As part of my ongoing effort to make a pony setting of my own, I have the goal of making 7 ocs (not counting Bloona, who was made before I decided to start worldbuilding a pony setting). In my pony setting, there will be 7 tribes of ponies.
Destriers (Earthponies)
Hippocampi (Seaponies with hindlegs and amphibious gills)
Pegasi
Thestrals (Batponies but they aren’t nocturnal and they’re deep undergrounders)
Unicorns (But with a drastically different magic system)
Kirin (But completely overhauled with a different set of abilities and without the Nirik form)
and Nightmares
When I say “Nightmares”, don’t think Nightmare Moon, they’re moreso supposed to be based on Nightmares in various TTRPGs. They don’t have the DND “former pegasi that had their wings removed thing”, what I mean is they get a monopoly on teleportation and dimensional travel.
The lore document of my setting isn’t finished. I’ve written 17 pages, but it needs further editting for clarity and conciseness, various important aspects haven’t been covered, and it contains references to ideas I no longer intend to do for various reasons. That being said, I do intend to release an unfinished prototype of that document Soon:tm:, but it will be only half finished, only covering the 7 tribes and overhauled magic system. The completed document will also make reference to various non-pony races which serve the purpose of being various sources of external conflict.
I’ll release that later, I tried a TL;DR for this post just for the sake of explaining what a Nightmare was in my setting but ended up writing a wall of text where I explained the changes to magic, alicorns, unicorns and kirin before getting to the point, and at that point yknow I’ll just wait to release the actual document yknow.
Point is Nightmares can teleport, even to different dimensions, but have to travel through their shadow to do it, and certain materials can interfere with the process. They can also use dark magic to corrupt ponies allowing them to control them, and seek to corrupt the alicorns of my setting to steal their power for themselves (I mean this collectively, it wouldn’t just empower the individual nightmare that did it). Nightmares are innately evil due to their inherent dark magic, but they are still a true pony race, and in this setting, being friendly is a racial trait of ponykind. So because they are friend shaped, they can’t be that evil. They can corrupt you so they can control you or put you in a dungeon, but aren’t very likely to do anything more extreme then a cartoon villian or ineffectual sympathetic antagonist. Any race with similar powers that isn’t pony shaped does not have the same restriction.
Poison Seeds in particular has a magical brooch on her cloak that holds a rare gemstone, which has a feedback loop of earth mana inside, giving her regular access to earth magic spells in addition to her own dark magic. Her plan is to use her magic to spread corrupt seeds she carries around in her seed bag along with her runes, so that they slowly overtake an area with corruption, creating a corrupted environment she would be able to control. This plan would actually be a very effective plan if she would silently teleport to hard to reach areas, hide the seeds and wait to reap the poison fruit.
…buuuuut Poison Seeds is so PROUD of this plan, that not only is it her ONLY plan, but she also ANNOUNCES her plan to everyone the moment she starts the plan, every time, almost immediately after she’s finished spreading the seeds. She is not a clever mare. She’s more collectathon 100% completion sidequest material then main antagonist.
I also made my most suggestive drawing so far because the first rule of being evil is to dress like a slut and I thought the character was hot after I finished doodling the concept art.