Aberrations and Abominations

Aberrations have always been poorly defined. Sometimes they're just weird, sometimes they're affiliated with Cthulhu. Guides to designing monsters, like A Magical Society: Beast Builder, outright state the distinction is an arbitrary "I'll know it when I see it" sort of thing. That's not a stable foundation for world building, so I'm going to go ahead and give "aberration" a clear definition.

Demons versus Devils primer

Sometimes the distinction between demons (see 13th Age Core Rulebook) and devils (see 13 True Ways) may be a little arbitrary. I’ve devised this primer to provide guidelines for how to distinguish them clearly.

On Spirits

So here goes my primer on spirits and their consequences for the game world and rules.

Spirits are anthropomorphic personifications of abstract and physical concepts.
They lack body-soul duality. If you try to steal their soul or they try to possess someone else, no soulless body is left behind. If a spirit is damaged to the point of death it is usually banished rather than destroyed and may reform in the future. Spirits are generally sexless (but may express a gender) and unable to reproduce (but some have offspring with mortals), with special exceptions.

Sources: Encyclopaedia Divine: Shamans, Relics & Rituals: Excalibur, Mythos: The Animae

Three primary distinctions

Primordial spirits: The primordials were the first spirits to come into existence from the primordial chaos, predating the distinction between spiritual and physical. They personify abstract fundamental forces: the Archons of Order, the Achamoth of Chaos, and the Aeons of Balance. (These names are taken from Gnosticism, and unlike other monsters they loosely emulate their namesake.) [Aberrations, Abominations, Asuras?]

Terrestrial spirits: Everything in the material planes, even the planes themselves, has physical and a spiritual aspect or soul. Humans and their ilk have animi; animals, forests, rivers, mountains, and light have terrestrials. The latter exist outside of but still tethered to their physical counterparts. Most of the time terrestrials slumber in the near ethereal unless their physical counterpart is disturbed.

Ephemeral spirits: The thoughts and emotions of living things leave residue in their surroundings. As this ambient emotional energy collects it produces ephemera (sing. ephemeron). Ephemera are so named because they lack physical counterparts to anchor them and must consume the emotions that spawned them.

Other spiritual states

Subcategories of spirits include aberrations, celestials, elementals, fey, fiends and manifestations.

• Aberrations are spirits that originate from primordial chaos, outer space, nightmare worlds and aborted planes. They include aeni qael, akata, denizens of Leng, mâlites, proteans and qlippothim. [Origins in other planes of existence (primordial chaos?), outer space, nightmare worlds (dreams of mad gods?), aborted planes (a possible future, the previous universe, an alternate timeline?), and mad wizard experiment? (That's silly!)]
• Celestials are spirits born of of law and light or created by the gods thereof to oversee the workings of the world. They include angels, couatls, kami, lammasu, pegasi, psychopomps, shedu, sphinxes, and unicorns.
• Elementals are spirits born of the elemental chaos, representative of one or more elements. An elemental is a dual entity consisting of a soul inhabiting a body of base matter. The animating soul could be of any kind: spirit, demon, undead, etc.They include atronachs, gargoyles, genies, jyoti, mephits, sceaduinar, verms, and weirds.
• Fey are "souls that have been given one last chance at existence" (see The Complete Guide to Fey p8). Rather than a class of related spirits, to be fey is a state of being not unlike—albeit inverse to—undeath. They include azatas, blink dogs, dullahans, hags, nuckelavees, nymphs, and satyrs.
• Fiends are spirits born of evil. They include the endless varieties of demons and devils.
• Manifestations (see Relics & Rituals: Excalibur) are spirits born of strong desires and emotions. They include animate dreams and the spectral dead.
• Unborn (see Book of Hallowed Might)

Building the great wheel

13th Age doesn't include information relating to planar adventures by default. It's easy enough to refer to other OGL sources for further information, but for my blog I will be putting my own spin on the planes that I hope would be in line with the design goals of 13th Age.

Cultural views of the soul

Different cultures developed different views of the soul. Paracelsus posited an "elementary body", "sidereal body" or spirit and "eternal spirit" or immortal soul. Both the Chinese and the Egyptians believed that human beings had multiple souls and that these were tied to different parts of the body. This led to the Egyptian's practice of storing mummified organs within canopic jars and to traditional Chinese medicine's preoccupation with organ systems

The ancient Egyptians believed that every person had a soul composed of multiple parts and that these needed to be maintained in order for the deceased to maintain a happy afterlife. Hence the elaborate mummification and funerary rites and the continued practice of making offerings to tombs. The exact schema is unknown because all our knowledge was painstakingly reconstructed from Egyptian texts and thus the greater context was lost.

At its most basic the Egyptian soul was divided into "a body (khat), a spirit (ka), a mind (ba), a shadow (sheut), a heart (ib), and a name (ren)." These parts would be transformed, split and merged through mummification and judgment in the afterlife. There were other parts, like "akh", but the nature of these is not clear and may have changed over time.

Taoism devised a scheme where every person had two sets of souls, the hún and pò. The hún is the ethereal soul, sometimes translated as animus. The pò is the corporeal soul, sometimes translated as anima.

The hún was divided into three parts, the pò seven. The precise symbolism varies between orthodox Taoism, folk religion, yoga, Buddhism and traditional medicine. These souls can be mapped onto any trinity or hebdomad with enough effort.

The hún souls variously correspond to Feng Shui's cosmic trinity of heaven, earth, and man, Aristotle's hierarchy of plant, animal and human, Taoism's three virtues of compassion, frugality, and humility, traditional Chinese medicine's three treasures of essence, breath and spirit, etc. The pò souls variously correspond to the seven orifices in the head, the seven basic emotions, the seven chakras, etc.

Placeholder: Switched to 13th Age

Previous I was operating from a framework based largely on Pathfinder, but I've since switched to 13th Age because it solves a lot of my beefs with the d20 rules like positive/negative energy, alignment, taxonomies, epic levels, and so forth. I'm going to have to revise what few posts I've made so far, so that may take a while. I will be taking inspiration from other retroclones while building my setting and the final result may be a bit eclectic.

Rebuilding the great wheel

I feel that now is a good time to re-examine the planes from a holistic perspective. What is their purpose? What role do they serve in an ongoing campaign? Are they interesting places to visit? What would it take to run planar adventures starting from level one? Could the great wheel benefit from some streamlining?

The dangers of rules rot... and I can't pick a system

Rule systems that are heavy, modular, and not properly proofread and streamlined become subject to what I will call "rules rot." Rules rot is similar to bit rot. When a rule system is suffering rules rot, then it has a large number of exceptions, complications, contradictions and redundancies that make book keeping a bigger chore than it was before.

Pathfinder is an excellent example of a rules system suffering from rules rot. FantasyCraft is an example of how a system that complicated avoids rules rot.

Pathfinder is extremely complex and full of silly sacred cows, but is by far the most popular and well-supported retroclone. Some alternate and third party rules are mandatory. Pathfinder Unchained fixes basic problems like combat and the Christmas tree effect. Spheres of Power makes magic-users less omnipotent and more flavorful. Path of War gives fighters nice things.  It's too bad it couldn't have gone the way of Trailblazer or True20.

Fifth Edition still hasn't slaughtered the stupider sacred cows that even True20 did away with. In other news, Lord of the Rings has officially licensed itself as a campaign setting.

I really can't decide on a system to build my homebrew around. I'm not going to build a new game because that's insane. Taxidermic Owlbear and Old School Renaissance Handbook are good resources for all the many options available for fantasy roleplaying.

Castles & Crusades or Blood & Treasure use a simplified third edition base. Definitely something to keep in mind. I had fun reading the books for inspiration.

13th Age certainly fixes a lot of the problems associated with third and fourth edition. The design approach is certainly flavorful.

Mazes & Minotaurs is great for alternatives to eurofantasy. Great inspiration too, even has a Norse mythology supplement.

Classic Fantasy, previously published under Basic Roleplaying and later Mythras, is entirely skill-based. Classes are collections of skills, so multiclassing or even making up your own is simple and easy. The only other comparison would be Basic d20.

Basic Fantasy has an awesome community contribution thing going on. It even has fantasy space travel in the form of Voidspanners!

OSRIC, Dark Dungeons, Labyrinth Lord, Swords & Wizardry, For Gold & Glory, Blueholmes et al are probably good inspirations what with being the foundation of the first wave of retroclones. I'm still not clear on the waves distinction.

I've heard good things about Adventures Dark & Deep, Dungeon Crawl Classics, Monsters & Magic, Lamentations of the Flame Princess, Dungeon World, Hackmaster, Ambition & Avarice, Wayfarers and Adventurer Conquer King, but I'm not sure until I read more.

Monsters in myth and folklore versus gaming

The difference between monsters in myth and folklore and monsters in gaming is that the latter are well-defined. Myth and folklore is vague and ambiguous about its monsters, their capabilities, even distinguishing them from each other. Game bestiaries, on the other hand, go to great lengths to explain monsters taken from myth and folklore in clearly defined terms often at odds with the source material or combines completely unrelated concepts.