Khorboth Khronicles

The ideas which became Cosmia were hatched many years ago. I shared many with Zyrlyn who added some of his own input. I tried to run the Champions of the South game in the poorly-developed proto-world. At that point, I already had the basic plot outline for the game, but it flopped with no real wold to back it up. I think we made it through 3 sessions before aborting that one. My ideas percolated and stewed for the intervening years, even having a short-lived unsatisfying solo campaign (at least that one finished). As the Champions of the South campaign was getting close to kickoff, I arranged a weekend with Fragile Sound to cement the ideas and draw a map. As you can see from the results, she’s a good artist; I’m not.

I started, as I start most things, with a basic concept. I wanted a viable fantasy world which would be good for roleplaying. So, I broke it down. What did I need? I needed an interesting world. It needed a medieval to renaissance tech level which would be stagnant. I needed large amounts of both civilization and frontier. Exotic races were a must. I wanted enough familiar fantasy features to be recognizable, but not enough to be middle-earth with a new map. And somehow, I wanted this all to manage to be believable.

Then, I jumped in to the one that bothered me the most about fantasy worlds in general: the tech. The only reason the dark ages lasted as long as they did on Earth is because of the oppression of the Catholic church. Yet, in a fantasy world, you frequently have a sword which is several thousand years old but not of older technology. Well, I couldn’t use religion because I want to have a varied religious structure. Even with magic commonplace, there’s no reason people won’t innovate if they had the opportunity. I went with guilds mostly because I was reading the Valdamar series at the time and really liked the merc’s guild from “By the Sword.” I figure that with the magic guilds holding things down, there’d be a believable reason for the stagnation.

Races have always bugged me as well. D&D is particularly responsible for making various races just like tall/short/hairy humans. I wanted something truly unique for everybody including humans. So… Humans became the only ones without innate magic. I still liked the idea of humans being more versatile and prolific than most other races, so I kept that. I debated for a long time on what races would be included. I’ve never liked Gnomes. Halflings took me a while to wrap my head around, but I finally took a hobbit-esque approach. Elves were simple; I always wanted to keep them fairly Tolkien-ish but a little more asshole. Dwarves have always been my favorite fantasy race, so I just made them to my ideal and moved on. Umli are my attempt at a truly new race. They’re actually inspired by Ur-Viles and Bloodguard from the Thomas Covenant series. My real stroke of genius, though was the half-breeds. It’s always bothered me that the various races are actually one species. Making the half-breeds into mules really serves to highlight the separation in the races. I also wanted to make the governments pretty alien to help accentuate the difference.

Having solved the ‘what’ of races, I needed a ‘why.’ This took some work, and I eventually struck on it when doing the map with FS. They were made. I always planned to have an ancient race of humans which created the Arrow River (the first thing to go on my mental map), and creating species of slaves seemed like a good achievement. Dwarves were made to mine, Halflings to farm, Orcs to fight, and Kobolds by accident. Each was given the magic needed to perform their job. The neighbors in Shun-Il created the Umli to keep the armies out of their lands. Elves were on a operate continent during this whole time and had no contact. When the Human civilization blew itself up (more or less literally), the Elves came to investigate. Since it took them nearly a decade to get the project together, little was left when the elves arrived. The Elves still have their own continent somewhere. Probably to the West and South, but I haven’t really decided yet.

Placement of countries and major geographical features was rough. I don’t have a huge amount of knowledge about geography or climatology, but I’ve taken a few classes. I wanted something believable. Cities need a reason to exist. Countries have to export and import. Mountains block weather currents. And I wanted something where it would take a true geographer to say “this makes no sense” to any major part of this. So… Light research and lots of fiddling led to the conclusions of where I am now. FS was of great help in this as well, and we rejected several sketches before the final map was drawn.

Something I was glad to preserve was the major magical land features. The Arrow River was placed by the ancient humans to create the fertile area. It floods like clockwork. The result of this massive project was the creation of a high magic area which became Eskaminzim. This is enough to clearly make the world itself magical without overwhelming the familiar in the manner of Xanth.

Well, that was pretty much the process of creating the world. All that remained was to type up the handout (currently on this blog, but I’m planning to move it to a wiki at some point) and then come up with a plot which spanned the whole of the area.

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