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.