Over the weekend, my group decided we wanted to try out a new setting… Using some of the ideas in Microscope, we built a collective world to try out with DW. Here’s the intro-text to our creation… .
Evil already won.
For more than a thousand years, the Feylords have demanded tribute from each of the supplicant races or face their powerful magical wrath. From the dwarves, gold and gems. From men, warriors for the Feylord Arenas and women to keep the men satiated. From the Lizardfolk, seafood delicacies, and crops from the Halflings. To fail was to be haunted in dreams by the creatures of the Feylands.
For most of the Supplicants, this was simply the way of things. There were no options. There was no escape. That is, until one day when Gammut Re Kazal, a dwarven alchemist and runecaster, stumbled on the unique properties of a curious rock brought to him by a miner. This rock, which Kazal called Durak, was black — and it seemed to block the powers of magics. Gammat brought his finding to his close friend, U’thane Bitrend. Bitrend’s father, Thane Murdrok, gave Gammut as much resources as he could secretly spare to investigate this further.
Gammut soon discovered Durak had different powers depending on its color. Black stopped magical powers, but blue seemed to enhance it. Yellow cast a light like the noonday sun, warm and bright. Green seemed to nearly float, and could be packed into an area and made to explode with a hard blow, while red could fuel forges with its great heat. More importantly, the powerful feysight of the Feylords could not sense Durak.
Then Murdrok hatched a plan to overthrow their tormentors. Using a specially constructed weapon of Green Durak, Thane Murdrok sacrified his only son, U’thane Bitrend, to secretly tunnel under the Feylord’s forest demesne. Using black durak to conceal themselves and armed with massive bomb of carefully refined Green Durak, Bitrend detonated a massive bomb. But, they didn’t just overthrow the Feylords with this weapon — they decimated them. The bomb rend the lands of the Feylords — casting islands of dirt and rock high into the sky where they stayed buoyed by the Green Durak… an area now known as the Skylands.
Too, the dirt and ash rose high into the sky, bringing night to the whole world. And temperatures dropped. And snows fell across the lands. Men stood by and watched their lizardfolk friends and allies die as the lands grew cold. They called upon the spirits of their descendants to teach them ways to survive this harsh new land. Halflings retreated deeper into their hilltop warrens and are rarely heard from.
All while Dwarves stoked their furnaces on the labors of others bringing warmth to their mountain cities. Dwarven demand for Durak grew. So much so they were willing to trade food grown with the sunlight properties of Yellow Durak to others for mining labor. Over time, though, these deals turned more and more to servitude and even slavery. Dwarves held games to celebrate martial prowess and invited all the races to attend — and of particular favor were the Fey battles with creatures from the deepest earth. In an act of great magnanimousness, they even formed a Council of Rulership, where members of the other races could voice their concerns over Dwarven policies — and when the Halflings attempted to infiltrate and kill the Dwarven O’Thane, Murdrok the fifth and they were rounded up to a one and gassed with a mixture of powdered Duraks, not a single member of the council of rulership spoke out in defense. Proving once and for all the way of the Dwarven Thanes and the rise of the Dwarven Industrial Lords was destiny manifest.
The Dwarves Are No Different Than The Feylords. What are you going to do about it?
