My Fantasy RPG World, Feedback and Ideas appreciated

I got some new satyr art.


On a non-satyr note, I hopefully will post a new Scarterran short story in a few days.

 

So a long time ago, @Warden mentioned how actual legends of Mayan bat monsters involve a lot of people being decapitated.

I have long had this rattling around the back of my head. I did create an aerial maneuver for kalazotz and camazotz called a dive bomb which has a low probability of hitting but if it does hit you could theoretically kill someone in a single strike, which I suppose could be a decapitation strike.

That said, a dive bomb is easier with a spear than a sword or axe and being impaled through the chest is just as dead as being decapitated.

Without a controlled dive where gravity is providing most of the momentum, I'm not sure what motion I would use to decapitate someone with a weapon I'm holding with my feet.

I did have a recent brainwave that while decapitation might not be practical for camazotz or kalazotz to do, I had thought that may camazotz have a cultural practice of decapitating the heads of corpses and prisoners and then displaying the heads as grisly trophies. A few of the more aggressive kalazotz could do that do, especially if they manage to get their hands on some camazotz heads.


In one of the campaigns I'm running, the King of Fumaya has recently hired kalazotz to run long distance messages over hostile territory undetected at night.

The Queen of Swynfaredia has hired camazotz mercenaries from Uskala to run interference and intercept and slay these messengers.

The King of Fumaya has ordered Kormatin, the patriotic Fumaya-loving PC, to go kill or drive off the camazotz before this happens.

I did not intend it to be this way, but this adventure has become the darkest and grittiest adventure I have have ever run in Scarterra.

Kormatin and his allies are not murder hobos, but he had to do some grim pragmatic things. Until this adventure, Kormatin's war record was the epitome of chivalry where prisoners were treated with mercy and dignity and excess force was never used. Before now, enemies who turned stool pigeon were also set free.

They were disguised as Swynfaredian troops to fool casual patrols, but they couldn't bluff their way through the first patrol. They had to kill them. They tried to hide the bodies but were caught by a second patrol who they also butchered (after some interrogation where they revealed what they knew of the camazotz mercenaries) giving them more bodies to hide

The kalazotz in Kormatin's team picked up a nearby group of seven camazotz with his sonar hearing. The camazotz were not aware they were in danger and were out hunting a deer.

With the element of surprise, they beat the cloud of seven camazotz. Then they tracked down where the camazotz had set up a tent to sleep during the day where their human liaisons were set up. They captured and interrogated the Uskalan humans, but they couldn't take prisoners this far behind enemies lines, so more executed POWs.

Also, while humanely killed, they had to savage the corpses and remove the heads to make it look like the camazotz turned on their handlers. Eventually the Swynfaredians are going to wonder why two squads disappeared and Kormatin and Company wants to incept the idea that the camazotz turned on their employers.

It just keeps getting darker.

Most of Kormatin's team are combat veterans who understand how dark war is but Aleesia is the satyr is a green veteran and a gentle soul who was brought on because she is patriotic for Fumaya's safety and has powerful plant magic which is good for many things.

I'm not sure the best way to roleplay here getting squicked out as this is something I didn't see coming.

Also Aleesia started as a side character but has become a recurring favorite.

Also, my gaming group isn't big on romantic side plots, but if Kormatin did have a romantic B-plot, it would be with Aleesia.

 

It must be summer,



the knights are getting shorter.

 

Just for a lark, I invaded Nightbringer's milestone thread, but I suppose this is the main place to celebrate Scarterra milestones.

I have just passed a million words on my main Scarterra page.

In order to cross a million words in style, I wrote a short story called "Shoemakers' Stand" rather than a setting or gaming related article. Some concrete progress in my vague resolution to write more actual stories this year.

I suppose I cannot resist shoe makers becoming unlikely heroes. Perhaps it's due to me being raised on retro cartoons.

I appreciate all the Scarterra support and ideas you have have given me on this thread.

 

Chimera are a creature of Greek mythology. I'm pretty Greek mythology had ONE chimera (what I call a "True Monster") not a race of them. Scarterra has an entire race of chimera, though they are on the decline. Your garden variety Chimera has a viper for a tail, wings, a quadruped body and the heads of a lion, goat, and dragon.



It occurred me to the other day that I have a soft goal of making each continent of Scarterra have a feel of a real world geographic region. West Colassia to Europe, East Colassia to Africa, Umera to East Asia, and Penarchia to South Asia, and Khemarok to an unholy mix of Egypt and Australia.

But because of my background, western folklore monsters are more prevalent. I thought what if instead of giving all chimera the standard dragon/goat/lion package if the heads resembled local beasts. The snake tail will also vary based on what the local poisonous snake population looks like.

East Colassia could have the standard chimera package, but West Colassia might have a dragon, boar, and bear head. Penarchia might have a dragon, goat, and tiger head. Umera might have a dragon, bull, and tiger head. I'm still not sure what the Khemarok variant would be for Australia but I figure they would have the nastiest snake tails because 9 of the 9 most poisonous snakes in the world live in Australia.

Dragons don't change. 1) dragon folklore exists on EVERY continent of real world Earth and 2) in Scarterran lore, chimera were created to oppose dragons.

It won't change a whole lot, combat stat wise, but it will serve the interests of the Rule of Cool.

I figure if a chimera flies to a distant continent, they are not going to magically have their heads change to represent the local animals, but any baby chimera (chimera pup? chimera hatchling?) is going to be born with three amorphous heads that take the form based on the local animals in the region it is born in.

 

As a weapon against dragons, chimera were not very good. There was supposedly a saying in WWII that a German Panzer could take out ten American or Soviet tanks but there always was an eleventh. In this case it usually took four or five chimera to take out an older dragon but it only took two or three to take out a younger dragon and the older dragons back then were assholes that made the younger dragons fight their battles.

Greymoria did it. Note that Greymoria's titles include "the Dark Mother" and "The Mother of Monsters".

Originally the Nine agreed to split the worship of all mortals nine ways evenly, but Nami opted to give mortals the Gift of Free Will and suddenly worship was up in the air.

Greymoria believes her contribution to the Divine Rebellion was the greatest. She poisoned Turoch making victory against possible in the first place, but Greymoria created the poison by torturing souls to the point where they were so mutilated that they became poisonous when Turoch when consumed them.

Most mortals (including the original dragons) found this horrifying and shunned Greymoria. So she created new races of monsters to punish the dragons which caused dragons to shun her more, which led to Greymoria inflicting divine punishments and so on and so forth.

It doesn't help that Greymoria sees Mera as a rival and Mera worship is very popular because...you know Mera tries to bestow good things on her worshipers.

Then in the Second Age, Greymoria did the same things with the elves who did not love her as much as she deserved and now she is doing it again to humans in the Third Age.

To add insult to injury, a majority of the new races Greymoria creates eventually rebel against her (that pesky Free Will again).

In the Chimeras case, at some point a forward thinking dragon said "If you guys work for me, I'll give you lots of food." Soon, most chimera were serving dragon masters, but the dragon nations were often at war so they would send chimera to fight rival dragons or to fight rival dragons' chimera.

Supposedly, Greymoria created dozens of new races to attack the dragons. About half of these races were driven to extinction by the dragons in the First Age. Of the survivors, about half of them didn't survive the First Unmaking. Of those survivors, about half didn't survive the Second Unmaking. I might expand the list later, but so far the list of Greymoria dragon killing races that are still around includes: chimera, kobolds, occumati (they deny being created by Greymoria claiming they created themselves emerging out Turoch's dead eye sockets), and dragon spiders.

No one is sure who created gravroks, but are awfully gentle for a Greymoria race and they were mostly servants to dragons. The dragons claimed that all the Nine except for Greymoria created the giants as a servant race for them.

Common wisdom is that Greymoria created goblins were created as a cannon fodder race to attack elves in the Second Age. Some believe that Phidas helped Greymoria do so because they have a materialistic Lawful Evil bent. But in the Second Age, most of the goblins were captured and enslaved. That is why modern goblins hate elves above all, though they kind of hate everybody including other goblins.

The vast majority of goblins believe that the Nine shunned them so the Nine aren't worthy of worship, Greymoria included.

Likewise, it is wildly believed Greymoria created the first camazotz (with an assist from Maylar). Modern camazotz do not worship Greymoria but they still hate everyone so Greymoria would call that a qualified win, if it were not for Mera "corrupting" so many into kalazotz.

It is widely believed that Greymoria had a hand in the creation of the dabeshi (hyena people).

Some say Greymoria created the metamorphs but the metamorphs deny this. Some say Greymoria created the tengku. Some tengku vehemently deny it, others shrug and say "We don't know who or what created our ancestors, all that really matters is the here and now."

The arachpliza (spider people) were created by Greymoria in the Second Age and amazingly they never stopped worshipping Greymoria. The have however become very cautious, so only slay Greymoria's enemies when they are reasonably sure they can get away with it.

I definitely need to increase the roster of Greymoria Second Age creations and I need to toss in a few Third Age Greymoria creations (I currently have ZERO). I have an idea for a humanoid race of organic non-undead vampires. They don't need to drink human blood to live, but if they drink human blood, they become much stronger, faster, and tougher leading them to become addicted to it. I'm still tinkering with the basic concept.

Also, Greymoria and her followers are pioneers in the creation of new undead variants. The mutilated souls she created that weren't consumed by Turoch essentially became Scarterra's first undead.

Plus Greymoria makes her fair share of what I call true monsters. She is easily the most proactive of my evil gods, so much so that I am pondering giving Phidas and Maylar some more atrocities so they can keep pace.

 

The Summer Camp 2023 world anvil event is drawing to a close. There are 40 prompts. I only need 32 to get the diamond prize, and I got 32. I might do a couple more if the muses strike, but I'm not getting all 40. Some of the prompts are either something I have zero interest in doing or something I've already done to death (Summer camp prompt responses must be new).

You can see all my Summer Camp entries here.

I got some new art from the talented Zeta Gardner aka Nalebunny.

Satyrs 7 and 8. Aka, the satyr kids.



I expanded the main satyr article to include a bit more on satyr growth stages and parenting strategies giving me an excuse to use the excellent portraits.

Anyway, this artist is awesome and reasonably priced, so I plan to keep working with him as long as he is willing to do so. Done with satyr art for now, but I currently paid to him to start making some tengku, different ethnic and social class variations. He also came up with some subtle differences for males and females that I look forward to seeing.

@Lord Agragax of Lunaxoatl , I figured the next part would interest you as well. Might as well flag @Warden too.

Finally, I discovered by accident that after the program being down for several months, Worldspinner's heraldry generator program is back online with some minor updates.

Hopefully I can start making some new heraldry again. Fumaya is the most developed nation in Scarterra and I already established who the dukes and duchesses are and what the ducal heraldry, but I have recently begun developing the Counts, so you'll start seeing new heraldry popping up here again.

I'm running two RPG campaigns in West Colassia. One of them has lots of story fodder but the other is approaching the ceiling of what we can do with the characters, so we are slowly winding down that campaign with a (hopefully) epic and grand ending.

Then we are going to pick up with a Penarchian campaign, or a Red Era campaign, or a Scaraquan campaign, so whatever new setting we go with will require more heraldry (there are not nearly as many fish options as I would prefer).

I'm also working on a new long term project. I have been running Scarterra as an RPG for years and I got most of the major kinks worked out, but all the RPG info is on my Scarterra wiki, but not everyone runs their RPG with an active internet connection. I am working on making a complete RPG book. To make the rule book less dry, I'm working on putting in little story vignettes narrating examples of what the RPGs rules are covering and I'll see about getting some art in it too.

I have no delusions of getting rich this way, but I already have enough money to retire on right now. I just have to not lose large quantities of money on this endeavor. I'd be thrilled to sell a thousand books and break even. But for now, even that is a pipe dream. I am doing this for funsies.

Right now I have one person outside my group of friends actively interested in playing Scarterra d10 and a couple people passively interested in it.

I'm not sure how to market this, but I would probably make the basic rules free online and ask people to buy my book. Like how Pathfinder works.

I got 70% of the bones of my RPG rules done done and about 40% of my setting overview done. I'm currently looking through to find any rules aspects that are missing or unclear.

Sometimes I have to take my preexisting material and trim it down, sometimes I have to take my preexisting material and flesh it out further.

The next step is to add some story vignettes for flavor. Then I'll see if I can get some lovely art in there without breaking the bank.

My current plan is to make the first draft a bit verbose and trim it down with subsequent drafts.

The art I've bought thus far is in the $60 to $120 each. It's about a 30% markup across the board if I commercialize Scarterra even if the art doesn't make it into the book (because my Scarterra page would legally qualify as marketing), but I could use the existing art I have in a book pretty easily.

Heck, just for funsies, one of my friends has taken a RPG campaign idea we didn't run with and is writing a campaign module for it. If Scarterra d10 did take off, my vision is that the RPG mainbook would contain enough information, rules wise and setting wise, to run campaigns with only that one book, but I'd release setting and campaign books presenting deep dives into small aspects of Scarterra.

 

Handsome bird people

I know @Paradoxical Pacifism hasn't posted much lately, but he mentioned in passing being a fan of handsome bird people.

I got some preliminary sketches. I need to figure out what adjustments to ask for (if any) before asking the artist known as Nale Bunny to make a full colorized sketches (at which point changes become more difficult).

The 2 x 2 square of headshots was meant to be

Airy Female Earthy Male
Fiery Female Watery Male

I had an idea that airy and earthy people would usually dress simply and utilitarian and fiery and watery people would be prone to making fashion statements.

NB suggested giving females smooth feathers around the head like a real world crow (right) and males have neck scruff like a real world bearded raven (left)



And I thought that idea was awesome, so I am officially making this the main way humans can tell male and female tengku apart.

I asked for a left/right female/male split and I received.

Zeta came up with the idea of a top/bottom young old dichotomy. So the top two are young adults and the bottom two are middle aged going on old. I'm not sure if a tengku would ever need glasses as their eyesight is superior to almost every other race but the spectacles look cool. Maybe since tengku are descended from flying birds with great distance vision, when old age sets in they become more far sighted and need spectacles to read documents in front of them.




I'm open to any feedback before I tell Nale Bunny to pull the trigger and make the finished product.

My buddy said it might be need to show one tengku at every stage of life which would be undeniably cool, but that would also require more money which I suppose I can afford but I don't want to burn money on my hobby too fast.

As was pointed out, the physiology of tengku leaves questions that a headshot will not answer. I plan to comission two full body shots using the headshots as a baseline "I want you to take x from picture 1 and y from picture 2" or something similar.

I figure one full body portrait of a tengku wearing armor and another wearing normal clothes.

Then I'm going to spring for an action illustration of a human and a tengku haggling at a market stall. By showing a human and a tengku standing near each other I can establish scale AND I can use the haggling scene as the cover image on pretty much every single article I have written or will write on Scarterran economics.

 

My friend gives me about three character portraits a week, I'm not going to post them all here but he perfectly captured the essence of a Scarterran redneck so I had to showcase it.



Way back on page 52, I covered stereotypes of the Colassian Confederacy on each other and Zakarel gave the opinions of Marshlandia, now viewable on the sidebar of the Marshlandia article.

Now that he has a picture, I might try to insert his commentary into more articles. If you are interest, I have a meta article called Master List of Quotes which lets you find all the articles where a character gets a quote. At this point, over half of them have a portrait now and this is slowly growing.

 

I'm sort of dealing with writer's block and indecision on what tengku should look like and how much variation should they have



Right now, of the so-called "player character races" tengku are the metaphorical cat. Since I have about 20 human ethnicities, 12ish gnomes, 4 elves, 4 dwarves, 3 kalazotz (and more to come), and 6 or 7 satyrs.

Tengku are both outsiders and assimilationists, so being "cats" might make sense.

 

Here's an update on handsome bird people.



The left two are female, the two on the right are male.

The top two are young adults (fiery female, earthy male), the bottom two are middle aged (airy female, watery male).

I'm going to pay for two full body portraits.

One is going to be similar to the upper right female. I want a tengku wearing light robes with bare arms and bare legs (to answer the obvious question what do tengku arms and legs and feet look like).

It is not yet set in stone what their legs and feet will look like. I'm not sure myself. I'm hoping my brilliant artist friend has some ideas.

The other tengku is going to be wearing armor and full battle gear. This will showcase what a muscular tengku looks like, what a tengku helmet looks like, and what tengku closed-toe shoes look like.

 

I was very active in World Anvil's Summer 2023 Camp and got a lot of likes and a lot more traffic from new visitors on my wiki. But very few of these new visitors opted to stay or read beyond my Summer Camp entries.

I suppose I tossed out about 50 likes about 10 generally positive constructive criticism comments on other people and a lot of people reciprocated (I got about 15 new likes), but I only ended up personally following three or four new worlds. I got two or three new followers myself, but they haven't torn through the depths of my articles yet.

I have a goal for Scarterra. I want to make three to five articles providing an overview of a broad segment of my lore. I'm going to call these tent pole articles. My plan is to make these tent pole articles efficiently written, beautifully illustrated and dynamically formatted and above all loaded with related hyperlinks to entice first-time visitors to my wiki to want to learn more about Scarterra. And ideally I'd like to get these tent poles done in time for Summer Camp 2024 when I should get a new wave of first time visitors to my Scarterra website.

I would be delighted to read suggestions from you guys on what I should write about and how I should I got about presenting them. For those who have been following this thread a long time, I would appreciate feedback on what parts of Scarterra hooked you and what made you want to keep coming back for more. And also, if any parts of Scarterra lore bored or annoyed it. I'm a big boy, I can take it.

One of the articles should be "the People of Scarterra" and incorporate the art work I've been slowly collecting.





I am planning on an overview of Scarterra's nine deities and common religious practices because that is the foundation I built the rest of my lore on. Condensing everything into bite sized pieces is going to be hard.

 

As I impatiently wait my next tengku portraits, I am pondering a new idea. The following is loose brain storming and as of yet does not have concrete implementation yet.

Undead plants

If I have a supernatural plant creature that is sentient or at least animate, it wouldn't be that hard to make an undead variant of them.

I am pondering undead versions of normal plants. Non-animate undead plants would not be a monster for adventurers to fight so much as they would be an environmental hazard. I'm not exactly sure how this would manifest, and what is to stop people from defoliating, burning, or scything a patch of undead grass, shrubs, and/or trees.

It's possible animate/sentient undead plants would like to hang out in patches of passive undead plants.

Another option is have hivemind undead plants. Where hypothetically every flower or every blade of grass is one tiny piece of an intelligent malevolent entity that acts with one will. Sort of like a plant zombie/Borg variant maybe. In this case, the more of the component plants that make up the collective, the stronger and smarter the gestalt entity is. I am not sure what the powers and motivations of such a thing would be.

Whether they are animate, inanimate, or some kind of hive mind, I like the idea that undead plants would have some kind of reverse photosynthesis and draw sustenance from darkness rather than sunlight. I don't know if they would be harmed or impeded by sunlight. After all, a normal plant can handle normal darkness as long as long as they still get some sun.

A patch of undead plants could act as a blight of sorts, gradually expanding to kill and zombify normal plants around them.

That is a big deal in zombie story in their dozens of variants. As the victims of the zombies become zombies the infection grows exponentially. But striking a balance is hard. I don't want undead plants to be so powerful that Scarterra and Scaraqua are overrun by zombie plants and I don't want undead plants to be so weak that Scarterrans and Scaraquans can simply expunge them from the world forever.

 

Here's the first one. It took a while, but it was worth the wait. A lot of preliminary pencil sketches were sent to me and I asked for a lot of minor adjustments which Zeta Gardner was happy to apply.

Here is a tengku that other tengku aspire to be.

He's rich, confident, rich, handsome, and rich.



The minimum requirement I asked for is an illustration that gives a clear picture of what their feet, legs, and arms look like.

I like the confident swagger of the pose and expression, and exotic color scheme of the clothes.

Gardener has consistently done good work, but this may be my all time favorite portrait.

We have not even started sketches for tengku #6. We just know tengku #6 will be wearing heavy armor. We had to do tengku #5 to figure out what a tengku basic body shape is before we could know what their armor and boots would look like.

 

I'm experimenting with Midjourney AI. All the big kids seem to be using it these days.

Here is my crude Microsoft Paint icon for the god Maylar.



My attempts to upgrade are not going great. AI art generators seem fuzzy on the definitions of "spear" and "two".






these are the "best of"s, Midjourney is not a magic bullet but there is a learning curve on it like with anything else.

 

There is an informal World Anvil event to make vaguely Halloween themed entries. 27 prompts, I get a participation badge if I get 13. I find I get increased traffic to my wiki when I participate in these contest, so I'm hitting this. Anyway, I made up a legendary weapon, the Mace of the Wyrm Slayer and I got a fantastic result from Midjourney AI as opposed to an adequate result from Midjourney AI.



Mace of the Wyrm Slayer