About 80 years ago, a variety of peoples from many places, had been transplated by unknown god-like power to this one world.

This world has been named Torus due to it being an obvious torus, the other side arcing across the sky. Spanning the gap is a great pillar.

The only available resources are stone, soil, water, and small plants. Enough for a stone age agrarian society. The pillar however, has many other resources inside, metals, magical herbs, and great dangerous but edible and useful beasts.

The inside of the pillar is a dungeon which alters itself every 9 days (which leads to a local 9-day week). Higher floors are more dangerous but have greater resources available.

Currently, the highest floor reached is floor 7.

Most importantly however, inside the pillar can be found the most valuable resource. It has many names, manacite, essence, light, lumin, etc. Whatever you call it, this essence is like power given form, though an etherial form, for no material substance affects it at all. To touch it is to absorb it. Thus, can't be transported, nor traded/given. If you want it, you must go in and take it for yourself.
This message was last edited by the GM at 14:15, Thu 09 May 2019.

I have natural lycanthropes in this world, originally humans altered during the War of Supers, a war of nations trying to make supersoldiers, of which the only "successful" experiments were vampires and lycans, naturally with weaknesses and pitfalls for each. Both types continue to exist but their creation is restricted and few groups accept them, but some do. This occured on the human origin world, so only humans are a base. Trying to create a non-human version would have unknown results.

The animal side however, which animal a lycan can become is not entirely predictable (for the character) but usually reflects their personality, culture, and nature.

In this world, shapechangers of any sort are easier to hurt with certain kinds of magic, particularly necromancy spells.

Lycans can go mad sometimes and lose their minds (often old or nearly killed lycans, though can happen to lycans suffering psychotic breaks, grief, etc), hence the stigma, fear, and stories of werewolves needing to be hunted down.

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Vampires are far more rare than lycans, as they were seriously hunted for a long time. A few villages had given shelter to some who in return provided protection. Almost all vampires still around came from this kind of pact, being harbored by villages who prospered with great warriors and hunters on their side. That said, this was a state of affairs not revealed to outsiders for nearly two centuries, during which time, the national propaganda had firmly set in against them in most places. The occasional rogue vampire being discovered just often to keep fear of them going.

Vampires have weaknesses, but many of the popular weaknesses are false or overblown. Garlic is not poisonous to them, but they can smell it quite strongly and overpoweringly, making it uncomfortable but not the protection many say it is.

Their lack of shadows is entirely false yet also very true. A vampire is technically bound inside a special box, and interacts with the world via a summoned illusory body, hence the lack of shadows. They do still have reflections however, as any illusion does.

Vampires are not harmed by sunlight, but it is blindingly and even painfully bright to them, thus they avoid it when they can.
This message was last edited by the GM at 05:58, Sun 12 May 2019.

Races

There were 8 original worlds upon which the races were created until it was time for them to be brought to the dungeon.

On Tercia were crafted the humans, dwarves, and halflings, which were all recreations of races related in the time before these realms were created. Tercia however was quite wild with magic and the most basic trait of humans is variability and adaptability. From these three, elves, orcs, and gnomes developed in the forests of heavy magic.


On Grachek the Gnolls were created. A simple world with little distinguishing features and overall rather plain. This made it easy to reach and interact with others and thus the gnolls fought quite a bit and thus prized strength and ruthlessness, becoming the last of the races to become civilized enough to partake in the grand test.

Dreamos is the world of the dragons. A sparse race with the lowest population of all, which is a good thing as dragons are much larger than any other race as well. The dragons have a wide variety in appearance, though they are distinctly predators and the most independent race. It is perhaps surprising that they attained civilization before the gnolls, but their great power and longevity made them much more wary of lethal conflict and codes of behavior and making mercantile contracts became their way of resolving conflict with each other. In fact, dragons are as dangerous as merchants as they are in combat, and accrue wealth easily from the other races.

Hadormin is home to the lamias. Lamias here are like Kin from the Goblins comic, a very human-like torso with the lower parts of a snake. However, their torsos are about halfling size, and a girth of a 1-2 feet, with a total body length of around 20-30 feet. Lamia have diverse cultures as they prefer strings of small enclaves with efficient trade routes over cities. They are one of the more technically advanced races.

The oozlings never named their world, simply calling it the world if they referred to it. Oozlings are much like the name suggests, amorphous blobs. Unlike what the name suggests, they are not true oozes, but rather more like a "swarm" of microbes with a single mind. They thus actually require sustenance and air to survive, but they also require magic to hold themselves together, thus magical disruptions tend to be very dangerous to them.

Uldior has two races, the fealings and the heks. The fealings are small squirrel like people, and by small I mean a few inches tall. Fealings also produce silk from their wrists and use to trap various insects and other small prey as well as tool making. Heks are about as big as halflings and have multiple forms dictated by diet during a larval stage. What makes heks truly unique is that they are small hive minds, consisting of up to 9 individual bodies for a single mind, though some powerful individuals have had more, the legendary Daiscid had 23 bodies and is regarded as holding the record for the most bodies. Heks are builders and have created the most amazing architectural achievements of all the races.

Gouda is home to the jirmoni, a race very much like humans, but all individuals look like women with metallic-looking skin ranging from brass to copper. Gouda is a particularly arid world and the jirmoni are adapted well for it, being able to absorb moisture through their skin and lose very little. They tend towards semi-nomadic lifestyles, homesteading in one place during the height of summer or winter (depending on latitude), while roaming around during the rest of the year.

Tamoya is the homeworld of zyphers and reaplings. Zyphers are basically intelligent flying tigers with raccoon-like fore-paws and a tiara of horn on their heads. Reaplings are an artificial race whose creation techniques were lost, being known to none but their original creator who was singly the most powerful mortal having managed to actually jump planes and visit many of these worlds. The reaplings can take many forms, as their form is based on a skeleton, either crafted or "borrowed." Their blood is black and forms the core of their race, creating a new individual when left in a pool with a skeleton and triggered by a ritual passed down very carefully to selected individuals.

Kobolds have no world of their own per-say, as they were not supposed to exist. They were an accident created when the dragons were made. Their creator figured it might be preferable when the time came for the test if the different races knew there were races other than themselves before the test, and thus spread them to the other worlds that had only a single race, Gracheck (gnolls), Dreamos (dragons), Hadormin (lamias), the oozlings world known to kobolds as Terria, Gouda (jirmoni), and Tamoya (zyphers, which didn't have reaplings at the time). Kobolds survived much better than their creator expected though they remained barbaric pests on most worlds, they survived many attempts to eradicate them, though on Tamoya, Hadormin, Terria, and Gouda some groups of kobolds achieved higher civilization and even have nations that stand on par with other races. In the dungeon world, this resulted in a great deal of uncertainty about them, as there were just as many tales of their barbarism as their civility, and the barbarians among them have made a lot of trouble leading to a stigma against them, though they can still enjoy equal status in some places.

Languages

Common is actually one of the dragon languages. They are the ones who basically stopped the early contact wars and brokered the peace treaties. As the key merchants, most everyone already had some idea of their language, and the simple syllables and structure made it something nearly everyone could actually speak, making it the most widespread language.

That said, while most races can speak it, it is rather difficult for many. Thus a group has been working on an interlingua, Tradespeak, for everyone to use, which has gotten some official support though it has been a slow process and is best known among scholars and merchants and some nobles.

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Each world had numerous languages of it's own, and most people can easily communicate with others from the same world in a variety of languages.