I recently discovered a popular game system called FUDGE. Rather cleverly, that stands for "Freeform Universal Do-it-Yourself Gaming Engine" but also refers to the act of cheating at die rolls during a tabletop RPG because you want something cool to happen, or "fudging". The system focuses on being rules-light and letting you decide how things go, based on a seven-point scale which directs how well something went, while you yourself decide what precisely happened.
So, I've been looking at the PDF of the FUDGE system... it's the 1995 version, I don't know if they've, like, updated the game or anything since then, certainly there's still a community, but the '95 version of the rules was all I could find, the website is very difficult to navigate.
It bears more studying, for sure. In particular, in my skimming, I found there's a very detailed section devoted to handling creatures of wildly different scales; the book directly illustrates the concept by comparing a human to a pixie and an ogre. And this scaling system... is the most complicated thing I've ever seen in an RPG book in my life, I thought this thing was supposed to be rules-light. I'm gonna keep studying it, of course, because I was told FUDGE was the gold standard for designing your own custom RPGs, and here it is, with a system devoted to the exact thing I'd wanted to make a huge deal in K&K, so... gotta figure it out! Kind of assumed it was a system I wouldn't have to figure out, but, can't have everything handed to you on a platter.
I've also just discovered that Shad Brooks, a YouTuber I follow who's an expert in weapons, fight choreography, medieval history, and tabletop gaming, is developing a system of his very own, called Cogent. Similarly, it seems to be all about customization. So, lots to look at, FUDGE and Cogent both might help me come up with a gaming system that has an actual world and rules to it!
Well, first thing to mention about Christalss would be the classes I came up with, but I already mentioned those back in Part 2, in the overall Classes entry. Something to think about for classes in K&K. As for a word to replace "class", Cogent calls them vocations -- that's a good one! That'll work.
Here we have the map of Christalss... is that really the only one I have, the topographical one? I don't seem to have one that tells me where all the countries and cities are. For that matter, I don't really remember what the topographical color-code means. Hmm... clearly black means a mountain range, I can tell that much. I bet gray means tundra. And based on what I actually do remember about the world, I'd say dark green means forest, bright green means grassland, and blue-green means... jungle? No, that's a kind of forest. Maybe blue-green is wetland. And then, I would guess light brown means desert, and dark brown...? Hmm. Maybe hills? Well, that wasn't so hard.
So, as you can see here, Christalss consists of three continents, four seas, and the Great Ocean. And then, uh... oh, hey! I was mistaken, I do have a political map, it must have been stuck to another piece of paper until just now, here it is:
That's a relief, because I did not remember where all the countries were. So, let's see what else I've got in this folder. Like I said, I haven't thought about Christalss in over four years, I'm a little rusty.
So, first thing after the maps, there's a list of cities. Some of the city names are cool, some are shitty. It's worth editing. In addition to cities in the sixteen countries, I also included cities in the seas and the ocean, because there are indeed a few underwater peoples, maybe not sophisticated enough to actually have political borders the way land-dwelling people do. I recognize a few of the cities from stories set in the world, but most of them were just names picked out of thin air.
After that, there's some handwritten notes about notable geographical features: mountain ranges, cavern systems (a la the Underdark of most D&D worlds), canyons and ocean trenches, valleys, lakes, rivers and waterfalls, forests and jungles, marshes and swamps, deserts, plains, tundras, reefs and atolls, islands, and icebergs. Again, no stories behind them, just some names.
And, let's see, what's next. Well, I have lists of characters from the various stories I was working on set in Christalss... worth revisiting. Ooh, and then there was the pantheon! I came up with 99 different gods for the setting; pretty much a single unified pantheon, and my goodness, look at this, detailed descriptions of each one. Physical descriptions, that is, plus each one has an outfit and a symbol and a weapon of choice.
After that, there was a list, dividing the gods into categories and throwing out a few ideas of what their portfolios might be. The categories were as follows:
- Head Council: The nine chief gods of the setting, generally worshiped as a pantheon, each one corresponding roughly to one of the nine classic D&D alignments.
- Lower Council: Ten gods of other important concepts usually covered in polytheistic religions, like love, family, chaos, vengeance, and so on.
- First Generations: The seven gods that came before the head council, who first brought the world into being (or maybe vice-versa): the goddess of the primordial world and the god of the underworld; their four sons, who represent good, evil, time, and space, and their lone daughter, the goddess of balance. In true "screwed-up polytheistic family" fashion, I imagine that most gods and other living things are direct descendants of the goddess of balance and her four brothers, I'm sure I had something like that in mind.
- Magic and the Elements: Eight rather simple gods whose only domain is, well, the elements. Not just the four classical ones, but also ice, lightning, acid, poison, and finally, magic itself.
- The World's Environments: Twelve gods who represent various habitats and biomes, like forests, grasslands, tundras, oceans, and the subterranean world. Later on, I scribbled in that maybe each stands for a specific virtue that people who live in that habitat generally try to live by.
- Arts, Professions, Crafts, and Sciences: Twenty-three gods who represent various, well, those things. Some are grouped in more specific ways, but this looks like a good thingy to look at to remind myself of what kind of professions non-adventurers would have in medieval fantasy worlds.
- Races and Creatures: The final thirty gods, possibly the most important after the head council. Twenty-three of them represent the various species of intelligent beings on Christalss, more about them later. The twenty-fourth race, humans, don't have a god of their own, but there's a goddess of women and a god of men; they're for everyone, but humans in particular tend to gravitate toward them. Beyond those twenty-five, there are then a few minor gods who represent undead, animals, beasts, bugs, and plants. Like the environmental gods, I scribbled down a few ideas for what in particular each god might teach and, therefore, what each culture is all about.
And then we've got a few other things which I didn't write down, but I remember. First, I mentioned earlier the primordial world and the underworld. These are sort of my equivalents to 4th Edition D&D's Astral Sea and Elemental Chaos... or, I guess that can be phrased in a much less nerdy way: heaven and hell. They're alternate dimensions you can go to with environments all their own... and I didn't really develop them much, I just know that the two of them together are where the gods and the world came from.
The only real thing I developed about these locations is how I could incorporate extinct megafauna. See, if dinosaurs were still around, the world would probably be a much too dangerous place for humans to develop into civilization, right? So I decided that animals which are extinct in the real world are normally inhabitants of the two other worlds and occasionally find themselves crossing over into the material world, so they don't interfere too much with civilization. My system is that animals that became extinct in the age of dinosaurs or earlier are from the underworld, while animals that became extinct after that inhabit the primordial world. So the primordial world is a bit more peaceful... I mean, they've got saber-toothed tigers, but overall it's just a more pleasant scene than the dinosaur-infested underworld. One exception I made was the megalodon. Megalodon existed well after the dinosaurs did, but they're too scary to be from heaven. They've gotta be demon sharks.
Final note about Christalss for this entry is that I had a plan to split it into three eras: Christalss-X, Christalss-Y, and Christalss-Z. Not terms to be used in-universe, just by authors so we know which time period in Christalss history the story takes place in:
- Christalss-X resembles the ancient world; Greece, Egypt, basically any country spoken of in the Bible, strictly BCE stuff. There's also clockpunk technology.
- Christalss-Y is the default setting, with a medieval Europe flair just like most fantasy worlds. The technology has upgraded to steampunk.
- Christalss-Z has seen this magical world develop into the modern era, with a 20th-century society and technology level plus a bit of superhero-esque sci-fi tech along with all the magic and monsters and stuff.
What's left is to talk about the creatures of Christalss, but I think I'll make that the thirteenth and final blog post of this series. No need for one more bloated post, yeah?
Before we move on, I just want to mention somewhere so I have it on the record when I start compiling this stuff, Dakota recommended a friend of his who's been collaborating with him on a few things, thought he could help me. He's been reading through these blogs as well as my outlines of Irregular Fantasy, and he's thrown out a handful of world-building ideas, all good, so I'd like to mention them here:
- Reading my thoughts on dwarves, he suggested that mead holds a similar place in dwarf culture that gold does, that it's gold you can drink. He also suggested that, if dwarves really do have such hale constitutions, most bars have the foresight to stock a certain incredibly alcoholic beverage, that way they don't clear out their entire inventory every time some dwarven customers pass through. He also suggested a not-uncommon idea that, when a dwarf commits a crime he can atone for, he is shaved. His beard coming back represents his atonement, and in the meantime, his lack of beard marks him as a criminal.
- He also suggested a variety of undead that's exclusive to pixies... I don't recall the details, I feel like the color red was heavily involved? I'll have to look at that message again, but I did very much like the idea. Pixies in Cosmos have that notoriously uncertain lifespan, I imagine they fear death more than most people do, I can totally see why they may have created a totally new type of undead to circumvent it.
- And finally, he proposed some sort of "reverse lich" -- a person terrified of undeath and evil who has infused their body with positive energy, turning their body into an over-healed mass of flesh or something, nigh unkillable and completely grotesque, but at least they ain't dead and, in theory, they ain't evil. I dig it.
Okay, one final entry about the creatures of Christalss and then, at last, we're done here.
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