Dark•Heritage Mk. III

I thought about changing the name yet again as I now have some additional interesting things going on—specifically that Dark•Heritage has marched on from Mk. II to Mk. III. The rules haven't changed much (for the roleplaying aspect of the setting anyway) with the exception that I'm thinking of slapping an E6 or E8 style ceiling on level advancement—but I've made a few fairly significant changes to the setting.

Most significantly, I've hybridized Dark•Heritage Mk. II with the "Mezzovian Main" pirate setting I'm using for my D&D game right now. The Strachina Basin is no longer a vast desert like the Taklamakan and Razina an important Silk Road stop like Kucha; the Strachina is now a peninsula like Italy or the Peloponnesse with Razina an important maritime city-state like Carthage, Knossos or early Republican era Rome. Although, honestly, its my intention to make it as much like Tortuga or Port Royale from the "Golden Age of Piracy"—these are more geographical similarities rather than cultural.

I've toned down the exotica just a bit; the main human culture around Razina is cosmopolitan, but not unlike what you'd expect to see in any American or European (or Canadian, or Australian, etc.) city. Familiarity breeds characters the audience can relate to, after all. There are a few desert-dwelling races of humans that look exotic still, though, as well as the chalky white inhabitants of my "Valles Marineris". I've also returned to an older idea that had been kicking around in my earlier notes but which I had abandoned of bringing orcs into the setting. I'm also going to bring a few more guys too—dimorphic goblins with a goblin and hobgoblin caste, and maybe even the "vazher"; mortal descendents of otherworldly afrit.

A core conceit of Dark•Heritage has always been that humanity is not native to Kael; a group of refugees fleeing the Deluge on earth ended up here. I'm now saying that the Deluge w2as but part of a "Multiversal Catastrophe" that struck inhabited worlds all over the place, flinging groups of refugees across the cosmos in a multi-front diaspora. I have to admit that this broadening of the catastrophe that brought people to Kael (and now also orcs, goblins and vazher too) was probably influenced by the scene in Magican: Master where Pug (Milamber) sees teh inhabitants of Kelewan enter the world, fleeing the depredations of "the Enemy." But hey; I never claimed to be original here, and in fact I'll be the first to say that I'm doing nothing but recombining elements that I've stolen from other sources that I like.

One interesting side effect of this change just occured to me while finishing up this post is that the geography of the circum-Mezzovian setting will now fairly closely resemble that of my friend Corey's Barsoom setting (I'd give you a link, but it actually just vanished a few weeks ago in one of the vagaries of the Internet; I believe the server it was housed on crashed and the data was lost or something like that.) I don't see that as a bad thing however; despite the fact that it's unintentional the two of us have long noticed a surprising convergence of tastes and ideas about this kind of thing, and if a change I make to my setting inadvertently causes a chance even closer resemblance to the setting that he's used so successfully before, then I've probably stumbled upon a good thing.