Farlell RPG
Introduction
Farlell RPG is a game-world I'm designing for my family's D&D nights.
Feel free to use it as a basis for your own tabletop games, but please contact me (User:Ezrec) if you want to use the world concept for commercial purposes.
There are two sides to this wiki: Farlell RPG and Farlell Spoiler.
Game Masters should look in the Farlell Spoiler section, and players should ignore it. It'll definitely ruin the game for you from the very first paragraph.
In general, monsters, artifacts, and places will have a Farell FooBar Spoiler link, which is for GMs.
General Information
The setting is a terrestrial style planet.
Astronomical Information
- Three moons - one approx the size of Earth's moon, two others the size of Mars' Phobos and Deimos captured asteroid pair.
- Two stars - one yellow, main sequence primary star, with a second binary companion with an apparent brightness of Earth's planet Venus.
- 'The Pit In The Sky' - an unusual astronomical artifact that appears to be in planetary orbit, and occasionally obscures a single star, or will look like a small back dot crossing the moons.
Terrestrial Information
- 23% oxygen, 74% nitrogen, 3% trace atmosphere
- Trace atmosphere is very high in neon, and beautiful orange lighting and will often illuminate entire cloud layers during electrical storms.
- Primarily silicon crust, with a very high heavy metals content.
- Gold, silver, and other "precious" metals are actually very common in Farlell (similar to the abundance of Iron on Earth)
- Slightly smaller in size than Earth (0.90 Earth radii)
- Slightly higher gravity (1.14G) than Earth (due to higher density)
- Mountains are, on average, lower than on Earth
Hex Biomes
The geology of the planet has resulted in some quite unusual... quirks.
Imagine an Earth-size sphere covered with hexagons - each about the size of the state of Wyoming.
Lines of magnetic flux erupt from the center of each of the hexagons, project about 30 miles into the atmosphere, then sink back into the planetary crust at the boundaries.
Wind patterns in a Hex either clockwise or counterclockwise, and may shift rotation and speed over the seasons. Rain,
Wind rarely, if ever, crosses from one hex to another. The high-flux zones typically have very still, almost eerie atmosphere to them, and never have any clouds.
Due to the high metal content of plants and animals on Farlell, these locations are immediately visible from quite a distance, as they will have very specialized forms of plant and animal life in the high-flux zones.
Since the biology required for Farlell land natives to survive in a high-flux zone is radically different than the low-flux zone that covers the majority of the Hex, each Hex's biome can be quite different, and sometimes you can take a half hour walk from a lush forest of elegant trees, cross the high-flux boundary of black scrub and needle grass, and be in a lifeless desert or primordial swamp.
The Farlell ocean's Hexes, while still noticeable by the keen observer, are easily crossed by sea plants and animals, since the flux density is much lower at the surface, due to the conductivity of the water.
It is a 'well known fact' that volcanic pits only occur at a Hex's center, and that earthquakes are most strongly felt on Hex edges.
Magical Items
Magical items can be found, purchased from a used items seller, or Requested by an O'Praetor.
There has been no verifiable account of a magical item's construction by man in the last 2000 years.
Magical items are most imbued with power at the lowest flux - get too close to the core or edge of a Hex, and all of your magical items will become useless junk - either temporarily, or permanently!
Some common magical items can be made to bud, and grow a copy of themselves:
- Egg of Separation - about the size of an ostrich egg, opens into two halves.
- Used to separate metal-poisoned food into a metal ingot an edible paste
- Second Sight - a barnacle-like device placed over a wounded or dead eye.
- Grows nerve filaments into user's brain, connected to a thousand tentacular eyestalks on the barnacle
- Gives the user IR-UV vision in that eye, and can see a Hex's Flux directly
- Getting too close to a high-flux area will can cause permanent brain damage to the user
- ChitChat - personal communicator, placed in the ear canal
- After 'introducing' it to a friend's ChitChat, you can communicate with them while they are anywhere within the Hex.
Rare magical items (not buddable):
- Butter Knife - short, 3" blade, plain looking handle, but cuts through anything 'as if it was made of butter'
- As of the current time, only 23 are known to still exist in the entire world!
- The Pretty Hat - indescribably pretty hat. A hat for kings and queens.
- No two people describe it the same way, but everyone says that it's the prettiest (or most handsome) hat they've ever seen
- Goddamit - two plain boxes that share the same contents
- A favorite of thieves - give one of the pair to a wealthy mark (usually in a jewel-encrusted case), and swipe the items they place into it from its mate.
All of these items can be destroyed by high-flux!
O'Praetor
A person that can conjure a new magical item is called an O'Praetor.
O'Preators summon magical items by a process called Requesting:
- Collect the offerings required for the Request
- Place the items in a gold bowl of the highest purity
- Speak their request into their Stone of Request
- If the Stone flashes blue, it can be held over the Bowl of Request
- If the Stone is happy with the offerings, it will glisten, then drips a single drop of blood into the bowl.
- The bowl is then quickly covered with a tight sealing, golden lid of the highest purity
- If all is well, the bowls will bend in slightly, and become hot to the touch
- After the bowls cool, the request is complete, and you can take your item.
A request consumes a small portion of the Stone (approx 1 gram), and a Stone can only be used by someone from an O'Praetor bloodline, who knows the valid requests and the offerings required.
Stones, being themselves magical, cannot be brought into high-flux areas without danger:
- In 2102, Drafel The Stupid forgot that he had a very old Stone of Request in his pocket. Only massing ~10 grams, it was easily overlooked. The traveling companions of Drafel said of the incident that they "could never look at red meat again, as it reminded them of the horrifying tree that Drafel's flesh became".
As of the current time, due to horrors the O'Preators were accused of during the #Zirnean War, there are no O'Preators that are willing to let their status be know publicly.
Stones of Request can, themselves, be requested, but they require the immediately severed head of a human as one of the offerings. The more creative or intelligent the sacrifice, the better the stone will be at handling complex requests. The Stone created by this process can only be used by a direct descendant of the sacrifice. The resulting Stone usually masses approx 1 to 4 Kg.
Although this 'special request' was not generally known for most of Farlell's written history, due to the Zirnean War, this process has become common knowledge in Wier and Lahndin.
Zirnean War
The most recent bloody conflict, lasting for 200 years, between the peoples of Lahndin and Wier.
Although the war's origin was lost to history, the atrocities of the last 16 years of the war caused popular revolt, the removal of the monarchy on both sides, the political merging of Wier and Lahndin, and the persecution and execution of all O'Praetor bloodlines in their territories.
The war is now 50 years in the past. The version of the history taught to the children is this:
- Weir and Lahndin were both controlled by powerful O'Praetor bloodlines
- After about 180 years of a stalemated conventional war, Weir decided to 'empower their people'
- Soon thereafter, simple magical armor and weapons began to pour into the Weir armory.
- Concerned about the new magical weapons being created en-mass by Weir, Lahndin had spies determine how they were creating so many weapons.
- The spies report on the mass production process was shocking, both in its elegant simplicity, and its sheer scale.
- Lahndin replicates Weir's process, but improves the quality of the magical items at the cost of a lower production rate
- A new stalemate occurs for about 15 years, as each side attempt to outdo itself on magical item power.
- After many years of suspicion about entire families being 'volunteered' against their will, an indentured O'Praetor of a Lahndin Requestory manages to replace all of Lahndin's Lazy Gun ammunition with self-unfolding pamphlets describing in horrifying detail the conditions at the Requestory in Lahndin.
- The revolt in Lahndin is swift, as the army turns on the ruling O'Praetors, then sues for peace with Weir.
- Weir, flat-footed by this turn of events, tries to stall for time, and begins 'deconstructing' its Reqeustories.
- Lahndin's General Grazny (Pvt Granzy a week prior) discovers the Weir spy report, and sends to Lahndin Army on a rescue mission to Weir's Requestories.
- They find hundreds of men, women, children, and babies, all shot dead; stinking pits filled with hundreds more headless bodies, and piles of useless O'Preator Stones.
- Wier's government soon collapses, and a representative government is formed to rule the union of the two countries.
The atrocities that old men still have nightmares about:
- The Requestory scheme was to 'volunteer' a three-generation family - grandfather/father/son, grandmother/father/daughter, etc.
- The eldest would be the sacrifice to generate a new Stone of Request, and the middle would be the O'Praetor for the stone created.
- The youngest would be taught advanced request methods, while the middle was creating simple magical items for the army.
- As soon as the middle's Stone had been consumed (sometimes in as little as a month), the middle would be 'sacrificed' to create a Stone for the youngest.
- The child was rarely told anything other than 'this is a gift from your father/mother'.
- The child's high level magical items would usually require some very rare offerings, and would be able to be active for up to 5 to 6 years before their stone was consumed.
- Children over 14 years old were 'bred', often against their will
- If they produced a baby:
- The baby's limbs were removed, and it was blinded soon after birth.
- It was taught complex, high level requests by rote verbal memorization.
- These 'Requested Ones' often created some of the most deadly war material, often at the tender age of just 3 or 4.
- It was always considered a mercy that none of these physically and mentally maimed children survived the war.
The battlefields of the war still stink of blood and magic.
Vegetation
Evolution has responded to it's environment, and has produced vegetation similar to that of Earth.
- Chlorophyll based photosynthesis.
- Most plants store energy as sugar and starches
- Most land plants chelate the heavy metals in the soil, and eliminate them as waste.
- Some examples are heavy fruits (which appear on the tips of branches) and glitter dust (which collects on the underside of leaf surfaces for some grasses).
- See Farlell Economy#Vegetation for a discussion on how humans use the plants.
- There are a number of carnivorous plants in Farlell, ranging from the small and dainty Farlell Fly's Folly to the enormous Farlell Paradise Island.
Aquatic Life
- Alga (very similar to Earth alga)
- Jello (similar to in bodyplan to Earth Jellyfish)
- Exclusively surface floaters
- Large quantities of chlorophasts
- Underside is covered in a foul tasting, sticky mucus
- Filled with hundreds of tiny, extremly sharp 'bones' made of Iron tubule meshes.
- Think 'tumbleweed covered in ballistics gel'
- Chromataphores - usually closed, but put two Jello together, and you have quite a show!
- Small eyes encircling the body, large eye on top.
- Unusually large amount of neural tissue - over 50% of the body by volume!
- Slow growing, long lifespan
- Millions on young spawned every year - most are eaten by predators before their mucus and interior tubules develop.
- Young are about the size of a dime, adults over 3 feet wide.
- Many species of Jellos are raised
- Tubla (fish analogues)
- Body plan is a tube with no backbone
- Ring-shapes bones (make of stiff iron metal tubule meshes, not calcium cystal lattices)
- Each 'segment' has it's own gills, heart, nervous system, and sensory organs
- 'Jet propelled' via internal cillia
- Night Sheets (shark analogues)
- Major ocean predators
- About 3mm thick.
- Black top and white bellies
- The 'belly' is the digestive portion, covered in millions of polyps.
- Eats prey by enveloping it.
- Complex, extremely fine metal bone structure allows the sheet to be resistant to punctures, and yet fold to any configuration
- Fishermen catch these, let the flesh rot off, then use the interlocked bone meshes as nature's own chainmain.
- Multilayer Night Sheet Armour is worn by many open sea fishermen.
- Many many more!
Farlell Animal Life
There main animal phyla on Farlell:
Glitter Bugs
These shiny animals fill the same niches as the Insect phyla on Earth.
- Extremely common in arid areas and dry caves, but cannot handle excessive environmental moisture
- Covered in scales made of chelated metal, pure metal, and chitin.
- Often very beautiful and irridescent.
- Liquidivores - most have sucking mouth parts, and inject digestive juices directly into their prey
- Extremely water conservative
- Most species can be placed in a box in a cool, dry place, and hibernate for over a hundred years!
- It has been theorized by some sages that Alhot The Maker created them when Farlell was in the Farlell History#First Dryness
- Size ranges from very tiny to as large as a man's head.
Creepers
Your 'worms' and 'caterpillars'.
Similar in body plan to Tublas, but with either 'flanges' or actual tentacles on each body segment
Common 'worms' are the size of earthworms. Farlell Mountain Eaters are as large as their name implies.
Flits
A distant relative of the Farlell Night Sheet family.
- Body plan is similar to a piece of paper where two opposite edges have been folded toward the center.
- Most species are nocturnal.
- Sizes range from butterfly size to vulture size.
- Omnivores.
Critters
Earth-like mammals. Fur, four legs, calcium bones. Edible by humans. All have a very low tolerance for heavy metals, and although their lifespans are theoretically unlimited, most die after 60 or so years from
- Kihtee
- Small carnivore
- Used by humans as both pet and vermin killers
- Very large eyes and head for extremely good night vision.
- Highly intelligent
- Grasping front paws
- Metal poisoning expected after 20-50 years.
- Puhpee
- Medium size omnivore
- Used by humans as both pet and family guardians
- Very large head
- Very good sense of smell
- Less intelligent then Kihtees, but extremely loyal to their owner.
- Puhpees will rarely leave their owner's family, even if they have died. Can only be passed on to immediate family, but many wealthy families have passed on guardians for over hundred years by feeding them
very restricted diets.
- Metal poisoning expected after 5-10 years if diet is unrestricted, but most people can ensure a 30-40 year life span by simple precautions.
- Chikchik
- Small size omnivore
- Two scaly legs, fur, beak, and vestigital arms (just little nubs).
- Primary food animal for humans
- Found in the wild, and raised on farms.
- Meat is heavily metallic, and poisonous.
- Eggs are edible
- Gosoink
- Medium size omnivore
- Primary food animal for humans
- No eyes, ears, nose, or legs.
- Placed on a board with a hole in it over a pit, and fed table scraps.
- Slow growing, but delicous meat when harvested.
- Reproduces by budding (about 6 buds every 6 months. Considered a delicacy)
- Gosmoo
- Large size herbivore
- Primary food animal for humans
- Quadraped
- Capable of chelating metal out of plant material in it's diestive tract.
- Fecaes are highly metallized, and are often smelted for metal in commercial settings.
- Has six 'fruit' - three on each size - which are harvested when ripe for meat.
- Some people find it very disturbing - as the 'fruit' ripen, they writhe to indiate they are ready to be picked.
- Produces a fine, metal free milk.
- Sexual reproduction
- Hoomen (humans)
- Large omnivore
- Extremely intelligent
- Metal poisoning expected after 10-15 years on unrestricted diet, but much higher (90-150) if simple well-known precaution are taken.