What's Snakebite?
Hi everyone,
If you're here, it's probably because you're checking in on my game. Mighty kind of you! The TTRPG community is alarmingly kind and helpful.
So: Snakebite!
I'm constantly playing with mechanics, because mechanics are how a game is played, and I want the game to be fun! But more: I want the right tools to really explore the world of Snakebite. This world, its ruins and villains and monsters and heroes, exist at the service of the themes, the feel of the setting.
So in this post, I want to talk about the world! I'll get to mechanics eventually, but the world is what matters: I want you to know how this world feels, how it tastes in the mind. Only then will any of it make sense.
A few years ago, I was hospitalized. I spent several days connected to tubes, in a dreamy haze. All I had was a stack of books my dad brought me; I asked for his childhood favorites and he delivered (because I'm dramatic and thought I was going to die. If you ever meet my dad, know that you've met an actual superhero.) Delirious and nearly-starved is, I can tell you, the right way to read Robert Howard and Lord Dunsany.
Snakebite is a world that feels like a Robert E. Howard story at all times. This can be Conan, or it could be Kull, and it absolutely could be Solomon Kane. It’s a world where every ruin is haunted — but ghosts are still rare and frightening. Sorcery is real, but ethereal, inhuman, and dangerous. Every woman is the most beautiful woman alive, every treasure is glittering, and every villain is a sneering, rapacious, smarmy tyrant. It’s not meant to be a stupid world — far from it, I want the chaos and the violence and the ruin to make “sense.” I don't really like dumb things, in comedy or action or tragedy. Instead, I want an operatic world, even when the challenge is as prosaic as avoiding starvation. There is no grinding in this world, and there are no easy victories. Characters are larger-than-life, all Conan and Red Sonja, but their survival is never assured — Snakebite is not intended to be as much a meat grinder as Call of Cthulhu, but it’s certainly closer to that than DnD. Life is always, even for the most decadent king, hanging by at most a handful of threads.
(Hey, a quick note on art: I’m using random Google imagesto set tone, but I’m loyal to artists: if ever I were to publish anything, I’d hire real artists. These are placeholders; I just like them being here. I hope that's okay?)
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I’ve created a world: Taurica, a vast continent of monsters, barbarian tribes, twisted landscapes, and forbidding ruins. Most of the map is blank space, but a bubble of relative order can be found in a region called “Kocari’s Domain,” the realm conquered by a now-aging warlord, Lord Kocari. The gem of his conquests: the city of Snakebite; the only true city yet built by humans. A place of iron in a world of bronze. Thousands of slaves and laborers, dozens of princes and gang-lords and aspiring oligarchs, fifteen major fighting pits, one aged and distant king keeping a jealous hand on power.
The central idea is that humanity was created as a slave race for the godlike giants, who came from the stars and ruled the world. But at some point, the dragons woke deep underground and emerged to war on the giants. Their inhuman power remade the world into a phantasmal, twisted place, littered with ruins, unnatural beasts, and alien intelligences; until both the empires of the giants and dragons collapsed and disappeared. Humans, the former slaves of now-dead gods, have spread out from their prisons into the world; carving out their mark with sabers and spears. It is a violent, decadent, amoral, relentless world. It is full of sex and violence and ambition.
If that appeals to you, read on! If not…well, maybe I can convince you? Following is an overview of the “core” game setting. Each of these regions is intended to be quite large, enough that one alone could support an entire RPG campaign or numerous stories. These are snapshots; there's much more detail for each in my master document.
I would genuinely love for you to like it. :3
An Overview of the Domain of Kocari
Snakebite: The largest settlement in Kocari, located on an arm of the Black River a few hours west of Kocari’s palace. This is a city of men, built by men, but using the detritus of a bygone age. Buildings are cut of sandstone blocks with protruding wicker window ledges. Crowds pulse through the narrow and filthy streets; beggars fill doorways and alleys. Hawkers lay out blankets of pottery and jewelry; more talented smiths rent workshops from where they sell weapons and armor.
Most settlements in Taurica are little more than fortified villages, concerned with daily survival. Snakebite, in all its filthy glory, is a true city. It is governed by avaricious merchants and ambitious warlords, and these rich masters live in opulence while the greater masses are hungry every night. Yet anyone who is free finds their way to the city, where there is always work, always violence, always action.
Slaves also find their way to the city, where they are auctioned or employed or trained to fight in the various pits that dot the city. Gladiators can earn fame and fortune, and while most die horribly to the sounds of rooting crowds, a select few have become masters of the city themselves.
Despite the poverty, Snakebite’s population is massive. This owes credit to the Tower Atlantica, a Dragon tower rising from the city center. Within the gem-encrusted surface the constant whir of gears can be heard, and twice a year the great tower trembles from top to bottom; none of the hundreds of sages and witches who have studied it can say why. There is no entrance to the tower nor hint to its purpose, but all who live near it seem to resist sickness and even the worst effects of old age: Indeed, this effect seems to permeate the whole of Kocari. Death is frequent, but disease is rare.
There is no single ruler or entity governing the city, but the most powerful individual is the crime-lord Gorlok. He is a repulsive figure, thought to be half-troll. He certainly looks the part. He is known for his cunning, but also his sadism. He takes pride in publicly tormenting and executing his enemies.
Kocari’s Palace: Located almost exactly in the center of his realm, Kocari’s palace was once a Giant fortress. Many of the vast columns and slabs have been raised once more through sheer mass muscle, though those split and damaged by time have not been repaired. It is a largely open palace, populated by hundreds of retainers, footmen, slaves, and craftsmen. Dozens of bright tents and pavilions fill the vast halls, where the lord’s guests and servants work and reside. The uninvited are refused entry to the palace, though given its incredible size and derelict state, the guards don’t seriously attempt to keep out determined visitors.
Lord Kocari feasts every night, and by day generally hunts monsters in the nearby fields and woods, surrounded by his warriors. To what extent he manages his realm, the work is done by his daughter, Saga. She is found always in the company of her Companions — bodyguards who have pledged their lives to hers. Their loyalty, like their ability, is beyond question.
Travelers come to offer services to Kocari, but otherwise it is not a major settlement: life at the palace wholly revolves around the lord.
The Dead City: East of Kocari’s palace lies the “Dead City” of Mundifell, built by the giants to house one of their vast legions of slaves. Two centuries ago, it was a major military center, replete with barracks, armories, manufactories, and civilian infrastructure. In the waning days of the war, the city was destroyed, and the survivors fled into the countryside.
The city remains, a skeletal version of itself. Scavengers have picked out the most valuable remains, but countless vaults and fortifications remain buried under mountains of split stone and the bones of the thousands who couldn’t escape the arcane firestorm. Dangerous magical energies still linger, as well as never-fired wards and traps laid by the giants.
The giants designed cities to their own technological standards. Buildings were made to massive scale, with residential towers as high as 20 stories tall, with elevated canals and pipeworks flowing between factories and refineries as large as modern villages. Lacking magical reinforcement, most of this infrastructure has collapsed, leaving heaps of shattered stone and corroded iron columns jutting into the sky. Despite the vast scale, the cities themselves are built at human proportions. The giants themselves could rarely fit comfortably within the ‘slave cities,’ which they left in the care of their thralls.
Other than scavengers, humans avoid the city. Inhuman creatures have made good use of the ruins for lairs, and even before the destruction, the industries of the giants left the ground polluted and toxic.
Windward Crags: These mountains form the eastern border of Kocari’s lands. Attacked by dragons, the battle wrought the stone of the mountains themselves into unrecognizable, twisted columns of stone. Arcane energies still linger here, and sorcerous hermits frequently take up residence in the countless caves peppering the Crags.
The name is not artistic: the winds howl piercingly through these bizarre, tortuous heights. Tribes of warring orcs and men build elaborate rope bridges connecting the spires, carving out precarious lives in the space between stone and air. Cannibalism is common here, and bone idols dot the landscape, serving as warnings, signposts, offerings, and more.
The monsters that inhabit the crags are particularly fierce, and their remains are particularly valuable. Many tribes exist purely for the hunt; trading bones and skins for food and steel.
Black River Canyon: The Black River runs from the north to the south of Kocari. It is broad, wide, and deep. Numerous tributaries drain into it from across the realm, making the river a shared ‘pathway’ across Kocari.
True to its name, the water is dark and icy cold. Though perfectly safe to drink, the river itself is perilous. Aquatic beasts are known to lurk below the surface, and children are never allowed to be by the water’s edge unattended.
In the north, the river flows through relatively open plains, but slowly the river cuts deep into the earth, forming the Canyon. This is a place of beauty, and also strange power, as if something powerful waits just below the water’s edge. Travelers oft go go missing here, and yet bodies are rarely found.
At the southernmost end of the Canyon sits the Black Pool. Here the canyon completely closes overhead, forming a vast, circular lake shrouded always in gloom. Druids consider it a sacred place, beyond good and evil: even the giants and dragons seemed content to let the Pool remain unmolested.
No one has ever claimed to dredge the bottom of the pool, and many who have slept near it recall disturbing dreams of endless, lightless, airless tunnels stretching away from them in all directions.
Wetwood: The southeast of Kocari is flooded most of the year, as it has no drainage to the Black River. This is the Wetwood: Remote, damp, and cold. The swamp tribes here feed on kobold, fish, eel, and moss; it is said that they accumulate so much poison in their bones that not even grass grows in their graveyards.
The ruins in the swamp are uniquely well-preserved, and many occultists have occupied the old towers and fortresses slowly sinking into the marsh. Given the difficulty of merely traveling the region, few efforts have been made to dislodge them.
Free elves live in the deepest reaches of the Wood. They are not hostile to outsiders, but seek little to do with them. Some do leave to adventure the world, but most are content within their groves, where they are rebuilding some sense of the civilization the world has lost.
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