Here's mine:
Languages- How do you create their sounds and alphabets? Here is my modest grouping of ideas for the complete solving of this problem. You take a real language and apply it to the D&D (or what have you) language. The same tactic applies for alphabets. An example list follows.No offense was intended to anyone.
Drow Baroness
Surface dwelling drow females, often exiles from their Underdark homes, have secured moderate tracts of land, often through use of their merchant skills (what drow house doesn't have their fingers in trade?). The land thus purchased, often through an agent to reduce the shock of dealing with the drow, will occupy large streches of wilderness where the Baronesses amass wealth through legitimate trade, such as the cattle or sheep industry, roadways (created and maintained, pay a small fee and your caravan won't be attacked by brigands running around loose*), or any other number of things. The Baronesses call their holdings "ranches", and each maintains a stable of "ranch males" who are generally not allowed to leave the ranch. They do the heavy lifting around the ranch, are often exiles themselves with no place to go. Cattledrives are led by females (often a younger daughter and other lesser females) with males as their underlings. Aside from the brand they receive, males suffer practically no physical abuse. A Baroness's daughters and other female relatives, and a handful of favored males, will live in the big house while the rest of the ranch males will live in bunkhouses.
The daughters work the ranch as regulators (regulating the theft of livestock from the ranch, qv. "Young Guns"), and the eldest serves as the interface between an established ranch and the rest of the world they have to do business with. Without Lloth's favor, they do not carry snake whips, but they do carry whips and each female is required to be proficient with it. Bolos are also present. Firearms are in my game, and the females carry pistols and something akin to a bowie knife. Males, when they are allowed to go to town, go unarmed and never go unescorted. (A crafty male can hide a dagger, a sling, or a bolo somewhere on his person.)
The Baronesses themselves form an informal corporation with Nepthas (sp?) contracts keeping them from turning on each other without good cause. Rules for "hostile takeovers" are clearly spelled out, and should a contract be broken, the Baroness and her three eldest daughters suffer the consequences. It is hoped that the new Baroness will learn by example.
The goals of the Baronesses varies from corporation to corporation. Some seek only to maintain their livelihoods and amass wealth while others seek to get into a position of power and secure larger and larger chunks of land to call their own, building armies and whatnot as they go.
*I'll give you one guess as to who ensures that the uncontrolled, no-fee roads are replete with brigands...
I've still got some work to do on it, like powers and whatnot, stats for a bolo, how a bowie knife differs from a dagger or a short sword, etc. But someday I will have the whole thing worked out, with Coal Dragons (double breath weapon, fire AND a cloud of black, sooty smoke), gnomish railroads when they get invented (and Baronesses gaining land by hook or by crook to get the rights to the lands the RR will run on), and other stuff I've used on the fly but never statted up.
Think Septerra Core: Legacy of The Creator. Now put in a Canyon, and throw in the Corusant Undercity. Scavenge ancient secrets and magic items to save the world. Or not. It makes a great setting though.
Idea: Pull a Guardians of The Flame Reversed. Respect Mah Athouratah!
Idea: The Guild of making Random Things, Big Explosions and Really Big Machines. A combined Gnome/Goblin guild where you get every thing else.
It's like this:
- Dwarves= Weapons, Armor and mining equipment
- Kobolds= Traps
- Eladrin= Magic Items
- Elves= NOTHING
- Half-Elves= NOTHING
- Dragonborn= NOTHING
- Tieflings= NOTHING
- Humans= NOTHING
- Halflings= Best Cooks EVER
- Gnomes and Goblins= Everything Else