Five Concepts About Adel

Whenever you consider using Adel as the setting for a game, the following five concepts may help you to evoke the setting as you play or to more easily come up with ideas for adventures and stories. These are five tools for you that set Adel apart.

1. The Power of Religion. Adel affords a world in which Gods are real. Many live among people, or move among them easily, but all the more live in the wilds, secluded and mysterious. They have hundreds of thousands of different forms, and they are reflections of as many concepts, objects and emotions. You can have plots where your characters are confronted with literal Gods that they can approach, persuade, and defeat. You can have Gods that are friends and neighbors to the characters. There are so many tiers of spirits that one can accommodate a powerful mythology in any standard of play. After all, the weakest spirit would still be a God to an Adelian – but if it is necessary the Adelian will fight the Gods as fiercely as he or she believes they will punish him or her back. There is plenty of precedent in their culture.

“Praying to God” can be a solution but at the same time, it can be a solution that fails. Spirits have incredible power, but they can use that power just as much to inconvenience others as to help them, as to do nothing at all. They are often whimsical or difficult for normal people to understand or relate to or leverage. A spirit has a rationale for how it behaves, but that rationale might not make any sense to mortals. Why is that spirit of water trying to “steal” the river? How is it succeeding in doing so? When you think about a narrative in Adel, it’s easy to start by mythologizing the problems of the setting, using Spirits and religion, and mythologizing the solutions. Test the power of faith, the power of spirits, the power of people, to create and solve problems.

2. “High Technology.” Adelians are a strange society about technology. Due to their discoveries of Lost World artifacts, the Adelians could have an industrial revolution, or progress to a steampunk society, or even high magi-tech. But they wont, at least not completely. Adelians have a great fear that their improprieties with technology may lead to a second Cataclysm. As such, Adelian technology is a pastiche of things, half of which they don’t understand, and refuse to really understand, except in the guise of their religious mythos. Some things they consider relatively safe, like the radio-like voice boxes, or their firearms. Industrial machinery, with its smoke belching and gear-grinding, would likely never be trusted. Many technologies lie fallow.

The majority of Adelians are indigenous rural villagers, who use the technology that benefits their traditional lifestyle, such as rifles for hunting, but would not give away the peaceful balance of a natural life for the convenience of city or town living. Meanwhile their few cities are highly developed, with tall buildings and lit streets, plumbing and well-planned layouts and yet people may still use torches and horse-carriages, when they have ships that can fly and wagons powered by arcane engines. Technology does not change all of the world. Attitudes of course vary – you can have a story about merchants on a flying ship. You can even have a bunch of merchants all with flying ships. Tradition is always on their mind, however.

When using technology to create and solve problems, think about how strange the society is, and use it to your advantage – or even to the player’s disadvantage and chagrin if that’s your taste. Even those people who do understand the technology are, perhaps, the ones most fearful of what it can do, and who must take the greatest care when employing it. You can use technology to help your narrative without affecting the entire world and how it “works.” Not everyone will be able to have a flying ship, even if the players and the bad guys do. And if they could, they probably wouldn’t want it anyway.

3. Convenient Individuals, Powerful Institutions. There are large institutions in Adel that would-be adventurers could be part of. In Adel, most adventuring as it is traditionally understood probably happens at the behest of Scholarly Societies such as the Andaliel Archeological Survey, who pay people for artifacts and findings from the Lost World, and keep a bulletin board of missions and requests available. The military is another place that could be full of characters, as well as market caravans and religious temples and church societies. Institutions in Adel are not helpless. The Guard can do something about the goblin raids. The PCs are not alone in competence. And the setting assumes that, for the most part, the governments care for their people, and are by default “the good guys.” Exceptions are possible, but institutions are not the enemy by default.

At the same time, Adel is also home to great people, who could rise up alone to become the next legends of the world. An Institution is not always there. There might not be a Guard to begin with that can take care of the Goblins. The army might be weeks away (even if they could take their flying machines there, likely they won’t, not for a bunch of goblins). This affords individuals the chance to be great. Individuals are mobile, and they are convenient. Institutions are not convenient, or fast, or flexible, even if they are competent and goodly. Sometimes individuals are needed. Sometimes they aren’t.

4. Mythology vs Reality. Adel can shift from being a gritty place to a whimsical place. It can be a safe place of mostly bloodless gameplay, or a terrible place of gorey gameplay. Context is very important. You can have a narrative about opium runners in Periterim or Vedaria, conducting terrible R-rated bloody business. You can have a game about children in a rural village in Andaliel who discover a friendly spirit and nurse it back to health, and experience great, fluffy PG wonders in the wilderness. Depending on how you start, you can end with a tale of realistic tragedy and gritty, life-like motivations, or a game of romantic legend with larger-than-life characters and fantastical, humorous events. How do you start? You start with the characters, and you start with their wants, their immediate setting, their life and their beliefs. This will guide you along.

5. A Safe World And A Dangerous One. Adel is overwhelmingly pretty safe, one would say, at least until things go wrong. It’s not a war-torn ruin, despite the number of ruins upon it. Civilization is not about to crash, governments are not in tremendous danger. People aren’t oppressed. People don’t fear to go out into the woods, though they may have legends about particular parts of the wood – such is their love of mythology. Beasts don’t abduct children every day or tear down the walls every week. Each story in the setting begins from the point that things are safe. People are happy and healthy. You can have a game with civilization in it, and the civilization isn’t fallen and broken. It is, in fact, thriving.

But things can go wrong after you start. They might go wrong on a small scale – a local spirit goes berserk, a local politician enacts cruel laws, a party of Sorians threaten a little village. They can also go wrong on a grand scale – an artifact of ancient powers threatens activation and ruin, a warband of the Furies rampages across the countryside toward the capital city, the Sorians mass in a great campaign with giants and dragons as their allies, and so on. You start with zero and then scale up as you need or want. When and how things go wrong is what you need to consider.