Hey everybody, let's do some worldbuilding. I came up with an idea for a fantasy/D&D world recently that I thought was kind of interesting, so I'll share the process that I came to it, the considerations that I made, how I would adapt it to a game setting, and whatever else pops into my head.
Takes Years Off Your Life
So I was reading a book (Sabriel, borrowed from Kait) and there was some mention of Greater Dead, and I started thinking about death knights, specifically that image of a dark warrior standing over a battlefield drawing in the life-force of his enemies. That's been played out pretty well, though, so I wondered how to create the opposite, a warrior who - who what? I faltered. Gives life force away? That seems a little less evil than the standard death knight.
I mulled it over. What kind of being would not want youth, would want to give it away? Well, the undead are healed by negative energy, right? So if they could absorb "age" or "death" or whatever from nearby living beings, that could give them a sort of immortality. Like the evil witch who steals youth and beauty, but opposite.
This led me to the essential pivot point for the world:
What if life energy can go negative?
(An aside:
I really like D&D 3.5. Part of what I really like about it is that there's a whole fantasy system that is strict enough that it gives a strong framework to any setting, but loose enough that it can be pushed and pulled and changed without falling apart. It's got, for example, positive and negative energy, and beings that use both, and a handful of effects and uses for each, but it allows the reader/player/worldbuilder to determine what they actually "are." If I do more of these, you'll see a lot of variations on the 3.5 ruleset.)
So what if life energy can go negative? In D&D canon, a living being shocked with negative energy (Inflict Critical Wounds) will become dead. A dead being shocked with negative energy (Animate Dead) will then become undead. In perfect mirrored contrast, an undead being who is first Cured and then Raised becomes living. A pair of high-level clerics could easily keep a single body oscillating between life and undead indefinitely.
(The inaccuracy of this rules analysis is that the zombie is either mindless or a servant of the cleric who raised him, where the human has free will; we'll flag that for review and come back to it later.)
So what can we learn from this?
Life (or unlife) is not the quantity of positive (or negative) energy. Instead, it is the difference between these two energies, and not when they are zero but when they are even, the result is death. There are a number of metaphors for this: warm water feels hot after being in cold water; acids and bases are powerful on their own, but combine to be neutral; electrical current does not care about quantity of positive or negative charge, but the difference.
So we've got two kinds of beings in this world: the living, powered by positive energy, and the undead, powered by negative energy. Both are sentient and can be good or evil, though there are obviously differences. The souls of the living inhabit complicated systems of flesh and blood, and undead inhabit nonliving matter (sometimes they inhabit dead bodies, other times they are more like golems or elementals inhabiting earth or water, and sometimes they manifest in air and appear to be ghosts). Every being has some positive and negative energy in it, maybe a lot, but it has a strong majority of one or the other.
(Let's go back to the mindless zombie thing: for the purposes of this world, we're going to say that +15 and -15 are the same; life is an "absolute value" sort of thing, though with obvious differences. Maybe negative beings tend to have lower intellect due to the fact that they're defined by stagnation and slowness, and are more easily influenced/controlled and more likely to be mindless.)
Let's go back to our witch:
She could actually act as a healer among the living, drawing negative energy out of them. She would heal them and herself at the same time.
What's an Energy, Anyway?
That raises a question, though; where do positive and negative energy come from? Does a living being start with a certain stock of positive energy, and after they cast twelve Cure Light Wounds, they die? Can the witch's target get to zero negative energy, and then she can't absorb anything else?
Positive and negative energy have to come from somewhere. Let's look at positive first and see if we can find any natural sources of it. How do we identify positive energy? Why, we look for things that hurt beings powered by negative energy, that is to say the undead.
What hurts the undead? Lessee: sunlight, running water, fire. Granted, everything is hurt by fire, but the undead seem especially unhappy with it.
Now we can create a source for positive energy. Positive energy is generated by heat, light, and motion. Negative energy must therefore be generated by cold, darkness, and stillness. Yes, those things are all "absences," but we're dealing with a world of magic here. We can say positive energy, as the name suggests, comes from things happening, and negative energy, similarly, comes from things not happening.
Origin Story
Ah-ha! Now we have an origin for the energies and for life itself! The sun shone on the earth and warmed and illuminated it. This generated positive energy, which became life. It inhabited the most motive matter it could find, probably fire or running water or strong winds, and so elementals were the first life.
Then night fell, and in the darkness and cold came negative energy. This became unlife, which inhabited unmoving matter: earth, still water, stagnant air. Elementals were the first unlife, as well.
The elementals clashed; they often combined and became dead, but stillness and motion created more of both. The living were more powerful in the day, the undead were more powerful in the night, it was a stalemate. However, the undead had a distinct advantage, since dead elements quickly arose as undead elementals. When they realized that all of the underground and shadowy spaces on the world made much more dark than light, it seemed that the undead would become the dominant beings in the world.
The living had a chance, however: they were inclined to change strategies, stay fluid, evolve. Eventually they developed bodies perfect for sustaining life: the bodies circulated warm blood, took in and expelled air, and even had currents of electricity. They were generators for positive energy.
These forms of flesh and blood allowed the living to function in light or dark, where the undead were forced to retreat into shadows during the day. Neither side ever attained ultimate victory, but the living claimed the surface world and pushed the undead to places of permanent shadow and cold.
Over thousands of years, the communities mingled, but they still keep primarily to themselves. The witches are the undead world's greatest diplomats, acting as immortal healers for the living by purging them of all of the negative energy they accumulate during the night (a fatal flaw in flesh is that it must spend a certain amount of time every day being very still in the darkness; this generates a fair amount of negative energy, which disappears only very slowly).
What's a Body to Do?
Alright, so now we've got the basic workings of a living being: their bodies act as generators for positive energy, but they naturally accumulate negative energy whenever they sit still or sleep or go out in a snowstorm at night or something. That negative energy won't just kill them, but it will weaken them. We don't think of it that way because we're used to it, but another way to put it is that removing that negative energy will strengthen a person. (Since negative energy can sit around, but since we don't want it to do so permanently, we should think of the energies as having a sort of "slow burn" chemical reaction where, when combined, they slowly fizzle into unaligned energy of some kind [arcane energy for wizards and stuff?], sort of like acids and bases phshhh together to make salt water, but slower.) In contrast, undead bodies generate negative energy just by sitting around, but because they have to move or think in order to do anything, they create a certain amount of positive energy, as well.
This means that wielders of energy don't have to worry about the source. A living cleric probably has enough positive energy to spare that he can toss of some Cures and barely get tired. He might be able to really push himself and pull some positive energy directly out of his own lifeforce, but obviously that's dangerous. He needs to have enough precision to pull out the energy powering his fingernail growth rather than his carotid artery. He probably has trouble mustering up enough negative to Inflict; if he does, though, it might cure his headache. Evil clerics would definitely spend a lot of time meditating in darkened freezers to get enough power to Inflict as much as they wanted to. They would also want to be very careful to start by channeling away any negative energy residing in their lungs before using the power that's turning their hair white.
Some Sort of "Positively" Pun
I was planning on talking about how this would translate into game rules and a real D&D campaign setting, but this ended up being pretty hefty, so I'll do that another time. I'll leave you with one flaw I've found, as well as the resolution I found while writing it:
Vampires. The real key to this setting came in remembering that vampires burn in sunlight; that means that 1., sunlight generates positive energy, and 2., vampires are especially vulnerable to it (hang on, that gives me an idea. Hold that thought.)
Here's the problem: we've already determined that the way that humans work so well is that they have warm blood coursing through their veins, which constantly generates positive energy like a water-wheel. But wait, don't vampires drink blood? Isn't that a little like an acid monster taking a big swig of bleach?
So here's my resolution:
Vampires are beings of negative energy, but they inhabit bodies that are only just barely dead. This gives them powers that no other undead have: transformation, affecting living minds, and most crucially reproducing by way of converting living beings (yes, wraiths and ghouls can convert things they kill into more wraiths and ghouls, but it's different, vampires have control). This comes from their unique combination of an undead soul and a living body, allowing for them to use the powers of both negative and positive for a greater result than either combined.
This comes with a price, of course: the body they inhabit will quickly become truly dead before too long and the vampire will become merely a zombie. The vampire must thus take constant infusions of positive energy to maintain the strength of his shell. That means that vampires are constantly on the edge, using as much positive energy as they can without burning themselves out (it's like a fire elemental being veeeery careful how much gas he puts in his car), and that means that even a few rays of sunlight can even out the positive and negative, resulting in true death.
***
So that's a worldbuilding exercise. Hopefully I'll do more of them at some point.
Takes Years Off Your Life
So I was reading a book (Sabriel, borrowed from Kait) and there was some mention of Greater Dead, and I started thinking about death knights, specifically that image of a dark warrior standing over a battlefield drawing in the life-force of his enemies. That's been played out pretty well, though, so I wondered how to create the opposite, a warrior who - who what? I faltered. Gives life force away? That seems a little less evil than the standard death knight.
I mulled it over. What kind of being would not want youth, would want to give it away? Well, the undead are healed by negative energy, right? So if they could absorb "age" or "death" or whatever from nearby living beings, that could give them a sort of immortality. Like the evil witch who steals youth and beauty, but opposite.
This led me to the essential pivot point for the world:
What if life energy can go negative?
(An aside:
I really like D&D 3.5. Part of what I really like about it is that there's a whole fantasy system that is strict enough that it gives a strong framework to any setting, but loose enough that it can be pushed and pulled and changed without falling apart. It's got, for example, positive and negative energy, and beings that use both, and a handful of effects and uses for each, but it allows the reader/player/worldbuilder to determine what they actually "are." If I do more of these, you'll see a lot of variations on the 3.5 ruleset.)
So what if life energy can go negative? In D&D canon, a living being shocked with negative energy (Inflict Critical Wounds) will become dead. A dead being shocked with negative energy (Animate Dead) will then become undead. In perfect mirrored contrast, an undead being who is first Cured and then Raised becomes living. A pair of high-level clerics could easily keep a single body oscillating between life and undead indefinitely.
(The inaccuracy of this rules analysis is that the zombie is either mindless or a servant of the cleric who raised him, where the human has free will; we'll flag that for review and come back to it later.)
So what can we learn from this?
Life (or unlife) is not the quantity of positive (or negative) energy. Instead, it is the difference between these two energies, and not when they are zero but when they are even, the result is death. There are a number of metaphors for this: warm water feels hot after being in cold water; acids and bases are powerful on their own, but combine to be neutral; electrical current does not care about quantity of positive or negative charge, but the difference.
So we've got two kinds of beings in this world: the living, powered by positive energy, and the undead, powered by negative energy. Both are sentient and can be good or evil, though there are obviously differences. The souls of the living inhabit complicated systems of flesh and blood, and undead inhabit nonliving matter (sometimes they inhabit dead bodies, other times they are more like golems or elementals inhabiting earth or water, and sometimes they manifest in air and appear to be ghosts). Every being has some positive and negative energy in it, maybe a lot, but it has a strong majority of one or the other.
(Let's go back to the mindless zombie thing: for the purposes of this world, we're going to say that +15 and -15 are the same; life is an "absolute value" sort of thing, though with obvious differences. Maybe negative beings tend to have lower intellect due to the fact that they're defined by stagnation and slowness, and are more easily influenced/controlled and more likely to be mindless.)
Let's go back to our witch:
She could actually act as a healer among the living, drawing negative energy out of them. She would heal them and herself at the same time.
What's an Energy, Anyway?
That raises a question, though; where do positive and negative energy come from? Does a living being start with a certain stock of positive energy, and after they cast twelve Cure Light Wounds, they die? Can the witch's target get to zero negative energy, and then she can't absorb anything else?
Positive and negative energy have to come from somewhere. Let's look at positive first and see if we can find any natural sources of it. How do we identify positive energy? Why, we look for things that hurt beings powered by negative energy, that is to say the undead.
What hurts the undead? Lessee: sunlight, running water, fire. Granted, everything is hurt by fire, but the undead seem especially unhappy with it.
Now we can create a source for positive energy. Positive energy is generated by heat, light, and motion. Negative energy must therefore be generated by cold, darkness, and stillness. Yes, those things are all "absences," but we're dealing with a world of magic here. We can say positive energy, as the name suggests, comes from things happening, and negative energy, similarly, comes from things not happening.
Origin Story
Ah-ha! Now we have an origin for the energies and for life itself! The sun shone on the earth and warmed and illuminated it. This generated positive energy, which became life. It inhabited the most motive matter it could find, probably fire or running water or strong winds, and so elementals were the first life.
Then night fell, and in the darkness and cold came negative energy. This became unlife, which inhabited unmoving matter: earth, still water, stagnant air. Elementals were the first unlife, as well.
The elementals clashed; they often combined and became dead, but stillness and motion created more of both. The living were more powerful in the day, the undead were more powerful in the night, it was a stalemate. However, the undead had a distinct advantage, since dead elements quickly arose as undead elementals. When they realized that all of the underground and shadowy spaces on the world made much more dark than light, it seemed that the undead would become the dominant beings in the world.
The living had a chance, however: they were inclined to change strategies, stay fluid, evolve. Eventually they developed bodies perfect for sustaining life: the bodies circulated warm blood, took in and expelled air, and even had currents of electricity. They were generators for positive energy.
These forms of flesh and blood allowed the living to function in light or dark, where the undead were forced to retreat into shadows during the day. Neither side ever attained ultimate victory, but the living claimed the surface world and pushed the undead to places of permanent shadow and cold.
Over thousands of years, the communities mingled, but they still keep primarily to themselves. The witches are the undead world's greatest diplomats, acting as immortal healers for the living by purging them of all of the negative energy they accumulate during the night (a fatal flaw in flesh is that it must spend a certain amount of time every day being very still in the darkness; this generates a fair amount of negative energy, which disappears only very slowly).
What's a Body to Do?
Alright, so now we've got the basic workings of a living being: their bodies act as generators for positive energy, but they naturally accumulate negative energy whenever they sit still or sleep or go out in a snowstorm at night or something. That negative energy won't just kill them, but it will weaken them. We don't think of it that way because we're used to it, but another way to put it is that removing that negative energy will strengthen a person. (Since negative energy can sit around, but since we don't want it to do so permanently, we should think of the energies as having a sort of "slow burn" chemical reaction where, when combined, they slowly fizzle into unaligned energy of some kind [arcane energy for wizards and stuff?], sort of like acids and bases phshhh together to make salt water, but slower.) In contrast, undead bodies generate negative energy just by sitting around, but because they have to move or think in order to do anything, they create a certain amount of positive energy, as well.
This means that wielders of energy don't have to worry about the source. A living cleric probably has enough positive energy to spare that he can toss of some Cures and barely get tired. He might be able to really push himself and pull some positive energy directly out of his own lifeforce, but obviously that's dangerous. He needs to have enough precision to pull out the energy powering his fingernail growth rather than his carotid artery. He probably has trouble mustering up enough negative to Inflict; if he does, though, it might cure his headache. Evil clerics would definitely spend a lot of time meditating in darkened freezers to get enough power to Inflict as much as they wanted to. They would also want to be very careful to start by channeling away any negative energy residing in their lungs before using the power that's turning their hair white.
Some Sort of "Positively" Pun
I was planning on talking about how this would translate into game rules and a real D&D campaign setting, but this ended up being pretty hefty, so I'll do that another time. I'll leave you with one flaw I've found, as well as the resolution I found while writing it:
Vampires. The real key to this setting came in remembering that vampires burn in sunlight; that means that 1., sunlight generates positive energy, and 2., vampires are especially vulnerable to it (hang on, that gives me an idea. Hold that thought.)
Here's the problem: we've already determined that the way that humans work so well is that they have warm blood coursing through their veins, which constantly generates positive energy like a water-wheel. But wait, don't vampires drink blood? Isn't that a little like an acid monster taking a big swig of bleach?
So here's my resolution:
Vampires are beings of negative energy, but they inhabit bodies that are only just barely dead. This gives them powers that no other undead have: transformation, affecting living minds, and most crucially reproducing by way of converting living beings (yes, wraiths and ghouls can convert things they kill into more wraiths and ghouls, but it's different, vampires have control). This comes from their unique combination of an undead soul and a living body, allowing for them to use the powers of both negative and positive for a greater result than either combined.
This comes with a price, of course: the body they inhabit will quickly become truly dead before too long and the vampire will become merely a zombie. The vampire must thus take constant infusions of positive energy to maintain the strength of his shell. That means that vampires are constantly on the edge, using as much positive energy as they can without burning themselves out (it's like a fire elemental being veeeery careful how much gas he puts in his car), and that means that even a few rays of sunlight can even out the positive and negative, resulting in true death.
***
So that's a worldbuilding exercise. Hopefully I'll do more of them at some point.
-Charlie
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