The Fearless DM

I”ve posted this picture before, but here it is once more: It’s a Dragonborn! Except I respun it as a sort of Ki-Rin-ish Dragonborn.

Because.. why not?

The other day (this was Thanksgiving weekend) my older son and I got a notebook and started hammering out a “worldbook” for a future D&D campaign. I wanted to show him how I did it, and I wanted to see his feedback. He’s at the age where he was proposing some worldbuilding stuff to me, and had spent all weekend playing Skyrim anyhow. So we talked about it.

So - one of the usual things I do- and I realize this is completely arbitrary, but it helps me focus- is to start by restricting right off the bat, the races and classes available in the world. “In this world, the fantasy is flavored like so”. Doing it that way let’s you really sculpt a unique identity to things like magic systems and so on.

So we started talking about that, and I was doodling a “planetary view”, and we came up with the idea that there is a main planet and two or three moons. But one of those moons would be a big icy crystal.And maybe, like Oa, the planet itself would be alive and sentient.

My mind started to drift back to Star Control.. remember Star Control? It had some really kick-ass alien races on there. One of those races was the Chenjesu (later known as the Chmmr) - a race of hyper-intelligent crystals.

So we wanted to incorporate (and somehow redeem) a race we both considered goofy- the Shardminds. They don’t fit in, in a regular fantasy context. BUT they are totally kick-ass if they represent a sort of alien intelligence.

Like..the Chmmr!

I got to work drawing a few, and I decided I also didn’t like the “look” of the shardmind- it’s a little too humanoid. Also, hate the name “Shardmind”. I like “The Shard” as a race name. I like Chmmr. I kinda just want to use that name. I also thought, what if a Chmmr was really just a man-sized floating chunk of intelligent crystal, and it was able to ambulate and manipulate with low-level telekinesis. So our Chmmr could never wear armor or wield melee weapons, but you could still operate a wand or implement. And then I thought.. well what if they had subraces, and one of those subraces was beefier and more ambulatory..like Goliaths! Execpt Goliaths are reskinned so that they are also a silicon/stone based lifeform- similar to Obsidimen from Earthdawn.

So it came to be we decided our icy crystalline moon was the home of the oldest race in the campaign- the Shard. The Shard are both the hyper-intelligence and psionically gifted crystals (using the Shardmind, but with restrictions on armor and weapons) as well as the stone-bodied goliaths. 

 I’m going to pst a bit about Shard culture soon. Their culture is going to be interesting, because literally every member of the race is related to (and can communicate with, in a fashion) the Great Crystal.

See you soon.