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There have been some changes to the setting! Still, in a nutshell, the setting is "A dark and paranoid magical Renaissance."
* This is a world where love, fear, and magic rule. Fear can push a character over the brink. Love can bring him back. And magic twists everything.
* Fear is the nursing milk of citizens in most Kingdoms. The rulers carefully portion it out, schooling their subjects in the dangers of magic. The spellstalks, the madfire, the feystorms and the monsters that howl in the forests - without the monarchies to control magic, it would be worse. Or so they say.
* There are two intelligent species: sturdy humans and elegant trolls. There are several races of each. One race, the fury trolls, appeared only ninety-eight years ago. They arrived in pieces, in trade ships from various distant ports. A foot here, a head there, a heart in the sawdust over there. Regeneration and sympathetic (or curious) harbormasters brought the trolls' bodies back together. Unfortunately, neither they nor any other source knows why they arrived that way or where they came from.
* It is an age of discovery. Engineers have built the first airships capable of traveling over the western mountain ranges. Several experimental submersible vehicles are prowling the icy waters underneath the frozen highland lakes. Royal courts compete with each other to see who can solve magical puzzles and create spell effects first.
* It is an age of opportunity. The Kingdoms are scrambling to explore the edges of the world that has been opened up to them. The Descent on the far side of the western mountains, the Divide in the north, and the degenerate kingdoms of the furthest isles all hold untapped resources of knowledge and wealth.
* It is an age of risk. Can the Kings continue to hold their population spellbound in the face of this new age? What will they do to preserve their power? How will they protect their subjects from the new magics?
* In the end, love calls us to the things of this world. It is said that the gods gave men love as a reward and magic as a punishment. But there are some who use both as a weapon.
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Rank: Administration
Groups: Administration
Joined: 3/12/2008
Posts: 234
Points: 569
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Magic deserves its own note.
* Magic hates magic. When two wizards are in the same place, their magics interfere. The wizards' intended effects are weakened or snuffed out. Simultaneously, unintended and usually destructive effects are created and strengthened. Thus the monarchs justify themselves: if magic were to run ungoverned and rogue magi went unexecuted, the spells would interfere and destroy neighborhoods, even counties.
* You can play SK without this setting twist. That is, you can play SK in a standard Gygax/Tolkien/Lynch/Mieville world where magic does not hate magic. The game balance between caster and non-caster characters might suffer in favor of the casters a little, but it is no worse than in most fantasy games. Also, if you provide another rationale for certain defenses against magic to work and leave those defenses intact while converting SK to another milieu, then the game balance is preserved.
* As it stands, the Kingdoms are in a Renaissance/Enlightenment transition. Whether they plow through to a modified Industrial Revolution or retreat from the brink in fear is yet to be seen.
* Most monarchies act as a police state. The brutality is explained to the public as necessary to keep magic in check. There is some truth to that. But the monarchs also are loathe to relinquish one iota of power, and they hoard spells, counting arcane secrets more precious than gold. Magic is the playground of the aristocracy, exclusively.
* Imagine the SS working for Richelieu and Louis, hauling in heretical witches, executing free thinkers like Voltaire and Rousseau, and keeping constant magical and non-magical surveillance on the populace. All the while, of course, they're researching their own occult secrets, and many of their arrests go not to jail but to the experimental arcane laboratories deep in the palace's dungeons.
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