In the beginning, there was darkness

Before I even begin to go into game mechanics, I'm going to write the world as a potential setting for whatever kind of game I want to use it for later.  If I want stories set in this world to be believable, then I'll need to pump it full of details first of all.

I suppose the first step is to pick a genre and general atmosphere I want to create.  For this world I'm going to go with dark fantasy.  I want my world to have elements of horror, but take them out of their usual setting to see how they react to medieval fantasy.  I want sunlight in my world to be very limited.  Lack of sunlight means poor agriculture.  How do the natives of my world carve out a living?  The entire ecology needs to be shaped around the lacking of this important source of life.  I don't want my world to be too cold, I want warm swamps, hot springs, and fiery pits where appropriate, so I need an alternate source of heat.  I'm going to go with internal.

When I was in high school I wrote a novel about a group of adventurers that were actually monsters in a world where humans were the dark threat.  I'm going to steal some of my old ideas and inhabit my world with monsters as the dominant species.  Humans are often the glue that hold other races together, with good reason, they have all the necessary attributes and diversity.  I'm going to go with that concept and have monsters and humans living together.

At the risk of being cliché, I've always been a fan of classic monsters.  The good old ones like Dracula, Wolfman, the mummy, Frankenstein, zombies.  I have to admit I've never seen or read Twilight.  I've been avoiding it because of what it seems to have done to the public image of vampires and werewolves.  I was an avid player of Vampire: The Masquerade and Werewolf: The Apocalypse,  I love Bram Stoker, werewolves that are bestial like the Wendigo, zombies that have the decency to shuffle instead of chase you like a cheetah on crack  That's what I want for my world; the classics.  Because I'm not writing horror, I'm going to make them more agreeable, but I want them to keep their old feel.