Dragon Heresy Races and Kingdoms
I’m into serious worldbuilding for the Dragon Heresy RPG now, so this will be a short post.
I’ve settled on an organizational structure for detailing the Races that come out of the SRD5.1 with nothing but the stat-block and abilities, and also the Kingdoms that make up the political entities in the setting.
So, what am I including with each?
Races
Each race of course has it’s game-mechanical abilities. But there’s also the other bits that define a bit of the culture and background for each one.
The SRD5.1 races are Dwarf, Elf, Half-Elf, Gnome, Human, Halfling, Tiefling, Dragonborn, and Half-Orc. Half-orcs might be a problem from a setting point of view, as they’re not really the common cannon-fodder monster – that honor belongs to lizardfolk and kobolds.
However, fey are a big part of the setting, and legends of fey mingling their blood with humans – usually through charms and shapeshifting – are pretty common. I may keep the stats as they are and just rebrand them half-trolls. But really they’re not real trolls, but half-hobgoblins, because goblins are fey in Dragon Heresy. (I needed more fey. I made a bunch of critters fey that weren’t before, mostly with some nudges from mythology. I might yet do more – Will-o-the-Wisps in Finnish mythology guard faerie treasure, so rebranding them as fey instead of undead makes a lot of sense to me.
Anyway, here’s the outline of information to be provided fo reach race:
[This Race] in Etera
- Do they have a home kingdom?
- What Kingdoms do they live in?
[This Race’s] Stereotypes
- Demeanor with each other
- Demeanor with other races
[This Race’s]Appearance
- Size, Weight, and Body type
- Distinguishing Features
Culture
- Social Organization
- Customs and Traditions of Note
- Religion
- Language
- Arts and Literature
- Forms of Government
- Economic Systems
Priorities
- Power/Influence
- Violence/Command
- Wealth/Resources
- Desire/Fellowship
Names
- Male Names
- Female Names
- INTRODUCTION
- BRIEF HISTORY
- PEOPLE AND SOCIETY
- GOVERNMENT
- ECONOMY
- COMMUNICATIONS AND TRANSPORTATION
- MILITARY
- RELATIONSHIPS WITH OTHER NATIONS
The overall work is about 306,000 words as last night. I was hoping to have the entire first draft complete by Sunday night, but I very much doubt this will happen – too much yet to write. I might be able to cover it all in a week.Edit: I also want to give a shout-out to both the +Norse Mythology G+ community as well as the Iceland reddit. While my forays into DnD-inspired reddits have largely been met with . . . hmm. Smug hostility? Maybe too strong. Still, it’s not been welcoming – and the SJG Forums are pretty special with regard to how eagerly people will embrace and comment on a well-written question – but these two communities have been very, very helpful to me in these later stages of development. The Iceland guys in particular have gone above and beyond the call to help me turn really bad Icelandic/Old Norse into far-less-bad Icelandic and Old Norse. The errors that will appear on the maps are mine, and mostly there purposefully.
Example? Rivers. The ending/word for river is just á. Toss in an -in ending, áin and you get a definite article or some such. I’m using it wrong deliberately – rivers in the primary Kingdom of my world end in áin in the area north of the river on which the capital city lies. It’s deliberately ungrammatical, to show that it’s a bit rough and tumble and archaic up there. Below the twin rivers that terminate at the capital city – the Freysáin and the Blítháin, all the rivers end in á.
They’re probably pretty smug about it, too.
