Races of The Realm: Saytirin (part 2)

Welcome back!

Now, after building a Saytirin archetype. We needed some example aspects.  We wanted examples that help push the stereotypes we wanted for the race.

Yes, stereotypes are bad.  They're also a narrative tool that is ignored at your peril.  Your players will not just instantly understand what a Saytirin is without some guidelines, and aspects (and keywords) help to share a mutual understanding of a subject.

We came up with a lot of concepts for the social design of the race, but finally stuck with the following archetypes:

• "Everything has a price"  Saytirin are both an extremely materialistic and spiritual people at the same time, and this shows in how they deal with each other.  They barter for everything, and haggling is a way of life.  Much of this is ritualistic, such as the idea of arranged marriages based on "selling" one of the newlyweds to the other's family.  The double meaning of this aspect also touches on the idea that some prices are just too high, and should never be paid.  This taps into the idea that while trade and barter is a symbolic part of Saytirin culture, being truly greedy is not.
• "Saytirin Hospitality"  This is a race known for it's manners and almost obsessive hospitality.  It speaks volumes as to how they interact with each other, and hints at how they might treat others outside their race as well.  The ability to be a gracious and generous host is an important social aspect of Saytirin society.  Their manners tend toward self-abasement while extolling the virtues of their guests, and the same is expected in return.  Rude guests are almost always treated with perfect manners and hospitality, and then never invited back. (or invited anywhere else, for that matter.  Word spreads quickly).  Their opinion of other races tends toward the negative in these matters though, since they often don't follow the same social structures and seem 'rude' to Saytirin hosts.
• "Family First"  The Saytirin idea of 'Family' is a complex subject, but easily worth the time.  In the most basic sense, the idea of family is much wider (and stronger) than in other races.  A missing child or grandmother will not only gain immediate notice of both close and extended family members, but by the community as a whole, with them often dropping what they are doing just to help with the current crisis.  This has a lot to do with how they view their friends:  If they consider you close enough to befriend you, then you're close enough to be family, and will be treated as such (for better or worse).  

We considered this a good start, and stopped here.  By the time of writing this article, it should be said that they have fleshed out quite a bit more, and have turned out to be a very viable race, with a solid depth to them.

After this, we decided to tap into their racial magic and make some aspects based on it:

• "Saytirin Witch"  With us deciding to have "Visceral" magic be a part of the Saytirin culture, it begs us to consider how other would view a Will-bending Saytirin spellcaster dealing in blood and spirits.  This lead me to think of the New Orleans voodoo practitioners and how outsiders view them.  I then decided that a combination of Arabic/Romanian/Voodoo looked great for their spellcasters.  To make it more fun, the amount of each culture varies from caster to caster.
• "Save us from Evil" Considering the above, we decided to shake up the idea on how the race viewed it's own magic.  After a quick discussion, we decided that they view it as an important part of their culture that is entwined with their rituals and religious practices.  Since their form of magic is so tied into strong emotions, they often watch spellcasters of their own culture in an attempt to prevent possible transgressions.  Those that cross the line are dealt with quietly and privately, making sure as few outsiders know about it as possible.  As of now, we have only defined one major crime, below...
• "You shall not wield magic to kill"  It's simple, you never kill with magic.  Ever.  Even in self defense.  Even as a last resort.  Even when a dozen other would die.  Or a hundred.  You can use a knife, or poison, or ANYTHING else, but not magic.  it's not really defined what will happen if you do, but it's considered taboo and worth of a death sentence, so it's probably bad.  Very bad.  Epic-level bad.  To the point that Saytirins doing this are titled "demons" and executed as quickly as possible in a dark hidden place, and the body burned.  Seriously, this is roll up new character stuff here for players, about the same level as tossing themselves into a volcano while cursing the gods and cutting their own wrists.
• It should be noted that animating a corpse, while distasteful, is not the same as killing.  No death sentence for that.  You just won't get invited to any of the good parties. That said, all other rules for assault, murder, theft, and the like still apply.  You do bad things, and nobody will care HOW you did it. 

That's enough for today, I think.  Maybe next time we'll look at the Borne, and how they are formed from magic and materials of their local environment.

Races of The Realm: Saytirin (part 1)

The Realm is, as of now, a pretty undefined space.  Botany and I had just decided on a fantasy campaign, and it was now up in the air as to what we wanted it to be.

We decided that first thing we wanted was the races for our new world.  We decided to grab for a few easy ones to start with.

Our first race was the Saytirin.  A race of satyrs and fauns, we hammered of some cultural archetypes that would help define them for the campaign.

• We need a common race that can run around with humans without being so rare as to be hard to fit in.  We decided that this race would fill that roll.
• As for cultural archetypes, we looked at them and decide they came from a culture of nomadic wanderers with Romanian and Arabic roots.  This sets them apart from the standard local human/knights/wizards/priests archtypes the humans are going to get.

At this point, we actually began working on some of the other races, such as the Centaurian Empire (why yes, they do have a regimented and Roman society, thank you very much!), and Felixians. (cat girls for the win!)  After we hammered those into some useable stereotypes, we came back to this race and tried to figure out what made them special.

• We decided to make them a race of people that were known for their interest in money.  Common opinion is that a Saytirin would steal your last gold tooth in a deal, but the reality was to be more complex.  In this case, we worked up the aspect of "Everything has a price", and used the double meaning to imply not only do they tend to try to estimate the value of everything, but that they have a cultural knowledge that some things come at too high a price.
• This made for an interesting idea of a race of merchants and peddlers, and that in the city (un-named at this point), we would have a Saytirin market district where most of them would live and do business.  This helped to decide they had an insular culture that separated them from the human population.  We went with strong family ties, and a careful manners.  Their use of money in many cases has become ritualistic, with marriages involving careful exchanges of dowries and payments from each family to the other in an attempt to gain prestige with their efforts.
• With their tendency toward the material, to give them a racial magic theme.  While not all of the race has access to magic, all those that do, use Visceral Magic.  This magic has several subtypes, including Blood magic (normally the caster's), Tantric (that deals in all kinds of strong emotion and boosting physical stats, think berserkers and succubus), and Necrotic (Why yes, undead and spirits too).  The nature of this magic was not really evil, but easily misunderstood, even by other Saytirin, leading to stories of witches and dark rituals.

The last part (magic) took some serious brainstorming, and even now, we're still hammering out the rules for how this magic works.  This did define that each race would have its own magic types, and that race would lock in what kinds of magic someone could do.  The basics are a skill named after the type of magic (blood, for example) and at least one aspect with the proper keyword (Like witch).  We decide this would offer the race a ton of story to work with.

It's late, so we'll discuss this race more later.

Night!

Introduction

Fate Core, as written by Evil Hat Productions, is a set of rules for a cinematic role playing game.  Unlike most paper and pen rpgs, the rules for Fate are designed to ignore the idea of power balance between players and the setting, and direct themselves at balancing the story and narrative so that everyone gets a chance to shine as the hero of their own story.

As such, there are no equipment lists, treasure indexes, or monster manual.  There are just simple rules that define how conflicts in the game are run, using the same mechanics for everything from dramatic arguments to superhero throw-downs.

My wife, Botany, and I wanted to really get into Fate Core as our primary RPG, just because it was a set of rules for something we've been doing for years.  Telling each other stories.  To this end, we fell back on building a campaign setting that we could make use of for not only learning the system of Fate core, but to make use of its best aspects (pun intended) for the campaign.

And that's what we're writing here.

In each article, we hope to also add our comments as to why we designed the setting the way we did.  Hopefully, this will help other make the best use of Fate Core for their own projects.

See you soon.