WORLDEATER: primer

I'm gonna post a swath of jumbled ideas I've had for a setting. MY DWARVES ARE DIFFERENT! the idea is that the races are more than just humans with pointy ears, that they're weird and different and alien. dwarves are earth elementals that breed by a bunch of a dwarves getting together and building a new dwarf and imbuing it/he/them with a portion of their own memories. elves are hermaphroditic natural psychokinetics that turn into extradimensional crystalline machine-beings when they die and breed like jellyfish.

it's low magic but not quite low fantasy, though Fantastique/dark/weird fantasy inspired. dwarves and elves are extremely rare, shunned, and mostly keep to their own villages. most humans keep to their villages, never leaving more than a few miles from home.

but there are those who do, who are called by the wilds, by life on the road. maybe something calls them, maybe they were born 'touched' by mystery, and through no will of their own find their life fraught with death, pushed onto the road by chance. outcasts, wanderers, swords-for-hire, mercenaries, burglars, bandits. these are the adventurers. weird things happen to adventurers, their journeys transform them. coming close to dark magics and mystery warps their bodies and minds over time, separating them even further from a normal existence. the only place the adventurer can exist is on the fringe of society.

on the fringe of that society, on the edges of primordial forests, in places where human society has crumbled or never existed, in the darklands, the borderlands, the places unmapped, forgotten, unmarked by fences, a dramatic change occurs. mystery and magick is born here, reality breaks down, different worlds warp and meld together. tunnels and dungeons spread and grow from the unknown like a mold.


the earth is hollow, with vast tunnel complexes spilling up from hidden places into the surface world, belching forth fiends, spirits, demons, monsters which convert Lawfulness into chaos the way bacteria and funguses and earthworms convert the dead into living soil.

these mystery places exist outside of reason. there's no explaining or understanding the dungeons. science is what the dungeon is not; science is what the dungeon eats. the dungeon feeds by absorbing law. it spawns treasures of its own devising or steals lost things that have fallen into chaos and places them around in its dank secrets.

adventurers go in and bring these things back to earn coin, or they fail and die horribly, their blood feeding the dungeon, and their souls being twisted to power its own machinations. maybe some of these treasures are like fruiting bodies and carry spores of the dungeon with them. imagine the horror of a wealthy merchant when he opens his vault to find that all those magical swords you sold him have transformed into a gaping hole in the ground infested with dream larva.

the dungeon isn't evil--there is no evil or good. there is only chaos and law. law seeks to force reality to fit into a mold, law wants to turn the entire universe to crystalize into one perfect state, unchanging and perfect. chaos seeks to transform the universe into a mass of transforming undulating nothingeverythingness, bubbling and twisting anti-reality dreaming of itself and all possibility.

the balance of the universe is allowed to exist where chaos and law meet and conflict. chaos and law are forces, neither winning out over the other. entropy and negentropy conflicting eternally. life, obviously, cannot exist in a state of pure chaos or pure law, but within that conflict.