Kapidhvaja Campaign Setting

Kapidhvaja (कपिध्वज) Campaign Setting is an amateur effort to develop a homebrew role-playing game campaign setting. Its locational focus is within Dungeons & Dragons’ (D&D) Eberron Campaign Setting, though its intention is extension and inclusion throughout the known worlds. Its temporal beginning was Sunday, September 30th, at 2:05 a.m., a point in time that worships Arjuna’s survival of Karṇa’s arrow aimed at his head. The helmet that was struck instead is represented by The Down Loading, a Lakṣmi-Vaiṣṇava event that compares to the two Tulasi-Vaiṣṇava events the First War (between Corellon and Gruumsh) and Forgotten Realms’ Spellplague.

While Kapidhvaja’s focus is Eberron, it builds off an idea offered in Bruce R. Cordell’s RPG The Strange: that of the character player. In that game, many twists are encouraged, including even the creation of one’s own human character as the likeness of the player of that character. In Kapidhvaja, the world within the creation is meant to include and map out our own three-dimensional reality, though of course there will be significant differences between the two.

Kapidhvaja’s initial cosmology is inverse, meaning that it is inward of typical core objects like black holes, stars, planets, or moons. But as it reaches out from its own beginnings it works with both sides, intra- and trans-, of such objects. It also works with levels of the universe both in hierarchization of milder to vaster and more intense (lunar, planetary, stellar, galactic, etc.) and hierarchization of weakness and strength (chaos/evil vs. law/goodness).

The fourth level is where the players (as we commonly think of them) of role-playing games live. They are humans, many with their own three-dimensional universes, such as a campaign setting may be considered. The third level is where a significant type of characterization is being worked for us: it is the world of fantasy, the world where dreams are made, the world of spirituality, the world where games are played. The second level emphasizes planetary sanctity and loves helping us achieve all that we desire to achieve in life; many of the gods and goddesses that we worship here live at the second level of this universe.

Inversion cosmology allows for those of us who choose to “be” present inwardly to work with a theoretically infinite number of levels as if it were all “one.” However, any affect our actions, including through speech or writing, might have on those realms where the differentiation of one level from another is important, is also potentially as important. This means that for the sake of safety and sanity we ought to work very carefully with the rest of reality around us.

There certainly are distinct levels of strength and virtue the inward side of life, even if each level recognizes and appreciates what “oneness” (monism) is. For instance, a long-term but more truly first level worshiper of second level god Viṣṇu might choose to identify his self as a Viṣṇu for the purposes of interplanetary gaming, but if at least one distinguishable (and we are told that there are innumerable such, many with their own universes, even some within the same universe) Viṣṇu relating from truer second level chooses to play a hand in a first level game, then said worshiper will reckon with the significance of that presence and influence of greater strength.

As Kapidhvaja’s universal aspect has simplest origin in Eberron’s Sharn, so does its humane aspect worship the non-player character (NPC) Josilian Tarli, though third level Vaiṣṇavism brings him to life as the playable character Vāmana, a form of Viṣṇu. Theurgy Wiki intends to elaborate on the rules by which any of us here on intra-Solar Earth might identify and participate with some of the possibilities in relation to one another. Josilian is a character that resembles the role played by Ed Greenwood’s Elminster in Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting, but the additional levels of play and the specification of inversion cosmology give reason to describe some significant differences along with the similarity.