Pictures and Words

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There will be new updates, hopefully in the next day or two – I’ve been moving house, which is much more exhausting than I predicted, and has left me little time for writing. Stay tuned!

The last five races of All-That-Is.

Humans, Elves, Orcs, Gnomes, Dwarves:

Humans, Elves, Orcs, Gnomes and Dwarves have remained largely unchanged. You could almost play these races straight from the D&D PHB (except for the difference in character creation numbers, which I’ll be detailing in a post of its own.)

Humans
My friend Damon, who was the person I worked closest on All-That-Is with in the first few months of its existence (before it had a name, and was simply (and a little egotistically) referred to as “The Peterverse”) hates the fact that Humans are the “base” of every other RPG system. The more I worked on All-That-Is, the more the other races intrigued me, and Humans were given a smaller and smaller role in the world.

In All-That-Is, instead of being the “dominant race”, they’re actually one of the least dominant – the only reason the other races ever notice them is because they fight all the damned time. Angels, as the large, self-proclaimed protectors of the world, are the most prominent, however Dwarves (for reasons I’ll go into later) are the most common.

Humans are notorious for their aggressive tendencies. The Human home-land (”Humania”) is in a state of constant civil war – it’s the only homeland that doesn’t have a capital city, simply because they couldn’t agree on one. In the in-universe year that the Traveller’s Guide is published, two of Humania’s states are at war, and the other two are just a number of tiny provinces (they refer to themselves as “kingdoms”) who are all constantly bickering over petty matters of land, kidnapping each other’s princesses, and setting dragons on one another.

Humans look pretty much like they do in our world – they’re slightly tougher and stronger, for the sake of adventuring, but otherwise there aren’t a lot of changes. Humanian Humans (Humans from the Human home-land) are of an Anglo-Saxon appearance, however Human skin has a unique feature – when someone spends more than a decade in another land, their skin slowly changes colour, and some of their facial features rearrange.

For example when a Human lives for more than ten years in the Angel home-land, their hair and face start to pale – within a generation, they have an entirely Albino appearance. (for the Fairy home-land, it’s a South-West Asian appearance, for the Gnome homeland it’s more of a Mediterranean look, etc etc.) Babies are born looking like their parents, however if they live for more than a decade in another land, the same thing happens. It’s not uncommon for a Human family reunion to be made up of two Albino adults, an Asian grandfather, a black grandchild, and a white cousin or two.

Elves
Elves, honestly, are the race that I’ve done the least work on. At this point, they’re essentially just stereotypical fantasy Elves, simply because I haven’t had much of a chance to mess around with the tropes yet – their civilisation live in cities in the Tree-tops, they’re a very formal society, warrior-based sort of thing – they’re by far the most racist of all the races, and the Elven homeland is the most “racially pure”, but I don’t really know enough about Fantasy to tell you whether that’s typically Elven or not.

As you can see from the picture at the top of the post, I had an idea early on about all Elves wearing glasses, but that was, fortunately, abandoned rather quickly.

I’ve written bits and pieces of fiction set in all the other countries, about all the other races, I just haven’t sat down and fiddled around with Elves yet, so they’re not at all fleshed-out. My cousin Gavin had an idea about their society being split into distinctly different social classes, but I haven’t decided whether or not to go with that. As I said, I simply haven’t worked on them at all.

Orcs
Orcs are a playable race – I never liked the Dungeons and Dragons race being “Half-Orcs”, especially since (at least in any of the campaigns I played) you never really came across many orcs, let alone felt compelled to start having sex with them. Essentially, Half-Orcs were their own race, and so when I brought them over to All-That-Is, I removed the “half” element, and just made the race Orcs. (Orcs are one “size” away from Humans – Medium to Large – and thus the two races are able to breed, but they’re not called Half-Orcs. A Half-Orc could be half-Human, half-Elf, half-Angel…)

Orcs have tough, scaly skin that comes in a variety of dark colours. (green, black, blue, red…) They stand at the same size as Angels, about a human-and-a-half, or two Dwarves stacked on top of each other. They’re dumb and strong, but not as dumb and strong as ogres. (one could describe them as Ogre-light, and the two races are often lumped together in-universe, simply referred to as “Trolls”. This can either be an insult, a term of endearment, or simply a description, depending on the tone of voice used.)

The race has an extremely strong sense of family, loyalty, and race-pride; Orcs don’t hate other races, but they’re unlikely to make close friends with anyone who’s not an Orc. They’re also strongly connected with nature and the world around them, with the vast majority of Orcs in the Orcish homeland living off the land. I haven’t decided whether or not to give them tusks yet, or just huge teeth.

Orcs are the second-most common types of slaves that can be found. Non-Troll slaves are extremely rare, except in the Land of Ogres, where pretty much anything goes.

Unlike Ogres, intelligent Orcs aren’t outcast, they’re revered, and given important positions in the tribe.

Gnomes

If Ogres are known for being big and dumb, Gnomes are known for being smart and smart. By far the most intelligent race in All-That-Is, Gnomes treasure above all else knowledge, intelligence, organisation, and smarts. Gnome, to many people, is synonymous with “Genius”.

Gnomes exist much as described in Dungeons and Dragons, except without the playfulness and creativity. Gnome society is a hairs breadth away from eliminating names altogether, and simply giving each Gnome born a number.

Any Gnomes born with even a hint of playfulness or creativity are likely to shun Gnomish society and become adventurers, though they might be regarded as stuck-up and stiff by their fellow adventurers. (especially Peedlings. Peedlings and Gnomes go together about as well as Orcs and Demons, or Angels and Dwarves. Ogres and Fairies, despite their differences, get along quite well.)

Dwarves

Of all the “kept” races, Dwarves are the ones that I’ve changed the most, though I didn’t even realise I’d changed them until someone pointed it out to me.

To begin with, all Dwarves have beards, even the female ones. Yes, I’m aware that Terry Pratchett did it first.* **

*so did Tolkien and early versions of D&D.
**I hadn’t actually read any Pratchett when I came up with this – it wasn’t until I was telling my cousin about it that he revealed the unoriginality of my idea. I’ve already written it into a couple of pieces, so I’m unlikely to get rid of it, even if it does cause unfavourable comparisons to Discworld. I’m not using it to make points about feminism, or metaphors for fitting in or coming out, I just think it’s an interesting idea that I want to play with.

Secondly, and this is the one that I had assumed automatically came with Dwarves, most Dwarves are Pirates.

I thought this was self-evident. They have beards, they speak in gruff voices, they drink alcohol by the barrelful – of course Dwarves were Pirates. It wasn’t until I was showing a friend the map, showing which Dwarven Clans controlled which parts of the sea that I was informed that no, Dwarves aren’t typically sea-faring creatures.

There are five Dwarven Clans. Three are primarily Pirate Clans, two are primarily Miner Clans, but they both have extensive navies and mining operations. The three Pirate Clans control roughly one-third of the ocean each, and range from “Good-natured” to “Evil”. Depending on which part of the ocean you’re planning on crossing, you’ll need to either hitch a ride with a heavily-armed ship, ready to fight for your life, or set sail prepared to stand to the side while the pirates rummage through your good cutlery. (in exchange for compliance, good-natured pirates won’t kill you, do any lasting damage to your ship, or take your food and water – if you don’t make it to your destination, they won’t be able to rob you again on the way back, and killing people tends to inspire missions of revenge. Who needs the hassle?)

Dwarves are fiercely loyal to their clan or to their friends, heavy drinkers, and great sailors. Dwarves are the only race with a majority not living in their homeland – most Dwarves are either sailing the eleven seas*, happily mining in another land, or simply adventuring.

*technically four seas and seven oceans.

All-That-Is is a world of islands (writers create their ideal world – I have always loved islands) and so Dwarves, controlling the oceans as they do, are ubiquitous. Angels might be the most powerful race, but Dwarves are the most wide-spread, making up about one-quarter of the world’s population. If an adventure takes places entirely within an Elven forest, or a Gnomish city, then you might not run into any, but if the story takes you anywhere near the ocean, you’re going to come into contact with Dwarves, and probably a lot of them.

I don’t even particularly like Dwarves, it just makes sense to me.

So those are the ten playable races of All-That-Is.

Character creation numbers and other stuff that needs to be known to actually play them will come in another post, this was just to introduce them, give an idea of the kind of world that All-That-Is is.

In the next few posts I’ll be covering some of the miscellaneous bits of information you need when you’re creating a world (e.g. what sort of Calendar is used, life-spans, religious beliefs), what Earth has that’s “missing” in All-That-Is, a bit about the countries and lands of All-That-Is…once all that pesky “world-building” stuff is out of the way, we’ll start getting into the meat of this project – The Numbers.

If there’s anything in this post that you think doesn’t work for whatever reason, feel free to leave a comment – at this point, I’ve done so much work with these races the way they are that I’m unlikely to change much, but this project is all about getting input, so let me know. If you think that Dwarves shouldn’t be pirates, or that Fairies are too small to be a playable race, or that Gnomes are just stupid and ugly and you hate them, please, leave a comment, and I’ll address it in a later post.

Up next: Miscellaneous World-Building Stuff!

More on the Races of All-That-Is.

Angels and Fairies:

I’ve always wanted to play a character in Dungeons and Dragons who could fly. None of the base races that come with the Rulebooks have the ability to fly – if you want a flying character, you have to get supplementary material, and adjust your levels, and it becomes such an inconvenient mess that you might as well just play a character who can jump really high.

I wanted to make flying characters accessible but not overpowered, and it wasn’t hard to decide on “Angels” and “Fairies” as two flying races to include.

Angels
Angels came from a simple idea – an all-Good race. In Dungeons and Dragons, you choose an “alignment” to describe your character.

There are two scales – Good to Evil, and Chaotic to Lawful, and you choose where your character sits on both. A Chaotic-Good character, for instance, would steal from the rich to give to the poor, while a Lawful Evil creature might be true and loyal to his evil overlord, and gleefully carry out his orders to torture you to death. (there’s also a “neutral” option on both scales)

Throughout fantasy history, there have been examples of “All evil” races. (the Orcs in Lord of the Rings, the Dark Elves in a lot of fantasy.) I wanted to play with the idea of an all-Good race, and since I’d already decided to include Angels in All-That-Is, the choice was obvious.

Originally, they were going to simply be a race of Good people, then I changed them to overly-religious zealots, then a race of fastitidious rule-keepers, and finally I combined various elements of the three – the Angelic people are ruled by a strictly organised Lawful-Good Church, which can be a bit over-zealous at times, but the average Angel citizen is just trying to get on with their life and do the right thing.

It’s a right of passage for every young Angel who wishes to join the Church to go out and see the world as an adventurer for a while. Others are sent by the church to do good around the world, and others (particularly Chaotic-Good Angels) don’t like to live by the church’s strict rules and leave the Angel homeland to seek their fortune elsewhere.

Angels are large and strong, but the entire race suffers a weakness to water. Submersion in water will kill an Angel, and even having a bucket thrown on them can be fatal. They are unaffected by ice or steam however, so most Angels carry an enchanted amulet with them that will either boil or freeze the first batch of water that comes too close to their body. (I feel that this nicely counters the advantage of being able to fly – it’s a huge but manageable weakness, and any player will have to weigh up the advantages of flight against having to be constantly on their guard from water.)

Fairies
I was raised on Enid Blyton books, so fairies were another pretty obvious choice for a flying race.

The Dungeons and Dragons races are all an extremely similar size – half-orcs are slightly larger, halflings (and gnomes and dwarves) are slightly shorter, but if you line all the races up and swing an axe, you’re still going to either behead or miss all of them.

As you can see from the diagram above, I decided to switch things up a bit with the All-That-Is races. Enter: Fairies. They’re one-quarter the size of Humans (one-sixth the size of Angels) and while they can fly, they don’t flit around like the fairies in Fern Gully, they travel at a speed which makes sense for their size. (as do Angels – flying speed, in an attempt to keep it balanced, is the same as walking (not running, walking) speed. The obvious exception is when they’re travelling downwards, and gravity is on their side.)

Their strength is correspondingly reduced as well, but what they lose in size, speed and strength, they more than make up for in intelligence and magical ability. (the magic system is something that I’m completely redoing – there’ll be a post with more detail coming up in the next couple of weeks, but basically your percentage chance of succeeding at a spell is determined by your race. Fairies, straight off the bat, have a 90% chance of succeeding at an average spell.)

Fairy skin comes in various different colours, depending on the colour of the food that they’ve eaten all their life. The colour of the food in the Fairy Homeland, in turn, depends on where it was grown, so a Fairy’s skin colour largely depends on the region that they were raised in. (except for big cities, which has food brought in from all over the country. This can create either Fairies with patchy rainbow skin, or a rather dull brown, depending on the quality of the food.)

Angel wings are big and feathery, pretty much how you’re imagining them right now, while Fairies come in a variety of different flavours – huge butterfly wings, small dragonfly wings, aeroplane wings, a couple of other non-typical designs.

I’ve tried to write a compelling reason for a typical member of each race to go adventuring, but Fairies don’t really have one. Sometimes Fairies just feel like going off and having adventures.

Demons and Ogres:

Demons
I wanted a race to counter the all-Good Angels, but all-Evil races are

a) Overdone,
b) Extremely constraining. Few players want to play an evil character, and even less people want to DM them,
c) Tricky to justify in-universe. Their society would just collapse, or every other race would try to wipe them out, and
d) Not really much fun.

I really liked the idea of a demon race though. When I think “demon”, I don’t think tall and domineering with the red muscly chest, and the glowing black eyes. I think small and mischevious – more like the Gremlin from that Looney Tunes cartoon. More Satan from Bedazzled than Satan from Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey.

Demons in All-That-Is are an all-Chaotic race. They’re small and gnobbly (I’m imagining they look somewhat like Dobby from the second Harry Potter movie) and have a reddish-brown, crinkled skin. I haven’t decided whether they should have tiny horns & a tail yet, but I don’t think it will dramatically affect gameplay either way. Demons stand at about half the height of a Human, and have disproportionately large heads, and smaller, pointed teeth. They have huge eyes, long noses, pointed ears, and long, thin fingers.

Demons probably suffer from the most racial prejudice of all the races on All-That-Is. They’re not outlawed from entering other countries, but they’re pretty widely disliked. They don’t like the term “Demon”, preferring to be referred to as “Underlings”. (this came out of a system where every letter of the alphabet described something different about a Player Character, so that a phrase like “AHBN” could sum up your character’s status at any given point. This system has long sice been abandoned (early 2007) but I liked the name “Underlings” and the idea of Demons having a different name for their race.)

Possibly as a consequence of being so widely disliked, Demons are extremely personable, good at making people trust them (another reason that people are so often warned not to) and just generally quite likeable. They’re your best friend, right until they stab you in the back. (this is, of course, a racial stereotype – a number of Demons work particularly hard to be trustworthy, just to prove that they’re not all like that.)

Ogres
The last “invented” race on All-That-Is (the other five are almost directly out of the handbook.) Ogres stand twice as tall as a human (like Fairies, Ogres came from a desire for more varied sizes in All-That-Is), are almost twice as strong, and about one-tenth as intelligent. Big and stupid are the two most commonly used words to describe these creatures. Tough, but…well, stupid.

“Min-maxing” is a technique used by players to create the strongest, most focussed possible character. If you were playing a game where you knew ahead of time that the aim was to break into a tower without being caught, for example, then when creating your character you might sacrifice all combat abilities and social skills in order to focus on wall-climbing, sneaking around, picking locks, etc.

Since the vast majority of pen-and-paper role-playing games focus on combat, players will often take hits anywhere else that they can in order to get more combat advantage. Systems like Dungeons and Dragons (possibly as a result of this) have their character creation process almost entirely based around combat, so that you can’t drop anything else (except maybe your Charisma stat) to get better at combat; you’re just trading off skill in one combat area for skill in a different combat area.

Ogres weren’t deliberately built for min-maxers, but I can see how they could appeal – I’ll be going into specific numbers in a later post, but if you choose to be an Ogre, you gain significant combat benefits in exchange for non-combat losses. Of course, in any combat situation with an Ogre, the enemy is almost exclusively going to focus on them, and their sheer size constrains them from entering normal-sized buildings, so picking an Ogre is a significant trade-off.

As I said, they stand twice the size of Humans, are about one-third larger than Angels, and approximately eight times larger than Fairies. They have soft skin and tend to either grow their hair quite long, or shave it off and keep it shaved. Ogres come in four main flavours – those with two eyes, like all the other races, those with two eyes one on top of the other, those with three eyes, arranged in a pyramid formation, and those with one single eye in the middle of their forehead.

(I’ve actually written different “factions” for all of the races – different states, regions, tribes, city-states etc etc. (Angels, for instance, are split into Chaotic, Neutral and Lawful. They’re not at war with each other or anything, but these are still three distinct groups within the Angel homeland.) Ogres are the only ones who show it in such an obvious physical manner.)

These four different Ogre-clans are constantly warring with each other – outside the Land of Ogres, they don’t leap straight into battle, but they’re more uneasy around Ogres of a different clan than they are around any other race. Ogres are the only race that are legally sold as slaves in all the countries of All-That-Is, even their own home-land. An intelligent Ogre (roughly the equivalent of a slightly stupid Human) is a rare thing, and generally outcast from Ogre society. Intelligent Ogres make up the vast majority of Ogre adventurers.

Tomorrow: The last five races – the ones from the books!

According to Kevin Smith, a writer “creates his ideal world”. In the world of Kevin Smith films, people talk in lengthy monologues about pop culture and sex. In the world of Charlie Kaufman films, reality is a bit vague and everyone seems to be miserable all of the time. That’s why the good guys win most of the time, nice guys get the girl, and everyone in movies is so attractive. People create the world that they wish they lived in, and hope that others enjoy it as much as they do.

All my work on All-That-Is has been written with myself as the target audience. If I thought something was cool, would be interesting, would solve a problem I have with the Dungeons and Dragons universe (or fictional universes in general), would be fun to play…if I liked an idea, I’d throw it in.

Bits and pieces are also based on various public domain works (The Wizard of Oz, Peter Pan) and others are (much less directly) inspired by works that aren’t public domain. I’ve only included information about the parts of All-That-Is that are vastly different to your typical fantasy universe (Lord of the Rings, Dungeons & Dragons) and I’m focussing on the parts that are relevant to the Traveller’s Guide.

One of the most interesting series of articles I’ve ever read was by Rich Burlew, the man behind Order of the Stick. (a webcomic set in a world that obeys Dungeons and Dragons rules, but is not necessarily a game of Dungeons and Dragons.) The series of articles was called “The New World“; it’s an (unfinished) account of him creating a new campaign setting, writing stream-of-consciousness, explaining his decisions as he makes them, and giving general universe-building advice.

I’ve been working on All-That-Is for literally years now, so I don’t even know why some of the decisions were made, but I’ll share the thinking behind the parts that I remember. Over the years I’ve bounced more than a few ideas off people – most notably my cousin Gavin, my friend Damon, and my sister Elizabeth. Without their input, All-That-Is, would be quite a different world.

You can see why I need an artist. This sketch is from 2006, when I first started working on the world. It really wasn't meant to be seen by eyes other than my own, but it nicely demonstrates the difference in size between the races.

Races

There are exactly 10 sentient races in All-That-Is.

In Dungeons and Dragons, not only are there the base races that come with the rulebooks, but you can buy dozens of supplementary books, full of more playable races. What’s more, a huge number of the enemies you fight are sentient as well. Reading through the monster manual (or, honestly, playing a standard adventure) it feels like you’re living in a world where you can’t go ten metres without running into a new sentient race.

It also brings up…I suppose it’s not really a “moral issue”, but I’ve always felt a bit strange, playing a character of “Good” alignment who has no problem murdering an entire town full of kobolds or goblins, casually killing children and unarmed men and women alike. The alternative, of course, is to let them live, which doesn’t really make sense either.

In All-That-Is, I decided to simplify it – there are exactly 10 sentient races, and 20 cross-breeds that can be made from those races. (I’ll be using the word “people” a lot in this article – a “person”, in All-That-Is, simply means “a member of a sentient race”, with people being the plural.)

There aren’t more races on other planes, there aren’t more races coming out in later handbooks, and any group of creatures terrorising a village is either going to be one of these ten races (making killing them a legitimate moral choice) or a non-sentient race that you can slaughter without feeling guilty. (if you’re the sort of person who feels guilty killing fictional people.)

I’ll be making a lot of comparisons to “humans” – this could be confusing, because Humans on All-That-Is are different to humans on earth. To make comprehension easier, whenever I say “humans” with a lowercase H, I’m referring to regular-brand Earth humans, and whenever I use a capital H, I’m referring to All-That-Is Humans. (this is in keeping with my habit of capitalising All-That-Is race names anyway.)

Similarly, if I’m comparing All-That-Is Dwarves to regular-style D&D dwarves, or halflings, or gnomes, I’ll use capitals for All-That-Is races, and lower-case for all others.

Halflings and Peedlings:

Halflings
I have never liked halflings – I don’t like the name, and I don’t like the race. Halflings are a D&D Race who are…well, they’re Hobbit rip-offs at best, but the way they’re described in the handbooks, they’re basically just short humans. They have almost nothing that makes them individual or unique, they’re just short humans with slight personality changes and hairier feet. If you want to play a human but shorter, you play a halfling.

In All-That-Is,”Halfling” is a name for any cross-breed. “Half-elves” aren’t listed as a separate race, they’re simply a Human/Elf halfling. The races are split into 6 different sizes (Big, Large, Medium, Small, Tiny, Xpedious) and any race can cross-breed with races of the same size, or the size one smaller or one larger.

There are a total of 20 different Halfling races – these won’t be covered in the Traveller’s Guide in any kind of detail. Halflings, to keep it simple, were originally going to be born sterile (like mules) but then I worked out a simple system that allows them to breed without a degree in mathematics required to calculate their children’s stats. (more on that in a later post)

While any individual Halfling’s culture is dependent on their parents, where they were raised, etc, they also tend to have an affinity for other Halflings. Most towns have a Halfling bar or club, where they can meet and associate with other Halflings without the prejudice that they regularly face from “normal” people. Halflings commonly become travellers, because they don’t really feel that they fit in anywhere.

Peedlings
To replace Halflings, I included a race called “Peedlings” (the name was chosen at random from about 50 different x-ling names I wrote down) – Peedlings are slightly taller than Dwarves, and covered entirely in hair. They have disproportionately large heads, hands, and feet, and skinny arms and legs. Peedling hair comes in all the colours that human hair comes in – brown and black are the most common, there’s an occasional blonde, and the much rarer redhead. Clothes are optional, but Peedlings in situations where loose hair could be a risk (such as, say, adventuring) tend to wear protective garments and tie their hair back wherever it’s longest. (or cut it off, but that’s not a common habit.)

Peedlings are the entertainers of the world – the vast majority of the great writings, paintings, songs, dances and plays of the world have come from Peedlings, and their culture is based around culture. A stereotypical Peedling is like a personified D&D Bard – great at chit-chat, terrible at combat. (give them the right class, of course, and they’re as tough as any other character.)

Peedlings suffer from an artistic temperament. This invariably makes them restless – a Peedling rarely stays in one city for their whole life, preferring to see the world, draw inspiration from life, and have adventures that they can work into creative pieces.

Tomorrow: Angels, Fairies, Demons, Ogres

Generally when I’m writing about All-That-Is, (expanding the universe, starting a novel, exploring characters or ideas etc) I like to write in-universe, pretend that someone who actually lives there is describing whatever I’m describing, as if my piece of writing exists in All-That-Is itself.

It’s a really useful technique for a couple of reasons, but it’s not something that I came up with by myself. I stole it directly from the video game The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, which has been my single largest influence while creating All-That-Is.

The Elder Scrolls is a series of games that started in 1994 with a game called Arena. I’ve never played Arena, or the sequel, Daggerfall, but from what I’ve read about Daggerfall, one of its main draws the huge world in which it was set – the in-game area was around the size of Great Britain – and one of its main drawbacks was that the huge world suffered from complete blandness.

Creating a game area the size of Great Britain requires either ten thousand monkeys programming for ten thousand years, or a program that will auto-generate locations. You tell it that a room has four walls, two doors, and a window, and the program can randomly generate an unlimited number of extremely boring rooms.

Apparently that’s what they did with Daggerfall. There were thousands of towns, which were essentially made up of the exact same buildings, slightly rearranged every time. There were 20 real quests, and an infinite number of “go here and get this for me” quests.There were over 750 000 named characters you could talk to, all with the same six topics to talk about.

So when the company started work on their next game, Morrowind, they focussed on fixing these flaws. Instead of making the game as large as they could (Morrowind covers about 0.01% of the area that Daggerfall covered) their aim was to create a world where almost every city looked completely different to the next, a world of strong visual flavour.

They succeeded spectacularly.

From top to bottom, left to right: Ald'ruhn, Balmora, Sadrith Mora, Ald Velothi, the Zainab Camp, Vivec. Any Morrowind die-hards could recognise almost all of them without even having to think about it.

Compare those six buildings. Each of them is not only unique and gorgeous, but their design makes complete sense, culturally and structurally. The second you step into a city containing any one of those buildings, you’re instantly aware of where you are. This is not only useful when playing a game, but it shows how effectively they created a rich, beautiful world. (it didn’t stop at building design – there are dozens of creatures that you can fight, almost none of which you’ll have ever seen before, and some of which have their own food chains and life cycles. They invented architecture, animals, plants, geography…Morrowind is my single favourite game, largely because it’s so visually striking.)

Throughout Morrowind, you can find, buy, sell, and (most importantly) read books. There are around 6 full novels worth of books to be read in the game, and none of them is entirely reliable.

Because they’ve been written from the point of view of characters within the world, they contain the same inaccuracies and biases that real books written in and about the real world by real people contain: a book titled “The 36 Lessons of Vivec”, by Vivec, detailing his own adventures throughout the land is to be taken with a grain of salt. As a writer, you can safely put anything you like into that book, and not worry about it contradicting canon – like the film 300, it’s deliberately subjective.

But it’s more than the safety of unreliable narrators, it lends a sense of character to the world. By writing a book that exists within the world, you’re not only adding depth through the content of the book, you’re adding more information simply through the fact that it exists within the world. Someone who exists in All-That-Is must have had cause to write the book – they had motivation, they had a purpose, they have a target audience. And there’s no better way to flesh out a character than by writing as them, so we learn about the kind of people who inhabit the world as well.

The aim of this project (the All-That-Is RPG blog project) is to create the equivalent of a Dungeons & Dragons Player’s Handbook – a book that the players can have next to them as they play, with everything that they need to create and play a character. I want this book to be written half in-universe and half out-of-universe: it’s going to be called The Traveller’s Guide to All-That-Is, with the idea being that it’s roughly (and I only just realised the similarity) the equivalent of The Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

The Traveller’s Guide to All-That-Is is a book that Travellers (the name used for “Adventurers” in All-That-Is) can take with them anywhere, with a rough overview of all that they need to know. A bit about each of the different races in the world, a bit about each of the different countries, other travellers that they can expect to meet and band with, handy spells to learn, weapons to buy, different deities and their worshipper’s customs, etc etc.

Anything that is simply description (”A Barbarian is someone who survives on their wits” “Gnomes are the smartest of all the races” “The problem with casting magic while fighting a man with a big sword is that you’ll probably die” etc) is going to be written in-universe. Anything that involves numbers that the player needs to crunch, or dice that the player needs to roll (”To see if you succesfully cast a spell while fighting a man with a big sword, roll a six-sided die and hope that it comes up 7″) is going to be written out-of-universe.

For clarity’s sake, I’m going to use a number of different background colours. Without committing to anything, I’ll probably use an off-whitey/yellowy/parchment-coloured background for anything written in-universe (like this) and a grey/”stone” background for anything written out-of-universe (like this).

I’ll also need a third colour, (probably a dull blue like this) because I want to use content from the Open Gaming License:

In late 2000, the company that publishes Dungeons and Dragons decided to take the basic rules and principles of the d20 system (rolling a twenty-sided dice to determine failure or success, the idea of characters gaining more skills and feats as they level up…heck, the concept of leveling up) and release them under the “Open Gaming License”, allowing anyone to publish a game using those rules, provided they included a copy of the license somewhere.

The reasons for doing so are interesting and complicated, and Ryan Dancey, the man behind the Open Gaming License explains them really well in this interview. Basically sales of Pen-and-Paper Role-Playing Games were beginning to drop, and Dancey came up with the Open Gaming License to try to boost sales. The idea is that the more role-playing books being published, the more people who are going to be getting into the hobby, and since Dungeons and Dragons is the cornerstone of pen-and-paper role-playing, more people getting into the hobby means more D&D books sold.

I can’t tell you whether or not it worked, but they wrote the Open Gaming License in such a way that they can never take it back – the second it was published, everything was irrevokably released for other game-designers to meddle with, alter, and release as their own.

I really like the d20 system, and I love the idea of the Open Gaming License, so I’ve decided to do the All-That-Is RPG using the Open Gaming License content as my base.

One of the conditions of using Open Gaming License content is that you clearly mark what is original content, compared to what’s being used under license. There’s no one correct way to do this – some people use footnotes, underlining, have open content on specially marked pages – I’m planning on fairly drastically altering a large portion, so that last one definitely isn’t an option for me.

Since I’m already using a couple of different background colours, using one more to mark Open Gaming License content seems logical. (all of this is assuming that I end up with a nicely put-together pdf file or (best-case scenario) actual physical book. If my final product is a word document, I’ll probably just use underline or something basic like that.)

If you want to have a look at the Standard Reference Document, the base Open Gaming License content, it can be found here. (I’ll be using the 3.5 edition because that’s what I started working from in 2006, and so a lot of my notes so far are based around it and also because they drastically changed the License for 4th Edition content. I intensely dislike the 4th Edition license, but that’s a post for another time.)

Despite my taste for writing information in-universe, I won’t (tempting though it is) be using that style for these blog posts. It’s great if you want to set a mood, or build character, or create depth and flavour, but it’s not ideal for concisely sharing information. Another problem I’ve found with it is that you can’t explain concepts that don’t exist – for example, in All-That-Is, the wheel was never invented. Try explaining that while writing as an in-universe character.

Another problem about writing in-universe is that you sometimes get distracted by writing about the author who is writing whatever piece you’re trying to write. (say that ten times fast.) The original plan for my 2007 NaNoWriMo novel was to rewrite The Wizard of Oz (the original has fallen into the public domain) as a novel that existed in All-That-Is, called The Vizard of Az.

The original Wizard of Oz was written by Frank L. Baum, and was so popular that he wrote a number of Oz books – The Marvellous Land of Oz, Ozma of Oz, etc etc. In the later ones, the true ruler of Oz appears, a girl called Ozma. She has complete power over Oz, and is completely beloved by all. One of the first things that she does is ban magic: no one can use any kind of magic unless they have her express permission. Naturally, as she’s beloved by all, this suggestion is celebrated and they all come out and kiss her feet, etc etc etc.

The Vizard of Az books were going to be written as thinly veiled political analogies, for an idiotic dictator who really tried to ban magic. In the months leading up to November (the month of Nanowrimo, when I was going to write the first Az book) I started to write a backstory for the writer. You can find Frankel’s backstory here, and the backstory of the idiotic dictator here.

November came around, and I realised that having written Frankel’s story, I didn’t actually feel motivated to write The Vizard of Az at all. There was no need for it; the story of Frankel was done, and actually writing the novel was suddenly unnecessary. I still have all my notes for it, a couple of paragraphs of prose (including the opening) but the story didn’t need to be told. (instead, for my 2007 Nano novel, I attempted Basil Turret and the Prisoner of Algebra, a Harry Potter parody set in All-That-Is.)

I have a couple of notes around about who is actually going to be writing The Traveller’s Guide to All-That-Is in-universe, but I’m not allowing myself to do anything with them, for fear that it will render the actual Guide superfluous.

For more information about All-That-Is, check out The All-That-Is Wiki, my (unfinished) novels. or the All-That-Is-themed entries from my livejournal.

Next time: All-That-Is Races: Halflings and Peedlings