GURPS Kirinioth - Getting Started

After a couple years of on and off writing, tonight I started gathering my notes together into a master setting document. I have some incredibly random, and often conflicting ideas. The setting document should allow me to organize and clean up a lot of those ideas. But, so far it's a pretty messy collection of copied and pasted old word docs.

A few of the key ideas so far:

• Elves and dwarves are not elder races. They are descendents of humans and either Dryads or Oreads, respectively, and in most cases are allied to each other.
• Both of these races are comparably sized to humans, though there are exceptions. Deep dwarves are subject to greater gravity and are a little stouter and denser. That's not how gravity works on earth, but there are magical reasons for it here. They are also saturated with a magic-absorbing metal, for now I'm calling it Adamant. This prevents these dwarves from channeling magic, but also affords them magical resistance. Elves are more solidly built than modern fantasy elves and have characteristics from their descendent Dryad tree. Some elves are capable of photsynthesis. While Deep Dwarves cannot channel magic, both Elves and Dwarves are inherently magical.
• The old gods of the world have been bound to various sites of power. In the past, these gods waged war against each other and nearly destroyed the world. In a last-ditch effort, the races of the world were able to subdue and bind these gods. This required dark magics, and there are dead zones and portals to dark dimensions as result of the binding. At different points in history, bound gods have broken free and wreaked havoc before being re-bound.
• One of the bound gods that had broken free was known as the Lord of Faces. He created a race of Doppelgangers that infiltrated every major nation and nearly succeeded in a bid for world domination. He was eventually re-bound, and every Doppelganger that could be located was killed. Still, Doppelgangers do pop up occasionally and are killed whenever discovered.
• Humans are not inherently magical and require sigils to be drawn. This is normally done as a tattoo, though a knowledgeable mage can draw one on themselves in a pinch (this requires a sharp implement and a skill roll, possibly some type of discipline or pain tolerance roll). Magic must be channeled through the sigil. Each activated sigil will bleed and cause physical damage to the mage (activating too many at once can be dangerous). A larger sigil can allow more magic to be channeled through it, but due to the size of the body, there are limits on how large, and how many sigils can be etched onto one’s skin. Each sigil requires its own skill to activate, but different sigils can be combined for different spell effects.

And it's almost 2am, so that's where I'll wrap it up for tonight. I'll keep adding to this and eventually migrate it to its own subdomain. I've started working on revamping the GURPS attributes, so that will likely be my next post. I also need to finish building out races, career templates, various magic systems and religions. I'll try to alternate somewhat between fluff and crunch, but I expect a lot of this to be pretty crunchy.

Francis

I should probably add something here.

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