Mortal Coil Setting Building
Last night we sat down to do some world-building for an upcoming campaign of Mortal Coil. It went really, really well - the only issue is that the world is so rich that the campaign might wind up being longer than I originally planned. I’m going to post the “Theme Document” here, which outlines some of the concepts and rules we came up with, along with the characters the players came up with.
We started out by deciding that the tone we’re going for is what we called “magical realism” - not particularly grimdark and depressing, but neither too light or zany. Sort of the tone of the Dresden Files or Perdido Street Station - magic is real and has real consequences.
In terms of setting, we really kind of went wild. We decided we wanted to build a fantasy world rather than setting the game in our own world, and quickly decided on a magical steampunk kind of setting with Victorian-level technology and several different magic systems coexisting. We further decided that several centuries prior to the start of the game, some kind of cataclysm called the Bleaching took place which made the planet’s surface uninhabitable, leading humanity to construct elevated cities in order to escape the devastation. What actually caused the event is unknown, but various magical forces were blamed, and following the Bleaching, magic became heavily regulated, if not outlawed altogether, for a time. However, in the ensuing centuries, magic-users have begun to retake influence, leading to tension among various power groups in the setting. The game will actually take place for the most part in an elevated city called Coil.
In terms of magic systems, we decided on four different (but potentially related) kinds of magic. First is the purest “magic,” like what you think of when you think of Merlin the magician. This magic is innate in nature and only a few people are capable of it - this kind of magic is passed down from wizard to apprentice, and was most heavily regulated following the Bleaching. Over time, wizards have used their power to accumulate a great deal of influence and so have circumvented most of these regulations. In some areas, wizards even run city-states as direct rulers.
The second kind of magic is based on heightening a person’s physical ability. This kind of magic is taught in exclusive academies which produce a cultured warrior class with essentially supernatural athletic and combat abilities. People learning this kind of magic don’t really think of it as magic - they see it as a philosophy of physical perfection called the Line. The Line involves extensive training in swordsmanship, and one member of the Line is a terrifying force when pitted against even large numbers of untrained people.
The third kind of magic we came up with is a sort of magical engineering, also taught in academies and not really considered magic by its pracitioners. With magic such a part of society, it has had a great deal of impact on technology, and this has trickled down to the point where it is essentially ubiquitous. This magic is the most diffuse and “middle class,” with magical engineers being employed by wealthy landowners and industrialists throughout most cities.
The final type of magic we decided on is alchemy, which sort of straddles the line between magic and science. We decided that this branch of magic was essentially founded by a cult that believed (and still believes) that it could summon a god to earth by building a suitable vessel for him. Following the Bleaching, this cult was completely outlawed, but a secular version of alchemy cropped up, with practitioners using their craft more scientifically. In reality, the cult was not stamped out, and many of these practitioners remained believers.
One odd magical quirk we came up with was that both magical engineers and alchemists are able to modify human bodies - engineers using clockwork parts, and achemists using a bizarre glass-like substance. We decided that no races other than humans exist in these cities, though there are legends that another race lived on the planet’s surface before the Bleaching and was left behind. Parents tell their children that these creatures will sneak into their homes and take them back down to the surface if they misbehave. However, there are significantly modified humans living in these cities, as well as clockwork automatons that act as servants (the capability to create AI exists, but humans intentionally restrict the clockwork beings’ intelligence).
We next thought through some of the themes we want to explore with the game, and one that jumped out immediately was class differences. We determined that natural resources would be exceedingly rare, and would be controlled by a small class of landowners and industrialists, while most people would work as servants, factory workers, or miners or other workers doing dangerous high-altitude work. Metal and stone would be mined from the peaks of certain extremely tall mountains, owned by extremely wealthy families. Other such families would own farming systems, shipping lanes, and water farms (which would be far from the mountains, necessitating sophisticated shipping, mostly done by airship and by trains that travel from city to city using sky tracks that connect them). Magical engineers and the Line would in large part serve the interests of the upper classes. High reliance on shipping lanes would also lead to air piracy at a pretty widespread level.
The cities themselves would be stratified literally as well as metaphorically. Upper classes would live in the highest sections, furthest from the pollution of the Bleaching. Poorer citizens would live in lower, more polluted areas (both residual pollution from the Bleaching and areas contaminated by factory waste). Some of these regions would suffer from extreme disrepair, even to the point where the ground in certain places would not be level (leading to being able to tell that someone comes from a poor area based on how they walk).
In terms of characters, Greg decided to play an air pirate and former member of the Line named Konstanin. Konstanin had fallen in love with a young lady while serving the Line, but she had spurned him for an aristocratic Lineman. Angry and young, Konstantin became involved with a faction of Lineman with a more egalitarian philosophy who began fighting against the systematic oppression of the poor. This “uprising” was brutally put down by the Line proper, though in the process the love of his life was killed (I’m not sure which side she was fighting on). Konstantin turned to air piracy (and alcohol) as a result. Konstantin’s passions are a hatred of the upper classes, a duty to look out for his younger brother, Jacob, and a love for the neighborhood in which he makes his home.
Chris settled on an alchemist named Jacob (Konstantin’s younger brother), a member of the cult of the Born God who intends to bring his god to life through alchemy. His passions are a love of his god and a desire to bring him to life, a duty to mix different forms of magic in order to achieve something higher, and a fear that Konstantin will destroy himself.
Jenni decided to play a young wizard named Lizabeth Mason, a mage’s apprentice whose master, and older wizard named Prufrock, has recently fallen into some kind of coma. Lizabeth’s primary desire is to find a way to restore him to life, believing that he is the key to solving the city’s problems. Lizabeth comes from a poorer area of the city, where her father works as a structural engineer in charge of maintaining the city’s platforms. She also has a fear that his job will one day kill him.
In terms of issues that the players want to tackle in the fiction, we've got a few. The characters want to see what's on the surface of the planet several hundred years after the Bleaching, they want to explore the tensions between the classes in Coil and the various sub-factions within the groups outlined above, and they want to get into the potential for a war of some kind (potentially an uprising by the proletariat). More than enough there to fuel a campaign, I think.
So that’s our initial setup. I’m really interested to see where it goes!
We started out by deciding that the tone we’re going for is what we called “magical realism” - not particularly grimdark and depressing, but neither too light or zany. Sort of the tone of the Dresden Files or Perdido Street Station - magic is real and has real consequences.
In terms of setting, we really kind of went wild. We decided we wanted to build a fantasy world rather than setting the game in our own world, and quickly decided on a magical steampunk kind of setting with Victorian-level technology and several different magic systems coexisting. We further decided that several centuries prior to the start of the game, some kind of cataclysm called the Bleaching took place which made the planet’s surface uninhabitable, leading humanity to construct elevated cities in order to escape the devastation. What actually caused the event is unknown, but various magical forces were blamed, and following the Bleaching, magic became heavily regulated, if not outlawed altogether, for a time. However, in the ensuing centuries, magic-users have begun to retake influence, leading to tension among various power groups in the setting. The game will actually take place for the most part in an elevated city called Coil.
In terms of magic systems, we decided on four different (but potentially related) kinds of magic. First is the purest “magic,” like what you think of when you think of Merlin the magician. This magic is innate in nature and only a few people are capable of it - this kind of magic is passed down from wizard to apprentice, and was most heavily regulated following the Bleaching. Over time, wizards have used their power to accumulate a great deal of influence and so have circumvented most of these regulations. In some areas, wizards even run city-states as direct rulers.
The second kind of magic is based on heightening a person’s physical ability. This kind of magic is taught in exclusive academies which produce a cultured warrior class with essentially supernatural athletic and combat abilities. People learning this kind of magic don’t really think of it as magic - they see it as a philosophy of physical perfection called the Line. The Line involves extensive training in swordsmanship, and one member of the Line is a terrifying force when pitted against even large numbers of untrained people.
The third kind of magic we came up with is a sort of magical engineering, also taught in academies and not really considered magic by its pracitioners. With magic such a part of society, it has had a great deal of impact on technology, and this has trickled down to the point where it is essentially ubiquitous. This magic is the most diffuse and “middle class,” with magical engineers being employed by wealthy landowners and industrialists throughout most cities.
The final type of magic we decided on is alchemy, which sort of straddles the line between magic and science. We decided that this branch of magic was essentially founded by a cult that believed (and still believes) that it could summon a god to earth by building a suitable vessel for him. Following the Bleaching, this cult was completely outlawed, but a secular version of alchemy cropped up, with practitioners using their craft more scientifically. In reality, the cult was not stamped out, and many of these practitioners remained believers.
One odd magical quirk we came up with was that both magical engineers and alchemists are able to modify human bodies - engineers using clockwork parts, and achemists using a bizarre glass-like substance. We decided that no races other than humans exist in these cities, though there are legends that another race lived on the planet’s surface before the Bleaching and was left behind. Parents tell their children that these creatures will sneak into their homes and take them back down to the surface if they misbehave. However, there are significantly modified humans living in these cities, as well as clockwork automatons that act as servants (the capability to create AI exists, but humans intentionally restrict the clockwork beings’ intelligence).
We next thought through some of the themes we want to explore with the game, and one that jumped out immediately was class differences. We determined that natural resources would be exceedingly rare, and would be controlled by a small class of landowners and industrialists, while most people would work as servants, factory workers, or miners or other workers doing dangerous high-altitude work. Metal and stone would be mined from the peaks of certain extremely tall mountains, owned by extremely wealthy families. Other such families would own farming systems, shipping lanes, and water farms (which would be far from the mountains, necessitating sophisticated shipping, mostly done by airship and by trains that travel from city to city using sky tracks that connect them). Magical engineers and the Line would in large part serve the interests of the upper classes. High reliance on shipping lanes would also lead to air piracy at a pretty widespread level.
The cities themselves would be stratified literally as well as metaphorically. Upper classes would live in the highest sections, furthest from the pollution of the Bleaching. Poorer citizens would live in lower, more polluted areas (both residual pollution from the Bleaching and areas contaminated by factory waste). Some of these regions would suffer from extreme disrepair, even to the point where the ground in certain places would not be level (leading to being able to tell that someone comes from a poor area based on how they walk).
In terms of characters, Greg decided to play an air pirate and former member of the Line named Konstanin. Konstanin had fallen in love with a young lady while serving the Line, but she had spurned him for an aristocratic Lineman. Angry and young, Konstantin became involved with a faction of Lineman with a more egalitarian philosophy who began fighting against the systematic oppression of the poor. This “uprising” was brutally put down by the Line proper, though in the process the love of his life was killed (I’m not sure which side she was fighting on). Konstantin turned to air piracy (and alcohol) as a result. Konstantin’s passions are a hatred of the upper classes, a duty to look out for his younger brother, Jacob, and a love for the neighborhood in which he makes his home.
Chris settled on an alchemist named Jacob (Konstantin’s younger brother), a member of the cult of the Born God who intends to bring his god to life through alchemy. His passions are a love of his god and a desire to bring him to life, a duty to mix different forms of magic in order to achieve something higher, and a fear that Konstantin will destroy himself.
Jenni decided to play a young wizard named Lizabeth Mason, a mage’s apprentice whose master, and older wizard named Prufrock, has recently fallen into some kind of coma. Lizabeth’s primary desire is to find a way to restore him to life, believing that he is the key to solving the city’s problems. Lizabeth comes from a poorer area of the city, where her father works as a structural engineer in charge of maintaining the city’s platforms. She also has a fear that his job will one day kill him.
In terms of issues that the players want to tackle in the fiction, we've got a few. The characters want to see what's on the surface of the planet several hundred years after the Bleaching, they want to explore the tensions between the classes in Coil and the various sub-factions within the groups outlined above, and they want to get into the potential for a war of some kind (potentially an uprising by the proletariat). More than enough there to fuel a campaign, I think.
So that’s our initial setup. I’m really interested to see where it goes!