Tolan!

Tolan is my homebrew campaign world. I've got a skeleton of things about it in my head, but it really needs to be put down in electrons, or else I'll forget about it. As I come up with stuff, I'll be throwing it on its own wiki (empty right now, of course).

Tolan is meant to be a world that embraces contradiction. I like being able to throw anything at my players, to have a world where my hair-brained ideas actually fit even if I just came up with them last week. Even though this is a human-centric world (thanks, Iron Heroes!), I want the ability to throw in all those cool evil humanoids and monstrous humanoids that exist. I also like the IH ideal of the world being new, governments being in their toddler stages, and the heroes being Big Players simply because they go do things no one else has ever done. At the same time, I like the high-magic aesthetic and sprawling urban environments.

My solution was to break the world, literally. A long time ago the ancient people had a super advanced magical society. Then something happened and they all died, and the world exploded apart. Now there are no large landmasses, just islands, and ancient ruins. The ruins are filled with magic radiation that mutates stuff into strange new forms. However, some of the ruins *have* been conquered by humanity, and have all their magical goodness exploited. To prevent this from getting out of hand, the magic is strongly paradigmatic; that is, it revolves around particular sets of rules that are different in each ruin. The ocean has the Null paradigm, so almost no magic works there at all. So, magic can't spread. There are no airships sailing between islands, and all the cool golems and flying carpets and talking plants are localized to their specific island where their specific magic works.

Bam. That solves, um, pretty much everything.

Next time: Elves!