Characters and Cultures

Beasts (Platypeople)

Platypeople are anthropomorphic platypuses. They are 3 or 4 feet tall and walk upright on their little webbed feet. They have fur, duck bills, venomous spurs on their hind feet, and flat beaver-like tails.  Most Platypeople keep to themselves. Their amphibious cities, which start on land but continue into the water, seem like quaint villages to other cultures. They celebrate Platypalooza on a certain full moon. Rumor has it they are provincial and uneducated.

Collectors

Collectors love stuff. All kinds of weird stuff.  Each Collector has a different kind of stuff that appeals to them. Collectors inherit their collections from older Collectors. Many of the old Collectors were dinosaurs. Rumor has it that dinosaurs are evil, and must be slain to take their collections.

Constructs

Constructs are artificial lifeforms. Although they have souls, their bodies are not flesh and blood. They are clouds of glowing energy, with a few solid components to interact with the world, like faces and hands.  They were built by a mysterious group, whose motivations can only be guessed.

  • Orichalcum: He’s traveling to find someone worthy of following. He comes on kinda strong, swearing fealty to people he’s just met, testing their leadership by following. Any philosophical disagreements within the party will be forced out early.  But he’s a powerful ally to have on one’s side.

Dragons

Dragons are great and powerful reptiles with terrifying breath weapons, or at least they were. Although they once ruled the world and were feared for their vengefulness, they were wiped out by treachery several generations ago.  Rumor has it that they are very greedy.

  • Fafnir: She’s a new dragon that hatched just a few days ago from a long-dormant egg.  (Buckle the Platyperson incubated it) She has four legs and two wings and is about the size of Golden Retriever. She’s very strong but lacks control.  Food-motivated.

Dwarves

Dwarves come from the stone and the mountains. They are small and dense. A typical dwarf might be 3’7″ and 350lbs. Rocks don’t have genders, so Dwarvish doesn’t have gender markers. Dwarves can marry more than one person, for love, or to secure alliances between clans.

Elves

Elves are tall, long-lived magical creatures.

Fairies

Fairies are the size and shape of a Barbie doll: impossibly slender and 11 inches tall. They fly on insect-like wings. Their skin can be any pastel color, and they name themselves after plants and flowers.  They are nude except for accessories, like jewelry or a hat, but a constant glamour makes their bodies indistinct, featureless, PG-rated.

Goblins

Goblins are somewhat shy and stay in their technologically advanced underground cities. Most never venture to the surface.  They send a few scouts to explore topside for new materials or power sources to help advance Goblin civilization.  Rumor has it that Goblins are redirecting underground streams.

  • Grinkle: A legend from the past, Grinkle has made mechanical improvements to his own body as well as his power armor. He’s a cyborg as well as a tinker. His power armor has rockets for dashing, rockets for flying, and rockets for punching.
    • Appearances:[swamp creatures]
  • Grokch:  (be sure to to pronounce the guttural ‘ch’ after the hard ‘k’!) was voluntold to become a scout and go topside.  He’s a Tinker, which means he has a unique suit of power armor. He’s customized his with a drill and a blaster. In addition to seeking scientific progress, he also wants the chance to show off his cool toys!
  • Smoky: A legend from the past. He drives a motorcyle with a drill on the front. It goes along the ground, up trees, and through the ground with equal speed.
    • Appearances:[Fairy & Mermaid]
  • Snort Gorldfarb: A legend from the past, Snort was a tinker who worked as the building manager and janitor for a great library in exchange for access to its technical books. His whirling polearm style was a terror on the battlefield.
    • Appearances: [library invaders]

Halflings

Not much is known about their culture, but they are small humanoids, about three feet tall.There’s one Halfling in every town, and they make their homes in trees. They recently won the Giant War by surrendering to the Giants, letting them occupy the Halfling lands, then pranking them mercilessly until they fled. Not all Halflings on the continent are refugees. Halflings have lived here for a long time.

Harbinger

They are blind prophets who have sight beyond sight.  They can see through the eyes of others, and have a vague sixth sense so they don’t run into things.  They are nomads, and avoid each other, since multiple prophets close together cause magical interference, distorting the prophesies.  When prophets dream, they are possessed by some magical force and recite or write prophesies. These prophesies come from several different sources.  Rumor has it that the prophets are just high all the time, and their visions are drug-induced hallucinations.

  • Agnes Nutter:  She rides a flying snake named Snek, who can shrink and coil around her neck like a scarf when flying is not needed. Agnes collects an item from each of her friends, which she uses to see through their eyes. She’s very protective of her friends, but her advice is always unsettling and gloomy, because she remembers the prophesies of doom that she sees when she sleeps.
    • Appearances:
  • Gwideon Greenhanded: A legend from the past.  She fights on the back of her pegasus, swinging her sword blindly, trusting to fate to strike her enemies.
    • Appearances: [library invaders]

Humans

They exist and are about what you’d expect. We haven’t learned much about them yet.  Rumor has it that humans are brainwashing the Goblin scouts that are sent to the surface, so they will go back and infiltrate the Goblin underground cities.

Humans from the Forgotten Lands are special, and have the power to make people forget the last few minutes. They chose to be forgotten by the world, but now they are done hiding.  An Order of Librarians commit themselves to study & preservation of knowledge. Rumor has it that those from the Forgotten Lands are all sorcerers capable of mind control, and that the land was forgotten because it went away, carried on the back of a great dinosaur.

Lanterns

Lanterns appear to be humanoids, each accompanied by a small floating light, but really they are extradimensional travellers, and the Little Light is closer to the “real” Lantern than the humanoid form it projects.  Maintaining the humanoid form is tiring, but makes interacting with others in this world much easier.  There are not many Lanterns in this world.   Rumor has it that Lanterns can possess other creatures, kind of like they ‘possess’ their humanoid projections.

  • Lumen:  She’s exploring to right wrongs, enforce justice, and protect the innocent, and she’s focused all her skill into making her Little Light as versatile and dangerous as possible.  Woe to the wicked!

Mermaids

Mermaid is the generic term that encompasses both mermaids and mermen. They have humanoid torsos and arms, and fish tails instead of legs. They breathe both water and air. Coastal cities often have submerged sections to accommodate mermaids as well as land-dwellers.

  • Dobby: A legend from the past. She’s not afraid to take decisive action, even if her companions disagree with her methods. She doesn’t back down from powerful foes and won’t give up, even when all seems lost.
    • Appearances: [Dragon, Spider, & Tinker]

Ogres

Ogrism is a rare mutation in Humans. Sometimes a young Human will reach puberty, hit a growth spurt, and not stop growing for a decade. Growing takes so much time and energy that Ogres don’t reach full size and adulthood until their mid-twenties.  Ogres are roughly triple the dimensions of a standard human, or about the size and weight of a minivan.  Their bones, teeth, and nails are made of stone and metal, necessary to support their weight and their powerful muscles.   All children born to Ogres are Ogres, so called “native Ogres” to distinguish from “first-generation Ogres” with Human parents. Often first-generation Ogres will leave their Human communities to find a place they fit in, literally. Ogres are incredibly strong and can life, throw, or smash almost anything. They are terrifying in battle, and also all the time, since they make break things without noticing just by moving around.

Rain

The Rain (singular and plural) are slime people who arrived on this world as fragments of an ice comet.  Rain tends to live with other Rain and not in the cosmopolitian, multi-species cities that are common across the world.  They all answer to the Ice King.  Rumor has it that the Rain want to create a great Ice City.

  • Melvin: He can’t be hurt by normal weapons, and in fact keeps several normal weapons inside his gooey, malleable form to produce and wield when the need arises.  He explores new lands partially because of some unpleasantness back at the royal court. Dedicated to the freedom of all things, especially himself.

Remnants

Remnants are incorporeal ghosts, unable to touch or be touched by anything.  Long ago, they served the dragons, but they were all killed in the same war that killed the dragons. Rumor has it that dragon sympathizers remain because they were cursed by witches!

  • Rook: They has a cute face like Tom Holland, but is still a sad, creepy ghost. They moves their legs in a walking motion when floating across the ground because that’s what living people do, but their feet don’t match up with the ground. Once killed a man without anyone finding out.

Spiders

Spiders, when capitalized, refers to a species of intelligent, almost humanoid creatures with two legs and many arms. Don’t confuse them for the giant spiders that Halflings tame as mounts, or the tiny predators from the real world.  Spiders live in fear of each other because they are power-hungry and often resort to cannibalism to consolidate power. Strange electrical current shimmers across their exoskeletons, like that glass sphere toy that sends harmless bolts of lightning to your fingers when you touch it.  Spiders can sense each other and communicate via a special electrical frequency.

  • Heartthief: A legend from the past. She is a master of crowd control, with webs and paralyzing venom, as well as Witch powers to hex her enemies and create undead servants from recent corpses.
    • Appearances: [swamp creatures]
  • Pikano: She appears to be a human child, but can turn into a spider and produce silk webs.She’s helpful, kind, and loves sweets.
  • Sapphira: She carries her babies along with her, which is unusual,since most Spider parents would eat them. She avoids killing if she can help it. She can spit toxic needles from her mouth.
  • Spider-Girl: A legend from the past. She wears a mask to hide her face. A bit of a motor-mouth, she always has a plan, and is quick to tell others what to do.
    • Appearances: [Fairy & Mermaid]

Legends of the Land

Every traveler who journeys to this new continent has heard stories of amazing people, locations, and artifacts that can be found there. Are these stories true? Perhaps.

  • city of gold
  • crystalline underwater cathedral
  • energy from a new material
  • library of powerful magical tomes
  • mystical shrine to recover from grief
  • natural spring whose waters produce euphoria
  • secret word or sign to make any enemy show mercy
  • swamp monster in a lake
  • temple that can restore the Dragons
  • underground water highway built by Dwarves
  • a treasure, or maybe seven treasures that increase magical power
  • librarians from the Forgotten Lands, not wanting to be forgotten
  • constellations are the bones of dinosaurs