Other cities of the Basin Area

[DShomshak]

On 11/10/2022 at 7:46 PM, Mr. R said:

 

Well the supplement doesn't really say,...

 

Which is why you're here, trying to go beyond what's provided!

 

I've done development work for pay. It may not be fair to judge this supplement (what's its name again?) by your short summaries, and I haven't followed all your redevelopment threads, but what I've seen of the source material doesn't impress me. I think you'll need to do quite a bit of work to make this a setting that will wow your players. I'll try to point you toward the questions to ask, but in the end you're the one who needs to answer them.

 

Dean Shomshak

[Lord Liaden]

I have to concur with Dean's point. I'm also not familiar with this setting, but it seems to lack a distinctive vision or flavor that would make it stand out from many other fantasy worlds.

 

Rather than concentrate on adding specific details, it might help to give some consideration to the overall "meta" of this setting. What kind of experience(s) would you like your players to have in it? Epic quest? Political intrigue? Picaresque exploration? Conflict between great powers? Conquest and kingdom-building? How did your world get to the configuration and condition it's in now? What direction would you like it to go in future? Are there events happening in the wider world, or going on hidden under the surface, that are impacting the scene at the local level?

[Mr. R]

11 hours ago, DShomshak said:

Which is why you're here, trying to go beyond what's provided!

 

I've done development work for pay. It may not be fair to judge this supplement (what's its name again?) by your short summaries, and I haven't followed all your redevelopment threads, but what I've seen of the source material doesn't impress me. I think you'll need to do quite a bit of work to make this a setting that will wow your players. I'll try to point you toward the questions to ask, but in the end you're the one who needs to answer them.

 

 

10 hours ago, Lord Liaden said:

I have to concur with Dean's point. I'm also not familiar with this setting, but it seems to lack a distinctive vision or flavor that would make it stand out from many other fantasy worlds.

 

Rather than concentrate on adding specific details, it might help to give some consideration to the overall "meta" of this setting. What kind of experience(s) would you like your players to have in it? Epic quest? Political intrigue? Picaresque exploration? Conflict between great powers? Conquest and kingdom-building? How did your world get to the configuration and condition it's in now? What direction would you like it to go in future? Are there events happening in the wider world, or going on hidden under the surface, that are impacting the scene at the local level?

Thank you both!

[Mr. R]

So I am going to give a short synopsis of the supplement I am using.

 

Name: Shadow World- Star Crown Empire and the Sea of Fates

 

Published 1989  Iron Crown Enterprises

 

I won it at a Convention

 

Pages 5-11 are a history of the setting encompassing 6042 years in the basin area called the Gefting Sea.  We get wars, alliances, plagues, assassinations. through it all the seven same nation states all seem to stay the same, and by same I mean the borders never seem to change.   War happens, orc invade and rampage, but as soon as things calm down we go back to the same towns and borders as 500 nay 5000 years ago.

 

 

Page 11-12 a glossary of terms for the geography of the area

 

Page 14 -19 a thumbnail of each nation

Danris: a farming nation made up of slaves, serfs, and land owners.  It also makes good money on the slaves taken from the northern jungles.  Politics is based on land owned, cattle owned and property (yes slaves count). 

Fey:  Magocracy.  If you know magic, you are nobility, regardless of background.  Politics is a mage council with an arch mage heading it.  His word is final and to go against him is to challenge him to a duel.  Small agrarian production, with pearls, sea products and luxury items.  NOTE- slavery is illegal here.

Kerq: Classed society of serfs the craftsmen and finally Crafts Masters.   Essentially a collection of city states that grouped together for mutual protection.  Major military power due to it have the largest navy of all the states, this despite the fact they import all the material to make the ships.

Moregador:  a competitive and aggressive people.  lives are centered around success, achievement, social position and wealth.  Spend a lot of time hatching diplomatic coups!  Social mobility is based around how ruthless and capable you are and is designed to cull "the weak".  Political power can change within months.  Economically is an exporter of grains, fruits and vegetables and lumber.

Ruecha: Basically Sparta.  Warriors at the top, then craftsmen, tradesmen then slaves.  Exporter of weapons, armor and some food scuffs.

Thosque:  A merchant nation dominated by a clergy to the god of commerce.  Religious and statutory laws are enforced. Classed society with clergy and nobles at the top, then far below, tradesmen and finally serfs/slaves.  Shares a border with Moregador.  

Tenryk: Next door the Danris.  They have a common border along the Kulana River that empties the Gefting Sea into the Northern Bays.  Like Fey, slavery is illegal.  Is an oligarchy in system, but society is feudal in nature.  

 

Page 19-25 Other races.  This includes dwarves and elves and centaurs (all eliminated) as well that the Nomads to the west, the highlanders to the south and the icemen who inhabit islands to the south of the continent.  Also the people who inhabit the northern jungles are given a mention. 

 

Page 25 - 29 a small town is explained as a place young adventures can get started.  Its nice enough except it is NOT located within the above states, but in the borderland.  

 

Page 30- 42 three small adventures, none of which occur anywhere in the above nations.  (One is a floating island located in the surrounding ocean.   )

 

pages 42-48 Religions, Money (basically different denominations over the 6000 year existence) Remarkable individuals (Magic, literature, the arts, theology, philosophy.  I wish this sections was expanded), Healing and medicine, Types of magic (basically Rolemaster colleges) and Languages

 

Page 48-60  NPCs and tables for various militaries and a small weather table.  If you are curious the central basin has a temperature range of 0-110 F ( -17 to 43 C) with most of the precipitation coming in winter and spring.  

 

In the center is a pull out section with a map of the continent in color and smaller maps of the individual nations.  Just to note the scales for the smaller maps all agree with each other, but not the scale of the big color map which has the scale 1/3 smaller.  Thus I am going by the smaller maps which gives the Basin Sea a size of about 1000 km east west and between 150 to 250 km north south!

 

Hope this helps understand why I am asking for help to flesh this out!

 

 

[Mr. R]

On 11/12/2022 at 12:55 PM, Lord Liaden said:

What kind of experience(s) would you like your players to have in it?

Personally I like Point of Light types of games.  Civilized town, then an agricultural area of small villages, then wilderness.  In some cases there are places where the PCs can make a real difference (Opening up the river for the city of Koy or at least making Ruecha safer for the peasants.)  But I also want some strange things out there in case my players decide to go a exploring!

[Lord Liaden]

Oh, Star Crown Empire! I remember reading over that decades ago when the Shadow World line with Hero System stats was released by ICE. Never owned it, and obviously it didn't stick in my mind.

 

Well, Shadow World came with its own meta-setting. It has a very long history marked by wars and magical catastrophes. Geopolitics is shaped in no small measure by "essence flows," vast currents of magic that can severely affect local environmental conditions, and tend to keep regions of the planet isolated from each other. "The Unlife" is the great looming evil of darkness and corruption, driven back in the past but still influencing the world.

 

How much of that did you intend to utilize? A lot of it isn't essential, but some things might not fully make sense without that background.

[Mr. R]

8 hours ago, Lord Liaden said:

How much of that did you intend to utilize? A lot of it isn't essential, but some things might not fully make sense without that background.

Well since the Unlife is hardly (actually I think never) mentioned in the supplement, it was not going to be a major part of my game.  I did mention that undead do exist, but not as an organized meta opposition.

 

Also they mention Essence Flows, but really it seamed to keep everyone else out of this continent.  Which suited me fine.  This continent north south is equivalent to South America (complete with coastal mountain chain) in size.  It is fairly BIG.  I just want it that if my players decide to zig left rather than right, I can accomodate them as I have some idea of what awaits them and not "Here be Dragons!"

[Lord Liaden]

Hmm... maybe an occasional dragon, or something as bad as a dragon, might spice things up a little.

 

Thinking about Essence Flows, it might be interesting to introduce a bit of occasional instability to their paths, so they actually have an impact on the continent itself. For example, one shifting over a former trade route could severely undercut the economy of one realm or region, while the diverted trade causes another to flourish. Perhaps a city which had been overwhelmed by a Flow becomes accessible when it moves off, with treasures to be looted... but perhaps still housing things altered by Essence.

[DShomshak]

Shadow World. Ah. I acquired one supplement set there, The Iron Wind, back when it was all fairly new, and even then I had, hm, issues with the design stule. Some aspects were an advance for the time, but the state of the art has moved on. (And some bits I intensely disliked.)

 

Sample adventures not using the countries the supplement is about is kind of a flaw by any standards...

 

The biggest question remains what style of campaign you want. Treasure-seeking murder hobos call for different design emphases than a campaign of social and political intrigue, a cold war that threatens to turn hot, High Fantasy quest, or the like.

 

For instance, my current D&D campaign has a nesting series of design choices. Overall, the setting is the Magozoic Era -- Earth 250 million years in the future, become a world of monsters and magic. Everything has a past -- sometimes a very long past, stretching back to legend. Every few days' travel, you encounter some eerie or enigmatic relic of past events, from a forest of living stone trees to a field that lightning strikes every time a storm passes nearby. The city that forms the focus of the campaign is on a spit of land that formed around an immense granite breakwater, so old that coral covered it and turned to stone. It is not the first city to occupy the site, either.

 

Shrinking the focus, everything's happening in the Plenary Empire, modeled a bit on the Byzantine Empire: the shrunken remnant of an empire that was once much larger, menaced by aggressive neighbors that want to complete its fall and take its land, people and wealth. The greater danger, though, may come from the infighting among the empire's elite as they seek to gain greater shares of the empire's wealth and remaining power, or attempt secession because they'd rather be masters of small domains than functionaries in a big one. Politics and war and the themes: I explicitly decided that while the world includes dragons, beholders, liches, demon lords and other such threats, they won't be the principal threats. In its rise and heyday, the Plenary Empire faced such threats and defeated them. It's a premise of the setting that once a state reaches a certain size and effectiveness of government, no outside force can defeat it: It can only defeat itself. (Yes, you might find some contemporary resonance here. That is deliberate.)

 

The specific campaign began in the city of Thalassene. It's low fantasy: the PCs are members of a neighborhood watch that finds itself dealing with much bigger threats than bar brawls and riots, from an undead serial killer to scheming foreign ambassadors. The characters have advanced in power, though, to the point where such challenges are no longer challenging: The campaign is on hiatus while we, and the PCs decide where to go next, but the PCs are sufficiently involved in the lives of various NPCs that Thalassene will stay the center of the campaign for a while. No world-spanning quests in the offing.

 

What sort of campaign do you imagine running?

 

Dean Shomshak

[Mr. R]

20 hours ago, Lord Liaden said:

Hmm... maybe an occasional dragon, or something as bad as a dragon, might spice things up a little.

I am not sure if you remember, BUT, my goblyns are actually a whole host of creatures lumped under that umbrella.  It includes

Goblyns- your standard unnamed hordes

Goblyn Lords/Mages- yep, these guys practice magic and can become nasty warriors

Bugbears- bigger, stronger goblyns

Ogres- for when you want to challenge the whole party with one guy

Ogre Magi- for when you want to scare the party with one guy

Giants- walking disasters.  One giant can be a major event.  Oh and yes the giants can practice magic.  

[Mr. R]

6 hours ago, DShomshak said:

What sort of campaign do you imagine running?

 

A combo of

1- the world is broken and needs fixing.  Goblyns overrun parts of the Basin area.  Up in the northern jungles are rumours of lost cities with treasures and goblyns.  Even the Coastal cities and the Divided Plains are not safe, and the Bola Desert has a large contingent of them.

2- finding and exploring those cool places like : the former capitol of Tenryk, now a ruins inside a goblyn forest   A mythical island of a pirate king and his treasure, just beware he may still be guarding it   A city surrounded by an ever storm in the Bola Desert.  If you can get in, what treasures await.  Also rumoured to hold the Library of Readaer.   

[Mr. R]

On 10/27/2022 at 2:38 PM, DShomshak said:

Rasul: Your basic mercantile city, nothing very distinctive here, either.

In the supplement Rasul is a theocracy, dedicated to the god of commerce where strict religious and statutory laws keep people in place.  Is very divided, with clergy at the top then, far below them the tradesmen, then a bit lower serfs and slaves and finally females.  But they are known for being the best merchants on the continent.  But merchants have no political or economic power.  (Non sequitur, must analyze.  Faulty, faulty!  Must Sterilize!).

 

So how do I keep  them as a mercantile city, where Tobaris, God of Commerce, Travel, Exploration is still held in high regard, merchants have more of a say in the affairs of the city and finally where females have a greater share of the power.

 

I was going to use a system of government taken from a city in the Turakian Age supplement.  But now I think I will add as a wrinkle, the wife may vote in place of her husband, if they declare she has his proxy vote before the council before he leaves town.  And the reverse is true also.  

 

 

HMMMM!   Ideas welcome.  

 

OH OH OH.

 

Is actually a matriarchy today.  The men got so full of themselves and the majority left town to fight the goblyns, and got destroyed.  Now we have a city of mostly females who have been taking the reins of government because they have no other choice.  Even if some of the men make it back, the city has been irrevocably changed, and refuse to go back to their tidy small existence.  

[DShomshak]

On 11/15/2022 at 5:29 PM, Mr. R said:

 

A combo of

1- the world is broken and needs fixing.  Goblyns overrun parts of the Basin area.  Up in the northern jungles are rumours of lost cities with treasures and goblyns.  Even the Coastal cities and the Divided Plains are not safe, and the Bola Desert has a large contingent of them.

2- finding and exploring those cool places like : the former capitol of Tenryk, now a ruins inside a goblyn forest   A mythical island of a pirate king and his treasure, just beware he may still be guarding it   A city surrounded by an ever storm in the Bola Desert.  If you can get in, what treasures await.  Also rumoured to hold the Library of Readaer.   

This has promise. Give more thought to how the world is broken, how it broke, and what PCs can do to fix it. For instance, why are goblyns so hostile? Is there any way peace could be made between them and humans?

 

The desert with the ruined cities is a good location to show the brokenness of the world. Likewise Reuchia and the country withe the backstabbing aristos.

 

To reinforce the exploration theme, include something cool in ever location the PCs visit. Not necessarily anything important, but memorable. Maybe there's something distinctive about the way people adorn their houses, or themselves. Maybe there's some peculiar local tipple -- I've got a lot of use out of that one. If you need inspiration, read Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino, or pretty much anything by Jack Vance.

 

You can combine these themes through locations that are both interesting to describe, and in some way broken. For instance: A great bridge crosses one of the main rivers. Its three arched spans are longer than humans know how to build, and its stones are larger and heavier than humans could move into position (at least without powerful magic). But tales say humans didn't build the bridge: goblyns did, long ago. The stones are not too heavy for ogres to move, and legend says giants waded the river to build the bridge -- or charmed the blocks into position!

 

But the central span of the bridge is broken. <Insert story about who broke it, and how.> The bridge is wide enough for two elephants to cross, going opposite directions; but people must cross the central gap on rope bridges that can bear the weight of fewer than a dozen people at a time, going single file. Merchant caravans must stop when they reach the bridge, unload all their goods from their wagons and pack animals, and carry them across to where a new set of beasts and animals wait on the other side.

 

(If humans have magic that could build something sturdier, OK, it doesn't make sense to have the rope bridges. But you can still make the patch across the gap clearly inferior to the rest of the bridge.)

 

Dean Shomshak

[Mr. R]

3 hours ago, DShomshak said:

This has promise. Give more thought to how the world is broken, how it broke, and what PCs can do to fix it. For instance, why are goblyns so hostile? Is there any way peace could be made between them and humans?

 

 

I am using this as inspiration

 

https://mythlands-erce.blogspot.com/2016/06/humanoids-part-ii-trolls.html

 

Goblyns are hostile because they represent that mythic unknown, primal chaos and wildness.

 

Dragons are great, but I remember the Against the Giants Modules where the PC are facing a horde of Giants.   Add in trolls, ogres and a some goblyns as sacrificial pawns and the HORDE looks dangerous indeed.  They can't be reasoned with as they hate humans on a genetic level.  This is the opponent you can beat up and not really feel bad about it.  

[Lord Liaden]

I know quite a few gamers who are uncomfortable with the "born evil" trope for fantasy races. But it strikes me that this is an area where the aforementioned Unlife could be a useful plot element, as the force whose influence is keeping these creatures evil, to work its will for chaos and death. And that hearkens back to Dean's question as to why the world's broken, and how do we fix it? If the influence over the goblyns, trolls etc. can be broken, it's possible they may be redeemed, and peace achieved, at least eventually. That makes a good long-term goal for the campaign to strive toward.

 

Mind you, you can still have higher-ups in the "horde" who have willingly given themselves over to evil, and use the lesser creatures as pawns. PCs can beat them up and even kill them, and actually feel good about it.

[Mr. R]

4 hours ago, Lord Liaden said:

I know quite a few gamers who are uncomfortable with the "born evil" trope for fantasy races. But it strikes me that this is an area where the aforementioned Unlife could be a useful plot element, as the force whose influence is keeping these creatures evil, to work its will for chaos and death. And that hearkens back to Dean's question as to why the world's broken, and how do we fix it? If the influence over the goblyns, trolls etc. can be broken, it's possible they may be redeemed, and peace achieved, at least eventually. That makes a good long-term goal for the campaign to strive toward.

 

Mind you, you can still have higher-ups in the "horde" who have willingly given themselves over to evil, and use the lesser creatures as pawns. PCs can beat them up and even kill them, and actually feel good about it.

I like!

[assault]

An option I've considered is to make "Orcs" undead - basically zombies.

 

The inspiration is the term "Orcneas" from Beowulf, which roughly means "demon corpses" or "monster corpses".

 

This makes Orcs nasty - your friend who fought next to you yesterday is fighting against you today, while avoiding the "evil race" issue. And sometimes they smile when you kill them... 

[DShomshak]

8 hours ago, Mr. R said:

I am using this as inspiration

 

https://mythlands-erce.blogspot.com/2016/06/humanoids-part-ii-trolls.html

 

Goblyns are hostile because they represent that mythic unknown, primal chaos and wildness.

 

The "evil race" issue is a consequence of the "Gygaxian Naturalism" to which the blogger alludes (and his link leads to an essay that's interesting in its own right). If orcs, goblins, bugbears, etc. are essentially "natural" creatures presumed to have lives of their own when PCs aren't fighting them, modern sensibilities may not be comfortable with saying, "Oh, just kill them and take their stuff." Including killing all the children? Not an issue for, say, the book of Jashua when God tells the Israelites to exterminate entire cities because they are inconveniently located in the land God has promised, but monder Western folk often feel uneasy with genocide. Or the rationalizations adduced to justify it.

 

If the adversary is emphatically *not* an essentially natural creature that has a life and culture of its own, the issues are a bit different. If goblyns are truly mythic monsters, their motives are not going to be natural either, and the moral calculus *might* change as well.

 

So, goblyns as primordial chaos. That can be developed. They might be, in essence, the world pushing back against the order that humans (and gods?) try to impose. Giants as comparable to natural disasters? They might actually *be* personified natural disasters. Why does an earthquake flatten a city, a storm capsize a fleet, a swarm of locusts devour everything and cause a famine? No reason. No malice. It's what they do.

 

OTOH the Norse trolls the blogger cites as inspiration are not always and implacably hostile to gods and heroes. Some of the Aesir are descended from giants, or marry giants. They have power: Odin stole the Mead of Poetry from a giant (who, in turn, extorted it from the dwarfs who brewed it from the god Kvasir's blood, so in a sense Odin was reclaiming stolen property? Complicated.) So it might be possible -- though still dangerous -- to deal with goblyns in non-combat ways. Like, moving from Norse to Russian, the ogre-witch Baba Yaga's usual story role is the reluctant helper: Heroes overcome her to obtain magical treasures.

 

On the other other hand, were goblyns always hostile? Or did something happen to make them that way? Like the conflict between the Hindu Gods and the Asuras, this conflict might go back to before the beginning of the world. (The gods and asuras had to cooperate in churning the primordial ocean of milk to produce the elixir of immortality. The gods cheated the asuras of their share.). But there might have been some historic event that turned the goblyns hostil and, effectively, broke the world. If it's something people did, then maybe people can fix it and restore harmony.

 

For instance, that desert that was burned over in magical war long ago. The devastation could have broken an ancient pact with the goblyns. They are trying to expunge humanity to prevent such destruction from happening again. Or conversely, the devastation might have been inflicted by the giant leaders in retaliation for some terrible offense given to them. Either way, they will not accept an "Oops, sorry, can we be friends again?" But if goblyns are a symptom of the break in the world, and not its ultimate cause, then just killing goblyns might not be an ultimate solution, either.

 

Okay, this has gone way too long. Enough for now, and more than enough.

 

Dean Shomshak

[Lord Liaden]

In my own modified Turakian Age campaign, there are a number of "barbarian" peoples who are hostile and aggressive toward the dominant "civilized" Men, the Ardunans. I decided to make that in no small measure due to the actions of the Ardunans themselves. As they migrated to new areas the Ardunans frequently drove out or killed the inhabitants, stealing their lands, property and women. In at least a couple of cases their depredations transformed the barbarians' culture, making them far more warlike. The Ardunans "today" take their aggression as proof that they're mere savages, little better than animals. (I'm sure everyone is thinking of comparable historical examples.)

[Mr. R]

I was recently reading a WIR on RPGnet about a JRPG called Sword World.  It posits some interesting ideas about dungeons and the reasons for their existence as well as those shadow areas filled with nasties.

 

So the dungeons are manifestation of magical swords/weapons/items that are created by said item (not consciously) as a test to the worthy adventurer who desires the item in question.  Only after getting past all the strange creatures and tricks and traps, can the person be seen as worthy of possession of the item.

 

The other is more of an explanation of why Goblyns and Undead are around.  The Primal Wilderness OR the Iron Wind will cause a demi plane to form at certain areas.  From these demi planes emerge the Goblyns OR Undead that seem to plague a region.  To stop them you need to first find the demi plane in relation to ours, find a way to enter it and destroy whatever is linking it to the world.  Otherwise, even if you defeat all the Goblyns, eventually they will come back, again and again and......

 

 

 

Thoughts?

[DShomshak]

On 12/15/2022 at 6:30 PM, Mr. R said:

ISo the dungeons are manifestation of magical swords/weapons/items that are created by said item (not consciously) as a test to the worthy adventurer who desires the item in question.  Only after getting past all the strange creatures and tricks and traps, can the person be seen as worthy of possession of the item.

 

Gimmicky. Avoid, unless you're building the setting around it -- like, these weapons or other artifacts are central elements of the setting, and it's known that yeah, people have had to do this before to obtain the Big McGuffin.

 

On 12/15/2022 at 6:30 PM, Mr. R said:

The other is more of an explanation of why Goblyns and Undead are around.  The Primal Wilderness OR the Iron Wind will cause a demi plane to form at certain areas.  From these demi planes emerge the Goblyns OR Undead that seem to plague a region.  To stop them you need to first find the demi plane in relation to ours, find a way to enter it and destroy whatever is linking it to the world.  Otherwise, even if you defeat all the Goblyns, eventually they will come back, again and again and......

 

Potentially interesting, especially if you connect this somehow to the "world is broken" premise you alluded to before. Whoever or whatever broke the world, however it happened, leaves the world open to these supernatural influences. Also privides an "endgame" in which the PCs can fix what was broken.

 

Dean Shomshak