Kobos
Twenty First of Midsummer, Year 995
Scope
The motivation behind building Kobos
Kobos is the culmination of 20 some-odd years of gaming, most of that DMing. Playing in the premade worlds was always a problem for me, I always had to remake good portions of them to fit in adventures I had in mind. Kobos is the kind of world that fits the right blend of adventure, sword-and-sorcery horror, mystery, intrigue and action that I want on the table when I am DMing a game.
The goal of the project
This is a large project for a game setting. It is designed (WIP) as a fully realized sandbox for D&D 5e, a living world made for a character driven campaign. If fully used, actions of PCs have an effect on this world, and once they work out how things are effected they can interact in ways to improve the world in a system-supported way.
Kobos's Unique Selling point
The world of Kobos is a world in which humanity is not at all dominant. They have only one autonomous country, tucked away on a backwater continent and largely weak and irrelevant to the world as a whole. Humans have become scrappy and intransigent, moreso than they naturally are, anyway, and the other races are learning what that means.
The history of Kobos is long and largely lost. Fallen empires have explored magic and technology, and some have even hybridized the two. Archaeologists advance knowledge as much as inventors and researchers.
Ultimately, it is a world with a dark secret sewn into the very fabric of the dimension, which was built on the bones of elemental beings so powerful as to rival gods.
Theme
Genre
Fantasy, Sword-and-Sorcery
Reader Experience
The underpinnings of the world for the humans is a sense of desperation. They are outmanned, outgunned, and there is a sense that if they don't fight for every scrap, they are going to lose it all. Heroes in this world overcome terrible odds, face horrifying enemies, and must navigate a landscape of factions that threatens to absorb them whole and chain them to their own ends.
Reader Tone
Kobos is a world in which magic is wild and often terrible. That being said, humans have adapted and face the dark with courage and conviction.
Recurring Themes
One motif of the setting is that for every rising power, another power rises to oppose it.
Another is that the world is artificial; it was created by the Demiurge and fashioned carefully and very much on purpose. Things work this way according to some mysterious plan.
Finally, a sense of things not being what they initially seem is a recurring theme. Villains head up charities, monsters masquerade as innocent travelers, and gods pretend to be mortal.
Character Agency
The idea behind the world is to support character-driven, open world TTRPG play. While history marches on, the players can choose what they do.
Focus
Drama
The dragons have begun to notice the rising humans in a big way.
The greenskins are uniting.
The Queen of Spite sees an opportunity to prime the world for destruction.
The elves and the Brass Tower are feuding.
Cambreath and Eldermeare keep ratcheting up their tensions. Neither side wants to back down.
Drake and Coltane are at loggerheads over the role of metallic dragons.
Faboren. All of it.
Alice's family.
Horroc is a stranger in a strange land, and his home is not what he once knew.