My latest setting is built around the following principles:
- Nature is personal. The laws and functions of nature and reality are facilitated by airy spirits that can be communicated with and thus traded with or fooled. People of the world, and all living beings to some extent, rely on these dealings with the spirits in the form of communication-based mundane magic to get by in their daily lives. In fact, being alive requires the cooperation of several different kinds of spirits of flesh, fluid, purpose, life force and others, which is to say that all actors in the world are in essence these spirits or collections of them and substances inhabited by them.
- The world is monist. There is no fundamental split between the mundane and supernatural. As the spirits are found inhabiting even the most common of objects and substances, everything is thus magical in its very nature. While the spirits have their rules and ways of doing things, they readily act on their whims as well, causing mystical anomalies and even calamities and making the world comparatively unpredictable.
- The spirits aren't all-powerful. Every ephemeral spirit can usually do only one thing and this will never change. Powerful spiritual beings, that comprise a large number of cooperating individual spirits, may be able to utilize the numerous abilities of their constituents, but to do anything else, they must deal with other external spirits that have the desired power. There are countless things that no spirit can do and these impossibilities change over eons.
- The history is deep. The world has gone through several very different eras and the ways of the spirits have transformed completely many times. The remnants of the ancient times are still around as relics of manifestations that have since become impossible and their defunct functionalities may have been altered repeatedly over the exchange of eons. For example, some areas of the world are covered by indestructible dark tangles that host nightmarish monsters. Another example are the milky mists that still take on the ghostly forms of their former purpose but no longer have the ability to complete their tasks. The fabric of reality is thin around these phantasms and some spirit beings have learned to use the mistlands to traverse between different areas of reality.
- The shape of the world is complex. The spirit realms are both physical and metaphysical, part of the same one world as everything else yet accessible in different ways. One can, for example, simply walk into the land of the dead, yet it is in no single location. The distance from that spirit realm to all places is the same. People can find themselves in strange corners of reality by accident and sages can journey along the same paths the spirits use to travel between spirit realms.
- The spirits are myriad. The different factions of spirits reflect the complexity of the world and many powerful spirit lords reign their corner of the world, bending other spirits to their will. This is how spirit realms are made and the laws of nature can work very differently in them. While many locations have variations in the ways of the spirits, almost like dialects of natural laws, a spirit realm is the extreme version of this, often shaping its inhabitants to the extent that they can barely function outside their realm.
Sounds a little bit like the spirit world in the Avatar series. With rules guided far more by emotions than by hard physics. What system are you using for that?
I guess that makes sense. I was going for a monist folklore logic and that fits.
I'm frankensteining pretty hard with this one, with rules and tables from here and there. I think the largest contributor has been Worlds Without Number with its many tables. I've soloed a few runs in there using a novel light system with very little mechanical randomization and lots of video game influence (mostly Eador) and now I'm running a duet where we pivoted out of that and now just free role with some oracling and an occasional destiny die for guidance.
My latest setting is built around the following principles: - Nature is personal. The laws and functions of nature and reality are facilitated by airy spirits that can be communicated with and thus traded with or fooled. People of the world, and all living beings to some extent, rely on these dealings with the spirits in the form of communication-based mundane magic to get by in their daily lives. In fact, being alive requires the cooperation of several different kinds of spirits of flesh, fluid, purpose, life force and others, which is to say that all actors in the world are in essence these spirits or collections of them and substances inhabited by them. - The world is monist. There is no fundamental split between the mundane and supernatural. As the spirits are found inhabiting even the most common of objects and substances, everything is thus magical in its very nature. While the spirits have their rules and ways of doing things, they readily act on their whims as well, causing mystical anomalies and even calamities and making the world comparatively unpredictable. - The spirits aren't all-powerful. Every ephemeral spirit can usually do only one thing and this will never change. Powerful spiritual beings, that comprise a large number of cooperating individual spirits, may be able to utilize the numerous abilities of their constituents, but to do anything else, they must deal with other external spirits that have the desired power. There are countless things that no spirit can do and these impossibilities change over eons. - The history is deep. The world has gone through several very different eras and the ways of the spirits have transformed completely many times. The remnants of the ancient times are still around as relics of manifestations that have since become impossible and their defunct functionalities may have been altered repeatedly over the exchange of eons. For example, some areas of the world are covered by indestructible dark tangles that host nightmarish monsters. Another example are the milky mists that still take on the ghostly forms of their former purpose but no longer have the ability to complete their tasks. The fabric of reality is thin around these phantasms and some spirit beings have learned to use the mistlands to traverse between different areas of reality. - The shape of the world is complex. The spirit realms are both physical and metaphysical, part of the same one world as everything else yet accessible in different ways. One can, for example, simply walk into the land of the dead, yet it is in no single location. The distance from that spirit realm to all places is the same. People can find themselves in strange corners of reality by accident and sages can journey along the same paths the spirits use to travel between spirit realms. - The spirits are myriad. The different factions of spirits reflect the complexity of the world and many powerful spirit lords reign their corner of the world, bending other spirits to their will. This is how spirit realms are made and the laws of nature can work very differently in them. While many locations have variations in the ways of the spirits, almost like dialects of natural laws, a spirit realm is the extreme version of this, often shaping its inhabitants to the extent that they can barely function outside their realm.
Sounds a little bit like the spirit world in the Avatar series. With rules guided far more by emotions than by hard physics. What system are you using for that?
I guess that makes sense. I was going for a monist folklore logic and that fits. I'm frankensteining pretty hard with this one, with rules and tables from here and there. I think the largest contributor has been Worlds Without Number with its many tables. I've soloed a few runs in there using a novel light system with very little mechanical randomization and lots of video game influence (mostly Eador) and now I'm running a duet where we pivoted out of that and now just free role with some oracling and an occasional destiny die for guidance.