An Introduction to Amal Fayys and Lore24

01 Jan, 2024

There was a creation challenge in 2023 called Dungeon23 which exploded and got a lot of people excited about creating megadungeons. The idea was that every day people would add a room to their dungeon and describe it and its contents, eventually ending up with a gargantuan structure. I enjoyed seeing what people were making but I wasn’t inspired to create one myself, partly because it’s been a busy year with work, kids and mental health and partly because I’m not that into dungeons. Going into 2024 there is a desire to carry on this year long challenge idea but there hasn’t been the unifying theme to bring everyone together. It’s nice to have a community around and there are a few things popping up to give people that shared structure. The one that piqued my interest was one going by the name Lore24¹ which came out of the RPG community on Mastodon. It feels a lot more relaxed than the more formalised challenges, the idea is to add something to the world every day to flesh out the setting, from a continent to an item and anything in between.

The reason that Lore24 appeals to me in particular is that I’ve become increasingly interested in setting books and sandboxes over the last year. As I’ve moved from exclusively home brew to wanting to incorporate more authored content into my own games I’ve found that I prefer these broader works which let me construct my own stories around their themes than the more specific narratives of adventure modules and dungeons. I love playing world building games like The Quiet Year, i’m sorry did you say street magic, and others. I like the idea of being able to play a large scale version of one of those games over the course of a year. It means that I can dip in and out of these games to do little solo things, maybe I want to make part of a city with street magic, maybe an item with Artefact, maybe a faction with this, or a vignette with that. The goal to add to a setting is pleasingly vague which means that even on days when I’m busy or uninspired I should be able to get something down.

Over the last few months I’ve dusted off an old idea that I called Lexeme. I’ll go into more detail about it at some point later but the pertinent point is that my heartbreaker is a game about exploring worlds and stories² using a note-taking framework as part of its core systems. At the moment Lexeme is a sort of tableau building game where you collect a modular character sheet in play, while I was working on that I started to make “mad libs” style templates for different elements of the world and characters. Lore24 will be an excuse for me to use and play test these templates, flexing my creative muscles and building a habit of creation which I find exciting. As I’m using these templates I’ll be able to refine them and make them more useful but, because I have them, each day will be a case of filling in the blanks initially, which is a great starting point that I hope I’ll be able to maintain.

What am I making then? I have a few ideas for settings that I want to work on but the one that I’m going to dust off is an anachronistic alternate history setting. I’m personally interested in the history of magic, in particular British folklore, Faeries and the magical beliefs of the long nineteenth century. The setting that I have in mind mixes art nouveau, fin de siècle occultism, jazz clubs, folklore and cocktail parties. I’m inspired by the likes of Casablanca, The Place of Enchantment by Alex Owen, Johnathan Strange and Mr Norrell, Stardust, The Waste Land, The Fifty Year Sword, the works of Katherine Briggs, The Dispossessed, the Prague Cemetery, Sandman, Neverwhere, The City and The City, and many other things which may or may not make it into the final setting. They all coalesce around these themes of society, modernity and how we come to terms with our increasingly abstract world. With that said my first day is a high level pitch of the city the setting will focus on. The specific piece of Folklore that I’m using as a backdrop is a tidbit about a battle between faeries and pixies in the Westcountry where I live³. From there I have a reason for Faerie to encroach on the mundane world on a broader scale, factions to play with and a way to ground the setting. I hope that I can make a city which has conflict but is fundamentally an exciting place to be. I want to capture a colourful sense of fun and playfulness with an edge of danger. I think it will be fun, we’ll see where it goes.

Amal Fayys is a medium sized city which has grown rapidly from a small hamlet in the last seventy years. The city flows down and fills both sides of a valley at a boundary between Faerie and the mundane world. A relatively small brisk river runs through its centre dividing the two halves of the city which stand in separate worlds. Unlike the other borders, which are jealously guarded by their Fairy Lords the gap which grew into Amal Fayys was opened by The Rebellion during The Cyclamen War when they sought help from the mundane world to overthrow The Local Fairy Lord. Being so modern, most of the architecture on the English side is in Arts and Crafts or Art Nouveau style. The earliest parts of the city are in a Gothic Revival style and the most modern are starting to incorporate more geometric forms. On the Faerie side of the border buildings seem to be grown rather than built, huge sprawling organic structures blend outside and inside with carvings mirroring living trees and plants. The city is full of green space on both sides with huge vertical variation of towers, terraced gardens, tall building and stacked constructions.

The roads leading in from the we are well maintained and orderly. The roads leading in from the east are many and strange. The first thing you notice as you approach is the ghost of the second city.

In the past it was a little known secret and now it is a Mecca for those interested in the newly exposed realm of Faerie and the opportunities it affords.

The residents are many and varied, they think of themselves as pioneers or revolutionaries or just lucky.

Vignettes

1. A small room is dominated by a shining black grand piano, dozens of people in white tie and flowing floral dresses drink cocktails from elegant glasses. The sounds of discordant jazz underscores the hum of conversation.
2. A group of pixies gather in the upstairs room of a bar, large glass windows overlook beautifully maintained parkland. One member of the group is holding a pamphlet and orating animatedly.
3. In a candlelit room surrounded by books and books, cards and papers a woman chalks a sigil onto a circular board, it pulses with a faint glow.
4. A group of English people and faerie folk share a picnic in the sunshine on a roof terrace surrounded by lavender.
5. The glint of moonlight on a bright blade flashes from the shadows of a sewer outlet.

#Lore24 #game-design #rpgs