SORQ 1 of N
SORQ
Science fantasy in conception, dungeon fantasy in execution: the magics and beings of F20 worlds rejoice in a pseudo-scientific basis in "planes" and "planar energies," but in a universe with stars, planets, gravity, cells, photosynthesis, evolution. Intelligent, symbol-wielding beings find ways to interact with planar forces, through words of special meaning and spaces of efficacious aesthetics.
The interior of the planet Sorq is the underworld. The planet is honeycombed with natural caverns, subterranean seas, the excavations of many eras of intelligent life, and less easily defined spaces. The underworld begins just beneath the surface of any city, and frequently irrupts into any landscape. Cities tend to rise upon hills and mountains of older construction: all the great nations and many smaller ones practice ritual purification and re-dedication of cities through razing and rebuilding every few centuries. The rubble of ordinary dwellings fill in around the bones of grander ones: palaces, temples, architectural wonders and legally entailed properties grow taller and taller, their former ground floors now beneath street level. Old structures have many buried levels; some are domed over, or a grand new edifice encloses something too rich and important simply to destroy, yielding atria and artificial caverns amidst the catacombs, buried properties, shrines, and proper dungeons stocked with monsters.
The powerful energies of the outer planes penetrate the interior of Sorq, interacting with the surface and atmosphere but concentrated deep in rock and magma. Ritual spaces in cities and elsewhere draw magical power into civilized infrastructure: the lower levels of cities, extant or ruined, are the uppermost true underworld. In the underworld, magic and symbol predominate. The underworld is shifting, trackless, protean; its chambers and passages endlessly change configuration. A room may remain unchanged for chiliad upon chiliad of years, but its doors and stairwells lead the pilgrim not to a static adjoining room, but to mystery and uncertainty.
Navigating the underworld requires knowledge, magic, insight, a meaningful quest, puissant guides, power
Practically, ludicly, there are two modes of play.
RANDOM underworlds
Science fantasy in conception, dungeon fantasy in execution: the magics and beings of F20 worlds rejoice in a pseudo-scientific basis in "planes" and "planar energies," but in a universe with stars, planets, gravity, cells, photosynthesis, evolution. Intelligent, symbol-wielding beings find ways to interact with planar forces, through words of special meaning and spaces of efficacious aesthetics.
The interior of the planet Sorq is the underworld. The planet is honeycombed with natural caverns, subterranean seas, the excavations of many eras of intelligent life, and less easily defined spaces. The underworld begins just beneath the surface of any city, and frequently irrupts into any landscape. Cities tend to rise upon hills and mountains of older construction: all the great nations and many smaller ones practice ritual purification and re-dedication of cities through razing and rebuilding every few centuries. The rubble of ordinary dwellings fill in around the bones of grander ones: palaces, temples, architectural wonders and legally entailed properties grow taller and taller, their former ground floors now beneath street level. Old structures have many buried levels; some are domed over, or a grand new edifice encloses something too rich and important simply to destroy, yielding atria and artificial caverns amidst the catacombs, buried properties, shrines, and proper dungeons stocked with monsters.
The powerful energies of the outer planes penetrate the interior of Sorq, interacting with the surface and atmosphere but concentrated deep in rock and magma. Ritual spaces in cities and elsewhere draw magical power into civilized infrastructure: the lower levels of cities, extant or ruined, are the uppermost true underworld. In the underworld, magic and symbol predominate. The underworld is shifting, trackless, protean; its chambers and passages endlessly change configuration. A room may remain unchanged for chiliad upon chiliad of years, but its doors and stairwells lead the pilgrim not to a static adjoining room, but to mystery and uncertainty.
Navigating the underworld requires knowledge, magic, insight, a meaningful quest, puissant guides, power
Practically, ludicly, there are two modes of play.
RANDOM underworlds
connections and changes are inscrutable, and dice are rolled at stated intervals.
A chamber or passage may require a roll every time it is entered;
every hour at the table;
A chamber or passage may require a roll every time it is entered;
every hour at the table;
or every time some benchmark is reached:
for example, a PC dies or levels up;
a boss is killed;
Water flows from Heaven to the abyss of abysses, and rises again to Heaven.
All water is the River of Creation, and all water partakes in the secrets and wisdom of all its kind.
Schools of sages and wizards pursue the Grail, water-mind, profound knowledge and union with water-as-such. Much lore and many artifices allow this or that communication with the Element:
"Are you potable?"
"Show me the last seven faces who reflected in you."
"Do you lead to the Surface?" etc.
Still, the Tongue and Conversation Panaqueous is elusive, and while Sorq has much magic and preternatural abilities, true water-mind may not exist.
Subgterranean temples and ritual spaces.
a boss is killed;
PCs find (or miss) a powerful item;
a spell of 5th level or higher is cast.
The Random, or Programmatic underworld will be a design challenge to make something not just an exercise in rolling and bickering over missed or neglected rolls; the goal is inscrutability, and a mood of wonder, horror, perhaps satire: not just one damned encounter after another.
QUEST underworlds
The Random, or Programmatic underworld will be a design challenge to make something not just an exercise in rolling and bickering over missed or neglected rolls; the goal is inscrutability, and a mood of wonder, horror, perhaps satire: not just one damned encounter after another.
QUEST underworlds
PC actions and intentions cause the underworld to react to them,
giving them what they want,
what they merit;
sequences of thematically related rooms and challenges;
stages and stations of a myth, quest, ideology, or mystical discipline;
The Quest underworld will considerable attention to make something artistically interesting and fun to play: an intersection of mechanics, cosmology, monster design, and so on.
***
Sorq orbits an orange subgiant star: a star once somewhat larger and hotter than Sol, and consequently faster to use up its mass and expand. Sorq has migrated from earlier orbits to remain uncooked. A major campaign plot could address whether the planet requires steering, if the planetary drive is functional or accessible, who or what controls such things, and whether the planet has its own agenda, such as heading out to the cometary cloud.
Species:
giving them what they want,
what they merit;
sequences of thematically related rooms and challenges;
stages and stations of a myth, quest, ideology, or mystical discipline;
The Quest underworld will considerable attention to make something artistically interesting and fun to play: an intersection of mechanics, cosmology, monster design, and so on.
***
Sorq orbits an orange subgiant star: a star once somewhat larger and hotter than Sol, and consequently faster to use up its mass and expand. Sorq has migrated from earlier orbits to remain uncooked. A major campaign plot could address whether the planet requires steering, if the planetary drive is functional or accessible, who or what controls such things, and whether the planet has its own agenda, such as heading out to the cometary cloud.
Species:
humans big, medium, and small: "giants" of double stature, "halflings" and "gnomic ones" much smidgeonly, are all one species with bog-standard humans; all Sorqite humans come in a variety of colors and physiques produced by habituation to extra-planar energies and, for some, underworld life: blue, red, purple, metallic gold and silver, tiger stripes...
wyrms, dragonkind, the warborn - reptiloids infinitely various and all of a kind. Their existence is agony, and they revenge themselves on the universe that bred and profited from their fury. [i have a lot more to say about the dragonkind]
qlaqqar - tall reptiloids with sharp beak, prehensile clubbed tail, short tempers and legalistic minds
yhhayk, sky-people - winged beings, bodies the size of dogs or children, with a peculiar relationship to space, the stars, and selfhood
the blight, bone-frogs, ultgru - clawed and fanged amphibians, rigid skull-like faces, equally at ease using tools and weapons with hands and feet. Bone-frogs cannot abide humans and most other races. Their cruelty is legendary.
[more]
UNDERDARK, UNDERWORLD
Sorq is tectonically quiescant, with a very thick lithosphere half-way to its core. Immense cave systems, whole chthonic oceans, and a stupendously vast biomass inside the stony world. The Underworld of intentional structures with occult alignments exists within an Underdark ecology.
A lattice of exotic glassine material conducts heat and electricity throughout the lithosphere, as well as providing part of the medium for extra-planar forces. This supports your obligatory underdark forests of giant fungi and such: the fungal mycelium enmeshes the planet, feeding on the very rock as well as light from dark stars and the flesh of decaying titans... The energy base for underdark life is a mixture of thermal, magnetic, and chemical metabolisms: microorganisms, oozes, slimes and the like may use these for sustenance as well as the energies of the beyond.
The rivers, seas, wells, pools, cataracts, seeps, aqueducts, canals, and baths of the Below are full of secrets, powers, and curses. Any water in the underworld is as significant as monsters, tombs, and inscriptions.
wyrms, dragonkind, the warborn - reptiloids infinitely various and all of a kind. Their existence is agony, and they revenge themselves on the universe that bred and profited from their fury. [i have a lot more to say about the dragonkind]
qlaqqar - tall reptiloids with sharp beak, prehensile clubbed tail, short tempers and legalistic minds
yhhayk, sky-people - winged beings, bodies the size of dogs or children, with a peculiar relationship to space, the stars, and selfhood
the blight, bone-frogs, ultgru - clawed and fanged amphibians, rigid skull-like faces, equally at ease using tools and weapons with hands and feet. Bone-frogs cannot abide humans and most other races. Their cruelty is legendary.
[more]
UNDERDARK, UNDERWORLD
Sorq is tectonically quiescant, with a very thick lithosphere half-way to its core. Immense cave systems, whole chthonic oceans, and a stupendously vast biomass inside the stony world. The Underworld of intentional structures with occult alignments exists within an Underdark ecology.
A lattice of exotic glassine material conducts heat and electricity throughout the lithosphere, as well as providing part of the medium for extra-planar forces. This supports your obligatory underdark forests of giant fungi and such: the fungal mycelium enmeshes the planet, feeding on the very rock as well as light from dark stars and the flesh of decaying titans... The energy base for underdark life is a mixture of thermal, magnetic, and chemical metabolisms: microorganisms, oozes, slimes and the like may use these for sustenance as well as the energies of the beyond.
The rivers, seas, wells, pools, cataracts, seeps, aqueducts, canals, and baths of the Below are full of secrets, powers, and curses. Any water in the underworld is as significant as monsters, tombs, and inscriptions.
Water flows from Heaven to the abyss of abysses, and rises again to Heaven.
All water is the River of Creation, and all water partakes in the secrets and wisdom of all its kind.
Schools of sages and wizards pursue the Grail, water-mind, profound knowledge and union with water-as-such. Much lore and many artifices allow this or that communication with the Element:
"Are you potable?"
"Show me the last seven faces who reflected in you."
"Do you lead to the Surface?" etc.
Still, the Tongue and Conversation Panaqueous is elusive, and while Sorq has much magic and preternatural abilities, true water-mind may not exist.
Subgterranean temples and ritual spaces.
Tombs, catacombs, mausalea, mummies, skeletons
whole cities slain with their Monarch
Idol fanes where planar beings and transmogrified humans (and other beings) maintain Operations, Influences, Workings, Rendings, etc., across silent chiliads
Altars and ritual paraphernalia attended by priests, wizards, etc.
Strong places of cults and defeated rulers
Wizarding schools
Irruptions of outer planes, and settlements of their denizens
--of these, Great Old Ones and their servitors
Weird and wonderful places, halls of beauty
The Halls of Foreverness [from Tshai]
Treasure chambers, hoards, and the art of [treasure]agogy
whole cities slain with their Monarch
Idol fanes where planar beings and transmogrified humans (and other beings) maintain Operations, Influences, Workings, Rendings, etc., across silent chiliads
Altars and ritual paraphernalia attended by priests, wizards, etc.
Strong places of cults and defeated rulers
Wizarding schools
Irruptions of outer planes, and settlements of their denizens
--of these, Great Old Ones and their servitors
Weird and wonderful places, halls of beauty
The Halls of Foreverness [from Tshai]
Treasure chambers, hoards, and the art of [treasure]agogy
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