Welcome to my latest setting idea, Terra Phantasia. Well, the latest may not be entirely accurate as the general concept has been percolating for years. Not as long or as much as Gal Hadre but it is probably about equal with Red Horizon for the amount of time I have spent thinking about it so much so that I almost wrote a blog post about it back in 2021, there is still a more generic title for a blog post on the topic in my draft blog posts doc.
So what is the basic concept of Terra Phantasia? It is a fantasy world, designed mainly for pathfinder 1st edition that uses the real world for both its map and much of the inspiration of the setting. Centred around the mediterranean sea it sees different fantasy species in place of various cultures, starting with Rome being the human culture of the setting. Very loosely placed around 270 BC, so just before the first Punic War, it is of course not a direct mapping of real world history and no one should assume that I am trying to imply that various historic cultures are actually linked in any way to the fantasy races used in the setting.
It annoys me how often fantasy settings have at best one token polity for each of its non-human species then a load of them for humans. Even I am guilty of this to a certain extent in Gal Hadre, though I think only the Peshtar really only have one location there. Thus there aren’t five human cultures and one of a bunch of others.
One of the first challenges with this is that you can’t purely assign fantasy races around the perimeter of the mediterranean and call it a day. Rome, Egypt, Carthage and Greece all mediterranean, but also linked to cultures farther from the great sea, so I had to go at least one if not two layers further out to places like Numidea, Persia, Dacia, Brittania, Germania. This quickly meant that I would need more than the species from the core rulebook.
Some species locations have been set for a long time, I knew that I wanted the Roman Republic to be humans, I also knew that I wanted dwarves to be the setting’s equivalent of Greeks (which both allows them to have cities seemingly everywhere and also means that in setting common is dwarven not a human language) and that orcs would be gauls. For the other core races I decided that Gnomes should be Phoenicians for a few reasons, first it meant that they would also then be Carthage putting the humans in conflict with a less common though still important species. This means that Gnomes actually have the most distinct split of any species, probably followed by dwarves. Halflings I decided to put in eastern Anatolia and the Caucasus, this puts them out of the way of most of the major conflicts brewing but still in a location where you can find halflings spread to many places. Last of the core races I had Elves where I felt I had two real options; first they could go in Egypt or they could go in Persia. I ended up with them in Persia because for Egypt I wanted a species where it made sense that they have literally dozens of dynasties, which wouldn’t make sense for elves given how long they live.
Egypt was obviously still a big gap that needed filling and I decided to go with with Gnolls for that. Gnolls have long been a favourite less common fantasy species of mine. This did require me to design a version of Gnolls that don’t have racial hit dice, which pathfinder technically did in their advanced race guide but for some reason they designed them to be terribly weak, probably because they didn’t want to give them traits that didn’t show up in their bestiary entry. I solved that by giving them a few extra traits, a bite attack and the ability to charge, run and withdraw faster than their normal speed. Gnolls make it much more believable that the Pharaohs have gone through dozens of dynasties that usually only last a handful of Pharaohs each.
Another important thing I had to consider was how to handle gods and by extension demi-gods and such. There were really two ways I could go with the gods, one pantheon that everyone worshipped but maybe called by different names or each species having their own pantheon. While the first would have been far easier, doing the second seemed like a good way to further differentiate the setting from others. It will be a lot of work to sort out all the domains, favoured weapons and so on for the gods of at least 10 different species but it should really help the world feel more like an ancient rather than mediaeval setting. And in a setting with more gods, based on a time period where the people thought the gods were more active it is important to have that pulled into the setting. The real societies of the ancient world believed that their myths actually happened, at least in some form. Kings claimed that their line was founded by the son of a god, entire cities claimed the patronage of deities. I felt like that needed to be captured in a setting based on that era, so for example, every Patrician family in Rome claims descent from a demi-god.
Of course using a ruleset designed for a late mediaeval/ early renaissance setting requires some adjustments like plate armour being incredibly rare but the intent is that Terra Phantasia works using only the core rulebook for pathfinder and my setting document.
What do you think is most interesting about Terra Phantasia? Is there something obvious you think I have missed that definitely needs to be added? Let me know and hopefully we are back to a more regular posting schedule.
Comments
Post a Comment