The Niontians

You walk along, the cloud cover above hiding the sun from view. You glance over at your shadow on the wall, then do a double-take, as nothing else has a shadow. You stare in horror as the shadow begins moving on its own, and scream as it raises a ghostly crossbow... You've just met your first Niontian. In a small departure from the plan, we're first going to spend a post exploring the origin of the Niontians, before heading to their Realm next post.

This story begins, as most of mine do, with the name. "Niontian" originated as a nonsense word used in the oft-mentioned short story that started this world (which I should finish one day, methinks). The story went through two drafts (or, at least, the first few pages went through two drafts), and in both "Niontian" showed up as an architectural term. In draft one, I mentioned "a brand-new Niontian residence shoved up next to a millennia-old Pestilence Prime guild hall," and in the other, I used as a setpiece "a Niontian museum that had long since been converted into a makeshift community." The name didn't long stay fallow -- when I decided to turn the story into a campaign world, I made a list of all the names, terms, and words I'd put in as fluff, deciding which ones to turn into something substantial. I liked the name "Niontian" quite a lot -- it sounded dark and creepy to me -- but it was voted down by my playtest group when I ran it by them for which names should develop into Bloodlines.

I was not to be dissuaded. When coming up with ideas for the "Outlander" Bloodline -- that is to say, all the weird creatures that live in other realms who would serve as enemies and player options for those who wanted something exotic (like the D&D player who always wants to play a race from the splatbooks, or even the Monster Manual) -- Niontians came back. I brainstormed a handful of ideas, trying to make them all bizarre and unlike what I had seen in my D&D days. Among those ideas was "living shadows." I thought the name "Niontians" seemed to fit with "living shadows," so I set them together and, without further explanation, called it good.

The next time Niontians came up was when I was creating the second playtest campaign. One of my players had requested a "big bad" race to fight against, something that could be pure evil and that would not overlap with the PC races -- "so we're not always just fighting people," as she put it. I didn't really get it, myself -- I think fighting people is far more interesting than monsters -- but I do like the idea of the "big bad" villains to bind a campaign together into more than unrelated adventures. So I looked through the Outlander ideas for a species that might invade the City, to provide a large-scale threat and so that the heroes would have a definite goal to mark an endpoint to the campaign. Of all my Outlanders, the two I found most interesting were the Niontians and the Fractal Elves, who are designed to be far too strange to understand, much less do something as mundane as invading, so Niontians it was.

Little did I know how complicated that would end up being.

A word of warning: should you ever decide to incorporate living shadows in your own campaigns, think long and hard before doing so. I have had quite a headache figuring out the ramifications of 2-dimensional creatures and how they would interact with a 3-D world -- and my players are not the kind of people to just let this stuff go without explanation.

So, starting with a few ideas I came up with from reading Flatland and concluding (for now) with a long, long conversation with my playtesters in the midst of a play session, we have these facts about Niontians:

• The original Niontia Prime is a 2-D world where humans can’t survive. 
• When in a 3-D Realm, the Niontians live on the surface of the ground -- or side of rocks, or structures, etc. 
• Niontians build their own shadow structures that are barriers for them, but not for humans -- but 3-D barriers hold no problem for the Niontians. 
• In nature, Niontians can see only along the 2-D place -- when a human’s foot leaves the ground, it vanishes. 
• Niontian Crafters, especially Shadowshapers and Farsharers, can perceive the 3-D world. 
• Shadowsteel is one of the only substances that can affect both Niontians and 3-D creatures (or “corporeals”/”corpies.” 
• Niontians are essentially the first Shadowshapers -- they can create and control shadows, and are vulnerable to either too much light (extinguishing them) or too much darkness (they are lost in it and spread into nothingness). As in Avatar: The Last Airbender, where the first Airbenders learned it from the Flying Bison, the first corporeal Shadowshapers simply learned how to do what the Niontians know how to do instinctively. 

Well, now that we've spent a post on Niontians, let's move on to their nearest colony Realm... next time! See you then as we explore Niontia Unprime 236!

The Inspiration

A few months ago, I decided to start up a roleplaying campaign with my girlfriend and some friends of hers. I had been running another game in another city, but the sci-fi system I'd been using was a turn-off to my prospective gamers - and the "urban fantasy" model I'd used another time was also not for them. So - high fantasy it was to be. I replied with one caveat: this was not going to be Dungeons & Dragons. I've played in plenty of D&D games, and, frankly, I've grown tired of it. Too many dour dwarves, too many squishy wizards, too many orcs and goblins and all the old tropes that haven't been interesting or original since Tolkien first laid them down in the forties. I wanted something grander, something stranger, something I could call mine.


So I sat back and thought about old half-finished projects: the crashed spaceship turned fantasy world (abandoned once I learned just how much a cliche that was); the D&D-with-the-serial-numbers-filed-off, distinguished only by a variety of anthropomorphic animals that, once again, seemed much more original back when I first conceived it; the RPG treatment of the War in Heaven (still on my list, but with both an atheist and a fervent believer among my prospective players, I decided against that one)... and then I hit upon a half-finished short story that had come tumbling from me a few months previously. It had everything I needed: a world without boundaries; an unusual setting, as close to unique as you can get in this day and age; and only a few details laid out, with immense room to grow.

This story, and the matching campaign setting that began to spill slowly out of my head, has more than a few inspirations. First and foremost are several works by Neil Gaiman (who is as a god to me): The Sandman -- specifically, the arc collected as Worlds' End. The inn known as Worlds' End is a place where people from a variety of times and places and realities can meet and tell stories. The meeting of innumerable worlds represented there -- and, most specifically, the stories "Cluracan's Tale" and "Cerements," made me want to make a city where anyone from anywhere could come and meet. Another work by Gaiman, the obscure short story "How to Sell the Ponti Bridge," was of surprising influence -- it showed another cross-dimensional world, and an off-handed line of dialogue mentions "Dead-Blooded," which proved to be... well, I'll get to that later.


Another significant influence was another worlds-spanning work, the latest volume of House of Mystery for DC Comics, written by Bill Willingham and Matthew Sturges. In that work, the titular House of Mystery holds doors to an infinitude of worlds and settings, from pulp sci-fi to sword and sorcery to Lovecraftian horror -- and every character who walks in one of those doors tells a story from their corner of the multiverse. It's worth noting that all of these works I've mentioned so far share two facets: they feature a locale that can be reached from anywhere, and the travelers tell stories of their own strange reality to the others (and thus, by extension, to the reader).


A variety of other works of fiction have conspired in my mind to create this campaign setting, mostly distinguished by the meeting of multiple worlds and/or a large, important city that is as much a character as any individual in the story. And so, drawing on these multitude of sources, I began to create:


The City of Lives


Next time: Bloodlines



Inspirational Bibliography:

Books
* The Chronicles of Amber, Roger Zelazny, 1970-1991 The Great Book of Amber: The Complete Amber Chronicles, 1-10 (Chronicles of Amber)
* The Discworld series, Terry Pratchett, 1983-present (depictions of the city of Ankh-Morkpork) Terry Pratchett Discworld Collection 7 Books Set (Unseen Academicals, the Colour ofMagic, GoingPostal, Making Money, the Light Fantastic, Equal Rites, Mort)
* "How to Sell the Ponti Bridge," Neil Gaiman, found in M is for Magic, 2007 M Is for Magic
* "How To Talk To Girls At Parties," Neil Gaiman, found in Fragile Things, 2006 and M is for Magic, 2007 M Is for Magic
* The MythAdventures series, Robert Asprin (and later Jody Lynn Nye), 1978-present Another Fine Myth/Myth Conceptions 2-in1 (Myth 2-in-1)


Comics
* House of Mystery, Bill Willingham and Matthew Sturges, 2008-present House of Mystery Vol. 1: Room and Boredom
* Lucifer, Mike Carey, 2000-2006 (particularly the stories featuring Christopher Rudd and the nobility of Hell) Lucifer Vol. 1: Devil in the Gateway
* The Sandman, Neil Gaiman, 1989-1996 (especially stories found in vol. 8, Worlds' End) The Sandman Vol. 1: Preludes and Nocturnes


RPGs
* The Dresden Files RPG, Evil Hat Dresden Files Rpg Volume One; Your Story
* Mage: The Ascension, White Wolf Mage: The Ascension (Revised Edition)
* Planescape, TSR Planescape Campaign Setting (Advanced Dungeons & Dragons)
* Spirit of the Century, Evil Hat Spirit of the Century RPG