Points of Darkness in a Sea of Light Game World Concept

Roughly this is the basic concept for how Eden exists as a game world and interacts with D&D 4th Edition. Obviously, a person’s own game does not have to coincide with how I use Eden. I created it, but people are welcome to play it as they like. This is how I laid it out to be, however. It is in sharp contrast with D&D 4th Edition’s Points of Light setting (and plenty of old fashioned medieval settings), which I call “The Sea of Darkness.”

D&D 4th Edition presents what I can most eloquently describe as a real crapsack world.

Every bit of civilization is walled-in and ready for battle in an eternal war against, basically, every single other thing in the world and perhaps the universe. Stepping out into the woods gets you eaten by owlbears, robbed by goblins and beat on by ogres, probably all in the same stretch of forest and in the same day.

The only hope for the world are the PCs. The only 5 people in apparently the entire world who get to be special, strong and capable, more or less, are these five guys who play through the modules and get nagged at by the Raven Queen and get ambushed every other road they walk on and so on. They are the sole people who can go and kick a goblin in the face. Whenever the town well becomes infested with zombies, or whatever other crazy crap happens in the PoL setting, the PCs must fix it.

Eden isn’t like this.

Spirits of Eden is the reverse – it is metaphorically a “sea of light” with points of darkness in it. This isn’t to say everyone is nice and happy. People are mostly polite because that’s just the culture (and there are areas, like Periterim, where this isn’t the culture) but they do have their human emotions and human tragedies of day-to-day living. They are distrusting of strangers at times, they are highly superstitious and even sometimes intolerant. But at the same time, the world hasn’t smashed them into a state of total warfare against everything. They can out of their towns and pick berries in the woods without being robbed blind and killed. There isn’t a monster breaking into the place and killing half the town every Tuesday. And there aren’t adamantine walls everywhere. Government is functional far more often than it is dysfunctional (from the average person’s perspective) and can actually, for the most part, protect and help people. Though their response time may leave something to be desired.

However, there are Points of Darkness, and even genuine “here be dragons” areas of the map where you know you can only go in if you’re crazy or a badass. People will tell you stories of these places, legends and myths and rumors of how bad and wrong those places are. Often you might be a badass, but usually you’re just crazy. These are the ancient ruins of aberrant cults, the twilight forests, the hunting grounds of dragons, or even just generally undesirable places like swamps and the middle of the desert or a cave that leads straight to Hell. However, a Point of Darkness isn’t just a spot on the map nobody goes to.

There are points of darkness in villages and homes, where there might be abominable acts and crimes hiding. The typical human behaviors of greed, gluttony, lust, all can create a point of darkness. So bad people are points of darkness, waiting in the light for the chance to do whatever is there to do. Most of all though, Spirits can be Points of Darkness. These in particular are the Points of Darkness that players handle – Spirits, organized crime, corrupt leaders, crazy cults and the occasional monster.

If you want a basic framework of the most basic, basic Spirits of Eden game possible, the equivalent of “go kill goblins because they’re harassing the town,” it’s this. A Spirit of Lightning woke up one morning, found some reason to be really angry, and pitched a massive fit. A perpetual thunderstorm has formed over some little village. Nobody has died yet because Ragnor, The Lightning That Cleaved The Firmanent, has apparently hilariously bad aim. But some people have gotten hurt, some things have been burnt, everyone is scared, so you go sort that out. The town guard will remain in town. Guarding it.

(Ragnor, by the by, is not a solo monster. He probably has cohorts in the form of lesser spirits that aren’t worth his breath and hang out with him to feel tough, and even just spirit bits that he has shed as he grew and which dance about him in vague shapes. Servitor spirits, basically mindless collections of magic he commands, are basically his equivalent of a goblin minion.)

Orcs and Goblins and such things have been phased out as threats for the most part, except when enough of them join together to cause a nuisance in some remote forest trail. Overwhelmingly what the PCs do is take care of supernatural threats, either because they’re the only ones with so little to lose that they consider this good work, because it’s the work that pays best, because they’re nice enough to see that nobody else will do it if not them, or because they are honestly badass enough to do it.

The town guard isn’t going to go out and deal with Ragnor, the Lightning That Cleaved The Firmament, regardless of the fact that Ragnor is probably Level 5 at best in a metagame sense, covering one village is the best he can do, and that he probably just woke up on the wrong side of the bed that day and needs a few good lumps (or diplomacy, which is actually possible more than 1/4 of the time) to put his dumb rear end back into line. But they also aren’t impotent when a couple of kobolds set up shop on a road. In fact those Kobolds are probably halfway to extinction because of the general competence of the town guard.

An important note is that none of this really applies to the nation of Selvage. Selvage is uncivilized and practically the most massive Point of Darkness in the setting. Not to say everything in Selvage wants your blood or is evil. Tribes of decent people live there, but the most civilized place there is a walled-off city of racist Elf-supremacists, and it’s walled off for a reason. Selvage is insane, you can walk in and meet a psychotic fey spirit who’ll turn you into diamond for giggles. You could turn a corner and have a giant snake gulp you down, and you could overturn a rock and find an insect that’ll cause your flesh to rot from touching it. If anything, Selvage is its own self-contained Points of Light In A Sea of Darkness setting, to be honest with you.

But for the most part these supernatural or human (by which I mean products of emotion and sin) enemies, or the uncharted places of the world, are the Points of Darkness. But Eden is a fairly stable world – in comparison to the world where every wilderness area is teeming with beasts all of which really, really want to eat you because that’s how they roll in this ghetto.

I hope that was sort of a coherent explanation of that concept. As for why the Spirits themselves don’t put out the Points of Darkness, it’s because overwhelmingly they either won’t allow themselves to, or don’t care. Most Spirits live under the eternal gentleman’s agreement of Karma and Fate. This regulates their behavior quite a bit.

If a Muikara is around to see Ragnor making a massive black cloud over a village, it might inform people where and when they can catch Ragnor on the ground and put a Maul to his gut, but it won’t fight Ragnor, even if it can.

It may help if it genuinely feels affection and a connection to the people Ragnor is tormenting, but otherwise this is not it’s problem. It can find another forest to sleep in. Most battles between two Spirits have to be declared duels where there is a grievance involved, unless the Spirit is so rock stupid it doesn’t even know how to do that and just gulps whatever it can stuff into its mouth. Which happens rather more than anyone would like.