Dev Blog #0 – Introduction to Easthalen

Below is the introduction text to Easthalen, my on-off again game world that been floating in my head for far too long.

The world of Easthalen is in fact two worlds..two planes joined together through a divine act, although some view it as a punishment.
In many ways that what it was. The World Barrier was constructed almost 500 years ago to contain a mad god, Halen, to prevent him from undoing existence. Halen had somehow bound the whole of reality to his life force. If he died..so did everything else. So he was imprisoned instead and kept asleep.

This prison was built on the site of his capital city, Franner and cover it and an area of the continent on which it resides. It also sadly meant the gods had to be in the prison with him, along with some of the location population. They sacrificed themselves so that creation was spared as nothing can get past the World Barrier. Nothing. In fact time and space get mixed up and the rules of reality are bent to breaking point and beyond making it dangerous and unpredictable to approach it.

Attempts at traveling into the past, to before the creation of the World Barrier met with messy results. It was during these attempt to escape by the population that the two worlds discovered each other. Within this area, this prison for a mad god, the two twin worlds resides. The two dimensions could not be more different, yet similar. Geographically they are the same, but one is filled with magic, dragons and supernatural beings. The other with science, mutants and technology. Often people and beings who exist in one world, exist in the other, even though their personality may be different.

The creation of the World Barrier had other , unplanned effects. In the arcane world, magic energy started to build up, allowing almost all the population to be able to cast spells of some description, but only those trained in the arcane arts can cast a spell without a side-effect. In the science world, this odd energy manifested in the form of mutants and mutations. Everyone has one, with the vast majority of them being something trivial like odd coloured eyes or hair. Some are not so lucky.

This is the world of Easthalen. Two worlds joined together by unimaginable forces. Forced to share a prison with a mad, slumbering god and each other.

The main features of the world can be summed up as follows:

• Nothing gets past the barrier. Reality’s rule gets funky the closer you get to it. This allows for many things, such as an almost infinite expansion of the world and changeable areas around a core, stable zone.
• The Gods are very real and for those worthy enough, a direct audience is possible
• The two worlds are the same physically, but different in outlook and feel [This was done deliberately so those who want a sci-fi game can play one, those who want a fantasy type game can play one and those who want a mixture have one – All in the essentially the same location]
• Great houses that manage the world exists
• Traditional fantasy races, such as dwarfs, elfs etc are rare
• Technology does exist in the arcane world and magic does in the technology world, but is rare
• All can use magic, but only traditional spell casters, like wizards etc can use it safely.

A few questions need to be answered and will be covered in the following weeks (with a lot more obviously):

• Who are the gods of Easthalen
• Who are the Great Houses and their lands?
• What does the world look like?

The nature of the game itself

• The rules will, at the start anyway, be based around DnD/Pathfinder as this is the rule set I am most familiar with. Conversion to others is not ruled out at this point
• The core set will not have character creation rules etc, as this will be a supplement to those.
• Changes can, and will, occur between initial development and final release. It’ll be ready when it’s ready. Better to take time and bring out something better than to rush and make it messy.
• The plan is to , to begin with, push out an update at least every couple of weeks. Real life considerations may overrule that, but hopefully not. Hopefully, if i can find a good wiki plugin for here i’ll be adding that to the site as well and each update will go into that.

Last point – any feedback, questions or comments, please send them in – either here or on the Facebook page.