After reading the history section in the basic compendium, the sections entitled "Once Upon a Time in the Future" through "A Rich History to Discover" I had many kernels of useful ideas come up. I wasn't sure where to talk about them in the forum so I put them here, since they would deal with potential future products, I suppose. My thoughts all shared the same train and progress, concerning the world of Dardunah. And in the end I had an idea that may take the game to a whole new level of involvement and popularity. So then, here is the line of thinking that developed, you really MUST read those sections for this to be meaningful, so if you havent, do so and THEN come back and read this. BUT remember the warning of the book, it is MASSIVE spoiler content that you may not want to read if you dont want to know the mundane origin of the world and it's true reality. With that being said, here's my material:
We know from the information provided in the basic compendium that the Space Ark / Zoo of the mother and father crash landed in northern Rakbar after systems failure during the use of the experimental hyperdrive, so we know that the mother and father and all the janah occupied this one single shard of the broken planet without the means to visit any other shards and for the most part, without any knowledge of the existence of the other shards.
BUT...
What if there was another shard or shards where the janah somehow proliferated anyway?
Perhaps the ship broke up in the landing like General Grievous' battle cruiser in Star Wars-Episode III - Revenge of the Sith and some janah DID land on another shard and miraculously survive.
Or Maybe:
In the distant, pre-historic past when janah and Chün co-existed before the decision to separate, some chün, being fully aware of the existence of all the other shards, took some of the janah to them, either as slaves, or food-livestock, or colonists, or even some unguessable Chünish reason alien to our understanding!
IF SO THEN:
Maybe you could have a shard where the janah's culture arose WITHOUT the influence and benefits of the presence of the mother and father and the deva. A place where other gods not of the deva we know arose, or even an understanding of Shündé like we now see just beginning in our characters has long been established.
Plus, imagine the ENTIRELY different culture they might have, even more animistic and alien to us American Roleplayers that the Middle and Far Eastern cultural paradigms of the Shard we know and play on. Maybe something more like we see in the book "The Weigher" (Author(s): Eric Vinicoff, Marcia Martin; ISBN: 0671721445/0-671-72144-5 (USA edition)) A place where the retention of the practice of predator animals eating prey animals was allowed to progress in it's natural course to this current day. Or even stranger, imagine that they adopted the Chün culture, the different magic and 'technology' (such as it is) of the insect people as their own!
OR HOW ABOUT THIS POSSIBILITY:
What if a shard, having by one of the aformentioned scenarios managed to have janah survive and thrive with THIS twist:
Only a handful of Jenu survived the crash or came over with the Chün or whatever, such that only five or so different jenu occupy the whole shard, not even knowing that there ARE any other types of janah! That may seem unlikely at first, but it would really be just like Earth there with it's five races of mankind, Hispanic, Asian, White, Black and Middle Eastern. And imagine that each Jenu's culture that arose over their ten-thousand year history was as different as the various Earth -race cultures. So you might have for example, a nation of lions, a nation of buffalo, a nation of sparrows, a nation of monkeys and a nation of Rattlesnakes. And that's it! No other jenu on the whole shard and multitudes of those five jenu forming entire civilizations, derived entirely from the instinct and influence of their own species. You might, for example, see such developements as a monkey culture that is entirely arboreal, and so is the Sparrow civilization. Whereas the Lion culture are raiding bands of nomads, like vikings or the Mongol Hordesor even something akin to the Native American way of living off the land and following food herds. Perhaps the buffalo culture is a city building civilization, good at defense. And finally the rattlesnake empire is subterranean, like Morlocs but cooler.
Okay so those were just examples of the stuff that came immediately to my mind. Now here's were we borrow a stroke of genius from Massively Multiplayer Online Games and the savvy RPG company, Wizards of the Coast, the inheritors of the mighty TSR game company we all grew up with. MMORPG's have a cool draw in that people feel as though they contribute and help shape the world. Some players proudly talk about how their blacksmith shop in Ultima Online was actually known throughout the real earth world by customers whos character came there for services and whos' players were from countries as far flung as Japan and Germany and South Africa. They enjoyed the personal satisfaction of doing something that was enjoyed and partaken of by people all over the world. Now, look at the Eberron project that Wizards of the Coast did just a few years ago, they asked the world-wide community of D&D players to submit suggestions of neat ideas to help build their game world to replace GreyHawk and the Forgotten Realms. The response from the gaming community was tremendous! People really liked the idea of being able to proudly say, "I made this!" when referring to some aspect of the new Eberron game world they had developed.
We can take advantage of the same community building concept and it's allready built into the game world! I mean look at the cover of the world guide! There must be ten shards at least, and all the world we've developed only occupies ONE SINGLE SHARD! Friends, this is the potential for somethign that could be awesomely popular. A chance to create a gaming community that could well outlast the lives of the original developers. Plus the dardunah company could draw from literally hundreds or thousands of creative minds to cull the best ideas, the finest concepts and make the greatest possible game world ever yet seen by Role Playing Gamers! And, you don't even have to hire and pay them a ton of money! If you even offered a modest cash prize for winning entries, say, 1000 dollars and a free copy of every book for the game system ever produced for a lifetime, I'm SURE people would send in entries by the drove.
So anyway, that was my idea in the first place. Then I remembered Ezra and I having talked about a Dardünah Future sourcebook for the game and I dug up my old notes for that. I'll make that a second post though.
We know from the information provided in the basic compendium that the Space Ark / Zoo of the mother and father crash landed in northern Rakbar after systems failure during the use of the experimental hyperdrive, so we know that the mother and father and all the janah occupied this one single shard of the broken planet without the means to visit any other shards and for the most part, without any knowledge of the existence of the other shards.
BUT...
What if there was another shard or shards where the janah somehow proliferated anyway?
Perhaps the ship broke up in the landing like General Grievous' battle cruiser in Star Wars-Episode III - Revenge of the Sith and some janah DID land on another shard and miraculously survive.
Or Maybe:
In the distant, pre-historic past when janah and Chün co-existed before the decision to separate, some chün, being fully aware of the existence of all the other shards, took some of the janah to them, either as slaves, or food-livestock, or colonists, or even some unguessable Chünish reason alien to our understanding!
IF SO THEN:
Maybe you could have a shard where the janah's culture arose WITHOUT the influence and benefits of the presence of the mother and father and the deva. A place where other gods not of the deva we know arose, or even an understanding of Shündé like we now see just beginning in our characters has long been established.
Plus, imagine the ENTIRELY different culture they might have, even more animistic and alien to us American Roleplayers that the Middle and Far Eastern cultural paradigms of the Shard we know and play on. Maybe something more like we see in the book "The Weigher" (Author(s): Eric Vinicoff, Marcia Martin; ISBN: 0671721445/0-671-72144-5 (USA edition)) A place where the retention of the practice of predator animals eating prey animals was allowed to progress in it's natural course to this current day. Or even stranger, imagine that they adopted the Chün culture, the different magic and 'technology' (such as it is) of the insect people as their own!
OR HOW ABOUT THIS POSSIBILITY:
What if a shard, having by one of the aformentioned scenarios managed to have janah survive and thrive with THIS twist:
Only a handful of Jenu survived the crash or came over with the Chün or whatever, such that only five or so different jenu occupy the whole shard, not even knowing that there ARE any other types of janah! That may seem unlikely at first, but it would really be just like Earth there with it's five races of mankind, Hispanic, Asian, White, Black and Middle Eastern. And imagine that each Jenu's culture that arose over their ten-thousand year history was as different as the various Earth -race cultures. So you might have for example, a nation of lions, a nation of buffalo, a nation of sparrows, a nation of monkeys and a nation of Rattlesnakes. And that's it! No other jenu on the whole shard and multitudes of those five jenu forming entire civilizations, derived entirely from the instinct and influence of their own species. You might, for example, see such developements as a monkey culture that is entirely arboreal, and so is the Sparrow civilization. Whereas the Lion culture are raiding bands of nomads, like vikings or the Mongol Hordesor even something akin to the Native American way of living off the land and following food herds. Perhaps the buffalo culture is a city building civilization, good at defense. And finally the rattlesnake empire is subterranean, like Morlocs but cooler.
Okay so those were just examples of the stuff that came immediately to my mind. Now here's were we borrow a stroke of genius from Massively Multiplayer Online Games and the savvy RPG company, Wizards of the Coast, the inheritors of the mighty TSR game company we all grew up with. MMORPG's have a cool draw in that people feel as though they contribute and help shape the world. Some players proudly talk about how their blacksmith shop in Ultima Online was actually known throughout the real earth world by customers whos character came there for services and whos' players were from countries as far flung as Japan and Germany and South Africa. They enjoyed the personal satisfaction of doing something that was enjoyed and partaken of by people all over the world. Now, look at the Eberron project that Wizards of the Coast did just a few years ago, they asked the world-wide community of D&D players to submit suggestions of neat ideas to help build their game world to replace GreyHawk and the Forgotten Realms. The response from the gaming community was tremendous! People really liked the idea of being able to proudly say, "I made this!" when referring to some aspect of the new Eberron game world they had developed.
We can take advantage of the same community building concept and it's allready built into the game world! I mean look at the cover of the world guide! There must be ten shards at least, and all the world we've developed only occupies ONE SINGLE SHARD! Friends, this is the potential for somethign that could be awesomely popular. A chance to create a gaming community that could well outlast the lives of the original developers. Plus the dardunah company could draw from literally hundreds or thousands of creative minds to cull the best ideas, the finest concepts and make the greatest possible game world ever yet seen by Role Playing Gamers! And, you don't even have to hire and pay them a ton of money! If you even offered a modest cash prize for winning entries, say, 1000 dollars and a free copy of every book for the game system ever produced for a lifetime, I'm SURE people would send in entries by the drove.
So anyway, that was my idea in the first place. Then I remembered Ezra and I having talked about a Dardünah Future sourcebook for the game and I dug up my old notes for that. I'll make that a second post though.
"Daggra" means "Enemy" in Tibetan.
"Chora" means "Thief" in Sanskrit.