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14:03, 28th March 2024 (GMT+0)

My Game Notes and Ideas

The Old World: Magic spells and divine magic work there, but technological advances. such as steam engines, gunpowder, and the telegraph have been impossible to control.

The New World: Roughly 500 years ago, sailors discovered the New World, across the ocean to the west, devoid of intelligent life, and started colonizing it.

But elves and dwarves did not, would not, go to the New world, would not set foot there.

Over the next 25 years, humankind noticed that the population of elves, dwarves, and other races were increasingly thinning out and disappearing. Inquiries were made, and humans were told that the gods of the elves and dwarves were being "called away." Dwarves started digging deeper and deeper underground, away from the surface-- and not returning. Elves started travelling... some to the east, some to the icy north, some to disappear in the barely-explored jungles to the south, many building ships and simply disappearing.

"The New World is cursed," one elf cleric was finally rumored to have said. "No one should ever have set foot there. Now this land is cursed, too."

Roughly 225 years later, New World colonial expansion reached the Great River-- a wide, incredibly long north-south river, muddy brown in color.

But although the Old World magic did not work in the New World, the New World "sciences" of steam and blackpowder did, and allowed for great speed of engineering feats. The river was bridged.

On the other side, however... things were different.

First, humans met the tribes of animal-people who collectively referred to themselves as a name that translated to Thunderhearts. Coyotes, porcupines, jackrabbits that stood and walked like men on two legs, who could learn to speak like men, who had hands that could hold a hatchet-- or fire a gun-- about as well as a human.

Second, men discovered that the new frontier was rich in metals: gold, silver, copper, iron. Mining began in earnest. Fortunes were made. Cattle and sheep were raised in great herds. Other resources were found, and began to be collected and shipped back east...

Third... there were warnings, passed along by the Thunderhearts... increasing warnings, that the land did not want men in it, and certainly did not want the land mined of its riches...

The warnings, it was always explained, were not from the Thunderheart tribes themselves, but from the spirits to whom the New World belonged.

The warnings were ignored. The violent storms, the earth rumblings, all dismissed.

And so it was, about 50 years ago, that the dead began to rise, and even worse horrors and monsters began to walk the land...