First of all, I'm still working on my role playing system: Elrahna, the sundered realms and to be perfectly honest I actually think work is progressing at an alarming rate! Been doing 3-5000 words a day for a little over 2 weeks now, which to me is quite alot, so everything is proceeding as I have foreseen!
Release for Christmas is going to be my ultimate goal, it's still very much up in the air if I'm going to be able to do this, since I have no idea what I'm going to be doing for cash over the course of 2014, so for now we'll just leave it at what's planned and not think about what might happen ;)
I will, over the course of 2014, be more active in here and update on the project as it progresses and probably some other stuff as well, but mainly the book-project. I'm planning on once a week for an update.
Now for this week's update I was thinking of doing my introduction on the book and how everything fits together.
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The Setting
Elrahna is a world of wonder. Elrahna is a
world unlike any other. Our Lord and Creator Boranis forged this world of ours eons
ago from the fires of his World Forge. He created the mountains and gorges of
Elrahna and when he gazed upon his creation, the Lord wept and the oceans and
the lakes and rivers of the landscape were filled with tears of joy, for so
filled with pride at his own achievement was the Lord that no crevasse was left
unfilled. Lastly the Lord created the Eadhan and Shinabhan. Two equal beings of
immense power, to guard and act as wardens for his creation. For the Eadhan,
Boranis broke off a piece of his heart and forged the splinter into the first
Eadhan created, in order to give to them, the noble and proud demeanor of their
lord. For the Shinabhan, our Lord broke of a piece of his mind and gave it to
the first Shinabhans, in order to give them scientific
insight, while also providing industrious demeanor, for them to go out and keep
building the world in the image of our lord.
-
Lord Tishar, Deity of Science, Lord
of Knowledge, Keeper of the Call
Elrahna is
a fantasy setting, for role playing games. It is a fantasy setting like so many before it and yet so unlike any other. Elrahna is a world of knights, maidens, dragons, magic, monsters and glorious
heroes making their mark on the world. It is a fantasy setting laden with
unspeakable horrors and uncountable treasures.
"But what, exactly IS Elrahna...?" - asked the wide-eyed little street urchin.
"But what, exactly IS Elrahna...?" - asked the wide-eyed little street urchin.
Elrahna is
a world of bloody combat, unfathomable magic and mind-numbing mechanica. It is
a world of colossal machines, resembling marauding, steel and wood robots. It
is a world of all manner of magicians, warlocks, wizards and near-godlike spellslingers. Quite simply put – Elrahna is a setting
wherein all of your favourite worlds and settings are collected and formed into
one big, massive game world, where players and GM alike, can play the game
however they like, be it high-magic, low-magic, action packed or investigation
heavy or even horror and mood-based adventures. Elrahna offers it all.
The world
itself is built on floating islands of massive proportions. If you think
continents among a sea of clouds, you’ve got the idea. Astronomically speaking
the world of Elrahna would more like be a bunch of enormous asteroids floating
around a Gas Giant, but let’s not get bogged down in scientific nonsense and
let’s try to keep up the illusion that magic is real and that every fibre of
creation is permeated by magic.
Each island
is most often ruled by a single Lord, King or otherwise politically powerful
figure, although some islands are actually large enough to house more than one
nation – such as the island of Pyranir, where the Pyranirran Empire is the
largest nation, but others work hard to carve out their own place on the
floating piece of land.
The
floating continents of Elrahna do not move amongst each other as continents do.
They simply remain fixed in space and therefore cartographers have no trouble
making maps that are easily used by Sky Captains, piloting enormous and
wonderful Skyships. Sky Captains are independent entrepreneurs, making their
living from transporting both goods and the peoples of Elrahna, from one island
to the next. Most of them are honest businessmen, if such a notion ever
existed, but a few rotten apples do tend to have a mean streak and often take
passengers to abandoned islands, dump them there and demand huge sums of chits
for them to get to their destination, failure to comply – have fun on a small,
uninhabited island with no chance of survival.
The
mechano-magic of Elrahna is built on ancient and complex technology. Eons
ago another “system” of magica was used on Elrahna, this magic was raw and
often uncontrolled, until the emergence of the Eadhan and Shinabhan, two separate
cultures with vastly different view on society, power, humanity and politics. These
two cultures left lots of ancient technology in sealed tombs or “vaults” all
around the world. During the sundering, these tombs were obviously mostly
destroyed, but the ones that survived were spread on the floating isles that
later became home to the cultures and races of present Elrahna and have now
been discovered on a few islands and the power within has been harnessed to
create the techno-monsters utilised in modern warfare. The concept of these “robots”
called Mechano-Golems, or Me-Gos for short, is that the mechano-magic of the
ancients is used as a conductor for power, which fuels the machine, while a
magical bond between controller and Me-Go, servers as a way of issuing orders
to the mechanical beasts. The controllers are called “Magineers” or
affectionately referred to as “Techers” or simply “Mechanics”. Magineers often
seem to others as loners or highly anti-social, since they spend most of their
time talking to their gears and odd machinery. This is not true, though – most
magineers are just like regular folk, but the amount of time needed to study
the inner workings of Mechano-magic forces Magineers to spend most of their
time alone and flooded with textbooks and manuals in order to fully control
these spectacular fusions of magic and steel.
Magica in general is not just the war machines of the Magineers, but rather an all-consuming and all-creating force in the world of Elrahna. The giant ball of light, which the islands orbit, is actually a giant ball of raw, uncontrolled and quite frankly unfathomable magical power. All magicians draw their power from this near-inexhaustible source, to create the amazing and wonderful effects they use to build, break, probe, analyse, fight, fly and loads more. Every magicians on Elrahna understands that he is merely a diminutive piece of the mighty force that is Magica, therefore not everyone feels like harnessing these powers. Magica is not rare per se, the rarity in magicians is merely the fact that not everyone has the courage and ability to control these bursts of pure, magical force and therefore magicians - true magicians that is - are exceedingly rare.
Elrahna is a world that entails both wild unharnessed natural wonders and civilised, controlled and very familiar aspects of modern society in that both hunter/gatherer societies, shamanistic tribal societies and civilised and highly political and domesticated societies exists on the floating isles of Elrahna.
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Next week I should be able to dig deeper into the systematic aspect of Elrahna, the sundered realms. Focusing on Magica, Character Creation and Encounters.
In the meantime: Stay Classy!
As always, follow @ramucorp on Twitter for day-to-day updates!
