Constructing Cosmos: Part 7, WorldAnvil (1/2)

Okay, in this entry, we're going through the WorldAnvil wiki I made about the world of Cosmos. Then I'm gonna scrap that thing, it bugs the hell out of me. Gonna switch to Campfire! Campfire was my first choice, but at the time they didn't provide any ability to collaborate. They do that now! So, a Campfire venue to fill in all the known lore for the benefit of myself and my fellow Cosmos creators.

So, what the WorldAnvil ended up with, was just a few categories:

• Characters of The Choices
• Countries
• Creatures
• Legendary Characters
• Organizations
• Races
• Religions
• Spells
• Stories

Okay, I guess let's just tackle those in that order. Alphabetical.

CHARACTERS OF THE CHOICES

All noteworthy characters appearing in (my loose outlines of) the first season of Keys & Kingdoms: The Choices. I don't think I'll be telling you that information, sounds like that would be spoilers, I'll just let you know if I find anything interesting.

Looks like what I had here was a pretty good system of writing character profiles. WorldAnvil provided a character-profile-makin' thing where I listed their species, age, and height. In the actual article for each character, I had the following sections:

• Background: What I know about where each character comes from and where they can be found as soon as they first appear in the story.
• Abilities: In this section, I started by listing their character class, and what sort of tactics and skills they use in combat -- derived from 1st-level 5E character sheets I made for each character. I didn't want to give other writers of the series access to these character sheets, merely give them an idea of what the characters were capable of, so I translated their stats into mere descriptive text of what they're good and bad at. The special abilities of their species were also included here.
• Spellcasting: I included this sub-section for every character of a spellcasting class, a list of the D&D spells they were capable of casting.
• Personality: This section included every character's D&D alignment and some details about why they are of that alignment and how they express it. Followed by some noteworthy personality traits to keep the writing of their dialogue distinctive.
• Appearance: Details about what the character looks like and how they dress, and how their appearance affects the way they are perceived in social situations.
• Writer Data: Various significant reminders. Two things were listed for every character: their sexual orientation plus their personal beliefs and attitudes regarding romance and sex; then, their nationality and how much they identify with it. Where relevant, I also included a detail that I've always had trouble remembering when writing non-human characters: how their sleep differs from that of humans. So this section included reminders that elf characters don't sleep (which may or may not remain true of K&K elves) and that gargoyle characters can't be awake in scenes set during the day.

So, rather than reproducing all of that character data here, I'll just write it down and, as I said, let you know if there's anything of particular interest to be found in these character profiles. This seems like a good time to do another thing!

This here's a little thing I made earlier today, displaying the five phases thus far of designing the characters of The Choices. So now that I've gathered all of that data, I intend to look at all of those pictures and decide precisely what the characters will look like in Phase Six, which will presumably be the final, final stage, the precise character models we will use. Hmm... you know, I was thinking maybe we don't go to final redesigns until after we make the pilot, but no, I'd actually rather the pilot had the final designs, the pilot is very much the beginning of the story, I don't want all the character designs to change midway. Anyway, as for that planning of Phase Six, I'm gonna do that immediately after I catalogue all this WorldAnvil stuff.

Nope, I'm back, I was wrong, I had to decide precisely what the characters really look like before proceeding. Okay, where were we? All right, I read all the character articles... didn't find anything worth talking about here, but made a plan to convert all that data to Campfire.

COUNTRIES

Entries on Cosmos's 18 countries. Very, very short articles, because when assembling the WorldAnvil wiki, I knew nothing about any of the countries, all the stuff in Part 6 was made up sometime after I made the most recent additions to the wiki.

So, each country had only the following information:

• The basic geographical location of the country.
• What part of the real world I intended to use as inspiration for the country.
• What very general form of government I expected it might have -- I restricted myself to choosing between "empire", "kingdom", and "republic".
• The demonym for the country. That, if you didn't know, means what you call people and things from that country. Like how people and things from Peru are called Peruvian. Where's the V come from? I dunno. So, found that worth mentioning.

The articles for Akhmis, Athundoft, and Magnae also linked to the articles about the three pantheons, as those countries are where the gods live. Kind of. Technically the gods live in another dimension, but you get there via those three countries. Y'know.

So, I'm gonna write down all those demonyms, that's just about the only thing I need to remember at this point. Every now and then, when writing the first season of The Choices and the time came that I absolutely had to identify a location more specific than a country, well, I did so. Here's what I've got.

• Eirdale: A small town in Sheafell, where most of the first season of The Choices takes place. It's a small town. It's coastal. It has a university. And that's all I know, even though I wrote an entire season of television set there. You see how much I suck?
• Caeminster: A larger, more politically significant city in Sheafell. One of the Choices' first missions is to escort a prisoner there, but they fail at the task and the city is never visited.
• Stitwood: A tiny village in Sheafell. Stacky is from there, and... again, that's all I know, it's visited purely for character development, the village itself has no character whatsoever.
• Arakka: A northern coastal town in Akhmis, heavily involved in the international spice trade. A place cooked up for... some sort of caper or another early in the season, something about checking the records of shipments from there.

And that's it, that's all I know about individual towns in the world of Cosmos. Meep.

CREATURES

Any time I had reason for a creature outside of the ten core races to appear, I gave them an article; here's everything I figured would appear in the first season of The Choices. Each creature article started with its creature type, then had four sections: History, Appearance, Abilities, and Life Cycle.

Fire Elemental: Such a creature is summoned at a climactic moment of the first season. Most of this elemental stuff is straight out of D&D lore -- maybe we can mix it up a little!

• Creature Type: Elemental.
• History: Elementals are as old as the universe, being semi-living embodiments of the elements of creation.
• Appearance: Nine feet tall. A pillar of swirly red flames which might sprout arms or a face at its own discretion.
• Abilities: Everything it touches ignites. Non-living, so immune to things that would afflict living things (poison, disease, suffocation, etc.); and non-physical, so its fiery body can pass through any opening. A mild weakness against water, gotta figure out how to make that game mechanic work. And immune to non-magical attacks.
• Life Cycle: Elemental spirits are eternal. However, for the most part, they are mindless and bodiless, just natural features of the Inner Planes. Wait, did I still have the Inner Planes in the K&K cosmology? Anyway, elemental spirits only take shape into an actual creature when summoned by magic.

Giant Leech: I thought a swarm of giant leeches would make for a fun adversary for a wilderness-themed subplot at the season's midpoint. I knew there were giant leeches in Pathfinder, so I looked up their stats, and also did a bit of research on real leeches.

• Creature Type: Beast.
• History: Leeches have existed since the dawn of time. Giant leeches in particular usually only appear in places untouched by civilization. They favor temperate freshwater environments.
• Appearance: Biologically speaking, leeches are annelids: segmented worms, just like earthworms. The giant leech variety in particular is about five feet long, and has a toothy circular mouth and a long tongue. I don't think real leeches have teeth or tongues, but, I dunno, the giant ones always do. How do I know that? In what media have I ever seen giant leeches...?
• Abilities: Fast swimming. A powerful bite, with which they latch onto a victim and drain its blood. As far as weaknesses: they are blind, slow-moving on land, and... damaged by salt. God bless Pathfinder, they think of freakin' everything.
• Life Cycle: Let's see, I put down that they're hermaphroditic but reproduce sexually and lay clutches of eggs outside of water. I mean, I assume I wrote that down because I studied and learned it was true of real leeches, I dunno. And the average giant leech specimen lives... 80 years? Yikes, that's a lot. Maybe better make that the maximum instead?

Gnoll: This classic D&D creature has, well, a brief cameo in the pilot episode, we might see more later.

• Creature Type: Humanoid. Fun fact, you'll recall my earlier mentions that D&D isn't using the word "race" anymore, and along with that, they're also phasing out the notion that any humanoid can have an inherently evil culture -- since after all, humanoids have free will, and saying that a free-willed creature is always evil is, for lack of a better word, pretty racist. And gnolls in particular have always been super evil, so some settings have reclassified them as fiends. Some, not all, so I'm assuming in settings where they're still humanoids, there are good gnolls now. I briefly considered giving them the fiend classification myself just now, but, then I remembered Rik Canis, the lead singer of a rock band from several of my written works, whom I intend to appear in not only Cosmos but also every high-fantasy story I ever write, because his band travels the multiverse... and he's a gnoll, and, well, it'd be presumptive to say "not evil", but he's definitely not so blindly destructive as the typical gnoll.
• History: In D&D, (or at least 5E, I don't know how far back this story goes), gnolls started out as hyenas, who ate the kills of the demon lord Demogorgon. These hyenas turned into humanoid hyenas just as evil as Demogorgon himself, and their descendants are gnolls. So you can see why either the fiend or humanoid classification would work! Now, early in the development of K&K, I posed the question to Naty of whether I'd be able to include D&D's humanoid peoples that are essentially anthropomorphic animals, such as gnolls, bullywugs, and lizardfolk, in a world where my homebrew natives exist. I figured for starters a gnoll looks a lot more monstrous than a hyena native, and Naty suggested that maybe such peoples are descended from natives who were corrupted. And so that's the story I cooked up for gnolls! Centuries ago, a native village whose inhabitants were of canine and hyena appearances was suffering a famine. In desperation, they summoned a demon who hunted for them, and everyone who ate of the demon's kills became the first gnolls, way more demonic and ferocious than the natives they were before. Modern gnolls live in nomadic hunter-gatherer tribes and get most of their resources from slaughtering civilized people.
• Appearance: Gnolls stand about seven feet tall. They have the legs and tail of a wolf, but a humanoid torso, and the face of a mangy, rabid wolf or hyena. They have a shaggy pelt with black spots and patterns, a black mane, and pupil-less eyes that glow intensely. That's all D&D stuff except for the wolf part and the eyes -- see, Christalss gnolls were canine instead of hyena-like D&D gnolls, I figure K&K gnolls can be both due to the connection with natives, and had glowy eyes because, well, I like glowy eyes. I'm on the fence as to whether or not they can turn the glowiness off for stealth reasons...
• Abilities: Gnolls have supernatural strength, a vicious bite, perfect vision in darkness, and are fast runners.
• Life Cycle: Gnolls reproduce like, well, most mammals, I suppose, and grow up fast -- being fully grown at the age of 6 and living to be about 30.

Goblin: A very common opponent in just about every high-fantasy story you've ever seen, these little guys have made an appearance or two in the first season.

• Creature Type: Humanoid.
• History: Goblins have existed for about as long as dwarves, but have never formed stable civilization, always having to subsist as raiders and bandits. Some say that goblins were created specifically to serve as easy combat experience for young warriors. Goblins thoroughly resent the gods for this theory.
• Appearance: K&K goblins are a bit over two feet tall -- quite a bit shorter than D&D goblins, who are a bit under three and a half feet. Having shrunk down dwarves and having a number of diminutive hero-style characters, I figured some iconic threats ought to be smaller as well. You know, expand the little guys' worlds a bit. They're a bit ape-like, having long arms and short legs in comparison to humans, but fully bipedal. Their skin is acid-green or yellow, and they have vibrant catlike eyes, large pointy ears, and sharp teeth.
• Abilities: Nimble, speedy, and with perfect vision in the dark. Hm, gotta make a sliding scale of, like, different levels of darkvision. And figure out how to implement that rule in the RPG.
• Life Cycle: Says here goblins are fully grown at 8 years old and live to be about 60. Yeah, that's usually a thing; while dwarves and elves live for a very long time, goblins and orcs tend to have shorter lives than humans and grow up faster. Which I guess makes sense, most living things in real life reach their adult size way faster than humans do, but when you're dealing with other kinds of people, it does come across a bit weird. I gotta think about this.

Shrieker: The classic giant mushroom guardian thingies of D&D. They're seen prominently in the pilot episode.

• Creature Type: Plant.
• History: They come from the underground. Ooh, I haven't thought about that. All D&D settings have an Underdark, a cavern system just as large as the world itself, where dark elves, aberrations, and other nasty-nasties live. Until recently, I always found the term "Underdark" a bit cheesy, I've always used "underground" in my campaigns, but "Underdark" has recently grown on me, probz gonna start using it, but not in K&K. Hm, I think Christalss might have had a better term for it. I don't remember, but I guess I'll find out. Anyway, shriekers are cultivated by various underground dwellers and placed on the outskirts of settlements to discourage trespassers.
• Appearance: A shrieker is a mushroom, about five feet tall, with an off-white stalk and reddish-brown cap. The storyboards drawn by Casey gave shriekers a very alien appearance -- I was just picturing really huge toadstools, but what Casey did is loads better, excited for you to see it.
• Abilities: While shriekers are immobile and have no means of actively protecting themselves, they do have, well, the defense they're named for. At the slightest sign of motion within 30 feet of their position, they start screaming, continuously, until the motion is gone and for several seconds afterward. In D&D, light also causes this reaction, but I dunno, I wouldn't mind the use of shriekers above the ground where there's sunlight too. Maybe they react to sudden light, so a sunrise doesn't get on their radar.
• Life Cycle: I put down "TBD", because, I don't know how mushrooms reproduce and I didn't want to look it up. I'm into animals, not fungi. So, we'll figure that out.

Skeleton: Skeletons, one of the two lowest forms of undead, make an appearance in an early episode, commanded by a young up-and-coming necromancer.

• Creature Type: Undead.
• History: The dark magic that animates skeletons is of unknown origin, but -- hey, you know what? Making a call right now: D&D includes the mention, often, of how certain undead or unnatural creatures come about via some sort of magic ritual, but said rituals can't be found anywhere in the rules, so we don't know exactly how they work or what kind of magic-user you have to be to achieve them. I think I'm always gonna specify such things in the rules. I mean, in D&D's case, your character can get some skeletons and zombies via an Animate Dead spell, so, you know, bad example, just something for me to keep in mind. This section also states that skeletons will attempt to kill every living creature they see unless specifically ordered to refrain from doing so by their master.
• Appearance: Most often, a human skeleton, but the magic works on any dead thing with bones. In general, a skeleton is a bleach-white skeletal version of the creature it was in life.
• Abilities: Skeletons have intelligence and common sense that zombies lack; where a zombie will claw at a door in vain forever, a skeleton will go for the doorknob. They understand speech but cannot speak themselves. They are vulnerable to blunt weapons but resistant to bladed weapons. Stat-wise, I guess that, as in D&D, they start off with the stat block of whatever thing they were in life but with a "skeleton" template that modifies stuff. We'll figure that out.
• Life Cycle: Animated by necromancy, and generally they endure eternally or until destroyed.

Wood Sentinel: An invention of mine, a very simple construct. One appears in the pilot.

• Creature Type: Construct.
• History: Wood sentinels date back about 2,000 years. The first was created by an inexperiened apprentice wizard for the purpose of fetching water from a well -- yup, going full Sorcerer's Apprentice with these guys, hey, I guess some Disney content made its way into the story after all. In modern times, they're generally used as butlers or waiters. Sometimes guards, but that's considered a high-risk proposition.
• Appearance: Well, they're made of wood. Often, they're made from brooms, in reference to the original model, or chairs, or simply a human-shaped wood carving slightly smaller than an adult human.
• Abilities: Being constructs, they never get tired or hungry. They follow the task they are given, which can be at a level of enough complexity that you can trust your wood sentinel to, say, wait tables for a full shift without your supervision. Now, the brooms from The Sorcerer's Apprentice had a rather terrifying level of regenerative power, yeah? Perhaps this is because troll blood is a component in the creation of a wood sentinel. They can heal themselves up unless you burn 'em up. Now, I wrote down that any piece broken off a wood sentinel eventually grows into an entirely new sentinel that continues the original copy's objective, but... my God, that's terrifying. That would be an incredibly overwhelming thing to fight, I intended them to be, like, easy constructs. Maybe they don't do that, maybe every wood sentinel just has a "heart" or something and only the part with the heart can grow back.
• Life Cycle: Being magical constructs, they can endure forever, never ceasing at their assigned job.

Zombie: The other kind of simple undead. Encountered in this story, as they often are, accompanied by skeletons.

• Creature Type: Undead.
• History: Zombies arise from dark magic as old as time itself. Usually it's cast deliberately on a corpse, but sometimes the dark magic can simply saturate a place until zombies start occurring naturally from the corpses in the area.
• Appearance: Any living thing can become a zombie. Hm, should we specify which creature types are living and which aren't...? Anyway, zombies decay like any other corpse, so you can tell they're dead within a few days of them being so; all decay lingers forever, as do all wounds, so a zombie, well, it looks more zombie-like the longer it exists.
• Abilities: Zombies are completely mindless, with no sense of self, comprehension of battle tactics, or common sense. If they have a master, they follow the master's telepathic commands, but that's it. They are not infectious, so if a friend gets bitten, don't shoot them in the head. Heh, that's a D&D joke I like a whole lot, maybe it's a common misconception in the K&K universe?
• Life Cycle: Raised from the dead by necromancy. If not given any commands, it simply stands on one place until it completely decays. Hmm... I have two notes for my past self here... one, zombies should probably also attack every living thing they detect, like skeletons do, otherwise a zombie without a master would be completely non-threatening and we don't want that. But the difference is that masterless skeletons wander around performing instinctive behaviors from their life, so they might be able to find living things, whilst zombies, yeah, they just stay in one place until living things turn up. Two, if zombies decay, does that mean they eventually become skeletons, which are smarter and stronger? Well, I think no. The skeletons of living things are held together by ligaments and stuff; skeletons in schools and museums have to be held together with wires and screws, which I guess means undead skeletons are held together by the magic that animates them. So if a zombie decays enough to be skeletonized, it falls apart and ceases to be a zombie -- zombies have a shelf life, weeks to years depending on climate according to the Wikipedia article on skeletonization (didn't realize at the beginning of this sentence that that's actually a word!). Then you can recast your necromancy on the bones and convert your zombie into a skeleton.

LEGENDARY CHARACTERS

This category, reserved for characters who might appear in any story set on Cosmos rather than contained to one story in particular... though, of course, no character needs to be contained to one story, it's a shared universe after all.

The only legendary character I listed was Merlin. Merlin's story is that he was born in the fifth century, some 2,600 years before the present day of most Cosmos stories. He was a very powerful archmage, and some mysterious connection to fey magic gave him the ability to travel freely through time; he's been present for many important historical events, though just as a witness.

Merlin is an elderly man... who wears dark glasses, and has a number of cute catchphrases... and makes one small cameo appearance in every story set on Cosmos. That's right, the K&K version of Merlin is nothing but a shout-out to the late Stan Lee. And TV seasons count as stories, so he appears in Season 1 of The Choices, spotting Stacky walking in the streets of Stitwood and remarking, "Hey, I remember her."

There are other legendary characters planned. I figure as long as I had the Greek, Norse, and Egyptian gods, I might as well incorporate other figures of real-world legend. Such as Santa Claus, a former archbishop who now runs a factory of some sort, manned by elves. High-fantasy elves, not Keebler elves. I don't remember if I figured out what that factory does. As well as Jesus Christ, a demigod unaffiliated with any of the three pantheons, who never picked up a huge following but is just, like, the absolute coolest guy.

ORGANIZATIONS

The only organization listed on the site was the Choices themselves, the main characters of, well, The Choices. Though the party aren't called the Choices in-universe, that's just a script placeholder so we know who we're talking about. See, way back when I was first coming up with Keys & Kingdoms, I asked ten people from my life what kind of character they'd want to play in a game of Keys & Kingdoms; and eventually, I decided to make those ten characters the stars of a story, and to call that story The Choices, purely because I had recorded the choices everyone had made in a Word document entitled "the choices".

Anyway... ooh! I didn't think the article on the adventuring party would include anything of value, but it does! It includes a list of every possible relationship that might exist between the seven members of the group. Where I knew the nature of such a relationship, I described it. Cool, that's gonna be valuable, Campfire has a tool for mapping relationships.

And, okay, this is running pretty long, I anticipated that it might, so, WorldAnvil episode being split in two! Be with you in a minute with the next one.

Constructing Cosmos: Part 6, World Map

So... as this journey takes us to the sixth and final episode of Explore Cosmos, let's figure out what I actually know about Cosmos, as far as the big picture. Simply put, we know that the heroes of any given story set there are probably adventurers. If we assume that to be a not-unusual concept, well, that implies the sort of fantasy world that's very unsafe for travelers, where the kingdoms serve as beacons of civilization and safety in an untamed world. Where civilizations have fallen, and the world is full of ancient ruins filled with unclaimed treasure.

These are all very baseline assumptions about D&D worlds. It certainly doesn't sound much like a fairy tale... or maybe it does. Fairy tales are teeming with giants and witches and trolls, after all. One gets the impression in fairy tales that these encounters are very unusual circumstances, but... what if they're not? Well, then our fairy tale setting swings back around to being a high fantasy one. Logically, if monsters are about, well, you have to be pretty badass if you're gonna be, say, a farmer. Cottages out in the woods? Those can't contain any ordinary granny.

So, you know, something to think about. The main cast of The Choices find themselves traveling through, perhaps, an unrealistic percentage of the world over the course of the five story arcs I have planned for them. But I haven't the slightest clue what exists outside of the places they go. And by that, I don't mean that the only cities I know about are the ones they visit, I mean that I don't know what's beyond a twenty-foot radius of their position. Every city, dungeon, and wilderness area they visit contains only what they need to advance the plot, so... let's get to work on filling in the rest of it, because theirs isn't this world's only story, not by a long shot.

Before we get into this episode... well, we had a rather bizarre shakeup the other day. These blog posts have primarily been for the benefit of one guy in particular, who's been looking them over and helping me brainstorm. Before that, he played a part in writing one of the Explore Cosmos episodes, the one we're about to talk about. We were in the TAPAS chat room discussing the Cosmology blog post that just came out, a task he'd been particularly looking forward to, when suddenly... he was gone. Only a few hours later did I realize he hadn't just gone offline, he'd quit the server altogether.

I went to DeviantArt and asked him what was up, and he said he had no further interest in my project, my organization, or me, for reasons that were none of my concern. So... I left him to it. I'm incredibly wounded and confused. What could I have said to make the guy go from enthusiastically swapping world-building ideas with me to never wanting to see me again in the space of twenty minutes? Everyone else in the chat room can see the conversation we had, and none of them can figure out why he so abruptly chose to ditch us all either.

I just hope he didn't block me. You know? I hope he gave me the chance to prove that I can respect his wishes and not contact him again. Which I won't, gonna leave him be.

The show must go on, I guess, but I don't know who I'm gonna talk about these blogs with now. Hmm. Whatever I did, he doesn't want to be affiliated with me anymore, so I guess he doesn't want his name on this episode or any other part of this he helped with...? Heck if I know. I suppose if this content ever gets released and he wants his due, he knows where to find me, and I'll be happy to comply, because, well... he didn't do anything wrong, he's still pretty much cool in my book, he's guilty only of being... incredibly confusing. It's the absolute strangest thing, it truly is.

Episode 6: World Map - written by Sage Mann, Dakota Umlauf, & [redacted]

I don't remember the exact reasons for who got writing credits on the previous episodes, but for this one, I do. When the time came to put together Cosmos as a world, I started off with a list of eighteen countries. Each one, I chose to base upon a real region of the world. Then, I distributed the eighteen countries evenly over three regions, each one ruled over by one of the three pantheons. Eventually, I ended up with this map, crudely slapped together on some mapmaking website or another:

Someday there'll be more to it than just continents, oceans, and borders, but mapmaking is so not my area of expertise that it's not even funny. Gonna find me someone who actually knows how to make a fantasy map, and we'll figure out how to add rivers and mountains and islands and lakes in a manner that makes for, you know, the potential for good stories being told in these locales. Climates and landscapes that actually make scientific sense? We might do that, but it wouldn't be much of a fantasy world if we did. And while we're at it, let's make the coastlines and stuff a bit less... square. They're a bit square.

Anyway, as far as writing credits: Dakota helped me kickstart the actual geopolitical situation of Cosmos by, completely unprompted, providing me with a ton of ideas for how the three regions can each be unique -- not all of it was viable, but I jotted it all down and most of it can be found sprinkled throughout the descriptions of the various nations.

Then [redacted] and I went down the list of countries one by one, he threw out a bunch of ideas, and I ran with them. We didn't finish working on that, so this episode of Explore Cosmos was the only one that was never completed; the identities of the southern regions of the world are still mostly unfinished. Not sure why we stopped. Presumably because I lost the bulk of this year to the worst depression of my life. I'm probably better off for it; word on the street is that this year hasn't been very much fun, probably for the best that I don't remember most of it. Anyway, since evidently [redacted] isn't gonna be the one to help me finish writing about the south, let's just... see what we've got.

COSMOS

To discuss the global political situation in Cosmos, one must start with the gods. The three pantheons discovered each other at some point, and decided to distribute the world amongst themselves, each pantheon sticking to its own territory to avoid violent conflict that would result in mutually assured destruction and a lot of collateral damage. The northernmost region, Disvik, belongs to the Asgardian gods, the eastern region of Samea belongs to the Olympian gods, and the southern region of Tsir belongs to the Pharaonic gods.

The Choices, and presumably most other Cosmos-set stories as well, begins in the year 3065, counting the years since the magical harmonic convergence which, among other things, brought about the existence of fairies. In the status quo of the year 3065, each region happens to have six major geopolitical powers.

DISVIK

Disvik, often plain and simple called "the north", is ruled over by the Norse god and, with that association, is the home of many tough and proud warrior cultures, with whom the gods take a very hands-on approach, often going on adventures of their own.

Athundoft: A kingdom in the frozen north taking the heaviest inspiration from the Norse. The northern point of Athundoft is where the Bifrost is, the rainbow bridge that'll take you to Asgard. The king of Athundoft isn't a huge deal due to the close proximity and heavy involvement of the gods, but he's a nice guy. The country is full of hardships and violence, and you have to be tough to survive, but the Athundor people aren't grim about it -- they enjoy fighting monsters.

Sheafell: The place from which three of the main cast members of The Choices hail, and where the first season of the story takes place. This three-island country takes inspiration from those two disproportionately-influential tiny islands that make up Britain and Ireland. So, quite a bit of Arthurian influence in its history, I should think. Some of the greatest kings and queens of all time hail from Sheafell, along with some equally famed heroic knights and one particularly legendary time-traveling archmage. Modern-day Sheafell is now in the hands of the prime minister, but the royal family remain beloved celebrities.

Underheim: This small country has a surplus population of goblins and kobolds... so being a farmer, an even bigger deal than normal, as I alluded up top. Underheim is big on meritocracy: the weak die, and that's their problem. You'd be hard-pressed to find a charity or social institution there, only ways to work your way up. The original inspiration was Germany, so I imagine similar levels of anger and bitterness... and art direction matching that of Snow White and Tangled, Disney's films based on German fairytales. Being the studio's first film and their first CGI princess film respectively, they really went all out, so, might as well reflect that and make Underheim friggin' gorgeous.

Strumvik: Another, much larger, frozen north kingdom. Currently ruled by the czar, who presides over the advanced capital city, while everyone else in the rather large country live in smaller, more primitive tribes -- those tribes being the descendants of the native Strumvians, while the czar and others in the capital are descended from conquerers from, oh, let's say Magnae. The czars over the generations have always been advised by a council of thirteen undead generals, one of whom is the real emperor. As you probably gathered, cultural motifs are Russian, with the oppressed commoners being more Central Asian.

Gyanshi: A vast and proud empire, inspired by China. A big part of the world's economy and trade; they're willing to buy and sell with anyone, though they see anyone not from Gyanshi as barbarians. Though they lake some cues from the northern gods, their culture primarily revolves around ancestor worship, praying to them for guidance. The elites who can learn advanced magic, or pay someone who knows it, directly summon their ancestors from beyond the grave for advice.

Nixi: A republic made up of dozens of tribes, each with their own rulers, but all answering to a democratically-elected chief elder and his hand-picked parliament who set the parameters for the republic at large. Inspired by the various indigenous nations of North America, with some extra technological advancement and unity. They're famous for their horse-mounted mercenaries and their talent for elemental magic, acquired from a dangerous magical rift in the earth, left behind long ago by a meteor strike.

SAMEA

Samea, or simply "the east", is ruled by the Greek gods, who are described as creative and free-spirited, their influence giving the entire region a reputation for pioneering developments in art, technology, and political rule.

Magnae: The location of Mount Olympus and, as a result, the country taking the most inspiration from Greece, most ancient and modern. The gods lack the influence they may have once had, when the philosophers of Magnae discovered scientifically that the gods are not as divine as they had previously claimed -- for instance, both the Olympians and the Asgardians have a guy who pulls the sun along in a chariot, while the king of the Egyptian gods does likewise in a boat. The discovery of these three contradictory stories and the true nature of the sun, that shook the mortal world's faith a bit, though not a ton, as the gods still plainly exist and are plainly super-powerful. And it's still largely thanks to the gods that Magnae has a very good economy and high standard of living, with wizardry being a very common practice there. The ruler of Magnae is an elected monarch; the people choose the king or queen after a long campaign, but it's regardless a lifetime appointment with virtually absolute political power.

Nastiin: Taking inspiration from a region of the world that's, well, not often made an inspiration of in the fantasy genre: the sinking ship that is the United States. Nastiin has the best education and medical care in the world... if you can afford to pay for it, which you probably can't. Too on the nose? Don't care, it's true. Nastiin was originally settled by those few Magnaeans who were far more offended than most about the gods' deception, and sought to escape their influence, sailing north to the massive continent where Nastiin is now. They conquered it, and the republic was developed by immigrants from all over. Hmm, who lived there before? That's something to examine. Nastiin is possibly the most powerful geopolitical entity on Cosmos; Nastiicans as a culture still hold some bitterness and resentment toward the gods and reflexively seek to defy them whenever possible, and despite their rich melting-pot culture, have grown somewhat isolationist in recent years.

Onnecco: Onnecco is a collective of city-states; the capital city, whose ruler gets to govern the entire country, changes every few years based on the winners of an athletics competition held every five years. Their complex culture takes cues from the eastern gods, but reinterpreted their teachings for the nation's personal tastes. Their magic and infrastructure rivals the glory of that of Magnae, but the culture is plagued by practices such as trial by combat, slavery, and rampant corruption and nepotism. Cultural motifs are a mix of ancient Roman and modern-day Italian.

Pontou: A very magical place, inspired by France and the Disney films that are set there, some of the most glorious in the Disney catalogue. It was in the place that is now Pontou that the first fairies appeared during the harmonic convergence, and magic continues to run wild there. Pontou recently declared its independence (hmm, that's an interesting idea that I don't remember having -- independence from whom?), and are ruled by a benevolent family of sorcerers descended from the fair folk. Ooh, that's right! I had forgotten about that idea about "wild magic" sorcerers, that they're descended from fairies, that all fairies are, technically speaking, wild magic sorcerers themselves, they're just not all obligated to follow their true nature, they can learn to take on any class. Thank goodness for that reminder of a little tidbit to put under "fairies" and "sorcerers" in the real Cosmos encyclopedia. Anyway, Pontou is known for its gorgeous architecture, master classes in wizardry, and harmony with nature.

Khuvira: Fun fact to open with: I originally called this country Khufira. Google Docs spellcheck wondered if maybe I meant "kufira", so I looked up that word. It's Swahili for anal sex, and that, boys and girls, is the best example ever on why you should always Google the names you invent for your speculative fiction. There are only so many combinations of sounds in the world, you gotta make sure it's not already out there somewhere, or that if it is, it doesn't mean anything silly. Thank you, Google, for your apparently bizarrely comprehensive spellcheck database. So it's Khuvira now, a word which I'm pretty sure doesn't invoke anything except for Kuvira, Zelda Williams's character in The Legend of Korra. Solid upgrade. Anyway, Khuvira is inspired by the Middle East. The data we have: it's mostly desert, the civilized part centralized in a vast "sea" of trees, where olives and pistachios grow. Its capital city is regarded as the most romantic city on the planet, with glorious golden architecture, libraries of ancient lore, and lots of coffee. Elemental magic flows freely in both the lush and barren parts of the country, while the desert is home to some of the deadliest beasts in the world: giant worms, whose corpses, if you're a mighty enough hero to actually slay one, provide the perfect fertilizer for delicious and juicy cactus fields.

Mabayashi: Inspired by Japan, as was probably your first guess, given the blatantly faux-Japanese name. Described as a place where technological wonders meet an ancient culture of honor and etiquette. The emperor is a samurai warrior blessed by the gods; his undead skeleton has continued his reign many centuries after his death, but don't worry, he's a good necrocratic emperor, very good at taking care of his people and even better at defending them. Villages in Mabayashi each operate as tiny countries all their own, each with a completely different climate (because magic), and largely self-contained economies, infrastructure, and culture, each with a different approach to the use of magic and technology.

TSIR

Tsir, or simply "the south", is the domain of the Egyptian gods, is described as being more varied in its cultures than the other two regions, and exotic to northern and eastern eyes.

Akhmis: The largest and oldest empire in the world. An empire of merchants, Akhmisian explorers and traders are responsible for the entirety of Cosmos being mapped. The nation is also responsible for the most in-depth studies of magic, unlocking many secrets of the practice and all its forms. Currently, Akhmis finds itself a bit degraded; the gods and the royal family (led, naturally, by a pharaoh, whose coronation is subject to the approval of the gods) keep things running pretty well, but local nobility and elites are rather hedonistic and leave their people in extreme poverty. Akhmis's geography and culture are inspired by Africa -- which is, of course, a continent, with uncountable cultures contained within, but that's to be reflected by Akhmis. Akhmis is an empire, after all, and a really big one in a world that lacks fast travel (well, there's teleportation, but that's hard to come by), so there are tons of different cultures and climates throughout.

Mahanja: Inspired by India and other South Asian places, Mahanja is a very old kingdom currently in the grips of a slow-burn civil war. Tribes and civil leaders often find themselves in opposition to the royal family, whose political sway is weakening. Which side is in the right, and which will be backed by the gods, remains to be seen. And that's all we've got, we didn't finish working on this one, we need a little more.

Tehuaco: Didn't get to dig into this one. I know it's a monarchy, and that its inspiration comes from Spain and Portugal. It plays a part in the history of the next country, Itaxan, and I'm going with an idea Dakota had of a country that's "secretly" run by criminal cartels.

Itaxan: Inspired by pre-colonial Mesoamerica and the modern-day Latin America that replaced it. Latino culture is a pretty cool mix of the Christian traditions of the European colonizers and those of the indigenous people, plus all sorts of tidbits from every ethnic origin imaginable. Itaxan is an empire founded by immigrants from Tehuaco, who overthrew the empire that lived there previously, a regime that was said to be fascist and tyrannical before the Tehuagans came along, but you know what they say about who writes the history books. While technically all of the big worm-shaped island belongs to Itaxan, most of the important stuff there is within a week's travel of the capital. Fine stone roads connect the capital to the outlying villages and farms, but beyond that, you'll find a low stone wall surrounding the civilized portion of the country, easily stepped over but marking where the land gives way to the thick, treacherous jungles of the isle. All of this was in place before the colonization, and the Tehuagan colonizers found the roads impressive enough, and the border wall a good enough marker of when it was too dangerous to venture on, that they didn't change a thing.

Keyfell: Another one I haven't had a chance to develop. I know Keyfell is based on Australia, and I get the vibe it shares the same relationship with Sheafell as Australia does with England -- a prison colony for Shea criminals. I originally planned it to be a republic, but I might go with something a bit more fantastical, maybe taking a lot more cues from the Aboriginal equivalents. One of the last world-building ideas presented to me, back in June before I fell into a depression and TAPAS as a whole went on sabbatical for a couple of months, was when [redacted] pitched to me the idea that Keyfell sets up a lot of temporary coastal settlements for the purposes of whaling, showing me a photo of such a place in New England.

Wogo: A nation of many islands -- presumably way more than just the eight big ones you see on my crude map -- inspired by the Polynesian parts of the world, a region and ethnicity which wasn't often on my mind before Moana came out. I fell in love with the region, not from the movie (though I adore the movie), but from learning about the research that the filmmakers did to make sure they were capturing the place right. Notably, Polynesian culture is where we get the word "mana", a concept often employed in modern magic systems, so perhaps mastery over our world's magic system started in Wogo. Wogovians are masters of the oceans, and presumably on good terms with the people of the neighboring Keyfell. I imagine the region has a singular king -- something that resonated with me from those Moana special features was someone saying that Polynesians see the ocean as something that connects their various islands, not separates them.

So, those were the six episodes of Explore Cosmos, which I put together not so much to educate viewers about the nature of Cosmos, but to educate myself on the subject, having found the story I'd been writing thus far lacking in any kind of world-based uniqueness.

Three more of these Constructing Cosmos blogs to go -- first, I'll be looking at the WorldAnvil wiki where I was previously attempting to compile what little I knew about the world. 

Then, I'll be organizing all the data I've collected from watching my Disney collection for the past... wow, exactly two years to the day, according to my Facebook memories. I compiled a list of over 200 Disney films and have been watching them in the order in which they were released, mining each one for ideas about how to make Cosmos stand out as a fantasy setting.

And then, finally, I'll be digging deep into the archives of my old writings, looking into all the notes I had on Christalss, the first fantasy setting I created, to see which parts of that world are still worth visiting.

Any one of these three pursuits, of course, might end up the same way that Explore Cosmos did, having way more data than I gave myself credit for and have to be split into multiple parts. That seems to be the way things are going for me these days.

Constructing Cosmos: Part 5, Cosmology

You know, I'm actually starting to feel pretty confident about this whole thing? I've prepped the rest of this now nine-part project thingy and the ideas, once I start organizing them properly over on Campfire Blaze, actually generally seem pretty good. There's some gaps to fill, and I still don't know how any of this stuff is going to make it into any of the stories, but we'll get there -- I'm even starting to get strokes of inspiration for how the gameplay might work.

Episode 5: Cosmology - written by Sage Mann

Here's the D&D cosmology as it stands in 5th Edition -- essentially, it's the classic version with a few minor touches lifted from 4th Edition; if I haven't mentioned this already, 4th Edition is just so wildly different from any other form of D&D that basically the whole reason Pathfinder was created was to be a 4th Edition that actually felt like D&D. I was a huge 4th Edition fanboy for many years, but I eventually got tired of it and wanted to tell more versatile stories and 5th seemed to be the way to go there, but let's never forget, there'd be no 5E without 4E -- they brought back D&D in its classic form, but they distilled the good stuff! I really mean no disrespect to 4E, like I said, I was a 4th Edition devotee for years, it was an attempt at something new, I for one enjoyed the emphasis on pulse-pounding action sequences, and I genuinely adore the 4th Edition cosmology, I'm so glad bits and pieces of it made their way into this one.

So, let's look at this model of the D&D universe, from the inside out. At the center, we have the Material Plane. Just the normal world where people live. Coexisting with the Material Plane are its "echoes", the Feywild and the Shadowfell, parallel dimensions to the material world, introduced in 4th Edition. The Feywild is the light side, a realm of nature and magic, while the Shadowfell is the dark side, the domain of death. Then we have the Ethereal Plane, which... I don't really get, I guess that's where like ghosts and stuff exist, and they sometimes cross over into the Material Plane? Do we really need an Ethereal Plane and a Shadowfell? Seems a bit redundant.

Then we have the Inner Planes, better known as the Elemental Planes -- air, earth, fire, and water, entire worlds of just... that stuff. And more interesting stuff where they meet, like slimy swamps where earth meets water, volcanic mountains where earth meets fire, and frosty landscapes where water meets air. The Elemental Chaos is what replaced the Inner Planes in 4th Edition; it represented a world where all the elements raged on all the time, instead of the more structured division. Having both is a pretty good idea.

Then we have the Outer Planes -- the realms of the gods. Each of the sixteen Outer Planes is based on one of the sixteen ways you can combine D&D's alignment system -- all possible combinations of Good versus Evil and Order versus Chaos. The seven planes with elements of Good in their nature are the Upper Planes, and the seven with elements of Evil are the Lower Planes. The two on the horizontal axis are the two with neither good nor evil, Mechanus representing pure Order, and Limbo representing pure Chaos. The Outer Planes that people tend to care about are pretty much just the Abyss and the Nine Hells, as those are where demons and devils come from, respectively.

Incidentally, I am extremely attached to the alignment system. Sure, it serves no real purpose, and 5th Edition made sure that no actual rules apply to it except for those related to roleplaying. But it's an interesting philosophical template and an excellent way to start developing a character's personality, a culture, or a system of government.

Back to the Outer Planes, the Astral Plane is the way one travels from one Outer Plane to another, sort of the magic version of outer space. Not depicted here are the Outlands, sort of the seventeenth Outer Plane, a neutrally-aligned realm. On the edges of the Outlands are the sixteen Gate Towns, each one connected to an Outer Plane; in its center is a massive stone spire atop which sits Sigil, the City of Doors, a city built on the inside surface of a ring-shaped parallel dimension. The doors that Sigil is named for can lead you anywhere, and when I say anywhere... well, I'm not actually sure if this is actually canon or just my personal interpretation, but I get the feeling that, as many D&D universes as there are, there is only one Sigil, and by finding the right door, you can travel to any universe.

And then on the outermost edges of this model there's the Positive Plane and Negative Plane, I don't know anything about those, I think maybe they're not places, per se, just representative of positive energy, which heals the living and harms the undead, and negative energy, which does the reverse.

I'd also like to discuss the 4th Edition cosmology, which kept things simpler while also being rather inventive; as I mentioned, the Feywild, Shadowfell, and Elemental Chaos debuted there. In 4th Edition's universe, there were basically six places. There were also only six creature types in that edition, each creature type corresponding to one of the six worlds of the setting.

You had the Material Plane, the Feywild, and the Shadowfell, respectively the homes of natural creatures, fey creatures, and shadow creatures. Above the world (metaphysically speaking) was the Astral Sea, and below it the Elemental Chaos. All of the Outer Planes could be found in the Astral Sea, as scattered islands dotting the plane rather than a neat ring -- all except the Abyss, that is, which could now be found at the center of the Elemental Chaos. Creatures of the Astral Sea were immortal creatures, and creatures of the Elemental Chaos, including demons, were elemental creatures.

Then there's one more plane that you won't actually find on any map of the universe -- the Far Realm. The Far Realm is a separate universe, one beyond mortal comprehension. In the distant past, there were portals to the Far Realm, where aberrant creatures came through, along with the alien magic that sometimes gives people psychic powers. Generally, no portals to the Far Realm exist in modern D&D universes; just as well, as a single glance at the place would instantly break the brain of any mortal.

So, that was D&D Cosmology 101, now let's talk about how I planned it out for K&K. For one thing... I don't like using the word "planes" to describe these places. In my D&D campaigns, I've always called them "worlds" instead, and referred to the Material Plane as simply "the World", and occasionally I drop terms like "realms" and "dimensions", but I dunno, I don't like "planes". Maybe because it feels a bit too sci-fi? Of course, that's also true of "dimensions". I dunno, I'm fickle and I don't understand my own opinions half the time.

The short about cosmology begins with, well, an acknowledgment that Cosmos suddenly becomes a pretty confusing name for a planet once you start also talking about the cosmos. It discusses the material plane, Cosmos itself, and then the ethereal plane and astral plane. These two planes are generally used for fast travel. The ethereal plane is described as the easier of the two to reach (which isn't saying much, most people go their entire lives without getting any inkling that there are other planes); its utility might be to get from point A to point B without being detected by any other living soul, the risks being that you might meet a ghost or a giant dimension-jumping spider or some such. The astral plane, as you might imagine, is reached via astral projection, which is incredibly advanced magic; but then once you're in the astral plane, you can walk to anywhere in the universe, providing you know the way.

Then the Feywild and the Shadowfell are discussed... now, those names aren't part of the Open Game License, because the 5E OGL only includes 5E rules that are either, A) absolutely necessary, or B), were in the 3E OGL, while also being C) not trademarked product identities of the D&D game, and as mentioned, these two dimensions were invented for 4E. So I don't think I can call these places the Feywild and the Shadowfell, as much as I'd like to, but I simply must keep the concept: two worlds parallel to the material world, one of light, magic, and nature, the other of darkness, death, and negativity. One thing established in this short is that between the world and its two echoes, geographical landmarks are recognizable. Say somewhere in the world you have a massive ancient oak tree. In the Feywild, that same tree also exists, but is like a super pretty magical fairy tree! While in the Shadowfell, it's all gray and gnarled and has no leaves, but even though it looks dead, it grows along with its material-world counterpart. And this carries over to all changes in the landscape... if you bulldoze a hill to build a freeway, the corresponding hill in the Feywild and Shadowfell will also vanish, and perhaps some magical semblance of pavement will grow in its place. This portion of the short is narrated by Cristela, whose personal goals in The Choices relate to finding the Feywild. So such a place definitely needs to exist. Just needs a new name.

Then, the short discusses the Elemental Planes and alludes to the Elemental Chaos. These realms are described as being bigger, more extravagant, and more beautiful than anything that can be found in the material world, both in terms of the natural landscapes and the civilizations there.

Then we come to our equivalent to the Upper Planes, identified in the short as the "celestial realms" or "heavenly realms". I never intended to use the sixteen Outer Planes of D&D, which is good, because they're trademarked, I would've been disappointed. Instead, there are only three of them: Olympus, Asgard, and the Offering Fields, one for each of the three pantheons. The heavenly realms are, in a sense, rather easily accessible, as you can walk there from the material world without using any kind of magic; you can climb Mount Olympus in the center of Magnae, cross the Rainbow Bridge in the northern reaches of Athundoft, or enter the great pyramid in the northern deserts of Akhmis. Of course, you're unlikely to make that trip without being noticed by some sort of divine being, so, have an excuse ready. Most of the gods live in their respective pantheon's celestial realm, each having their own territory there, and there's also a lot of heavenly geography to explore and celestial creatures to meet, like angels and ponies and stuff.

Then we discuss the hell dimensions, our equivalent to the Lower Planes. Not in very much detail; all that's said is that they're where fiends come from, that travelers who find themselves there don't live for very long, and that for all intents and purposes there are an infinite number of such places. Then we allude to the Far Realm by mentioning that aberrations are from someplace beyond the hell dimensions, a place that residents of Cosmos probably can't even look at without their minds snapping.

And that was it, it was a pretty short... short, I guess. Final note: Keys & Kingdoms definitely has a multiverse, Cosmos is not the only world that exists in the franchise, there's definitely a couple more that I have in mind and I'm excited to incorporate maybe a few worlds created by some other people! Just need to think of a way to connect them apart from Sigil, Sigil is also trademarked.

Constructing Cosmos: Part 4, Religion

At this point, I have people wondering why I seem to think I need help with this world-building stuff. After all, I'm presenting heaps of information here.

Well, here's the thing: setting aside the fact that most of those heaps of writing are about trying, and not succeeding, to think of ways to make my world-building different from the default assumptions about Dungeons & Dragons, of all the information on the world that I have come up with... well, none of it matters.

I've been begging people for ages to help me out with this world-building, and they all tell me, world-building arises naturally from the telling of the story. Thing is, I have the story; at least, the first story set in this world. I wrote it. It's been written. It is done. And it takes place in a terrifying empty void instead of a world. Because no matter how much world-building I do, nothing I come up with is anything approaching relevant, none of it could possibly be important to a story... at least not in any way I can figure out. So that's why I started writing these educational shorts about the nature of the world, because even though I know the story from beginning to end, that story does not at any point cross paths with the world it takes place in. And that's unacceptable. This is a fantasy story, the world has to basically be the main character, not a complete nonentity.

So... I'm furious with myself, but for once, it's not because I've lost something. I used to read books by the truckload, now I just stare blankly at pages for hours. I used to be charming and entertaining; now I'm invisible, and even my loved ones only notice me when I'm miserable, at the end of my rope, and literally begging for someone to validate my existence. I used to be a renaissance man, writing hundreds of pages each week, composing songs, drawing the characters. I can still write. These blog posts are, after all, extremely detailed expressions of my thoughts which... seem pretty well-written, I think, maybe even excessively so. And my stories, mm, they need a couple of dots connected, I need help with them for sure, but I still have it in me to come up with a story and construct it fairly well. Music and art, however, are lost to me, the holes drilled into my brain by so many years of depression have taken them away from me forever... a loss that causes me untold pain every day.

But I've always been terrible at worldbuilding, in the exact manner in which I'm struggling with it now. I have a number of speculative fiction stories to my name. I have my world of Christalss, the first high-fantasy setting I created... abandoned it several years ago, but it may make a comeback as a Keys & Kingdoms campaign setting, distinct from Cosmos. I have Iris, my take on the young-adult dystopia genre. I have Mina, my fairy-themed stage play. Like Cosmos, these settings have quite a bit of meat-and-potatoes to them: countries and cultures, species and races, histories, religions, magic systems, historical figures. And just like The Choices and a few other small attempts I've made at telling stories on Cosmos -- at no point in the story of Mina, or the story of Iris, or any of the four or five stories I've written set on Christalss, has any of that world-building ever made its way into the story.

Because the only way I know how to tell a story is with characters; who they are and what they do, and just setting them loose. And I know what you're going to say: to lean into that, to just tell stories with characters. If you were paying attention, I told you I've already done that. The story is told, the characters are amazing, but the setting is nonexistent and that's not okay. A story needs a plot, characters, and a setting; I learned that on the first day of third grade and I assume you did too. Quit trying to wriggle out of helping me with my setting, you said you'd do it.

To sum up: I have a world. I have a story. Both are extremely unfinished and can't be fleshed out by me alone, but more importantly, the two have never met and I can't figure out how to introduce them.

Episode 4: Religion - written by Sage Mann & Archer Slam-Bam

In the early days of conceiving of Keys & Kingdoms, probably around the time I started watching my inspirational Disney collection and took note of the scene in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in which Snow White says her prayers before bed, I started thinking about the religion of Cosmos. The conclusion I came to was that the world should be led by three pantheons: the gods of the Ancient Egyptians, the Ancient Greeks, and the Old Norse.

Soon I discovered that there was a D&D supplement, 3rd Edition's Deities & Demigods, that included a "Fantasy-Historical Pantheons" section with instructions for integrating these exact three pantheons into your campaign (and just those three; they had also wanted to include a section on Celtic deities, but it wasn't in the budget, which, hey, works for me). Not all at once, though; the section was about creating a D&D world ruled over by one of these three pantheons; a world that includes all three of them I had to figure out on my own. Which is good; that's what RPG gamebooks should be for, helping you come up with ideas that are all your own.

Stacy spent a year or so on a commissioned project, drawing all 53 fantasy-historical gods depicted in that book, seen here in family tree form. A key to reading the family tree:

gold border: king of the pantheon

red border: greater god

green border: intermediate god

blue border: lesser god

purple border: demigod

red line: marriage

green line: siblings

blue line: parent and child

Which gods are deemed important enough to make it into the pantheon as anything more than "quasi-deities", and how they relate to each other in terms of power and morality, well, I'm just gonna lift all that straight out of Deities & Demigods and work from there.

Before I start talking about the information given in the "Religion" short film, there's something I have to mention before I forget: one thing I haven't thought of a whole lot is the role of these deities in a world populated by people other than humans. Deities & Demigods contains a few suggestions on the subject, indicating which deities would be worshiped by dwarves, elves, and so on. For instance, in a world ruled by the Greek pantheon, dwarves would probably have a fondness for Hades, due to his connections to wealth and earth, and Hephaestus, for obvious reasons. And, er, that's all I can remember, I'll check that book again, and hopefully, you know, also have some ideas that are actually mine. Percy Jackson is probably a good place to work from, since that series acknowledges that satyrs and centaurs and stuff are people too and have a role in this world of gods and heroes.

When discussing my world-building woes with Christine, she offered a significant contribution: the notion that long ago, dwarves were digging at the foot of Mount Olympus, like ya do, and ended up digging too deep, like ya do, finding themselves in the kingdom of Hades. That of course was an amazing idea, a perfect example of mixing modern high fantasy with classical mythology, and is now absolutely, most definitely, a thing that happened sometime in Cosmos's distant past. But, as we've established, I can't conceive of any situation in any story set on Cosmos that would provide anything resembling a reason to bring it up.

There are a lot of things storytellers do that I can't comprehend, just don't see how they're possible. Incorporating a world's history with the story being told now is one of those things. It just blows me away, because it's beyond the grasp of my mind how people even come up with the idea to do that. But what I do know is that all these things I can't wrap my mind around -- which range from foreshadowing and callbacks to catchphrases and meaningful echoes -- are all absolutely necessary components of a story. That's why I need help.

The Three Pantheons

The short film addresses some misconceptions the audience might have about religion in Cosmos based on their experience with modern-day real-world religion, in which every denomination believes theirs to be the one true religion and everyone else to be doomed to hell. Not a great way to live, I don't recommend it.

So, the gods of the three pantheons are described as "indisputably real as fuck". They are compared first to celebrities, in that no celebrity can sign every autograph or answer every piece of fan mail; likewise, while prayer works and each god can hear every prayer directed at them (and comprehend them all at once thanks to godly brainpower), they can't possibly answer every one even if they wanted to. Then they're compared to political candidates, in that people are encouraged to choose the one whose morals and ideals most closely match their own... and also that no matter which one you pick, you're never gonna find one who's 100% morally upright.

Finally, it's established that the gods have existed for approximately 12,000 years, roughly the lifetime of the universe Cosmos calls home, and therefore had free reign for a good 2,000 years before mortal civilization happened.

The Asgardian Pantheon

The Asgardian pantheon, also called the northern gods, can be found in the heavenly realm of Asgard, reachable by crossing the rainbow bridge in the far northern reaches of the country of Athundoft. It's established that we'll only be talking about the really important gods -- the ones who, on the family trees above, have red or gold borders -- because they have the most impact on everyday life and are most often on the minds of ordinary people.

• Odin: The king of the Aesir. A wanderer, a seeker of knowledge and a purveyor of victory. I included a reference to a rather amusing discovery I've made when promoting Stacy's artwork: evidently there are a whole lot of Odin fanboys out there, who claim there's so much more to Odin than just being the king of the gods that apparently it's somehow inaccurate, or something, to display him alongside Zeus and Re-Horakhti. I still don't get what any of these guys are trying to say. He's the king of the gods. The other two are also kings of the gods. That is a very cool job, you don't need to object that there's more to him than that. I'll accept opinions that Odin is the coolest of the three, maybe even agree, but how does that make me somehow wrong for displaying them all together? Friggin' nerds, man.
• Frigga: One of Odin's wives, presumably his favorite as she's the one who gets to be the queen. Goddess of love and motherhood, but also vicious animal life with cruel shredding claws.
• Thor: A son of Odin (but not Frigga), the most popular god among the common people and an adventurer in his own right. Armed with his mighty hammer and the power of storms, he is a champion of the people and a peacekeeper.
• Loki: A frequent companion to Thor on his adventures, of unknown origin and unknown motivation. Thieves and tricksters pay tribute to him.
• Frey: A member of the Vanir, former enemies of the Aesir who now live alongside them. The most popular of the Vanir due to his association with agriculture and the harvest, which are, you know, kind of a big deal.

The Pharaonic Pantheon

Also called the southern gods, this pantheon can be found in the northern reaches of the sprawling empire of Akhmis. Near the mouth of the largest river in the world stands a great pyramid, and beneath it is the entrance to an underworld, the Offering Fields, where these gods dwell.

• Re-Horakhti: The current leader of the pantheon and god of the sun; once called Horus, he ascended to his current form when his ancestor, Ra, retired to seek true perfect enlightenment far from the mortal world. The pharaoh of Akhmis is crowned in Re-Horakhti's name.
• Osiris: Father to Re-Horakhti, the undead god of nature and life, who supervises the Offering Fields and the lands of the dead just as his son oversees the southern lands.
• Isis: Sister-wife to Osiris and mother to Re-Horakhti, with dominion over fertility and marriage (kind of a common job title for those who are queens of their pantheon, ain't it?), as well as magic. Hot but crazy.
• Set: Brother to Osiris and Isis, the god of darkness and one of the most powerful forces for evil in the world. He unleashes sandstorms and pestilence across southern lands, and his cults are a constant, global force of corruption and temptation.

The Olympian Pantheon

The eastern gods, who live atop Mount Olympus, a supernaturally tall mountain in the dead center of the island kingdom of Magnae.

• Zeus: God of the sky, king of the pantheon, and leader of the twelve Olympians. Rules in the style of a stern, distant father... and in fact is a literal father to many people in the east. Legendary for his amorous encounters with all sorts of women, an ever-expanding roster of godlings, monsters, and exceptional mortals are his children.
• Poseidon: Zeus's brother, who lives in his undersea palace but sits at Zeus's right hand at meetings of the Olympian council. Poseidon reflects all aspects of the sea, sometimes being peaceful, bountiful, and full of life, other times full of destruction and death.
• Hades: The elder brother of Zeus and Poseidon. He keeps to himself and does not sit on the Olympian council, living beneath Mount Olympus instead of upon it... I put the underworld directly beneath Olympus. Instead of... where was it in the myths, I want to say you got there by sailing out of the Mediterranean, and then instead of the Atlantic you end up in Hades? Or did I make that up? Anyway, Hades (the guy, not the place) has dominion over earth, death, and wealth... which I just kinda like reiterating. Lots of "eath" words.
• Hera: Sister-wife of Zeus (I give points to the Norse gods here for nobody being married to their sister), seated at his left hand, the goddess of marriage and political intrigue. A jealous goddess, ever seeking to regain her former prominence in the pantheon. 
• Athena: Seated at Hera's left, the favored daughter of Zeus, with a rather inexplicable origin. The goddess of civilization, who favors mortals with her inventions, creations, and strategic wisdom, making her largely responsible for the advancement of Magnae in particular and the east in general.

Better than a Sponge

Well, this blog post begins the same way as the previous one: a Monday evening emotional breakdown upon realizing that this week's to-do list would never, ever get finished. That I don't know how to do anything. That I've lost the mental capacity to learn how to do anything. And that nobody in this world has the time to spare to give me the help I need to survive.

People think I'm too hard on myself and I set my sights too high... and I honestly have no idea where everyone gets that idea, because the only thing I want from myself is to be a human instead of a sponge. And I'm not. I've always been a sponge -- I've always been perfectly content being a sponge, in all honesty; I like life best when I'm a sponge, but capitalist society won't let me just be a sponge. I'll be kicked out, left on the streets. So, I devote my days to trying to be better than a sponge.

But... I'm not. I'm not better than a sponge. I'm just... not. And every time I try to rise above that level, I end up hating myself because all the evidence indicates that I just can't do it. The only time I don't hate myself is when I don't try anything. Because trying things... it never ends well. That nasty voice in my head constantly telling me that I'm incapable of succeeding is proven more and more correct with every passing day.

Monday blues aside... tomorrow we're watching The Princess Bride, and the week after that, Little Shop of Horrors. Those two videos will probably be out before the Killer Bean Forever video we made last week, because that one's going to take a lot of audio mixing, to make sure every moment in the movie is audible, and every moment of our commentary is audible, and... I have absolutely no clue how to do that, so I've gotta find someone who does. Editing the other two videos, the videos in which we'll be cutting down the film to a highlight reel of 15 minutes or so, will be much easier for me, I imagine.

Hmm. Apparently not. We couldn't watch The Princess Bride. No one I was watching it with could actually see the film, nor could my screen-recording software. I was so sure Zoom watch parties were a thing, a thing that people actually do, with real movies... but apparently Zoom does not beat copy protection. So I guess for now, we're only watching things we can watch for free. Until we figure out how it works. Lots of people do reaction videos, and when they do it looks a heck of a lot better than when I do it, so there's got to be a way to do it and a very easy way at that, you see so many morons out there with professional-grade, well-edited reaction videos, it can't be that damn hard but I just can't figure out how it's done! You know, the same thing happened when I first started trying to record Let's Plays on my PS4; I couldn't beat copy protection. And I just don't get it! Everybody else does it.

So... one of these days we're gonna do Princess Bride, and Little Shop, and it's going to actually look and sound good, damn it -- I just need to figure out how every joker on the internet with a camera can do it while I have to break my brain figuring it out. So, that? That attempt at filming a Princess Bride reaction, just... completely wiped me out, emotionally. So awful. I'd so been looking forward to it. What is wrong with my life? Everything just goes bad like old food. I never get a phone call back from anyone, I can't draw a straight line, or record clean audio, or keep things clean, or make a paper airplane, all my life everything I do has always been just off enough to leave me... constantly frustrated.

And, hey, while you're here -- subscribing to the blog, is that a thing you can do? Down at the bottom, after the comments section, there should be a follow button; and then below that, a place to enter your email address so you can follow the blog even if you don't have an account. I have two followers at the moment, but some people have said they haven't figured out how to follow the blog. Please try to do so, and if you can't, let me know what you're seeing so I can figure out what's going on. Or maybe I never will. Because everything I do goes wrong, in ways no one can explain.

Constructing Cosmos: Part 3, Creatures

This one should be much shorter -- let's talk creature types. As I said in my most recent podcast, while I'm working to excise the D&D stuff from this setting and start being inspired by Disney like I was supposed to, one place I can't really do this is with monsters. Disney films don't really have much to work with as far as monsters. I'll certainly try to work with every monster Disney has, but primarily we'll have to populate this world by creatures drawn from D&D.

Incidentally, while talking to Rob, I think I finally came up with a way to explain the concept of Keys & Kingdoms that won't be immediately met with the question of how I'm going to avoid being sued by Disney. Namely: I'm creating a fantasy world and roleplaying game that feels as if it's taking place in a Disney film. Feels. Just feels that way. Actual Disney characters are not appearing anywhere, stop asking how I'm gonna pull that off.

It's definitely not a crime to project an atmosphere that feels like you're living in a Disney film. To wit, look at every 2D-animated feature film ever made that wasn't made for adults; they look and feel an awful lot like Disney films, don't they? Disney didn't sue any of them. Except Filmation, but they were trying to pass off their Snow White and Pinocchio films as actual sequels to the Disney versions, so, you know, really shouldn't'a did that.

No judgment on other companies from the 2D era for using Disney-esque designs and animation, incidentally; it's the only animation style I actually like. I freaking miss it, man.

Episode 3: Creatures - written by Sage Mann

In this episode, the characters introduce the fourteen creature types. These are, naturally, exactly the same as the fourteen creature types in D&D 5th Edition. It's a really good system, I don't really want to mess with it too much. Here are the fourteen types, in the order in which they're described in the short I wrote:

Humanoid: Basically, people. A flesh and blood creature with a human-like body plan, a language and culture, and not a huge amount of inherent magic -- that's a humanoid. In the short, most of the races described in the first episode are displayed; but not all! I'll get back to that in a moment. We also see some imagery of assorted other humanoids: a gnome, goblin, orc, gnoll, kobold, lizardfolk, and sahuagin.

Gnomes are worth mentioning: they've been a core race in D&D from the beginning, but nobody ever really knew what to do with them because they were the only core race without a Tolkien counterpart. They've evolved over the years into a combination of elves, dwarves, and halflings, with a few unique traits such as their tinkering with steampunk technology, their affinity for illusion magic, and, basically, their overall silliness. I didn't make them core races in K&K, but I definitely plan to incorporate them... in the style of a traditional pre-D&D gnome, about a foot tall with a short white beard and a pointy hat, since we need more creatures who can operate on the scale of the myshkas and pixies. Still have no idea how to make that work gameplay-wise, you know, it's gonna be more interesting, surely, than just everybody in that situation having one hit point. As for the others besides gnomes, you know, just your basic D&D opponents. Goblins and gnolls appear in (the current version of) the first season of The Choices, so I wrote 'em up for the WorldAnvil blog, we'll talk more about them in that entry. Or entries.

Beast: Described in the D&D book as non-sapient creatures that form part of the natural ecology. Put more simply, if it's an animal that exists in real life, or used to, it's in the beast category. With a couple of exceptions, such as fictional "dire" or "giant" versions of real animals, and, for some reason, the stirge. The stirge is basically a giant mosquito, but different enough from one that I wouldn't have put it in the beast category were it up to me.

In the short, Zaya demonstrates beasts by displaying a tyrannosaurus and a frog, respectively the strongest and weakest beasts in the game rules. Well, maybe the frog isn't the weakest; it's one of two creatures in the game that have what I call a "00" challenge rating -- a creature that not only has a challenge rating of 0, but also grants 0 experience points for defeating it since it's completely incapable of causing harm. The other is the seahorse, and a frog is more versatile than a seahorse, can go on land and jump and stuff while a seahorse can do nothing but, you know, swim slowly. So, if we're tiering the 00s... you get it.

Dragon: Definitely important enough to merit their own category! Half the title of the game, after all. In D&D, there are ten types of true dragons: the five kinds of chromatic dragon (white, black, green, blue and red), who are usually evil, and the five kinds of metallic dragon (brass, copper, bronze, silver, and gold), who are usually good. Each has their own unique breath weapon (yes, only a few of them in fact breathe fire), a unique type of habitat where they like to make their lairs, and a unique culture and personality -- it's all rather impressive. The dragon category also includes most creatures that are vaguely draconic, such as the pseudo-dragon, the faerie dragon, the dragon turtle, and the wyvern.

Giant: One might assume that giants could just go under the humanoid category, I'm pretty sure Pathfinder did that, but I like this, I think giants have a bit of magic to them, plus they have a caste system that includes all giants and only giants, so it makes sense for them to have a cut-off point where one is in fact a giant rather than just a really big humanoid. As with dragons, there's a lineup of the true giants -- storm, cloud, fire, frost, stone, and hill, pretty sure I correctly ranked them top to bottom there -- plus an assortment of other people who qualify for the giant category, such as the ogre, troll, cyclops, and ettin.

Monster: Actually, in D&D 5E the word used is "monstrosity", but I find that an unnecessary amount of syllables and, you know, a bit excessively mean, so I refer to creatures of this category as simply "monsters". Of course, in D&D terminology, any creature you can encounter is called a monster, but, well, that's why we have the word "creature". In D&D, the monstrosity category is basically the "other" category. Effectively, a creature can be classified as a monster if it's a creature of flesh and blood -- whether or not it has origins in nature -- but doesn't fit into any of the above four categories. In the short film, I illustrate this category by displaying a minotaur, a griffon, a basilisk, and, in one of the few strokes of originality in this episode, a cecaelia. Cecaeliae are very obscure mythological creatures; only one member of this species has made any particular impact on world culture, namely, Ursula from The Little Mermaid. Ursula being a very prominent Disney character, her people should have a fairly prominent place in Cosmos.

Fey: Creatures with strong ties to nature magic and the wilds. Displayed in the episode to demonstrate are a satyr, a dryad, and, for the darker side of fey folk, a hag. There are never very many creatures in this category, for whatever reason, seeing as arguably most creatures in mythology belong in this category. Now, here's an interesting thing: in D&D, all playable characters go under the "humanoid" category -- I think the only exception is one elf subrace who are close enough to nature to be replaced in the "fey" category -- but in K&K, two of the core races, the fairy and the pixie, are most definitely fey. And I think it would be really cool to think of playable characters of non-humanoid categories. The cecaelia is a good example, maybe the ogre as well. Some other fey? We'll see.

Ooze: An iconic creature type in D&D, not exactly prominent but so freakin' weird that they have to have their own category, they just don't fit anywhere else. Amorphous creatures made entirely of digestive acids, most famously the gelatinous cube, which actually managed to get itself a cameo in a Disney film earlier this year. The gray ooze, the ochre jelly, the black pudding, and... that's pretty much all of them. There used to be a green slime, but I think that's a kind of fungus now, not an ooze. That's too bad, I liked the green ones.

Plant: Any plant or fungus creature falls into this category, regardless of how sapient and humanoid it is, such as the myconids, giant mushroom people, or the treants, Tolkienesque giant tree guardians. Good place to stick some playable peeps.

Undead: A pretty easy category to identify; any time a dead thing is reanimated by dark magic, it ceases to be the creature category it was before and is now an undead. The undead can be divided into two basic subcategories: the kind that are effectively walking corpses, from the lowliest mindless zombie to the dominating vampires and liches, to the kind that are incorporeal spirits, like ghosts, banshees, and shadows.

Construct: Creatures made out of raw materials and then shaped and animated by magic. Most famously, the golems, which come in four basic forms: flesh, clay, stone, and iron. Me, I like coming up with new things to make golems out of, I wonder if I still have my old Christalss notes on the subject. Most constructs are essentially mindless, but in this short, I was sure to mention that some have enough capacity for independent thought to essentially be people, something I wanted to establish early to foreshadow what I've been calling "heart constructs".

Or was it "soul constructs"? Meh, I dunno. Anyway, before I came up with the myshkas and syrsas, the ten core races were filled by two other kinds of characters, and one of these was the heart construct, meant to be the race representing any constructed character, be they made from magic or art or science, granted sapience and morality by the love of their creator, a race that could represent Disney characters as diverse as Pinocchio, Tron, Olaf, or Baymax. It just wasn't working out, as far as figuring out the mechanics for a single race that in fact could encompass all these characters... so they won't be a core race in 1st Edition Keys & Kingdoms, but such characters absolutely have to show up eventually.

Elemental: Creatures of the elemental planes, who embody air, earth, fire, and water in their purest forms. There are the four kinds of true elementals, and some other creatures that have four varieties, such as genies; and plenty of other creatures who embody only one element or two, or stuff that's vaguely elemental, such as ice or storms, or combinations of two elements such as magma (fire and earth) or smoke (fire and air). Plenty of those. Elemental creatures include phoenixes, gargoyles, salamanders... again, genies... and that's about it for the creatures that'd be recognizable to non-gamers. K&K's gargoyles are, of course, humanoid, not elemental. And I have all sorts of ideas for depicting genies, seeing as there's a fairly well-known one in the Disney catalogue that you might remember.

Fiend: Fiends are creatures of evil, hailing from what the D&D cosmology calls the Lower Planes. I think in K&K, I'd call such places "hell dimensions", a la Buffy. Most fiends are either demons or devils. What's the differencce? Well, demons are chaotic and devils are lawful. I like the alignment system, though many find it philosophically obsolete. Basically, demons want to destroy the universe, while devils are more about gaining power and influence through trickery and deception -- two different flavors of evil.

D&D's reputation for evilness in the late 1980s caused them to remove explicit mention of demons and devils from their pages -- so, D&D's 2nd Edition, which was current from 1989 to 2000, instead referred to demons and devils with the totally awesome made-up names of "tanar'ri" and "baatezu", respectively. These terms are no longer in use in modern D&D, but I still use them in my own D&D campaigns, because they make a demonic or devilish villain's boasting so much cooler. Can't use them anywhere else, though; still trademarked. The yugoloths, neutral counterparts to the tanar'ri's chaos and the baatezu's order, are still called yugoloths, because as it turns out, their former name of "daemon" is actually pronounced the same as "demon". And apart from those three categories, there are plenty of fiends of other origins. All evil and from evil places.

Celestial: Celestials are the opposite number of fiends, hailing from the heavenly realms, or Upper Planes, instead of the hell dimensions, and are pure embodiments of goodness -- though, it's acknowledged, it's slightly more heard of to find an evil celestial than a good fiend. There are very, very few celestials found across the various D&D monster books -- after all, most creatures in the book are for the characters to fight against, and most heroes don't spend very much time fighting the forces of good.

In all the 5E monster books I have, of which I've made a list for use in my campaigns, among all the hundreds of creatures, only eight are celestials, and three of those are different types of angels. Other than that we have the pegasus, the ki-rin, the unicorn, a couple of more obscure things. I personally would have made the unicorn a fey, not a celestial, but I actually like it better this way. Unicorns are awesome and super-important, I should think. They represent not just nature, but the gods of nature. That's way cool.

Aberration: And finally, the aberrations. Effectively, they're the fantasy-genre version of aliens, creatures from the stars and from other dimensions outside the normal cosmology, who have found themselves in D&D worlds. Tragically, D&D's most famous aberrations who so often serve as villainous masterminds -- the mindflayer and the beholder -- are trademarked, while the one really famous one that isn't trademarked, the otyugh, is a simple predator, not really villain material. I been thinkin' that Disney films such as Lilo & Stitch and Treasure Planet have a ton of neat alien designs (which come with absolutely zero alien lore) so they can probably provide some inspiration for original aberrations.

And that's it for the short film and the creature categories that currently exist in 5E. There's another thing I wanted to look into: the creature categories that exist in 5E's predecessors, 3E and Pathfinder.

• Aberration: In 3E, whether a creature went into the "aberration" or "magical beast" category seemed to be almost entirely arbitrary. Granted, every confirmed alien went into the "aberration" category, but so did a lot of creatures that were not aliens and are now, rather sensibly, in the "monstrosity" category.
• Animal: The animal category was used for all modern-day animals and their "giant" or "dire" versions whether such things existed in real life or not.
• Beast: The beast category was used for creatures that don't exist in real life, but have animal-like behavior and no particular magical powers, such as the ankheg, griffon, and hydra. Dinosaurs, weirdly enough, also went in this category. Pathfinder retired this category, instead placing dinosaurs in the "animal" category where they belonged and all fictional animals under "magical beast" regardless of how magical they actually were.
• Construct: A distinct category that's gone through no particular changes.
• Dragon: As it is now, this category was used for both true dragons and for dragon-like creature. Back then, any creature that was half-dragon (dragons enjoy shapeshifting and apparently get laid a lot when they do so, and the offspring always looks like a half-dragon version of itself) was also designated with the "dragon" category; they don't do that anymore, in 5E a half-dragon still has the creature type of the thing it actually is. Oh, hey, you wanna know something else crazy? In 5E, all of the true dragon species come in four age categories: wyrmling, young, adult, and ancient. That way you can fight a dragon at any stage of your adventuring career... which kind of misses the point of dragons, if you ask me, they should really be saved for later in your adventuring career, I don't see anything honorable in fighting a child, even if it is a dragon child. But 3E? It had stats... for all ten species of dragon... at twelve friggin' different stages of life: wyrmling, very young, young, juvenile, young adult, adult, mature adult, old, very old, ancient, wyrm, and great wyrm. Like.... WHAT?! In what universe was that necessary? We did not need one hundred and twenty different sets of dragon stats. A few other creatures in the manual had two or three age categories, but... seriously, yeah, what the heck was this? I still kinda think that the four sets of stats 5E has for all ten species is a bit much. Plus, as Order of the Stick author Rich Burlew points out, it means that statistically speaking, a lot more dragon children got killed over the history of 3E's existence than the children of any other creature...
• Elemental: A very underused category... it seems that what elemental creatures went in the "elemental" category and which went in the "outsider" category was, once again, completely arbitrary. Pathfinder did away with the elemental category altogether and put all elemental creatures under "outsider"... more about why I think that was a misstep a bit later.
• Fey: A small category then as now, and back then was more focused on the benevolent fey, as hags at the time were classified as monstrous humanoids.
• Giant: This category hasn't really changed from the 3E version, though, as I mentioned above, Pathfinder decided to do away with the category and just classify giants as humanoids.
• Humanoid: A fairly empty category in these two editions... I suppose you were supposed to just give every humanoid creature class levels and stuff and figure out for yourself whether your creation was a balanced encounter for your heroes. 5E gives you a bit more to work with, not only providing a whole bunch of humanoids, including some stats for chieftains, captains, elite warriors and stuff, as well as a whole bunch of generic NPC templates that can be applied to any humanoid character.
• Magical Beast: The magical beast category consists of creatures that are animalistic but also magical... though I'm a seeing a few that don't seem to actually be magical at all, so it seems that once again, we have two categories, "beast" and "magical beast", in which creatures were assigned at random. Most magical beasts have animal intelligence, but the sphinx also went in this category, among other creatures.
• Monstrous Humanoid: Pretty much exactly what it sounds like. In 5E, some formerly monstrous humanoids, such as the kuo-toa and grimlock, were reclassified as regular humanoids, while others, such as the centaur, minotaur, medusa, and harpy (all the Greek ones, apparently) went into the monstrosity category -- it seems the modern-day monstrosity category is an amalgam of the former "magical beast" and "monstrous humanoid" category... though, you know, I kind of actually liked it better when that category was divided into two? I don't like any of the names used, not "monstrosity" nor "magical beast" or "monstrous humanoid" either, but it would be kind of helpful if there were two categories to distinguish which monstrosities are sapient and which aren't, y'know? But, I suppose looking at individual entries is just as well.
• Ooze: Well, as this category in the 3E Monster Manual contains the exact same four creatures as in the 5E one, I guess oozes remain about the same.
• Outsider: Yeah, this? This was kind of a mess. In 3E and Pathfinder, every single creature that comes from the Inner Planes or Outer Planes was given the "outsider" category (except, again, those few Inner Planes creatures that were arbitrarily assigned "elemental" instead). This resulted in an extremely bloated and rather uninformative category. Now in 5E, the outsider category has been split into three: creatures from the Inner Planes are elementals, those from the Upper Planes are celestials, and those from the Lower Planes are fiends. Works much better that way. That being said, there's one tiny problem. See, the Upper Planes are of a good nature and the Lower Planes are of an evil nature, but there are two Outer Planes that are neither good nor evil: Mechanus, the plane of pure law, and Limbo, the plane of pure chaos. Mechanus is inhabited by modrons, who in 5E get the "construct" category as they are essentially robots; Limbo, however, is inhabited by slaadi, and 5E had to make the call, with no "outsider" category anymore, to categorize the slaadi as "aberrations", which doesn't quite fit right, as aberrations are generally from, or at least related to, the Far Realm, the universe beyond the Outer Planes. But ultimately, there's just no better place to put slaadi; by their very nature as being from Limbo, a slaad is neither fiend nor celestial, and a bit too extradimensional to be a monstrosity. Of course, that's not really our problem -- slaadi are trademarked, as are the proper names of the Outer Planes, and I don't intend to use the D&D "rings" model of the universe anyway. More about that later.
• Plant: No notable changes to speak of. Once again, all creatures of a vegetable or fungoid nature go in this category regardless of how ambulatory and/or sapient they may be.
• Shapechanger: Well, that's a pretty silly creature category. Lots of creatures can shapeshift, and they could probably be easily placed into some other category. A few creatures known for shapeshifting did end up in other categories instead of this one. I can see why Pathfinder didn't bother with this category -- indeed, even D&D 3.5 ditched it.
• Undead: Another one that hasn't changed in the interim. Quite simple; if it's undead, then it's in the undead category, regardless of what its creature type was before it became undead.
• Vermin: This rather odd category was reserved for, well, bugs. If it's an insect, arachnid, or centipede, it goes in the "vermin" category, whether it's a swarm of regular-sized bugs or some sort of giant bug -- but not if it's a magical bug, those go under "magical beast". Pathfinder also included jellyfish, anemones, crustaceans, worms, and gastropods in this category. (Pathfinder apparently had a thing, to rival my own such thing, for putting exotic real-world wildlife in its fantasy setting) Cephalopods, however, went in the "animal" category, because one of the rules for the "vermin" category was that they had no Intelligence score, and intelligence is one of those things the octopus is known for. Kind of emphasizes just how little sense this category made in the first place, and in 5E, bugs of all sorts go in the Beast category same as all the other animals.

One final word before I go on with my day: I mentioned the heart construct as one of two core races that I shifted out in favor of the myshka and syrsa. The other? The Nemo. Maybe should have talked about this in the Peoples entry, but meh, that one was running long.

The Nemo was inspired by the Nobodies of Kingdom Hearts. In Kingdom Hearts, a Nobody comes into being when a person's heart (heart in the metaphysical sense, not the organ) is extracted or devoured or lost -- sort of a regular thing in the KH universe, at least in the stories set in that universe that we the audience follow. If that person has a strong willpower, then their body and mind continue to act of their own accord -- alive but without a human soul. Nobodies are super-powerful, each defined by an elemental (or elemental-ish) attribute which they use in combat. While they revel in their power and, with a few exceptions, tend to ham it up and enjoy their villainy -- experts on the subject in-series claim that Nobodies have no emotions, and all appearances to the contrary are faked by a Nobody simply acting the way they remember they would act back when they could feel things, which gets called into question a lot and eventually debunked, but that's not important right now -- but regardless, the Nobodies wish to become whole again and are willing to murder millions to accomplish this, as they're tormented by the horror of their own metaphysical nonexistence and, implicitly, the "uncanny valley" vibe they give off in social situations.

Which brings us to the Nemo. In my reinterpretation, a Nemo is a person who is resurrected from the dead -- again, not a normal thing in D&D-esque universes per se, but at least normal in the stories set in this universe that we witness, because they're about badass adventurers with access to some powerful magical mojo. If a person is resurrected, but their soul is unavailable due to having been trapped somewhere or turned into an incorporeal undead creature, they are raised as a Nemo. So they're alive again as planned -- conscious, ambulatory, just as skilled an adventurer as they were before -- but they're not really there.

I removed the Nemo from the core race list because, well, they don't really work as a core race. Becoming a Nemo is a thing that happens to an incredibly tiny minority of people, and a thing that can happen to a person of any race -- clearly, it's more of a template. In addition, I couldn't really think of the game mechanics for being a Nemo. It requires a recipe that eludes me: one, reasons that it'd be pretty cool to play as a Nemo on a long-term basis; and two, a strong incentive to hunt down your own soul and get it back so you can become normal again.

For the first one, like I said, there's those elemental-ish powers I talked about. But those can't be truly extraordinary, not enough for the Nemo to overshadow their fellow party members... maybe some teleportation via shadow? Nobodies can open Corridors of Darkness, after all. But the incentive? Got me. There has to be some drawbacks, and not the roleplaying drawback of "you have to play your character as a clinical sociopath until your soul is restored" -- that's not exactly very much incentive for players to want their soul back, especially if it comes with a power boost. Depends entirely on the kind of player, of course.

So, sure: your character doesn't technically have emotions for a while, and everyone they meet is vaguely creeped out by them even though they don't know why. But what are the mechanical drawbacks to having no soul...? Gotta figure that out. No idea.

As for those elemental-ish powers, well, let's look at the ones possessed by the thirteen Nobodies who populate the Kingdom Hearts series' first story arc, each having a unique attribute:

• You've got the actual classical elements in there: Wind, Earth, Fire, and Water
• Plus some natural extensions, non-elemental things you often see as damage types: Ice, Lightning, and Light
• And then some fookin' weird ones: Nothingness, Space, Illusion, Moon, Time, and Flower