DraKaise Battalion Meta

Good Men Must Stand Guard.

Why Did I make the DraKaise Battalion?

The initial inspiration for the DraKaise Battalion came from a much younger dungeon master sitting down in front of a long and storied setting for D&D called Faerun. It had everything, countless stories of parties tearing up the landscape, villainous plots unraveling the fabric of reality and a pantheon to make one blush. But, it was far too much, and it felt wrong to mess with. Another setting, and the same problem. Nothing seemed to fit with the pseudo-magical world that I wanted to inhabit. So began the dive into Ithungsida. Over four plus years; a game with family became a quick timeline, became a 2000 year saga of a timeline, became a world. With 8+ campaigns ran inside it and hundreds of players, the world has grown and become something far more than it's beginning. It is a world with countless checks, balances and disasters that overturn the scales. A world built for the interest of you and other dungeon masters who might be looking for a world that fits the weird spots in between the cracks.

Motivation:

The Motivation for the DraKaise Battalion was foremost to make a setting for running multiple rpg campaigns in a growing and evolving world. While this was initially designed for D&D 5e it is designed to be system-agnostic; this means that it doesn't hold itself too closely to the technicality of magic systems or other features of gaming systems. Lore and Stories are free to break the established mechanics of any system as well as establishing mechanics that don't apply to any system.

Genre:

The DraKaise Battalion is an Epic Fantasy setting with a wide spectrum of other fantastical genres sprinkled in! Ithungsida has an industrial era of technology with widespread fantastical Vehicles that touch on steampunk tendencies while emphasizing a higher magic setting that has a rarity of actual magic users but an abundance of fantastical materials and capabilities that fuel a Sword and Sorcery aesthetic with Groups of Heroes fighting against constant recurring evils that threaten the known world.

Inspirations

While inspirations are hard to gather for a project spanning so many different players and so much time. Some parts are easy.

The Celestial Giants are ripped almost wholesale from WORM by Wildbow, as they are big space aliens with infinite energy that make smaller copies of themselves with powers to learn from a world they basically control. This is also the basis for my pantheon. All the gods had "Trigger Events" where they became superpowered, but were only men before. Due to being written as a D&D setting, many races and creatures come from those books. However, the way they are presented and treated is usually changed to be far different than the normal interpretation. With Halflings becoming a ruling class, Bulettes being farmed for gunpowder and Gnomes being an odd type of Halfling.

The gods themselves come from everywhere and nowhere. The Raven Queen was a request from one of my first players, so, she became part of the setting; while MasToch is just a pretty generic dwarven god. MeyGana is an Athena-Thor Mashup. Then, Firn and Garma are just meant to be cute while defining a reason for the morals of the world to be similar to that of real life. Ithungsida itself is influenced a lot by the topography of North America. The idea of a technologically advanced race settling on what is effectively a new world hinged a lot on science fiction elements. The bigger evils in the world coming from age-old ideas of evil wizards and lotr style conflicts between near-gods.