Like most roleplaying fans, I have had in my head several ideas to craft my own fantasy world for many, many years. Through the years these ideas have changed and evolved, and have been influenced by the great quantity of roleplaying games I have known. Now I am finally trying to round them up and work on them to actually forge a world and a roleplaying game in that world.

I call my idea Argué, Arche or Arché, but the world itself will probably be simply called “the world”. I follow certain classical Greek thinkers ideas, like those of Plato’s, Aristotle’s and Anaximandro’s, and I am heavily influenced by Alan Moore. The Arche is a mix of Plato’s and Aristotle’s world of ideas and of Moore’s idea-space.

It is a tetrahedral world created with the classical elements (fire, water, air and earth) (although I am seriously thinking about adding wood and metal). This elements are “equivalents” to our chemical elements: in the world of Arche, things really are made in diverse combinations of fire, water, air and earth atoms.

The being that created the world of Arche is the Demiurge (with upper-case). It created the world inert, but life appeared (despite its wishes) and, with time, developed a big diversity of sciences/arts/magics of distinct origins. Some of them are:

• Demiurgy: The Demiurge gave a lesser version of its capabilities to some living beings, trying to find a solution to the increase of the imbalance. These demiurges (in lower-case) are able to control, alter and transform an elemental pair, usually two opposed elements, simply with their will.
• Taumaturgy: Many living beings envied the powers of the demiurges, and were finally able to access it and create miraculous acts using the same rules that the Demiurge set up when it created the world.
• Logy: There were living beings who preferred to get away from the powers gifted by an unknown entity as the Demiurge, and decided to create their own science studying the world from the ground up, and not from the Demiurge down.
• Demonology: The study of beings similar to the Demiurge, and how to benefit from them. A hybrid art that employs knowledge from both taumaturgy and logy.
• Epistemology: Not only studying knowledge itself, but the Arche as well.
• Archelogy: Archelogists use epistemologic knowledge to explore the Arche looking for ideas and even trying to change aspects of the world by changing their “true forms”.
• Rhetoric: Appeared in opposition to the dominance of the taumaturgy and the logy, rhetoric is the mastery of words to convince and affect others.

The living beings of the world of Arche are very diverse. There are beings made of only one element, like fire, air, water or earth elementals, that incarnate the main physical and metaphysical characteristics of their elements. There are also living beings of two, three and four elements, in diverse combinations and proportions. Not all living beings are equally sentient and/or intelligent.

These are the big basic traits that this world has had in my head all these years. Now we have to see how they evolve with their writing down.