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---
title: "An Introduction to Apocrypha"
updated: "2017-12-25 Mon 14:22"
categories: AP
---

Apocrypha is a world of mystery and forgotten history, built from
first principles and the realization that even simple truths have
consequences.

My goal with building the world of Apocrypha is to create a generic
fantasy world which is both suitable for books and for use with TRPGs,
and is designed somewhere on the coherency spectrum between the
Forgotten Realms and Discworld.

Though it is being designed to function with the 5th edition of <a
href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungeons_%26_Dragons">Dungeons &
Dragons</a> in mind, I am also haphazardly designing a TRPG of my own
which may be abandoned along the way, but draws inspiration from
Apocrypha as well as breathing life back into it.  Over the last 2
months, I've found that working on one usually generates ideas that
are applicable to the other, and overall energy for both projects
benefits from this dynamic.

Occasionally Asked Questions

1. From a Forgotten Realms standpoint, "does the Weave still matter?"

There is no Weave, nor are gods' domains delineated in the same way as FR.

3. "Why in a D&D 5e-esque world have the elves and spellcasters not
   taken over despite the advanced age of the former and the quadratic
   power curve of the latter?"

My previous answer to this was chopped up and dumped in several
dumpsters in several different states, so I'll expand below.

Creatures don't have DNA.  Alchemy is not chemistry because there are
no chemicals.  Plutonium isn't an element: fire is.

All creatures share a common ancestry.  From the primal elementals, to
the mischievous fey, to the inscrutable nim, all are born by the
spontaneous generation of the physical from an immortal and unchanging
essence.  I'm working on how they are all related, but their forms are
determined by their essential natures.

The "planes" are just reality through a broken prism (in that they
started out with a common starting place for the condition of the
world, but since each has slightly different properties, due to the
absence of certain things (like say, gravity) or their distortion
(like the duration of magical effects lingering twice as long), they
each have developed differently (and different kinds of creatures have
been born there).

Magic comes in as many forms as creatures do.

Since creatures and magic and the elements and planes all have the
same ancestry in the grand scheme of things.

Wizardry, specifically, is the capturing of a specific magical essence in the form of a spell.

This 'bottling' allows you to take magic with you from place to
place. and release it.  But the power of most non-wizardry magic ebbs
and flows based on large geographical region (which I'm still working
out, since I don't have most of the other magic systems worked out
yet).  For example, druids can produce effects much more powerful than
those of a wizard if they are within their grove.  So high level
wizards trying to take over an area and being repulsed by the locals
is a fairly common trope.

As is practitioners of various regional magics attempting t extend
their influence by changing the lands around them. The Song of
Conquest is a kind of regional magic (or more like ancestral magic,
because it comes from the people, not the land), that has spread quite
far and is the power behind the empire (in addition to them
discovering wizardry and having a big army and the largest navy).

So, the reason that elves/wizards haven't taken over the Empire is
because of the Song of Conquest (which only
humans/halflings/faunus/orcs have access to) and the nation state
(because it's a #human empire which isn't racist towards elves per se,
but you know). 

Also, "there's always a bigger fish." There are dragons and nim and
patrons and icons that are more powerful than wizards, and gods above
those.