[GURPS Fantasy] Tinkering with a homebrew setting

Desert Leviathan

Goal - public brainstorming/info dump. Ask me questions or make suggestions, or just steal the good stuff with my blessing for your own games.

So I'm working on a setting for a GURPS fantasy game. The main idea is that human archwizards at the dawn of time had to build this world as an emergency response to the accidental destruction of their own world, which they probably caused. They were not as good at world making as whoever built their original home, and this place is buggy as hell. It's patched together out of a lot of only marginally compatible regions, where individual wizards tried to set themselves up as God-Kings, and redefined local physics to match whatever insane science experiments each one was interested in. But those guys have been dead for thousands of years, and reality has fallen into a mostly-stable configuration (with huge spans of the map marked "DON'T GO HERE, GRAVITY IS DIFFERENT" or whatever). The PCs are descended for the most part from them, or from their engineered slave races.

The first thing I'm going to do here is outline the sentient races. But broken into separate posts, because it is an unholy Wall of Text.

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Humans (or sufficiently Human-Like to produce offspring together)

Architects: Only a half-dozen of the original godlike archwizards are still around. These are the ones who were most dedicated to preserving stability, and their vigilance is essential to the continued existence of the universe, which is why they were meticulously avoided by the other more volatile wizards in the civil war that wiped most of them out. The descendants of the Architects also have power. Magic in this world is mostly a function of the reality-editing devices having shoddy security functions. They are meant to go "Are you [authorized Architect] (yes/no)", but are capable of reaching a "maybe" status for someone genetically similar to one of the Architects, or possessing the reincarnated spirit of one. Magic-users who aren't descended from the Architects exist, but they're subject to additional complications. All of the other listed strains of "Humans" have interbred with the descendants of Architects to a sufficient degree for Wizards to manifest among them.

Artficially constructed humans: Most slave races were constructed by a cabal of Architects who went all "Isle of Dr. Moreau". Their experiments in elevating lesser primates wound up being indistinguishable from regular humans. This factor of their origins has been carefully concealed, and they've interbred so extensively with the descendants of the Architects that pure strains are vanishingly rare.

Dwarves: Humans adapted for maintaining the physical integrity of the planet. The Architects understood geology only loosely, and found it kind of dull. But every time they tried to build a planet by just mashing desired ratios of elements together and waiting for the surface to cool off, the forces involved were too unstable. Instead of learn to do it better, they created the Dwarves with psychologies very interested in that sort of crap, and pretty much made them the Material World Maintenance and Repair department.

Goblins: Same deal as the Dwarves, but for the underworld - the Ethereal Depths. The Architects weren't fans of the souls of the dead being all over the place until they were reborn, so they built an Underworld, then built the Goblins to police the boundaries, and make sure it was an inevitable and one-way trip. They are fearsome fighters, as it's their function to assassinate those who make bids at immortality that are disruptive to the overall stability of the world (i.e. everyone but those half-dozen surviving Architects, and their authorized servants). Pure Goblins are rare outside the underworld, but Gremlins (Goblins with some Dwarf ancestry) are common in most of the civilized world.

Giants: Another unexpected problem the Architects ran into is that their new world had no Realm of Dreams. Slumber was just time without awareness, and it wasn't particularly restful. The Giants were built to have huge sophisticated brains that hosted an artificial Dream Realm. They spend most of their adulthood only a foot or two taller than the average human, but in later life they feel compelled to find some comfortable geography to hunker down in and grow to massive size, giving shape to the dreaming world that all other races visit. But the Ephemeral Reaches is also a physical place you can walk into, if you know the way. It's just a physical place hosted in the minds of sleeping giants. The souls of the dead pass through here once they've spent enough time in the Ethereal Depths to abandon all memory and attachments.

Elves: Much as their new world lacked a default mechanism for ushering the souls of the dead out, it lacked a system for directing loose souls into new bodies. The Astral Heights are where souls that are ready to return to the world go after they have been rejuvenated by a span in the Ephemeral Reaches, and the Elves were made to govern this process. This is the most esoteric and unfamiliar of worlds for mortals, and even those Elves who live in the Material World full time have a hard time articulating what exactly their Astral kin do.

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Sentient Animal Hybrids - from the same experiments that elevated most humans from lesser primates. All of them have built-in problems that their asshole creators designed to induce subservient dependency and population control. All the ones that thrive in the modern era have found ways around these problems.

Suvarna: Birdlike folk made from Corvids, with a touch of Raptors and Parrots. Without a specific magical procedure, they can only breed male offspring. The females have developed a form of ritual magic unrelated to descent from the Architects, which lets them fake this magical procedure. Doing so requires a substantial quantity of Gold as a material reagent though, so the over-abundant males are in fierce competition to accumulate enough wealth to permit them to mate. Some males use alchemical potions to toughen their lightweight bones, greatly increase their muscle mass, enhance endurance, reflexes and senses, although they become sterile in the process, and shorten their maximum life expectancy by around 20%. Mated units typically include one fertile male, one fertile female, and one of these Guardian males to protect the nest, who are treated by their culture as a distinct gender with its own pronouns and such.

Merrows: What happens when you give an Octopus telekinesis? It stops envying bony races for all their wonderful tools, because now it can fly around in outer space and grow to sizes that influence the ocean tides from orbit. Second oldest of the elevated races (after the primate-derived non-architect humans), and most physically similar to its base species. Mostly live on one of the Moons now.

Shelks: Derived from aquatic mammals, they went extinct during the Architect Civil Wars. OR DID THEY? May have migrated to the Ephemeral Reaches and become super unrecognizably weird.

(Dog guys?): Derived from canines, they went extinct during the Architect Civil Wars. Indeed, their sacrifice ended that tumultuous period, and their culture is looked back on as something of an ethical "golden age" by modern humans. Their architecture and art is venerated in a similar fashion to the modern US designing most government buildings in a Greco/Roman style, and a subculture of wizard kids with too much mana on their hands sometimes deliberately mutate themselves to resemble these, as a rebellious teenage political statement that only makes sense to themselves.

Heidar - Dust Elves: Long-limbed desert nomads known for their endurance. Derived from horses, although you probably wouldn't guess it just by looking at them. Lacking any genetic link to the Architects, they've made their own strange pacts with Angels and Elementals.

Trolls: Porcine-folk. Immune to practically all diseases and poisons, but carriers for many of them. Violently insane, tend to travel in huge filthy hordes that make large spans of geography impassable. Like the Heidar, you wouldn't guess that they're Pig People at first glance. I'm trying to avoid too much of an Anthropomorphic Cartoon Animal vibe on most of these.

Ogres: Gentle thick-skinned giants, made for heavy labor from Elephants, and engineered with intense pacifism and docile temperaments.

(Cat guys?): The only strain to escape the Architect Civil War went feral, and has since reverted to bestial intelligence.

Alshendan: Arachnid-folk who have developed a culture of intense honor and loyalty, mostly because they have to constantly convince the other races that they aren't HUGE FREAKY MONSTERS HOLY CRAP, if they want to have any non-violent interactions. Of course, they totally are huge freaky monsters, just huge freaky monsters with strict codes of conduct that direct their pointy and venomous parts exclusively towards even worse monsters.

(Goat guys?): Weird mountain hermits, so abrasive that they can't even stand each other for extended durations. Intuitive grasp of mathematics greatly exceeding most humans. They have figured out a lot of back-door tricks to reality manipulation, and maintain a sophisticated magical communication network. They just don't like physical proximity to other people.

(Rat guys?): Aggressive, prolific and territorial. Attempts to inhibit their breeding failed, and the Architects deemed them unfit for use for... whatever their designed purpose was. A few test subjects survive in stasis, in long-abandoned labs. If these were to get loose, things would be pretty dire for everyone else in the world for a while.

(Bat guys?): All the same problems as the Rat Guys experiment, but they fly and some of them drink blood.

Kobolds: Lizard-folk. Created just as an extra experiment group in Intelligence Boosting trials. All these other species were selected because the base animals are already very smart, or show signs of traits that could evolve into complex intelligence. The Kobolds were a weird underdog joke. But they're scrappy little bastards, sturdier than anyone anticipated, and survive in the hidden cracks of the world. Most people only know Kobolds exist because of widespread "dumb Kobold" jokes, and never meet one until they experience Kobolod door-to-door evangelism for their secret apocryphal dragon god. Despite Kobold stupidity being considered axiomatic by all cultures aware of them (including their own), Kobolds have a proprietary magic system that produces surprisingly strong results, and has no ties to the Architects.

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Spiritual Entities

Angels: BIG SECRET - the Architects weren't really "Archwizards" so much as "Sufficiently Advanced Scientists" from Earth's Future. The Angels were stable psionic energy patterns imprinted with artificial intelligence, but because they were named "Angels" as an act of humor/hubris, they inherited a lot of the cultural baggage of that concept from the minds of their makers. There are very few of them left, because the temptation to become and/or follow a New Lucifer was encoded into their narrative archetype. There wasn't so much a single Fall as there were multiple waves of competing Falls. Most of the ones that survive resisted falling due to being "glitchy", caught up in repeating appointed tasks beyond the required time. The last Architects keep these sequestered in spacial anomalies and deploy them sparingly, like self-aware power tools that won't turn off. A large part of ritual magic involves accessing the power of these insane demigods.

Devils: Locked outside of space, they come in a dizzying array of types. Some of them are actively malicious, vengeful or nihilistic, but they're all far more worryingly sane than the surviving Angels.

Relics: Angels who remained loyal, but weren't immune to falling due to insanity, were given the option to become other things with more stable configurations. Some became objects (The Eschaton Razor is a sword that used to be the Angel of Judgment, tasked with determining if a thing was so detrimental to the world that it should be cast out of it entirely), some became beasts (Camael the Feathered Dragon was once the Angel of Purity, and now serves as the executive assistant to the Chief Architect), and some became people (

Eidolons: A human spirit can escape the cycle of reincarnation by stepping into a role vacated by a fallen Angel, or functionally merging with a Relic. The wielder of the Eschaton Razor, over time, becomes the Eidolon of Judgment. The eight Elements of Magic each have a semi-permanent Eidolon to regulate it, Wizards of supernal power who work directly under the Architects.

Elementals: Generally these are simple spirits of automatic processes that ensure that those processes work correctly, with very little wit or initiative for anything outside that job, and a lifespan only as long as is needed to finish it. Sometimes they grow out of control, and each of the eight elements has an Apocalyptic Beast that its elementals can grow into. Preventing that from happening is the primary duty of the formerly-human Elemental Eidolons.

Manifestations: Any spirit created by a mortal Wizard that grows sophisticated enough to endure without a direct input of magical energy from its creator. So named because wizards find these sorts of free-floating spells distasteful, and refuse to dignify them with a more elaborate title.

Shenen: The void in which the Architects hung their world had not always been empty. Their creation sent ripples into the darkness and called forth echoes of the world that was before, a world that had deliberately destroyed itself, and resented the intrusion on its repose. The Shenen are void-monsters from outside space/time that want to wreck everything the Architects have built. They possess people and turn them into venomous slug-dragons, and defend themselves by projecting powerful illusions into the minds of anyone who might attack them, making it nearly impossible to discern their real location and other traits. The most prestigious military organization in the world is dedicated to fighting these creatures full-time, and its members are given diplomatic access to nearly all nations, regardless of their origins.


Inorganic Material Intelligences

Golems (Malstronian): Shortly after the Final Fall, the Architects experimented with creating physical automatons to replace the Angels. They were never successful at developing these to a complexity beyond menial labor without them developing similar psychological problems to the Angels, and wound up just using them as maintenance bots for their cities. They come in a few varieties, structurally suited for cleaning and industrial repair (Black), agriculture (White), civil defense (Red) and chasing off ghosts (Translucent. Decomissioned once they built the Goblins). These have a hive mind structure and a number of specialized castes, and with the Architects long gone, clash over the ruins of their ancient cities, where the borders between their respective domains are now hazy.

Golems (Clayborn): An anomaly only recently created by three wizard brothers, these are fully self-aware, and capable of manufacturing others of their kind.

Lich: Sometimes a person trying to make themself immortal just makes the tie between their body and spirit invulnerable instead, and the body goes ahead and dies anyway. The Goblins mostly track these as scientific curiosities, if they can't figure out a way to kill them. These are the only form of corporeal undead in this setting.

Desert Leviathan

So yeah. That's a pretty good Text Monolith so far. Right now, what I'm working on is racial templates for all of the above. Most of the organic races are pretty simple, at least. Any that anyone wants to see developed first?