World Tree (RPG) - TV Tropes

World Tree is a tabletop role-playing game set on a tree thousands of miles tall, whose branches are fifty miles wide and hundreds of thousands long. Eight "prime" species build a civilization with extremely widespread magic under the visible influence of nineteen seven-plus-twelve gods. Other intelligent races live in their shadow; the primes know that the world was created for the primes' benefit with the non-primes as part of the backdrop; some non-primes disagree. The world is very different from ours, from basic physics (no electromagnetism, no air pressure) to materials science (lots of wood, little metal; it's a tree), to cosmology (seven meddling gods visible in the night sky). The game focuses on adventurous primes who face monsters, intrigue and other parts of life on the Tree.

The prime races and the gods that created them include:
Common

• Herethroy (Creation): Peaceful, pastoral, six-limbed insects of three distinct genders who vary between farming and wielding three-handed swords.
• Cani (Control): Chummy dog-folk with complex social structure and instinctual loyalty.
• Rassimel (Healing): Obsessive, intelligent raccoon-people.
• Orren (Knowledge): Shapeshifting mercurial otterfolk with a tendency to go hyperactive under stress. Described as having "species-wide ADD." Explicitly labeled the Jack of All Stats.

Less Common

• Khtsoyis (Destruction): Sloppily-designed, floating heptapods (that is, seven-tentacled octopi) who pound things with triple-wielded clubs.
• Gormoror (Control+Destruction): Mighty bears with a magic honor sense. Proud Warrior Race Guy is their hat.
• Sleeth (Change): Non-anthropomorphic big cats with telekinesis over flesh-based objects and the Verbal Tic of speaking in present tense.
• Zi Ri (Sustaining): Cat-sized, immortal, hermaphroditic, hovering dragons with fire resistance and weak fire breath.

The game exists as a paperback sourcebook and an in-game novel plus the semi-canon, in-character diary of "Sythyry" written by one of the authors (which inspired several imitators).

The rules are largely skill-based, with most of what characters can do being summed up in their skills, together with ten stats and a point-buy attributes system. Magic is handled using an Arts system (similar to Ars Magica), with all magic made up of Nouns and Verbs combined in various ways. As the classic example, a fireball would use "create" and "fire".

For those interested, a rather good review can be found here.

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This tabletop RPG provides examples of:

• Alien Geometries: Locador magic is associated with some fairly screwy sights, and this goes in particular for its god, "Here", and his elementals. "Here" lives at the end of an impossible long corridor whose location is found in strange places, and never in the same place twice — for instance, it was once found inside a ruined castle guarded by monsters, at the heart of a primeval forest fifteen miles wide, which had somehow gone unnoticed in a back alley in the Tree's biggest city and could not be found again later.
• Alien Sky: Compared to the terrestrial sky, certainly: multiple moons that move somewhat erratically, the sun is a rolling crystal orb which ignites at dawn and is extinguished at dusk, stellar objects that wind about and fence each other or move stars around, and the seven creator gods looking down on the tree. And all of it but the stars are visible during the day.
• All-Accessible Magic: Magic is a vocational skill and fairly straightforward to learn; almost everyone knows a spell or two that's of use in their job or in the home. "Wizard" is an informal title used to those who work with magic at an advanced level, usually by professional casting complicated spellwork or actively researching the field.
• Amazing Technicolor Population: While most primes possess the typical colors of their real-life counterparts, it's not uncommon for some to sport fur in much more vivid and unusual shades. This is especially prevalent among the Rassimel, among whom pink, purple or metallic-hued fur is far from unknown, and the Sleeth, who are often dark blue or green.
• Animal Jingoism: The Cani and the Sleeth tend to get along very poorly, as per traditional cat-and-dog rivalries. Cani are intensely social, obsessed with social standing, and like people neatly sorted between leaders and followers; Sleeth find their social structures repugnant, and hate taking orders. Sleeth, alone among all primes, can detect the smells the Cani social cues depend on; they also uniformly ignore them, which infuriates the Cani. The Cani's tendency to challenge each other and other Primes over authority also tends to induce violent reprisals from the much more high-strung Sleeth. Perdithorne, a species of lynx-like monsters, also dislike Cani more strongly than they do other primes.
• Animal Stereotypes: The Prime species play fairly directly into their associated animals' stereotypes — the dogfolk are social, loyal, community-minded and obsessed with pedigree, the otterfolk are playful, fun-loving and fond of water, the bearfolk are gruff and fierce but honorable, the talking panthers are cunning, amoral and fond of hunting, and so on.
• Artificial Limbs: One short fiction in the sourcebook is narrated by an Orren woman who lost her arm to an accident and is planning on creating a replacement from ensorcelled water, and is currently trying to work out how to make it so that she can keep live fish in it.
• Bad Powers, Bad People: Subverted with Mind magic. There are legitimate reasons for studying that element, not involving Mind Rape, but anyone who's good at it is automatically suspect. See the entry below on The Dark Arts. Subverted with some monsters as well; some generally benign monsters have rather dire abilities.
• Beast Man: With a few exceptions, the Prime species all look like anthropomorphic animals of various sorts. The degree of anthropomorphism varies between species — Cani resemble furred humans with dog heads and tails, Rassimel have the bodies of bipedal raccoons but also have human hair, and Gormoror are simply upright bears with opposable thumbs. Several non-Prime species also resemble humanoid animals of various sorts.
• Believing Their Own Lies: Bonstables are pathological liars and deceivers, but never say anything that they truly think is false. Rather, they constantly delude themselves into thinking that whatever ruse they're keeping up is the actual truth — when they take the shape of a Prime species, for instance, they convince themselves that they are actually a member of that species for all purposes — and when they inevitably change their minds and start another deception rationalize things to believe themselves to have always been correct and honest at any given time. This makes them very difficult to discover, since mind-reading magic can't generally penetrate their delusions and and lie detection reads them as perfectly honest and forthright.
• Benevolent Architecture: In theory. The gods designed the world for habitability for their favored races, and filled it with inhabitable land and other resources for the primes. In practice, they also ended up filling it with monsters and natural hazards both for the hell of it and as a result of various design flaws.
• Big Creepy-Crawlies: Some creatures resemble outsized arthropods of various sorts. Zonn, for instance, are essentially grasshoppers the size of cattle.
• BFS: The three-handed sword, a popular weapon among Herethroy warriors, who have enough limbs and coordination to actually use one effectively.
• Blessed with Suck: Parents of different prime species can have a child, using complex magic. The hybrid kid gains the intellectual and magical benefits of both races at all times, and must shift between the two... painfully and involuntarily every hour (they can resist, but that hurts more) using the physical benefits of the current species, and dies young of debilitating illness. Theoretically, said parents could use even more magic to ensure the child comes out looking like only one of them. However, that's another ritual spell, and given their preparation times most people probably don't have time for that.
• Call a Smeerp a "Rabbit": A lot of World Tree creatures are given the names of Earth animals with similar social roles for the sake of expedience. Horses, for instance, are named such because they're domesticated for use as pack and riding beasts despite actually being nine unrelated genera of animals, some possessing claws and feathers or bony plates or the like.
• Chariot Pulled by Cats: The strange flying vehicles used to cross the vast gulfs of air between the Tree's branches include, among other strange things, giant kites drawn by birds.
• Creature Creation Committee: The entirety of the world was created a few millennia ago by the gods, and continues to be occasionally fiddled with, modified, and added to. A major part of natural philosophy is working out the specific creator god that made a species, why they made it, and how their mindset or its historic context affected it. As a rule, the eight Prime species were made with the most care, while other people, animals, and monsters were often sloppier jobs. The Khtsoyis are an exception: their creator, Accanax, procrastinated when the other six gods were making their races and had to retrofit what was meant to be a monster; the result was so inappropriate that another god, Reluu, had to help him make a second run. The gods continue to add monsters and creatures in the modern day, sometimes seemingly just to make life interesting for the Primes. Different gods also have different quirks and patterns of creation; for instance, Accanax will rush out dozens of sloppy but terrible monsters while his sister Gnarn will carefully fine-tune a single type of horrific terror, Reluu makes darkly honorable monsters to challenge heroes, and Virid and Mircannis prefer to make small, unobtrusive plants and animals useful to people or environments.
• The Dark Arts:
  • Mind magic is treated as this in the eyes of Prime civilization. This is due to the generally intrusive or controlling applications it's put to; there are legitimate uses, but even then it's considered suspicious, and "mind mage" has the same ring as "necromancer" in other settings. The negative reputation is played up more in some in-character journals than in the sourcebook; in the book, merely being good at mind-magic generally won't get you shunned, so long as you don't use it (in however benign a manner) on anyone but yourself. Given that Birkozon's stated ambition is total, if indirect, control over the Tree, anyone who meddles in mind-magic (Birkozon's domain) may be thought some degree of stupid, but so long as you keep it to yourself, everyday people have better things to worry about than your personal damnation. (Though there are those — in the Healers' Guild and knightly orders — who are more vehement about it.)
  • Necromancy does exist on the World Tree, but is at most viewed as "Rude" rather than "Evil" by those not related to the animated. Family? They might sue you... or worse. Compounded by a spell that creates a dead copy of a subject.
• Death Is Cheap: Used, but not quite as cheaply as expected. While certain healing spells can bring back a person after they're technically dead, most of these work best right after death, and leave the patient in quite a bit of anguish for a week or two. Resurrection after the soul has passed on (which doesn't take long) is much more difficult, with mistakes made frequently enough to discourage most attempts.
• Domed Hometown: Since one of the most common threats to cities is flying monsters from the Verticals swooping in over the walls, some Prime towns opt to cover themselves entirely with reinforced domes of various sorts.
• Earth Is Young: History measures about 4,200 years from the creation of mortals to the setting's present day — some span of time existed between the creation of the universe and the creation of the first mortals, but the details aren't known. Besides the gods, a few immortal beings such as the oldest Zi Ri have been alive for all or most of this time.
• Elemental Embodiment: Most of the noun gods brought along some number of lesser spirits, referred to as anything from angels to demons to fairies but most commonly as elementals, to help manage and oversee their element. In scope, they vary from direct servants and relations of the gods through gaggles of nature spirits who serve no particular agenda to temporary, and sometimes not so temporary, creations of spells.
  • By far the most common are the air elementals, airy beings who perform the constant work needed to keep weather predictable and livable in the setting's bizarre universe. They are diffuse beings without clear boundaries between each other, and often merge or split apart.
  • Comparative handfuls of other elementals exist as well. Merklundum Harnipsundum, the god of water, came alongside a vast number of water sprits who dispersed through the waters of the tree and copied their god in his sleepy indolence. Flokin, the god of fire, brought along seven pet "firecats" who grant powerful fire magic to mortals with whom they bond. "Here", the god of location, is accompanied by location elementals —its grandchildren— resembling giant spiky hedgehogs, who seem to serve little purpose beyond tormenting mortals. Kaimiri, the god of time, has eight skeletal servants who oversee chronological matters while their master meditates.
  • Other elemental types are rare — the god of animals prefer to use mortal knights as servants, and it's not all that clear what difference would exist between a plant elemental and regular if active vegetation.
• Empathic Weapon: Weapons and spells can have semi-intelligent spirits. "Bound spells" can be made to go off under particular conditions, though these are far cruder than instilling an item or spell with spirit.
• The Empire: One of the sample settings is a city on the edge of an expansionistic kingdom, the Codum Empire. Codun is a civilized land with a stable code of laws, but is also aggressively expanding its borders, treats Herethroy and Oreen as second-class citizens, and executes Sleeth, Gormoror, and Khtsoyis at the slightest provocation.
• Fantastic Flora: Plants are generally as likely to be magically active as animals, and several species exist that do things like power fire magic, produce cley, inhibit one's ability to sense magic, heal wounds and sicknesses, and so on. Other plants grow metal nuggets, stones precious and non, salt and other minerals in their leaves, stems, flowers, fruit and so on, which are often the only sources of these things on the Tree.
• Fantastic Racism: Prime society has a persistent and distinctive racist streak, not least because the gods obviously favor certain species. Sleeth and Khtsoyis can expect to be routinely denied entrance into guilds and high society, and for that matter much in the way of respect — a Khtsoyis archbishop and duke was expected to feel honored for being allowed to sit among the day laborers at her own retirement banquet. Non-primes get it even worse, and are lucky when they're treated as second-class citizens and allowed to enter cities without being lynched — more commonly, they're considered monsters or non-entities whom the primes can conquer, displace, rob and kill with little consequence. The degree of things varies from place to place. In more open-minded societies, civilized non-primes such as akkamagga, blee, or mherobump are given a legal status anologous to rural primes, protected against theft and murder, and allowed into cities for work and trade. In the worst ones, disfavored prime species —typically Sleeth, Gormoror, and Khtsoyis— are treated as badly as non-primes, excluded from urban life, and openly given harsh and unfair legal punishments.
• Fantasy Metals: In addition to regular iron, copper, silver, gold, mercury and so on, the World Tree contains a number of fictional metals with various properties:
  • Branzinion is blue, hard as iron and much heavier. It's mostly used in blunt weapons and axes.
  • Hezarion is deep red and very ductile. It's favored by Herethroy, who use to make inlays on their exoskeletons.
  • Mnerorzion is dark purple, veined with lighter stripes that slowly shift. It's most popular as jewelry.
  • Yulexion is dark and aromatic, and mostly favored by Cani and Sleeth because they like its smell.
• Force Field: Via magic using multiple methods. Perhaps the most interesting is literally creating extra space between yourself and the incoming attack
• God Is Evil: Some of them, some of the time. Even kindly Virid (Creation) made a small percentage of her species into mixed-gender people (a fourth gender; they have three naturally), and made the rest instinctively or dogmatically hate them.
• God Is Inept: Any number of questionable design foibles were put into the world by the gods. The Khtsoyis origin story, the origin of the seasons (in particular, the season of "Surprise"), and so on. The gods in concert would be omnipotent, but have never cooperated that much since the world was first made, if then; any of the gods can find the answer to any question it wishes, but they don't always know what questions need to be asked.
• God Is Neutral:
  • The seven great Verb gods made the world, filled it with people, animals, and monsters, and then sat back to watch history happen. They spend most of their time sitting high in the sky, watching events of the Tree, and are notoriously disinclined to interact with creation or talk with mortals much. Gnarn and Hren Tzen occasionally descend to hunt or mate with some of their creations, but trying to ask them for cosmic information or favors will be met with a snarl or a laugh before the deity returns to the matter at hand.
  • The twelve Noun gods are generally more present and live on the Tree itself, although their degree of activity varies. Kvarse and Lenhirrik are deeply involved with civilization and live among mortals, and are regarded as very helpful; Birkozon does as well, but rules his city as an unquestioned tyrant. By contrast, Flokin and "Here" act as the universe's immune system and care little for the queries and needs of mortals, while Merklundum Harnipsundum has spent all of history sleeping in a cave in some remote corner of the Tree and Kaimiri has been meditating on the moon for even longer.
• Grows on Trees: Played with; while the grand examples are absent, there are plants that grow small amounts of metal or other hard materials in their leaves, nuts, or so forth. Some grow gemstones, although not many; bushes that deposit salt in their leaves are more common. In a setting without much metal, this can be invaluable to harvest and refine. Also, due to their Magitek, Primes can do quite a lot with certain types of nut.
• Have You Seen My God?: A downplayed example with Lenhirrik, the goddess of plant life. She's currently in the shape of a wooden Herethroy statue, completely unresponsive, and has been for thirty years. This isn't the first she's done so, but every previous occasion lasted a day or two at the most. There's currently a lot of worry and no hard information, and speculation ranges to her having fallen victim to another deity to just being in the middle of a god's equivalent of a nap.
• Heinous Hyena: Cyarr, the setting's primary enemy species, are centauroid hyenas. They're noble, civilized and highly moral in their own societies, but they're also obsessed with waging constant war against the primes and eventually eradicating an entire prime species to take their place.
• Hit Points: Although the units are different than those in the game rules, primes have discovered there really are distinct health units that lead to death when depleted, and that practicing having your spirit hang onto an injured body raises your injury tolerance. Adventurers have volunteered for scientific "titration" (i.e., "death by a thousand cuts") to get this practice. These units aren't exactly quantal — that's a gameplay abstraction — but it's still quite measurable how well a spirit can hold onto a damaged body.
• Ideal Illness Immunity: Primes, though this because natural diseases simply don't exist for them. There are the exceptions of the four versions of "Mircannis' Gentle Slumber" and the occasional broken off bit of extra Corpador that gets in someone's nose (or sticks to their chitin/fur/scales) and causes sneezing or weird magical effects. Non-primes are not so lucky, thanks to Gnarn and Accanax.
• Jerkass Gods: It appears the universe was created as a form of entertainment for the gods and their various otherwordly friends. Consequently, the constant misfortune heaped upon the Primes is purely because the gods find it amusing to watch them deal with it.
• Longer-Than-Life Sentence: "Doorwaying", letting a non-prime into a city, gets you multiple executions. With an equal number of resurrections if it was an angel sent by the gods, or otherwise did no real harm. Healing magic is cheap enough in general that corporal punishment is not seen as a great thing — and getting killed and resurrected is just an extreme form of such punishment.
• Lost Technology: Much of society was wiped out during the Holocaust Wars, which means that ancient artifacts are frequently found by adventurers. However, the trope is notably subverted in that magic theory has advanced significantly over time. So while the artifacts may be valuable for their historical significance, their effects tend to be crude and trivial by modern standards. The sourcebook mentions a famous enchanted weapon that would be considered a homework assignment for second year students at most academies. Holocaust War artifacts may be especially potent because nobody would dare make such destructive things anymore, but probably not because they're beyond the reach of modern enchanters to make. On the other hand, the gods did get more personally involved in the old days; god-touched artifacts are much less common now (and were never exactly plentiful).
• Made of Iron: Justified, since there's plentiful healing magic, and survival is more dependent on the ability of a creature's spirit to hold on to its body (see the example on Hit Points) than the survival of any specific part of the body; even if there's an arrow through your heart, if the spirit clings well enough, it can keep beating.
• "Magic A" Is "Magic A": Subverted slightly, due to the gods' direct influence over magic. Primes have tried to make this true by developing "scientific" types of magic that are predictable... mostly.
• Magic Potion: The taptet, a species of deer-people, have a unique skill — partly a kind of species-specific magic and partly carefully-guarded secret knowledge — for making potions that confer considerable power or advantages to the drinker at the cost of alarming side effects, such as potions that confer great strength for a time but leave the drinker weakened and feeble when they wear off or healing draughts that induce tremors. Most other people prefer to use traditional magic, which is less powerful but much safer.
• Magitek: Magic is the technology. Why use expensive glass to make a crude tool that imitates an off-the-shelf microscopic-vision spell? Though there are some reasons to use such things, especially where information-gathering is concerned — information-spells are inherently unreliable. Sometimes you'll know they went wrong. Others, you won't — and that's when they're most likely to be horribly wrong.
• Magic Points: Justified as part of the world's physics. Primes get distinct units of "cley" (perceived magically as keys), and spells usually cost one unit, with more contributing more power if the caster is able to shove them in / if a spontaneous spell happens to use them. On the flipside, you can try to cheat, getting a weak spellcast without actually using a cley — but you need (and risk) one cley to make the attempt.
• Malevolent Architecture: When they made the Tree, the gods quite deliberately put all the livable areas on branches whose edges, up to twenty-five miles away, are filled with powerful, custom-designed monsters.
• Mind Screw: This one is about what magic can and can't do, particularly healing and destruction. One cannot either heal something so much it can't be destroyed again, nor destroy it so much it can't be brought back. Granted, the complexity of the reversal gets higher with each heal/destroy cycle.
• Mundane Utility: Most primes know spells with little adventuring use, for tasks like creating water or cleaning dishes. An in-book example shows an ordinary woman fretting over whether to study an obscure magic art to learn a better dish-washing spell, versus getting (expensive) clay dishes which the more common spell won't destroy like it would wooden ones.
• Mushroom House: Dullogs are large, dome-like mushrooms that grow up to a few hundred feet around and forty high. Their insides are spongelike networks of interconnected chambers, which people — usually non-primes, as most prime species have better options — often use as living spaces. While windows can be cut into the outer cells to let in light, people living further in depend on the fact that dullog flesh glows orange when wet.
• Nay-Theist:
  • True atheists are very rare in the World Tree — it's a difficult view to hold when the seven creator gods are visible in the sky at all times and there are multiple reliable historic records of the twelve lesser ones interacting with civilization throughout history. Instead, atheists tend to take the view that, real as they may be, the gods aren't inherently better or more "divine", whatever that may mean, than anything or anyone else — they're just bigger and more powerful. The sourcebook notes this to be a defensible position.
  • A similar attitude is present among some non-Prime species about the concept of Primes and divine favor. That the gods made the Primes special and like them best, while they view all other species as scenery and background actors, is a well-known and indisputable fact. Some non-Primes try to deny this, or believe that they can become Primes, but others accept that this is so and just don't really care. Akkamagga, for instance, give very little thought to any Primes other than the Herethroy that they often neighbor, while the sophisticated and magically-powerful nendrai view Prime civilization as a resource to exploit and do not give a whit about who the gods do or don't prefer.
• No Ontological Inertia: Magically-created objects soon vanish by default, but it's fairly easy to make them permanent. The book points out that the existence of Healing magic implies that everything has a natural "intact" state, and low-level Healing spells make wounds vanish only temporarily.
• Not Completely Useless: Sythyry regularly casts "The Raven's Beak," which does practically nothing but gives experience in every magical element.
• Otherworldly and Sexually Ambiguous: While some of the gods are clearly male or female, many others have no fixed gender, no gender at all, or gender identities alien to mortals. Hren Tzen, Pararenenzu, and Shax Shay Shaz use the zie/zir pronouns also used by the hermaphrodite Zi Ri and by the Herethroy's third sex. Flokin "rarely has a gender" and is referred to as "it", as is the cryptic Kaimiri. Kvarse is referred to as female and a she, but appears in male form only slightly less often than in female form.
• Our Centaurs Are Different: The cyarr are a form of hyena-centaurs, with the lower body of a giant hyena and the torso, head and arms of a humanoid one.
• Our Dragons Are Different:
  • Zi Ri are a species of small, hermaphroditic dragons who are often very different, even from each other — Zi Ri are very physically varied, and can range from regular if miniature Western dragons to bird-winged and/or -beaked versions of the same to reptilian birds. Some even look like tiny griffins or lizards, although deliberate self-mutation is probably at play there.
  • Merklundum Harnispundum, the god of water, typically appears as a dragon made out of woven brambles.
• Our Gods Are Different: The gods, referred to collectively as the seven-plus-twelve, are divided into two categories:
  • The seven verb gods, known as the creator gods, which each had a hand in the creation of the world itself and a prime species (or two), and each manage a magical Art related to how a things are affected; a Verb. Among them are creation, destruction, knowing, changing, sustaining, healing, and controlling. They generally sit in the sky and watch, rarely intervening in mortal affairs; two of them are known to visit on a frequent basis, but say and do nothing of consequence.
  • The twelve noun gods, who live on the tree itself and manage an element, a magical Noun. These gods are much more active in the affairs of mortals. The twelve nouns are fire, water, air, stone/metal, plant matter, animal matter, time, space, mind, spirit, sensation, and magic itself.
• Painting the Frost on Windows: The World Tree's natural systems are anything but natural, and to ensure that they'll keep working the gods created vast numbers of elementals to oversee them. Between the universe's weird shape and weirder physics, for example, habitable weather wouldn't naturally arise on it. The reason it does anyway is due to the endless armies of the air elementals, who constantly work to push clouds around, squeeze them for rain, make the winds blow, keep the air clear, arrange the seasons and the like.
• Physical God: Many of the world's creator gods appear in physical form on the titular World Tree with some regularity. Some of them blatantly reveal their identity and openly display their omnipotence (indeed, some of them lead guilds and other organisations, and one of them in particular, Birkozon, the god of telepathy and mental magic, rules an entire realm on the Tree). Yet others prefer to stay hidden, walk in disguise, or not get physically involved much with the world they created at all.
• Points of Light Setting: The World Tree has many branches, and is constantly growing. Civilization tends to gather atop the newest and best-sunlit branches, in handfuls of mighty cities and smaller villages, each normally surrounded by powerful and deadly magical walls. This is because outside of these areas are many monsters and dangers deliberately created or encouraged by the gods to populate a world of adventure, while the geography of the Tree encourages civilization to exist as long series of cities strung out along the (relatively) narrow branches, which makes it very difficult to enforce any kind of large-scale rule. While there are old and broken cities deep within the shadows of the lower branches, some possibly with treasures worth entire new cities, they might as well not exist anymore once the monsters take over.
• Power Perversion Potential: Mind and Body magic. Reversed with cley transfer, which grants someone more Magic Points but requires an embarrassing hug-and-kiss ritual.
• Proud Warrior Race:
  • The Gormoror are in many ways a parodic exaggeration of this. They mostly live in small tribes on the edges of civilization, and they're obsessed with a Bronze Age sense of honor focused mostly on fighting grand battles and performing mighty deeds. They occupy most of their time with living out their personal heroic legends, generally by challenging one another to dramatic duels, fighting monsters or rival tribes, swearing and keeping honor-oaths, or raiding and sacking other species' settlements for treasure and the glory of killing a few farmers, stealing their stuff and hightailing it before the army arrives.
  • The cyarr are highly militaristic, expansionistic and devoted to their personal ideals of honor. They're in a state of constant war, either hot or cold, with the primes, for the sake of honor, revenge for past slights, and territory, and are ruled by warrior-nobilities who hold themselves to incredibly strict moral standards. This lifestyle presents something of an issue for them, however, as they have no access to healing or metal-shaping magic, which gives them serious disadvantages in protracted battles and campaigns — the associated gods plain don't like them and deny these gifts to the Cyarr.
• Rage Against the Heavens: A Zi Ri is known to have once blasted the goddess of animals with the spell "Grand Inferno", with no effect.
• Rank Scales with Asskicking: While many politicians and bankers and such wield their own sort of power, high-ranking members in many of the guilds that rely on magic are, by definition, potent mages. Especially notable are the Smiths' guilds and the Healers' guild.
• Rat Men: Scawn are a non-prime species resembling humanoid rats about four feet tall. Because each Scawn can alter its shape once or twice in its life, and these changes usually breed true, many tribes and bands sport various additions to the basic bodyplan — they may be rat people with stinger tails, or with wings, or with horns, or so forth. Insofar as other species are concerned, they're mostly minor annoyances, petty thieves and would-be brigands. They have a peculiar obsession with the feline Sleeth, believing that they will reincarnate as a Sleeth if they're killed by or if they themselves kill one. Both beliefs are false, and greatly irritate the Sleeth.
• Reincarnation: All mortals reincarnate after death, although all memories are removed between lives. The Gornazzits, a non-prime species resembling furry slugs, are an exception to this — they remember all their past lives, and some can clearly recall the time before primes existed.
• Screw Destiny: The cyarr (hyena-centaur) race of non-primes believes it can achieve prime status and become one of the gods' favorite races, if only they exterminate one of the existing prime species.
• Sliding Scale of Anthropomorphism: The species of the World Tree follow a broad gradient of anthropomorphism. Among the primes, the Cani begin at one end as essentially humans with dog heads, fur, and tails. Rassimel and Orren are bipedal raccoons and otters, with distinctly nonhuman legs and bodies. Gormoror straddle this line, as their males are upright bears while their women have distinctly human-like torsos and faces. Sleeth, Khtsoyis, and Zi Ri are completely non-anthropomorphic, being sapient panthers, octopi, and tiny dragons. Non-Prime species occupy various positions on this scale —the ralike scawn are about as anthropomorphic as Cani, the deerlike taptet have hoofed legs, and the lizardlike akkamagga aren't humanoid at all— or side branches, such as the centaurine, hyena-like cyarr.
• Sorcerous Overlord: One of the sample settings is Ymarku, the City of Obelisks, a land ruled by a group of seven terrible wizards who wear illusionary forms and govern through orders relayed to terrified bureaucrats. Recently the wizards have fallen into civil war, and terrible things happen in the city's halls of power.
• Talking Animal: While most primes are either anthropomorphic or fully fantasy creatures, the Sleeth are simply panthers that can talk.
• Those Magnificent Flying Machines: Travel between branches of the World Tree by necessity involves crossing enormous gulfs of empty air for anyone who doesn't fancy the long trip around through the trunk, and skyborne vessels are consequently common and, as they're explicitly magical in nature, very elaborate. Airborne ships, chariots pulled by birds and giant kites are among the more common of these contraptions.
• Translation Convention: Employed by the rulebook. As the foreword notes, the in-universe names of the magical skills are based on the names of the gods (Viridoc, Accanoc), but for ease of use, are rendered based on English words (Viridoc is Creation, so Creoc; Accanoc is Destruction, so Destroc).
• Treetop World: The entire setting exists in the highest reaches of a single, mind-bogglingly large tree floating in space. The ecosystem there is friendly and well-suited to intelligent beings; lower reaches are progressively less explored and more perilous until the lower trunks become a full-on Death World. Cities are mostly strung out along the upper surfaces of branches — the sides of branches and the trunk, called the Verticals, are mostly home to flying monsters — and metal and stone are very scarce and mostly obtained from certain plants that deposit them in their leaves and fruit.
• Uncoffee: Kathia, a spicy drink made from the leaves of the kathia plant, is described as similar to coffee or spiced tea. There is an associated character flaw, "Needs Kathia to Wake Up".
• Useless Useful Spell: There's a listing for the spell "Destroy the World", along with other mighty spells likely way above anyone's skill level.
• Voluntary Shapeshifting: Bonstables can take on the form of either any Prime species or of silver-winged birds.
• Weather Dissonance: Built right in; a one-month-long season known as Surprise involves all nature of interesting and odd weather, in addition to typically being very hot or very cold for the entire month. The rest of the time the air elementals in charge of weather behave... more or less, and getting a universe like the World Tree to have mostly temperate, liveable weather means those elementals are doing a great deal of work indeed.
• What Measure Is A Nonhuman: Non-primes variously know, don't care, or ignore that the gods don't particularly care about them, and the terms "monster" and "non-prime" are used nearly interchangeably; the former is less polite. Primes' "mageriums" (mind-spirit connection and link to the gods) are visibly different too.
• Wicked Cultured: Nendrai, large reptilian monsters greatly feared by primes, thoroughly enjoy the benefits of civilization and surround themselves with the best creature comforts that they can. Their floors are covered by fine rugs, their libraries hold all the classics, and their cellars are stocked with rare vintages. They're personable and educated as well, and can be engaged in perfectly pleasant conversation, as long as the other party can convince the nendrai that it wants a chat more than it wants lunch or a new slave.
• Wizards Live Longer: There are various ways for a skilled magic-user to extend their lifespan, and the greatest Rassimel and Cani wizards have lived lives as long as any Zi Ri.
• World Tree: Explicitly, with literal branches and leaves and amber. The setting consists chiefly of a civilization built on the topmost branches of its central trunk; the World Tree goes on much further beyond that, with additional trunks and layers of branches extending much further beyond that and potentially forever.
• Wound That Will Not Heal: Chursash — bear-like venomous creatures — have a rather nasty variant of this, in that five gashes open on each of their cheeks at adulthood and remain there, dripping blood, for the rest of their lives. This serves to render them constantly angry and aggressive, and thus a constant challenge for primes to deal with. Their one saving grace in this is that, being simple animals, they're not intelligent enough to truly bemoan their fate.
• Xenofiction: The game is superficially about Funny Animals, but each of the Prime races has its own specific instincts, drives and feelings that make them distinct from humans and strongly impact how their societies, or lack thereof, work, even ignoring their magic and other powers.
• Yin-Yang Bomb: An interesting example, the spell "The Infinite Grenade" uses a combination of destructive, healing, and sustaining magics to repeatedly detonate the titular grenade.

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