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To a world of magic and adventure, a world where swordsman and wizards do battle against evil dragons and dark necromancers! A world of heroes bold and true! . . . Yeah, cheesy. I know. Bite me. The Knorld requires a new name. It's no longer the cheap Dragonlance knockoff I made in the fifth grade, so a combination of "Known World" just doesn't slice th e dice anymore. That, and I discovered there was a TSR campaign setting set in t he "Known World". Ansaloon it is. Or maybe it's Arken. Yeah, that'll do. It has three major regions: Fieria, Kundarath, and Yum-Yamma-Kur. The first was made as the aforementioned Dragonlance knockoff, the latter in an aborted game a ttempting to bring in both magic and mecha. I dropped it when it started turning into steampunk (admittedly kinda cool in and of itself, but not what I'd been t rying to do). Fieria is a rough analog to Europe, and it's a wart on the ass of Kundarath, the rough analog to Asia. I joined them together for the hell of it, and the changes are still shifting out. Yum-Yamma-Kur is the 'Dark Continent', a blend of Victorian Africa and Generic Amazonian Jungle. Dinosaurs live on Yum-Y amma-Kur and the southern portion of Kundarath, in the jungle home to the people who call themselves the Gan-Buru. I do believe this campaign setting need not have a world entirely like our own. It must, after all, obey the rules of both magic and physics, two forces that ge nerally conflict. Speaking of magic, humans shouldn't be able to use it ('cept f or the magi). It'd be a sphere, but the ecosystem is different (maybe even invol ving an Underdark). Ravaged by a supernatural cataclysm in the distant past known in the most ancien t histories (such as the dwarves') as the Night of Sky Fire, a multitude of new species could crop up to fill in the voids left by the mass destruction. Their r apid evolution was helped along by lingering magic of the Night of Sky Fire, and it is this magic that wizards and sorcerers tap into to cast their spells. Inde ed, there are certain dusts and fragments of rock that may well have reached the world during the Night, for those minerals contain great arcane power. A variet y of these minerals exist, all exceedingly rare and valuable to arcane spellcast ers. I may well have one link up to each school of magic, do something like boos t a caster's level if he has a piece of his school's mineral on him. If so, ther e has to be a general form that's more common than the school-specific form, but I'm uncertain what ability that'll grant. Perhaps a smaller boost to caster lev el per pound of the stuff. They even require a pinch of that dust to cast a spel l (just to make life suck for wizards, it has a cost - something like 1 gp per s pell level - and is never readily available. I don't quite know yet). These are a bit like Eberron's dragonshards, but not exactly. I will admit to the dragonsh ards inspiring them. I don't want them to be a severe hindrance to spellcasters, just primarily a motivation for adventuring, especially at levels too low to ha ve minions mining the magic minerals for you. What to call them, though... Spell stones! Every wizard needs a bit of spellstone, usually a ring or amulet that he got from his master upon completing his apprenticeship. I should see about digging up M&M's information. I rather liked the rival school s of magic idea I had there. Perhaps I should alter Magiran - yes, I will. Magir an will no longer be Magiran, and the Magi will be spread throughout the world a s a sort of occult society/fraternal brotherhood deal. Different sects (the afor ementioned rival schools), academies, lone wizards in towers, the whole nine yar ds. They could have an addiction to a certain compound made from the magic miner als, maybe even tattoos with the magic minerals as a component of the ink. The m ajerai still loathe the magi, but the magi aren't restricted to Magiran anymore. This is a step back towards my world's Dragonlance roots, but I'm happy with it . At least they're not divided by alignment. Matter of fact, they're not divided by anything more than just teachings - students of one school can learn spells of someone else's school just as easily as wizards in normal games. They're doma in wizards. I should probably rename the schools so they don't conflict with the Schools, ca ll them academies or houses or something. Proper noun names, too, not just 'ench

antment' and 'evocation' and suchlike. Different schools make use of different s pecialist abilities (but wizards probably shouldn't have to be specialists to ge t them). The following spellcasting variants are in play: Spell point system (Unearthed A rcana 153), spontaneous divine spellcasters (UA 64), and domain wizards (obvious ly). A wizard can be a specialist wizard in addition to a domain wizard, but his domain must align with his specialty school; abjurerers with the abjuration or antimagic domain, for example, or evokers with the evocation or fire domain. A s pecialist cannot have a domain of another school, such as an illusionist with th e divination domain (even though it's not a prohibited school for him). In that vein, I play loose with class variants. Pretty much any is available in this game, reflecting the huge variety of people in the world. Race variants, no t so much. I've always wanted to do a flying city. Thus, Arken now has airships. They're ma gic sailing ships, physically almost identical to their seabound cousins. Every nation has at least a handful of warships, massive masters of the sky that have batteries of cannon on their sides. There are also a good number of more mundane mercantile vessels and sky yachts, too. The Royal Palace in the Silver Kingdom is a castle floating serenely above the landscape. The art of gifting vehicles a nd buildings with flight is a fast-fading one, as it requires a big spellstone a t least the size of a basketball and getting bigger with the vessel to make a sh ip fly. There are still enough of the airships around that they aren't completel y unknown, but they're still an uncommon sight in even the most cosmopolitan are as. Skymen, the crews of airships, have a good deal of mystique and romance abou t them. Legends that speak of a flying city made of a mountain of spellstone are likely just that, but dozens of people have spent their entire lives searching for this city called Valheim. By the way, I should probably come up with a rationale for there being one elven subrace per elven nation (and then some). Ah, yes: They're inbred. Elven nation s isolate themselves, and have been isolated ever since the Night. They've slowl y changed to become different subraces, but the differences are almost entirely cultural. The PHB half-elves are the union of humans and clan elves (or humans a nd half-elves), whereas the mad half-elves are the union of humans and Siou or d row. Haven't done half-ghost elves yet. The dragons retain their longstanding near-divine prestige and power. I'm tempte d to rewrite them to be classified by something other than scale color, such as behemoths, flying dragons, sea dragons, Cambton dragons, and so forth but that's just not D&D. There's the Dragon of the Crawling Desert (a blue dragon), the Dragon of the Twi light Forest (a green dragon with the multiheaded template granting it two heads and fire breath), the Twilight Forest still being the haunted woodlands south o f the Dunholt Mountains but north of Dunador, the Dragon of the Northwood (anoth er green dragon, this without any templates), the Dragon of Firescar Mountain (a red dragon), and others as needed. They're all evil chromatic dragons; the meta llic dragons vanished long ago. Being Good, after all, is not a survival trait. There are two major varieties of dragon: The Dragons, who are ancient, powerful, intelligent spellcasting beasts and the dragons who're simply forces of nature, greedy and monstrous killing machines. Both are still true dragons, but there's a difference. The lesser true dragons are younger, (usually) less intelligent a nd incapable of spellcasting. Perhaps it is a flaw in their breeding. Perhaps it 's simply their age. The younger dragons are more the adventurer fodder (albeit really powerful adventurer fodder). The Dragons... aren't. They're powerful evil masterminds, creatures who view themselves as being somewhere between gods and kings and use legions of minions to carry out their plans for world domination. Lesser dragons who have the intelligence also have minions, finding them handy f or carrying out their own plans. Kobolds and dragon orcs are the most common min ions. The cosmology and pantheon, on the other hand, I can get a little more fast and

free with. Most players have no idea what the other planes are, and those that d o tend to be so anal that the other changes already turned them off of play. The re's the hell dimension of the Netherworld, but the others (if any) I've yet to come up with. Aside, of course, from the Mortal Realm. There should be a sort of fey plane (perhaps taking the place of the Ethereal). A character could walk to the Netherworld, if he could find the right cave entrance - the Netherworld is rather like Hades of Greek mythology. All you have to do is go deep enough. I'm not sure there should be a 'heaven' separate from the hell dimension of the Neth erworld. I am uncertain as to whether or not I want any elemental planes, or any thing beyond the fey planes and the Netherworld. Without a promise of a good aft erlife, the only thing the religions promise is in the here and now. Fieria is human country. Kundarath is not. Orcs are barbaric savages, like the w orst pictures of the 'Injuns', while goblinoids tend to be more civilized. Orcs live pretty much everywhere, but goblinoids are in Kyga and large portions of Ku ndarath. Reptilians (yuan-ti and lizardfolk) are in mostly the southern portions of Kundarath and Yum-Yamma-Kur. While Arken is a realm ruled by mortals, there are a good number of deities out there. The Great Twelve are the predominant deities of the Knights' Mandate, but they are not the only gods humanity reveres. The Manitorns worship their ancest ors. The people of the northlands are shamans and druids, revering the nameless spirits of nature. The Ebon Flame's answer to the Great Twelve are the Eighteen, a group of the foulest creatures in existence. Their loathing for each other is exceeded only by their loathing for the Great Twelve and the living, and the Ei ghteen are constantly scheming and warring. The Argent and Ebon Flames are the o nly sources of divine power in the universe. They dole it out to their servants and very few others; clerics and deities all fall under the category of 'servant s', but the deities get a lot more power from the Flames than mortal clerics do. It's worth noting that there are very, very few neutral deities. http://wwww.dandsconst.com/