During the last few months I have been working on a campaign setting called “Asecia”. The development of this world has been documented in my Dungeoncraft articles. But recently I was starting to get discontent with some of the decisions I have made and I am not entirely happy on how Asecia turned out. I had introduced some radical ideas to the world and in the end I had some trouble to get it all together.
So I decided to try some kind of reboot. I took a sheet of paper and wrote down all the things I liked and what I didn’t like and thought about how I could emphazise the strong points of the setting while eliminating the things that just didn’t work out.
On Magic
I’ve made some major changes to get the mood of the setting more in touch with what I had in mind when I started working on it. Although I really like the idea of the sorcerer marks and all what came with it, it doesn’t exactly fit the pseudo-victorian feel of the short story I wrote. And I had some trouble on how to make the avatar idea more than some nice fluff for gamemasters and players to read. So I decided to go another route with magic. In the “rebooted” version of Asecia magic was lost for a thousand years. Before the fall of magic, there were powerful magicians and they ruled over the world, but suddenly the magic winds subsided and all wizards, sorcerers, witches etc. were robbed of their powers. For a long time magic was thought to be a myth. Then, shorty after a industrial revolution was in full swing, magic suddenly reappeared. Now, a century later, Mankind tries to harness this new power source and a few magic academies have started training new wizards all over the world. It’s a time of change.
On Religion
The religions of Asecia will change a bit because of the lack of magic for a thousand years. The Brotherhood of the Three Sisters was created during ancient times, when there still was magic all around. When magic came back they found out that the rituals they repeated in their worship were actually working magic rituals. Several people that started to dabble magic have also started to pray to the Sisters, so that they may help them with their magical development.
The Church of St. Michael still exists in the rebooted version but it’s quite changed. In the “rebooted” version of Asecia, Michael d’Arellien was the second son of a noble from the Western Isles that chose the life of a monk in the Church of the Architect around 300 years before the return of magic. During that time church has become corrupt and many high churchmen were more interested in the gold in their coffers than in spiritual affairs. He became abbot of a monastery and started to preach against the corruption of the church. He started a movement that lead to a split of the Holy Cerynian Church of the Great Architect. The Michaelites, as they were called, finally converted most of populations in the Western Isles and western Cerynia. Today the followers of the Great Architect are still split into the Cerynian part of the Church and the Church of St. Michael.
Both the Church of the Great Architect and the Michaelites are wary of magic and the clergy if forbidden to practice magic, but the Brotherhood of the sisters fully embraces the magical arts.
On Technology
For over two hundred years the industrial revolution is in full swing. There have been major improvements in technology that lead to steam driven trains, airships, steamdriven ships, modern ways to wage war, like firearms and cannons. With the recent comeback of magic the industrial revolution was not set back. Some inventors have successfully combined magic and technology. Magic driven warmachines, called Wargolems have appeared on the battlefields and the armies have started recruiting wizards and sorcerers.
Since most practitioners of magic treat their art like just another scientific field, most people see magic as nothing else as some fancy new technology.
On the World
The world from a geographical standpoint will not change that much. And there will still be the same countries I wrote about before, but they will all be quite different because of the major changes when especially magic is concerned. My current plans is to start an Asecia campaign using FATE rules soon. The focus of the campaign will be the city Cerynia, home of the Holy Church of the Great Architect, center of learning and art and home of the Cerynian University of the Sciences, Arts and Magick.
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Usually most roleplaying game backgrounds feature polytheistic religions like the classic D&D pantheon. You have several gods that are responsible for certain domains like war, trade, luck, you name it. Monotheistic religions resembling real life religions are usually avoided in high-fantasy games. In my opinion monotheistic religions are much more interesting from a roleplaying standpoint.
