So I want to talk a little about Skaerune. I feel that a strong setting is an expectation of any d100 game, which is not a bad thing. The problem though is that the days of the truly powerful setting has passed. It is not as much a draw to players or at least ones I interact with. With a few exceptions, it is more difficult to use a setting as a selling point (1). The typical game master is going to run his or her own game anyway and may or may not use setting information anyway. Added to this is the small amount of room that can be spent (2) on setting in a given manual means that your setting has to come strong and be interesting and usable even when its bare bones. 

So I decided I wanted to combine the mythical fantasy feeling, the cosmic nihilism, and features from traditional fantasy. My old college adviser and mentor described the United Staets as a stew, not a melting pot. I don't want Skaerune to be a stew even though it will have some disparate bits that did not begin life together. The Cosmos acknowledges that many worlds exist, but they are distant and relevant only in their existence. It drops ingots of civilizations into a barren Earth - like world, where slowly but surely they begin to come together and identify more with this world then wherever they came from. Now that I think about it, I guess it will be a stew, or an artifact that is a unified whole, but the various ores are still visible on the surface.

And it needed a antagonist worthy of the name. The Rakshasa (3) are definitely the new power in town. While a bit sadistic as a race, they are not inherently what we might call evil as much as we could say they embrace chaos as a way of life. At least aspects of it. As rulers of the Fourth City and an ever growing empire, they are trying to create their own strange order on the world. Intelligent, inhuman, and physically strong they bring a pov that is alien to the world but in some ways alien to many players.

L8R

SMH