My avatar creates a race of Minotaurs. They form a Roman style empire, and it contains many cities, including two great cities here, and here, connected by one of their great technologies, the railroad. This city is the economic and political capital, home to the trading markets and to the senate. This city here is the spiritual and cultural capital. Here, the greatest minotaur athletes participate in the sport favoured by the god: Wrestling. It is like Greco-roman wrestling, the minotaurs lock horns and try to throw each other out of the ring in front of screaming crowds.


Dawn of Worlds is a pen-and-paper RPG by N. Bob Pesall, available freely on the internet. Where most RPGs feature the players playing adventurers exploring dungeons and fighting dragons, in this one the players play gods.


I make some fire trolls over here, and some ice trolls here, and some acid trolls here, that’s acid the psychedelic, their attacks are a trip hazard.


Through a point-based system, each player on his or her turn will help create a world, building a map on the broadsheet paper on the table. In the earliest of three phases, players build geographical features, though one player is bound to splurge on an ancient race of dorfs, or just cheat and have an avatar do the dirty work.


The plains centaurs roam here, warring with your dessert orcs. They start a war effort, and drive your orcs back, beyond this rock wall.


As the phases move on, the point values change, and creating races, then ordering them around become cheaper. The story of the world evolves as the players interact with each other, each race on the world just a pawn for the gods that are the players.


Since no-one has, I’ll create some actual fucking humans in the mountains here. I wonder if this is why humans are always a young race, they’re too boring and no-one bothers to make them for ages.


The game draws to a close as the history of the world completes itself, and the players find agreement in an ending. The world created can then be put to use how the players see fit: A world for fiction, a backdrop for another RPG, or just a shared memory of an entertaining afternoon.


Underneath the lake are a species of aquatic illithids – they’d eat our brains but they are stuck beneath the frozen surface. They gaze upwards through the ice and chart the stars. One day, they chart a star moving ever more quickly through the sky. That is when everything changed.

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