to more mental nurturing which, in turn, makes them seem very wise.