Campaign/World Tone, Aesthetic, Vibe

This is a document to describe the intentional tone/vibe/aesthetic of the world of Ostelliach, as well as the campaign we will be playing together in that world. It isn't a hard-and-fast rule where anything outside of this is banned, so much as a helpful guideline for character creation, interactions, and what to expect as we travel through time and space.

Tone: Ostelliach

Ostelliach is a world that is experiencing incredible uncertainty and upheaval, a lack of stability in the face of honestly world-ending calamity. To this end, Ostelliach was created with an explicit air of hopepunk embedded in its fabric.

Hopepunk

Hopepunk is a term coined as a deliberate opposite of grimdark; grimdark is described as fiction with a dystopian, amoral, violent, inherently bleak tone, where people are assumed to be generally cruel and the world is a hopeless place. Hopepunk, in contrast, as described by Alexandra Rowland who coined the phrase:

“The essence of grimdark is that everyone’s inherently sort of a bad person and does bad things, and that’s awful and disheartening and cynical. It’s looking at human nature and going, ‘The glass is half empty. ‘Hopepunk says, ‘No, I don’t accept that. Go fuck yourself: The glass is half full.’ Yeah, we’re all a messy mix of good and bad, flaws and virtues. We’ve all been mean and petty and cruel, but (and here’s the important part) we’ve also been soft and forgiving and kind. Hopepunk says that kindness and softness doesn’t equal weakness, and that in this world of brutal cynicism and nihilism, being kind is a political act. An act of rebellion.”

Alexandra Rowland, One Atom of Justice, One Molecule of Mercy, and the Empire of Unsheathed Knives

A core tenet of Hopepunk that Rowland describes is that hopepunk is not nice. Nice, as they put it, "is nonthreatening. Nice is comfortable. Nice is a quiet neighborhood with white picket fences and white minivans and an overwhelmingly white demographic, where we don’t talk about things if they aren’t nice."
Instead, hopepunk is focused on radical kindness, positive change, and communal response to change (and a general community focus rather than an individualistic one). Hopepunk, then, is not toxic positivity and blissful ignorance. It is weaponized optimism, the deliberate belief that there is good in the world worth fighting for--and that you may have to actually fight for it. Hopepunk is about obstinancy, stubborn refusal to give up; Rowland says "you can do a lot when you decide to be a stubborn motherfucker who refuses to die."

It’s about doing the one little thing you can do, even if it’s useless: planting seeds in the midst of the apocalypse, spitting on a wildfire, bailing out the ocean with a bucket. Individual action is almost always pointless. Hope and strength comes from our bonds with each other, from the actions we take as a community, holding hands in the dark.
Nobility and righteousness look really stylish and cool, and they keep you safe from criticism (how nice!), but they’ll tire you out...
Take bloodthirsty, vengeful joy where you can, because the night is dark and the fight is long and there are no knights in shining armor waiting in the wings to slay the dragon at just the right moment of dramatic tension...
Do whatever you have to do, as long as you’re doing something, as long as you’re taking hold of the world around you in a real way and yanking it in the direction of Slightly Less Terrible...
Give a fuck about the world around you, about the people around you, about the people who aren’t around you, about the people on the other side of the world, for no other reason than because they’re people who love their children, who laugh, who dance, who kiss, who cry.

by Quote from the Talmud

Hopepunk in Ostelliach

So how does this manifest in the creation of this continent, its people, its cities, its traditions?
No city is perfect, no system of government is perfect, no group of people is incorruptible or pure. This is a known fact, in reality and in the creation of Ostelliach. However, each city in Ostelliach, each group of people, is created both in world and out, with an inherent desire for goodness. That is, the people of each city or organization believe in and truly want to make a civilization that helps its citizens. Each form of government or type of organization was selected by its people to enact the best social change it could, without intentionally baking in a backdoor to corrupt or game the system to hurt people later.
In other words, the real world is hard and exhaustingly corrupt in many ways, and I wanted to make a world where at least the majority of people are trying to make things better, for everyone. There may be groups of people that are antagonists, there may be bad people in the world, but the focus is not that society is corrupt.
Put another way, there may be moments of character v character or character v group, but much of it will be character v nature, character v supernatural, character v creature etc.

Inclusive AF

In every step of the creation of Ostelliach, I have made efforts to bake in more inclusivity than one sees in classic D&D settings or in our culture today. This includes:

• Casual inclusion of LGBTQIA+ identities, including gender diversity, inclusive family structures, and neopronouns/people that use multiple pronoun sets

• Dispelling tropes around different species, for general wider options to play but especially to dispel harmful stereotypes (ex: likening Orcs to POC and simultaneously labeling Orcs as unintelligent brutes)

• Disability inclusion and a , rather than a medical one where disability is a thing to be feared, shamed, and fixed. People in Ostelliach strive to make life fit around disabled bodies, not the other way around.

• Disability inclusion and a Social Model of Disability, rather than a medical one where disability is a thing to be feared, shamed, and fixed. People in Ostelliach strive to make life fit around disabled bodies, not the other way around.

• Diverse languages featured; you will likely run into many names for places, groups, or people in Ostelliach that seem unfamiliar or like a very tricky mouthful. This was a deliberate choice, not to be difficult but to emulate the language and cultural diversity of a D&D game. The names you see are pulled from real-world languages shifted to fit fantasy ones, so things do not all read as English takes on beautiful existing tongues. This reddit post has some great examples of what I mean, though I did not follow their model 1:1. There will always be pronunciation guides for unfamiliar phonetics, and it's okay if it's hard at first. I simply did not want to flatten the diversity of Ostelliach down in this one area just because it was easier.

Campaign Tone

The campaign is supposed to be fun. Let's get that one out there right away. There will be jokes, of the punny or bawdy or completely surrealist nonsense variety. There will be silly quests, silly tavern shenanigans, silly NPCs, etc.
However, all who signed up for this voiced a desire for a game that also included serious moments, character development, exploration of emotional themes. So, there may be really serious stuff (other than stuff barred in Limits & Safety Mechanics). There may be moments of horror, moments of sadness, moments of loss. After all, a world with no shadow has no appreciation for light.
So by all means, come in expecting silly, but also build a character with emotional hooks for growth and loving DM manipulation. Build a tragic backstory, or a perfectly happy one ripe for ruination. Make relationships with other characters (PC and NPC). Buy in to the world, have stake in its fate. The goal is not to play a game that pretends everything is perfect, nor a game so bleak that it feels like reading the daily news cycle (depressing). And if we get some cool character moments, explore some interesting themes, maybe even have some catharsis imagining a world like Ostelliach, then, all the better.

Summary

So, to summarize:

• Hopepunk

• Solarpunk

• Natural reclamation

• Medieval meets magical tech

• Inclusion and diversity

Yay! Hopefully it's fun for you too. Now let's roll some dice.

Aesthetic

Ostelliach is designed as a world based in standard D&D medieval-time-period-esque fantasy, with chainmail and swords and anvils etc. This is the general aesthetic you can expect from your local tavern/inn, your general clothing options. Sometimes this will be true of our interactions with the world; for example, your characters still travel on foot or by horse/wagon.

Technology

That being said, Ostelliach is a land steeped in arcana, and everyone knows that magic and technology can and do go hand-in-hand in games like this. This world is considered magepunk:

Magepunk is similar to other -punk varieties, such as Steampunk or Dieselpunk, with the core difference being the change in technological origin.
Magepunk is defined by the common use of magic, runes or other arcane imagery. It is a blending or preindustrial technology and design crossed with common mage imagery.

So, technology through magic has advanced as much as your imagination wants it to. Some examples of this include:

• Medicine and healthcare being prioritized by Ostelliach means curative and preventative measures are far beyond medieval capabilities. Disability inclusion including prosthetics are advanced too. (See Blossomvale Health as an example of what Ostelliach offers.)

• Architecture may be more advanced, as in Arnun-Ohx where dieselpunk is more the vibe thanks to extremely advanced smithing from the Orcs there

• Constructs such as Warforged, no mere tin can robots, are able to perform incredible feats of engineering and look a million unpredictable, technologically cool ways

Furthermore, Ostelliach as a society highly prizes education, intellectual exploration, and scientific/arcane discovery. Many people in Ostelliach are educated to varying degrees, because most places make it accessible and affordable if not entirely free. They can afford to become highly specialized or choose to delve into as many areas as they are curious about. This means progress is always happening and there's many places curious characters can be rewarded for inquisitiveness.

Nature and Civilization

Ruins

Given Ostelliach has experienced hundreds of years of natural disasters and magical fuckery, there are ruins just about everywhere a person may look, meaning much of the beautiful countryside trips feature natural reclamation of buildings or entire cities.

by Giovanni Antonio "Canaletto" Canal

Solarpunk Ecology

Many groups in Ostelliach emphasize a desire to protect and co-exist with nature. In fact, given how voraciously dangerous nature has proven to be, this is the general consensus with differing levels of how militant and hands-on you are about it being the main difference. The general view is that nature is scary and will fuck us up, so we'd better do our best to coexist with it because we can't beat it and we don't want to make it angry.
You may think of this as solarpunk, a genre of fiction that envisions and works toward actualizing a sustainable future interconnected with nature and community. The "solar" represents solar energy as a renewable energy source and an optimistic vision of the future that rejects climate doomerism, while the "punk" refers to the countercultural, post-capitalist, and decolonial enthusiasm for creating such a future.