Haveno: City of Sand and Chrome & Speciation

Haveno is just one city within the greater world of Vaeth. It is located on the island of Krucho, which is just off the continent of Beleco. Haveno is a sprawling paradise. Situated at a leyline junction on the Northwest of the island of Krucho. The weather is mild, with only tropical storms and cyclones threatening it in the late summer. Millions of tourists visit the island every year, drawn by the glittering beaches, pulsing nightclubs, and world renowned casinos. It appears to be a minor player in the world; just a fun place to play.

In fact, Haveno is a major player in the international underworld of drugs, crime, politics, and corporate greed. It is a place notorious for money laundering and as a staging point for smuggling drugs into Beleco. Most visitors are vaguely aware of the corruption and graft from movies and TV. But they usually do not experience it first hand.

Haveno is a city I have written a TechNoir style plot generator (what they would call a transmission). It is the first I have written. I still need to give it an editing and proofreading pass before I post it here.

One of the idea forks I am at is dealing with various playable species in game. When I am designing, I usually look at things in a Hard Reality sort of way. What I mean by Hard is what people refer to as Hard Worldbuilding and Soft Worldbuilding. Hard being rigorously described and limited, while Soft is more freeform where character level and imagination are the limit. When I world build, I want to know everything about the world. If there are floating stones, why aren't all the stones floating, what happens when they crash together, how has this affected evolution and dispersion of flora and fauna, etc.

It is not that I prefer one method over the other, it is just the way my brain works. It is difficult for me to not dig deeper into these questions. So building up Vaeth (the world Haveno is set in, and probably the main setting for my next series of games), I have come again and again to the question of species.

I want various species, but do I want to limit what is there, or do I want to leave it open ended. In my Dwindle campaign I left it open ended, and we ended up with a PC that was a cognizant zombie fart, and another that was a ...um... bodily fluid golem...to put it gently. But when I start to plan my species, I think about their histories together. I usually think of our own world history, and end up with the questions: Why didn't dominant species just exterminate weaker species? As the cultures collided who enslaved who? Who colonized who? This makes it hard for me to write in more than a handful of species in the world.

Still I have tried to plan the species for Vaeth several times. The first time, I went hard left from standard fantasy tropes and created the Lannossee (hulking rabbit folk), the Skaelmin (small reptilian simian folk), the Hintae (banana slug folk), etc. I then did another pass, and decided that these might be inaccessible to players. Without the species appearing elsewhere in the mediaverse, they may not have any touchstones for them. So I decided to swap them for some standard fantasy folks. Thus I put in standard goblins, dwarves, tieflings, lizardfolk, etc.

But then I was on reddit (with its ever-growing community of RPGers) and someone was talking about a Stars Without Numbers campaign with a planet of undead ran by Liches. And I would love to have a city like that. Vaeth has a limited magic system, but it could still be a city ruled AI, churning out semi-cognizant robots.

So I am rethinking my speciation. I may give a half dozen example species, and then give the option for players to create their within certain limits. I definitely don't want farts wafting around causing troubles again.