One-Pager
From Towers
This is my attempt to write a "one-pager" like the submissions that I and 11,000 other people sent to Wizards of the Coast a year or two ago for the Wizards of the Coast Fantasy Setting Search. The format was dictated by the rules of the Search, but I felt it was a good format for getting the main points of a setting across in a short space. In any case, it's a format that a lot of people in the D&D world understand.
This is a first draft. I'm also pretty well aware that this "submission" would be too narrow in scope for Wizards of the Coast and would not win. *grin*
Core ethos sentence:
As hundreds of towerlands vie for power, heroes must find the balance between duty to kingdom, duty to their gods, duty to family, and duty to themselves.
Who are the heroes?
Some heroes come from the courts of small towerland kingdoms. These are princes and princesses, knights and ambassadors, courtiers and scholars. Other heroes come from the land: serfs and commoners struggling to make ends meet in a tough, feudal world. They find themselves becoming unlikely heroes in a perilous world. Heroes may eventually ascend the throne or carve a new kingdom out of the land. Those with the strongest bond to the land may become Scions through powerful druidic rituals.
What do they do?
Servants of the court struggle to keep their homelands safe and secure, repel neighboring enemies, and strengthen the kingdoms through diplomacy and force. When an adjacent towerland decides to invade, the heroes must lead the defense. The leaders of the towerland send ambassadors and emissaries to broker treaties and trade agreements. Some heroes may find themselves protecting the land itself, bonding with nature.
Heroes rise from the common folk to battle evil at home, in small villages in the Edgelands. These border towns eke out a difficult life in a place where marauders and monsters frequently attack. Some fight the oppression of a tyrant king. Others leave their homes to explore the ruins of the Fifth War of the Eternal or slip through a planar tear into the Plane of Faerie or the Lower World.
What are the main threats, conflicts, and villains?
The world breeds conflict. Forty years ago, hundreds of barons, enslaved by forces of evil, signed a secret treaty and fought back their oppressors. These barons became kings of very small kingdoms called towerlands. Once their main enemy was destroyed, they found themselves struggling to grab precious territory. Kings fight kings — some openly, others covertly. They scheme, destroy each other's trade routes, spy on each other, assassinate heirs, and occasionally make war.
Yet that dark enemy, the Host of Bessim, was not entirely vanquished: only driven back to the Lower World, where it gathers strength and sends scouts back to find a way to open the gates again and invade the Towerlands and the rest of the Middle World. The dark god Bessim creates fiends and eye tyrants and other horrors and sets them on the world.
Bessim has followers native in the Middle World, too. Evil humanoids of all kinds seek to destroy the world — or at least turn it into something unrecognizable. Orcs, goblins, kobolds, trolls, and ettins are the least dangerous of them.
What is the nature of magic?
All magic flows like water through the world. Magic is a natural thing, made eons ago by Uril, the goddess of all creation. While druids and clerics and wizards and sorcerers all have different ways of accessing that energy, it is the same source that powers it. The evil Bessim twists magic to create fell demonry and other black magic, but the source of his magic is from the well of power that Uril created before time.
What's new? What's different?
The setting focuses on nature and the wilds. Druids and rangers and the new warden class get the spotlight here. Wardens are like paladins that protect nature. Sorcerers get their powers from natural spirits. Kings and queens get so close to their homeland that they actually bond with it and become Scions, powerful regents who can summon the forces of nature to protect their kingdoms.
The cosmology of the world is unique. The planes are divided into the Lower, Middle, and Upper Worlds, plus the Plane of Faerie, the Plane of Shadow, the Plane of Mirrors, and four elemental planes. Tears between adjacent planes are common and there is magic to repair them. Open tears often carry hapless travelers across planar boundaries and it may be some time before they realize what has happened. For example, giant animals from the Plane of Faerie or dragons from the Lower World might start showing up in a kingdom, or the heroes might accidentally step through a tear into the Upper World and have to find their way back home.
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