Toy Land

If you were to take every single toy away from Toy Land, you’d be left with a place full of rocks, dirt, water, flora, and micro-organisms, but, from worm to whale, it would be devoid of non-microscopic fauna. In Toy Land, every animal or artifact visible to the naked human eye is a toy or part of a toy.

Toy Land is inhabited by toys that exist in the “real world”, toys that probably existed in the “real world”, and toys that could conceivably exist in the “real world”.

All toys in Toy Land are animate. How something like, say, a toy building is animate is an interesting question to explore.

Toy Land features all types of landscapes, whether mountainous, jungle, arctic, what have you. It includes all kinds of habitation, such as farms, villages, old cities, modern cities, cities of tomorrow… whatever one can imagine.

One thing that all toys in Toy Land have in common is that they’re fixated upon their individual purposes. A toy soldier is all about soldiering. A toy mailman is obsessed with delivering the mail. There’s a story about a toy farmer who once insisted she could be whatever she wanted and, so, opened a bakery. Her baked goods were just OK and they were all in the shapes of tractors and farm implements. She eventually went back to farming and was happier for it.

There are some toys whose purpose seems to be “generic person”. These toys are preoccupied with figuring out where they can fit into any given situation, regardless of the situation or of the purposes they’ve served in the past. There are toy skyscrapers in large toy cities that are chock-full of these “generic persons”, as when the building first manifested in the city, “generic persons” saw that it needed people to work in its offices and live in its penthouses, and so they all gravitated towards the building until it was occupied to capacity with “generic office people” and “generic penthouse dwellers”. If the building were to ever be destroyed or disappear for some other reason, the “generics” would wander aimlessly through Toy Land until some new purpose presented itself, in which case they’d adapt themselves to it for as long as that purpose remained available. Nobody’s sure just how many “generic persons” live in Toy Land, but some believe it’s a frightening number.

Unlike Gingerbread Land, Toy Land is extremely interested in gender – nearly every toy is male or female and it really matters. Yet, like Gingerbread folk, Toy folk don’t feel bodily pain or pleasure and they don’t biologically procreate, so there’s no sexuality. There are families, because the purpose of some toys is to be “Mom” or “Dad” or “Daughter” or “Son”. But that’s a good way to summarize how gender works in Toy Land, it’s integrated into the purpose of the toy, even though there’s no compelling reason for it to be, functionally or logically.

Toys can form romances in Toy Land, but they’re based upon intellectual and/or emotional intimacy and never physical intimacy, though the toys whose purpose is to be “married” portray mild physical intimacy. Gender is overwhelmingly important in romantic relationships, but nothing in Toy Land forces them to be hetero-normative. Even so, “romance narratives” in Toy Land are profoundly cliched.

Toys that aren’t given names at their creation pick names for themselves. By far the most popular names chosen are Theodore or Dorothy. Since there are so many toys that go by these names, diminutives are used to differentiate individuals (Ted, Theo, Dolly, Dotty, etc.), so those names are frequently encountered also. Some toys with obvious nicknames like “Tiny” or “Red” may have the occasion to admit that the name they chose for themselves was Theodore or Dorothy but their friends later gave them the nickname. The “generic person” toys are especially prone to only pick Theodore or Dorothy as a name, which somehow makes meeting and becoming acquainted with a large group of them even creepier than usual, and that’s saying something.

The thing that most people find most interesting about Toy Land is that it has over-the-top heroes and villains. Action figures, if you will. These action figures make it such that nearly all parts of the vast country of Toy Land are under some kind of threat at all times. Villains are always thwarted, of course, but sometimes only after a good deal of destruction has taken place. In a way, living in Toy Land is pretty-much like living in a comic book.

Toys that represent magical beings have magical powers. This is in contrast to Gingerbread Land, where only the gingerbread is magical, but the Gingerbread folk don’t even think of it in those terms.

Toy Land features a giant bay with a huge island in the center of it. Mainlanders just call it “The Island” because the people who live on it call it thousands of things. And that’s because the people who live on it are all villains and they each claim the island belongs “just to them” and insist upon calling it what they want, i.e. “Skull Island”, “Death Island”, “Doom Island”, and the like.

On the shore of the bay, afforded an excellent view of The Island, sprawls the capital city of Toy Land, called Shekila.

Pre-1982 G.I. Joes/Janes (Action Men/Women in the UK) guard the borders of Toy Land, as they have unmatched equipment and articulation. Many kinds of toy soldiers have defended Gingerbread Land, but none more so than these, even though they’ve only been in Toy Land for the past 60 years-or-so.

Puppet City rides the border between Wonder Land and Toy Land.  There’s a section on the dividing line that looks like New York City to some, Los Angeles to others, and many human-like pig-puppets (they talk, walk upright, and have human-like hands and feet but are otherwise pig-like) live in this section, so it’s called the Swine District. There's a famous vaudeville-style theater in the Swine District run by puppet-folk of a variety of types. The theater is not owned or managed by pig-puppets, but pig-puppets do make up the plurality of its players and laborers.  There are many vaudeville theaters in Fabulorigo, but many consider this one to be the best.

A puppet can be distinguished from other toys by a particular "aura" that surrounds it.  All toys are given life by magic (or by advanced inter-dimensional science, if one prefers), but with puppets that magic is easily visible as an aura. Some believe that the aura’s visibility suggests accessibility; that is, if one can see the aura, one might be able to tap into it and control it, and thereby control the puppet.

It isn’t commonly spoken about, and, actually, not commonly known, that all of the toys in Toy Land are made by gnomes who live in the lower reaches of the Obsidian Keep. The co-leaders of the Gnomes, twin siblings Auntie Gnome and Uncle Gnome, play key roles in this creation. In particular, Auntie Gnome is responsible for the arcane technology that brings toys to life. In fact, if a toy is ever destroyed, Uncle Gnome rebuilds it to mint condition and Auntie Gnome gives it life again, with all of its previous memories intact. The toy typically wakes up in what passes for its home, not knowing a thing about how or why it was resurrected, its last memory being the split-second before its “death”. Thus, unlike Gingerbread folk, who can be snuffed out with the destruction of their candy hearts, Toy folk can never die, only be “sent home”.

Toys in Toy Land can go anywhere a toy might be able to go, including under the sea and into outer space, and they can certainly take PCs with them to such places. No matter where they go, though, all artifacts, animals, and thinking beings are toys. If the PCs meet a toy Luke Skywalker, for example, and Luke takes the PCs to the Death Star, the ship he takes them there in is a toy, the station is a toy, and everything in the station is a toy.

Certainly, a player can play a toy in the Gingerbread Land RPG game, or the entire party can play toys in/from Toy Land, but, in that case, the character building and overall play mechanics would better be based directly upon Fate Core rather than upon the Gingerbread Land rules that we’ve based upon Fate Core.