So, I should start at the outset: my first, and most enduring take on fantasy comes from Tolkien. I devoured his work (The Hobbit, LOTR, The Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales) when I was about 9 or 10, and probably didn't understand half of what I read, but what I do remember is the sense of gravity, lament, of the incredible enduring weight of loss that the books carried. The Elves, Dunedain and Dwarves bore this most heavily, of course, but it ran through everything I read (that this was the most impressive and enduring element no doubt speaks as much to my personal temperament as to authorial intent and craft, but that's rather the point).
Having gobbled up Tolkien, I read Narnia, the early Shannara books, the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, and then moved on to Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising sequence; Lloyd Alexander's Chronicles of Prydain; Alan Garner's Weirdstone of Brisingamen and The Moon of Gomrath; Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea books and Katharine Kerr's Deverry books. Eventually, I got to the Osten Ard books by Tad Williams, the Wheel of Time series (a marathon unlike any other; one remains uncertain of the outcome), Steven Brust's Khaavren and Vlad Taltos books and Elizabeth Moon's Paksennarion series.
Most of these books carried just as much weight as those of Tolkien, if expressed differently - some didn't: I don't know if anyone would seriously advance the claims of Shannara in such a regard. However, not all of them would make my Appendix N - and many of them don't contribute very much. Mostly, they are a sort of subterranean contributor to the mythology of the New Kingdoms, and, most importantly for the purposes of this discussion - to the tone or 'feel' of the New Kingdoms (thus, Centaurs in Verkhun take their primary inspiration from CS Lewis' Narnian astrologer/warrior/healers, rather than the bibulous wild folk of other mythoi).
At the core, the world of Verkhun (of which the New Kingdoms are but one part, if the most richly detailed in game terms), has seen much better days. It has, quite literally, been torn in two by the disaster of Shroudfall, and is held in its current state of slowly degrading stability by an unfathomably massive investment of deific power. It is a world far fallen from what it was (although this is not some tale of the Fall - it was far from perfect before Shroudfall), and it is on a trajectory of ultimate destruction - an apocalypse of utter totality when the severed "halves" of the planet collapse back into one (not quite halves: the split is about 65%/35%).
Of course, in-game, few actually know this, and even fewer believe, and of that very small group, most have succumbed to madness of various kinds. Most folk live their lives even as we do, struggling, striving, scheming - one might say they are fiddling while Rome burns. PCs can strive, and even thrive in this world on borrowed time. But the tone of loss, and lamentation pervades (or should pervade) the moral and metaphysical fabric of the world. This constant sense of living with diminution is a hard thing to carry over into gameplay. I can - with a certain amount of effort, and dubious success - convey some of this through roleplaying or when writing some piece of lore for the players, but how does one get player buy-in? Should I even care? It's their fun, after all.
I've been tossing around some possible mechanics for use in the setting, but they're quite closely tied in with the HoNK ruleset I've been cobbling together, rather than any other system, so to outline those, I guess I'll have to lay out them. More Heartbreaker posts pending, I guess...
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