Originally posted on Cohost, archived in October 2024.

A word with interesting valences and connotations, seems ripe for fantasy storytelling. "Ichor" is both: 1. The ethereal, lethal blood of the gods in Greek mythology 2. An archaic term for foul-smelling discharge from a wound

Apparently in some cases this conflation was intentional as part of early-Christian propaganda against Hellenic religions.

Maybe the most common use of ichor today is in "petrichor," literally something like "stone ichor" or "earth ichor," the word for the smell produced by rain on dry soil. The word comes up fairly often in obscure word nerd trivia, but it only dates back 60 years or so.

Originally posted on Cohost, archived in October 2024.

This post will be laying out some worldbuilding and flavor for the people of the northern mountains and foothills, known as the Mez Kiri. This is the first faction I've fleshed out to this degree, and in a subsequent post I'll dig into their central mechanic, which I'm calling Waylay.

Background

Previously in worldbuilding, the Mez Kiri have been called "Mountain Nation" after the jagged mountains they live in and around. We've known that they're loosely organized but share an ethnic/cultural/religious context. Along with "Savanna Nation" to their southeast, they have history with the ruins in the desert, which we have since determined are the bones of an ancient god, into which a city was carved.

In the current moment of the setting, the Mez Kiri are known as highway robbers along mountain roads, and in particular the "Caldera City" to their south denounces them while privately paying "tribute" to protect their own shipments.

Economics

Starting with the basics, the Mez Kiri are primarily subsistence farmers and herders in the rough foothills between the mountains and deserts. There is likely a mix of livestock, but the large goats native to the mountain terrain are primary. The sparsity of resources means that Mez Kiri settlements are small and distant, with little formal political structure beyond the scale of a village. There may also be some mobility between regions, with groups moving to higher altitude in summer and lower altitude in winter to follow seasonal vegetation and temperate weather.

Alongside and intertwined with these villages are the cavalry. Atop sure-footed goats, they can take paths through the mountains impossible for horses, wagons, or most humans for that matter. This allows them to ambush travelers quickly from unexpected directions and avoid pursuit. Between scores, much of their time is spent on infrastructure; goat-paths, campsites, stashes, and even the trade roads themselves benefit from cavalry maintenance.

Religion

Like the "Savanna Nation," the Mez Kiri trace their history back to the god-bone ruins in the desert to their east. We've floated before that the schism between the two peoples was likely religious in nature, following the discovery of the nature of the bones and a possible calamity that occurred there. As I've done for much of the worldbuilding process, I turned to Kevin Crawford's Worlds Without Number to help sketch some of this religion. I'll show the results from the WWN religion generation questions and then we can interpret.

WWN Religion Construction

• Who leads the faith? There are multiple pontiffs, friendly or otherwise, with subordinate clergy obedient to their own pontiff and perhaps cooperative with others.
• What is the god’s origin? It was an Outsider or alien from beyond
• Why does this faith matter? It’s trying to expand and needs help
• What does this faith want? Strengthen or protect its devout believers
• What are the clergy like? Common believers chosen by their peers for their technical skill and good moral qualities.
• What does this god do in society? It explains the creation and order of the world
• What is the god’s portfolio? 1. Travel or Roads 2. Death
• What are the faith’s strictures? Never/always cooperate with a certain faith

An Aside to Gush

At risk of overstating, this set of results is the reason I use procedural generation (and WWN particularly) for worldbuilding. These are random rolls on a series of tables, but they mesh so well with what we already know about the Mez Kiri and provide interesting spurs for additional complexity. It's why I chose this approach, but it still amazes me sometimes!

Interpreting the Rolls

The Mez Kiri know their god is dead. It's the first tenet of their faith and the origin story of their mythology. The desert god (name TBD) is believed to have created the world, and its death is an essential part of its (and the Mez Kiri's) story. Then, it was an act of faith for the believers to walk away from the society of their antiquity, which continues to carve that god's bones to this day. That act of faith became a hard desert journey to the mountains and foothills they now call home, but they were seen through. The road is always treacherous, but the Mez Kiri devout believe their faith sees them through travel. And as geopolitics pushes more and more trade through their part of the world, some call that a divine act as well.

Organizationally, the clergy follows the same patterns as Mez Kiri life - anyone can become a leader in the faith if their community supports them, and hierarchies are shifting and informal between communities. The faith is as old as the Mez Kiri as a distinct social group, and its practices and culture are the strongest common reference they share as a people.

Some of the extra details here, such as "Never/always cooperate with a certain faith" and "It’s trying to expand and needs help" are still loose ends for now. We'll keep them in mind as we work on building up more of the social landscape around the Mez Kiri.

Politics

While the practice of waylaying travelers through the mountains is not new, it's only become a full-fledged institution since the corruption of the southern mountains in the last few centuries. Previously, Mez Kiri life (and political power) were centered firmly in the village, and by extension with the religious leaders there. The bands of cavalry who camp in mountain caves and swoop down on passing trade caravans don't fit very well in this system.

But many young Mez Kiri see the cavalry as an opportunity for adventure and a way to benefit their families and communities. And it's undeniable that the cavalry have brought significant wealth and resources to the Mez Kiri as a whole, extracted at swordpoint. As a result, there is a sometimes tense understanding between local priests and cavalry captains - the village provides mounts, recruits, and stability, and in turn most seized goods flow back to the village in time. Everyone attends the holidays together and plays nice, at least for now.

Next Up

I'm really happy to have one part of the world pretty ironed out and named so that things feel a little more substantial. I actually have a fair amount of design work done for Waylay, the signature Mez Kiri mechanic, so I'll be writing that up next. After that, I'll probably pivot to thinking about black, since it feels like the graveyard is going to be important for this set.

Originally posted on Cohost, archived in October 2024.

I've learned from a recent spoiler that Wizards has already explored small people riding normal goats. Time to corner the market on average-sized people riding large goats.

Originally posted on Cohost, archived in October 2024.

It's taken three months, but I've decided there will be goats in my setting. They live in the mountains and are ridden by the people there. I haven't decided yet if the people are small or the goats are large to enable this. Stay tuned for more thrilling updates like this at blistering pace.

Originally posted on Cohost, archived in October 2024.

After my last post tinkering with ways to animate lots of lands, I was ready to set the idea aside for a while. But as often happens with creative projects, some stray thoughts from research cohered into something compelling, which brought me back to the idea. The result is an animated land creature type I'm calling the ashborn.

What's a small land creature?

One question we didn't address in the previous post: from a Magic design perspective, what does a 1/1 land creature look like? Often, animated lands in Magic represent huge masses of earth rising up as an elemental or something similar, and accordingly they tend to have better stats than 1/1. Filling white's sort of "army" role as pseudo-tokens, we'd expect 1/1 land creatures to be something more on a humanoid scale.

I spent a fair amount of time looking at mythological traditions on beings made from earth or clay; in the previous post I used "Enki" as a placeholder counter name, referring to the Sumerian creation myth for humanity. But the ancient myths I read didn't really strike me for inspiration, and I'm generally very hesitant to pull on other people's mythology or religion as wallpaper for my fantasy setting.

That's also a primary reason I've avoided the obvious choice of golems. Broadly I'm not sure how Jewish folks feel about the way "golem" gets used in fantasy, but I feel weird enough about it that I'd rather avoid it altogether. Also, golems introduce some assumptions that don't work for me. Namely that they're created to obey orders, making them either automatons or a very linear-narrative underclass. Specific to Magic, since they're constructed to serve, they're usually artifacts, not lands. Both of these are things I'd like to avoid with our creature lands.

Bone China in a China-less World

Since many of the creation myths I researched focus specifically on beings created from clay, I began to read about ceramics. Eventually this brought me to porcelain and "bone china." Apparently, porcelain is sort of a subjective category covering a few different materials. In the broadest sense, porcelain includes both pure-mineral ceramics (originally from China) as well as "bone china," which uses bone ash to supplement a different mineral makeup (and is English in origin, despite the name).

From a fantasy perspective, bone china is much more interesting than other ceramics, with an immediate question being "whose (or what's) bones?" Creatures of animate porcelain would have a striking glassy white appearance, which is great for art purposes. If that porcelain is bone china, they'd also have a historical material connection to the source of the bone ash suffusing them. I came up with the name "ashborn" to describe these creatures.

Megaplex of Bone

We know that the ashborn represent a secret magic of the people we're temporarily calling Savanna Nation, who have some connection to the "megaplex" in the desert. So far we haven't really nailed down that megaplex in any way, only that it's a moment of shared history (and implicitly falling-out) between Savanna Nation and Mountain Nation. But now that we have a question of "where does the ashborn's bone ash come from," an explanation presents itself.

The "megaplex" is the skeleton of an ancient, colossal god. If that's not constructed enough to earn the -plex, we can say that a city was carved into the massive bones, in addition to whatever mining happens there. Perhaps the scale is so large, or the form so alien, that it's hard to recognize it as a skeleton without significant cartography and study. A natural moment of schism between Savanna Nation and the religious Mountain Nation would be the revelation of the skeleton's nature.

The people of Mountain Nation still worship the god, maybe believing that it lives on incorporeally, and oppose continued mining of its skeleton for resources. In contrast, Savanna Nation are the descendants of those who chose to continue mining and working with the god's bone as a material.

Nature of the Ashborn

Taking the megaplex as the source of the bone for ashborn solves some problems neatly. Rather than simply being constructs, the ashborn represent a fusion of the inherent magic of the land (mana, in game terms) with the divine residue within the bone ash. From there, we can make some additional statements backed up by "the bone just does that:"

• Ashborn are all of identical form (maybe humanoid, maybe not) and power
  • In fact, attempts to fire porcelain in a different form results in cracked, inert ceramic
• They are very durable and functionally immortal, and when destroyed or damaged can be re-fired
• Ashborn have agency and make decisions on their own
• The ashborn don't speak and rarely communicate except through gesture and action
  • They may communicate with each other through some other means, though it's not well-understood
• Their motives and goals are often opaque, but they value their own autonomy, as well as being in control of the creation of new ashborn

Filling in Some History

We know that historically Savanna Nation had a strong class division, and that a struggle happened recently to subvert that. The ashborn have a complex relationship to that history. They're dependent on the system that harvests bone and produces porcelain in order to (re)produce themselves. With Mountain Nation opposing that system, and Savanna Nation having long left the desert, porcelain production is difficult and intensive.

So we can say that there was a small upper class of Savanna Nation who controlled the mining/stockpiles/kilns used to produce porcelain, and for a long time the ashborn were more or less held hostage by that class. Given their durability (and their Magic status as an "army" in green/white), we can assume they acted as military/policing. Only recently was a broad coalition of ashborn and humans (or some other fantasy "race" TBD) able to overthrow this aristocracy. Now the ashborn have significantly more control over the kilns, though it's still an intensive process to gather bone and clay for porcelain.

The rate of new ashborn creation has been very low, but it remains an open question whether the ashborn will change that. It's not clear how the labor would be organized, or what impact such production would have on the land being mined for clay and mana. But the ashborn last a long time, and they haven't seemed rushed to action in the generation since the rebellion. One rumor says there's internal disagreement between the ashborn, although how would an outsider know? For the time being, they till the land and build houses and work the kilns alongside everyone else.

What Next?

Having designed the ashborn from a story perspective, I'm now really motivated to make them work mechanically. I have some ideas, but I'm going to put them in another post. Knowing about the god's skeleton in the desert also gives me a nice intro to the Mountain Nation religion, which will probably be my next worldbuilding post.

Originally posted on Cohost, archived in October 2024.

We're continuing Worlds Without Number's region generation process for high-level details of our setting. Last time we placed major terrain and landmarks, this time we'll build nations using a bit of randomly generated history.

Here I've had to modify the WWN approach a bit. In particular, I'm skipping any detailed mapping the book calls for (drawing rivers, etc). I'm also a bit constrained - as we discussed last time, Magic really does ask for a certain correspondence between terrain and social flavor. So I've massaged the process a little bit to make sure the flavor of our nations matches their physical geography.

National Borders

To start, we need to split our regional map into various nations / polities are located. To avoid our working map just being a jumble of text, I'll start by replacing the terrain labels with a color palette. Since the last post, I've also decided the mountain range should cut off the western part of the map from the north:

This helps answer an important question: what separates this region from the rest of the world? In our case, the mountains and the desert provide natural borders to the north and east, complementing the ocean to the west and south. It also works towards some plans I have for the red/green color pair; more on that later.

Next we need to add national borders. WWN recommends about six nations per region, so I've worked out the following map:

These names are temporary for this post. In subsequent posts I'll be working out the specifics of each nation, including actual names.

History Generation

Each nation receives two random historical events, which often imply connections to other nations. Rather than generate a pair of events for each nation individually, I decided to roll all six pairs at once. This gave me a little more flexibility to make sure each nation fit in with the Magic color identity of its area.

An Aside About Swamps

In Magic, the color black has a dimension beyond either the social or the ecological - while black represents individualist pursuit of power by any means, it's also poison, corruption, and demons, capital-E fantasy Evil. That gets aligned with the land type of swamps in a move that sits uneasily with me, working on a certain conception of a swamp as a location of corruption, death, and danger. This poses a problem: Magic needs swamps, and it needs them to support black's flavor, but as a designer I don't like resting on tired stereotypes about a real-life ecology. Trying to solve this ended up creating the core setting detail of this work, starting from our first national history:

Blackred Mountain

Tags:

• Twist of Fate: Roll again; if the event was positive twist it to ultimately be a negative to the group, and vice-versa.
  • Great Infrastructure: Some tremendous work of infrastructure was accomplished: canals, vast walls, roads, aqueducts, mines, or the like. (twisted to negative)
• Depravity: Vile debauches, unclean habits, and base hungers became commonplace among the group.

This was a huge undergrown mining and trade city built into an entire mountain. During a war with Swamp Nation, for unknown reasons an unnatural black fluid flooded Blackred Mountain and spilled outward. Denizens of the city were twisted by contact with the fluid, and their monstrous descendants are still present with unknown goals or social structure. Blackred Mountain has not engaged in diplomacy or trade since, and consistently lethal scouting missions have led other factions to avoid the area.

Swamp Nation

Tags:

• External War: The group faced a war with some external enemy or rival nation, with grave consequences.
• Brutal Oppression: Some portion of the group was reduced to a state of wretched subservience by the rest.

The swamp area used to be a regular marshland with several major cities and many smaller settlements, forming Swamp Nation. After the war with Blackred Mountain, corruption spilled into the swamp, making endemic life more alien and hostile, poisoning the land, and causing the buildings sink into the swamp. One city survived within Swamp Nation's borders, surrounded by ancient hyper-optimized farmland which resisted the vile changes. This city has developed a firmly rooted power structure and a massive underclass descended from wave after wave of refugees as the nation's other cities collapsed.

Savanna Nation

Tags:

• Freakish Magic: A particular type of magic was developed here that is unknown elsewhere, and its practitioners keep its secrets well.
• Class Struggle: Different classes were in conflict, either subtle or overt, all seeking their own gain.

This group once lived in the megaplex ruins in the desert, either as its original builders or later inheritors. They for the savanna after an ancient catastrophe, but they brought with them a secret form of magic. Unlike Caldera City spellcraft, this magic directly augments people (specifics TBD based on where we land on green/white mechanics). Until recently, this art was used to support a small ruling class's dominance over the majority of the population. In living memory, there was an organized revolution from the Savanna Nation underclass, resulting in a much more egalitarian, community-based social structure.

Mountain Nation

Tags:

• Religious Rise: A powerful new religion arose among the group.
• Consequences: Pick an event of a prior age; it had long-term consequences that were good, for a bad event, or bad, for a good event.

This is a loose affiliation of groups living in the mountains and foothills, traditionally herders. They tend to follow good weather and good grazing, and they all claim a shared past after fleeing a grim event (possibly the same that caused Savanna Nation to leave the megaplex). A strong religious tradition began with that exodus and binds this people together. After the Blackred Mountain incident, overland trade was rerouted northward through Mountain Nation land. With so much wealth flowing through the mountains, herding has been supplemented with highway robbery - a reasonable tithe to the Mountain Nation peoples.

Caldera City

Tags:

• Magical Tech: The group developed a useful and widespread magical tech or infrastructure that may have survived into the present.
• Diplomatic Coup: The group achieved an extremely successful alliance or affiliation with a neighboring group that may yet persist.

One of the oldest institutions in the region is the college of spellcraft in Caldera City. The arts taught there protect the city directly, and also confer enough wealth and prestige to solve most problems of diplomacy. While the City publicly denounces banditry in the mountains, practically they enjoy a mutually beneficial relationship with Mountain Nation. City caravans always carry a generous "tribute" for any unexpected stops, and Mountain Nation ensures that outsiders bent on less gentle robbery schemes are promptly put out of business.

Jungle Nation

Tags:

• Rare Resource: A uniquely valuable resource was found or manufactured by the group, which used or traded it to full effect.
• Exquisite Art: The group produced art that is revered to this day, either in general or in a specific medium or form of literature.

Jungle Nation nominally controls the full breadth of the thick rainforest, but in practice most people and power are situated along a major river system, connected to outside trade through a mouth at the western ocean. These rivers serve as primary transportation, avoiding the thick undergrowth in the forest or the beast-filled hills in the north and east. The jungle is home to a unique type of tree whose fibrous bark can be woven into textiles, and its cultivation, processing, and export drives Jungle Nation's economy. The most skilled arborists maintain trees selectively bred for color, allowing the creation of complex woven patterns without any dye or pigment. These are prized as fine attire throughout the region.

Non-National Elements

Each of the six nations above roughly corresponds to a Magic color pair. For three of the remaining four pairs, there are non-political processes:

• At the border of the swamp and the jungle, the process of seeping poison moves upward, weakening the land and transforming the endemic jungle ecosystem (black/green)
• On the coast of the swamp, the same corruption spills into the ocean, where more and more ships go missing and strange monsters are seen in the depths (blue/black)
• In the hills surrounding the jungle, there have always been large, territorial beasts. Some people eke out a living in small villages, others travel from afar to hunt (red/green)

A Trade Guild

While overland trade occurs, it seems that much of the region is more easily traversed by sea, or by air. A guild of sailing and flying merchants, with potentially complex internal politics but a clean bureaucratic exterior, fits the remaining color pair of white/blue well, and provides an additional entity for the various factions to have interactions with and orientations to. I'll likely use WWN's "Court" procedures to roll up more complex information about this guild in a subsequent post.

Looking Forward

I think that wraps up the region-level worldbuilding for now. The next few posts I make will probably be more focused on mechanics as I start to lock in themes and archetypes for the set, then we'll return to worldbuilding to drill into each faction in detail.

Originally posted on Cohost, archived in October 2024.

Starting off here, let's take a high-level look at the region where our set will be based. I'll be using Kevin Crawford's Worlds Without Number for this stage, which has really detailed procedures for building a fantasy world. Let's get started!

WWN is a fantasy setting that assumes a deep past of lost magic and seems to integrate some Dying Earth sci-fantasy elements as well. I'm following the instructions pretty faithfully, but will make some light modifications. In particular, WWN assumes the needs of a tabletop campaign: a lot of detail where the players start, rough outlines to be filled in later everywhere else. For a set that covers the whole region, we instead need a middling level of detail pretty much everywhere. Magic color identities and evergreen mechanics also require specific themes (need unnatural harmful things to fill out black) and content (gotta have creatures that fly), so we're a little more constrained than WWN might anticipate.

Major Features

We start by rolling six major geographic features in the region:

• Jagged mountains. A new or resharpened mountain range forms a barrier in the region. The mountains are young, tall, and likely cast a substantial rain shadow.
• Jungle. A classic adventure-worthy jungle of wild, semi-alien flora and fauna.
• Megaplex. The ruins of a single huge ancient structure stretch for endless miles.
• Scrub desert. These often appear on the leeward side of mountain ranges. Borders will often be grasslands or savanna.
• Swamp. A sinking river, lake margin, or wet coastal delta forms a vast bog in this flat land.
• Ancient farmland. A huge stretch of land was re-engineered for optimal farming.

From that list, we can pretty easily infer a geography, with the two wetter biomes separated from the scrub desert by jagged mountains. I was originally hesitant to produce maps of the region, since a Magic set doesn't call for a map, and because mapping frames how you think about the world in a certain way. However, later steps of WWN worldgen really do expect spatial relations between places. As a compromise, I've taken a very abstract approach:

Next, I want to integrate the megaplex, which I think will go well in the desert. I also have an image of a magical college or a city built on an island in the middle of a caldera as an anchor location for UR. (AN: In the process of editing this post I learned that the island in Crater Lake, notable caldera, is actually called Wizard Island. I'm taking this as a sign that caldera islands are universally understood as wizardly.) Between the scrub desert and the ocean I placed some savanna, which seems like a natural transition. I'm still not sure where "ancient farmland" will go, so I'm holding off on placing it just yet.

In WWN the next step is to start working on nations/factions operating in the region, but first I want to take inventory of how Magic color pairs might fit into this geography. In Magic, colored mana comes from specific types of land, so there should be some degree of correspondence between colors and terrain types. And designing for limited requires each of the ten color pairs to have it's own feel and themes, so the pairs are the most relevant color identities. There's probably some risk of this overdetermining the rest of our worldbuilding, so I'll treat it as a one-off exercise to identify where there might be gaps.

Most of these are freebies, treating the jungle area as green, the jagged mountains as red, the swamp as black, and the ocean as blue. I marked the central caldera as UR as planned, and assigned RW to the eastern foothills between the scrub desert and the mountains. Savannas have a history in Magic, and are typically associated with GW. There's one natural pairing, BR, which I didn't place yet, mostly because I think "swamp mountain" needs some more consideration.

The other two unplaced color combos are WU and WB. There are a couple options to consider. We could add some drier land around the swamp area and create a WB zone ("plains swamp"), for example. The current map also doesn't have any oceanic islands, which might work well for WU. They also might not be associated with major geographic areas - a single violently oppressive and/or haunted city might anchor WB, for example.

This post has probably gone on long enough already, so let's pause here. Next time, we'll generate the major nations/polities and think some more about color pairs.