Rawnotes
From Mare Tectum
Information from various email threads
This page is just a raw dump of stuff from the mailing list, so we capture that information in one, easy-to-search area.
- Speaking of planning, I think this campaign is going to be start in an archipelago -- there may be a bit of a nautical feel to the first part of the game (or it might be carried through the game, depending on you guys.) There will likely be one big city on one of the islands, and a number of smaller cities or towns scattered throughout the rest of the area. The world is emerging (or has emerge) from a dark age that fell when the ancient civilization collapsed about 500 to 1000 years ago. Much of the knowledge of that civilization has been lost and the world went through a very grim time after its fall. The Islands have held on to various bits of civilization, and the technology for things like city building and ship building is now surprisingly sophisticated. Gunpower will exist; it is an alchemical process known to a few, and really not that much more effective than your bows and crossbows for hand weapons. Where it shines is in things like cannons for taking out ships and probably knocking down city walls (though few of the cities are that well defended.)
- How big are the islands of the archipelago? Are we talking tens of tny islands scattered over a thousand square miles of ocean, like the nation of Tonga? Are you thinking of Hawaii, with a handful of significant islands close together? Are you considering something like Indonesia/Malaysia/Philippines with thousands of islands ranging from tiny atolls to islands the size of Borneo spread out over tens of thousands of square miles of ocean? Or is it something like a collection of large & small islands in a more circular grouping and distant from anything continental?
I'm thinking there are 3 - 4 large islands and a number of smaller islands fairly close together, maybe spread out over 200 miles or so. This is distinct from anything continental. I'll know more when I finish the map - How many islands, large and small are there? And how large are the largest? Are some of the islands themselves large enough to have or have had a tradition of mounted combat? I'd suspect that transport of mounts from island to island would be prohibitive in terms of logistics, but historically might have turned the tide in some significant battle.
The large islands are probably around the size of Jamaica or so; sizable but not Hawai'i huge. They would have horses, possibly multiple cities, and could certainly support a tradition of mounted combat. - I suspect, too, that unlike Indonesia, Oceana, or the Philippines, the archipelago of your creation in which we start is rich in resources like Europe and North America. Before the Fall of Civilization, was there much trading with the "outside world" or is the archipelago so separated from everything else that there has never been contact? Or is the archipelago so massive that it encompasses the entire world? If the archipelago does not encompass the entire world, and there has been no contact from the "outside world" since the collapse of civilization, do we know or have a clue what force or forces exist to keep us isolated? In reality, the Polynesian peoples, equipped with only with open double canoes managed to migrate throughout & colonize just about every piece of habitable land in the Pacific Ocean. In your description of the archipelago, the technological levels are closer to those of our Renaissance, during which time Western Europeans managed to visit just about every part of the globe.
There are some resources on the islands themselves; it is likely this area wasn't always islands, but much of the history of the time before the Cataclysm is lost, so who knows? There's a peninsula connected to what is likely a large land mass that's about 400 - 500 miles to the North that see pretty regular traffic from the islands. There's certainly a settlement or small city there, and a lot of resources, such as metals, flow from there to the islands. Beyond the peninsula, the land is very inhospitable, populated by monsters and natural hazards. Many who go exploring up that way don't return. Beyond that, it gets even worse and no one comes back; it's as though the very elements themselves were shredded in the Cataclysm. You can't sail too far South without running into the area where the very hostile Sahuagin live. They're not fun customers and enjoy ripping ships to shreds. Ships that sail to the East and West are pretty much eaten by the sea and never seen again.
A lot of magic goes into the making of the big ships, by the way. Shipwrights use special rituals to bind the wood together in planks big enough to form the keels and masts. Most ships will try to carry a ship's artificer to make sure there's someone around who can fix 'em.
Appropriate nautical skills are athletics for doing ship tasks and acrobatics for working topside on a ship. Nature likely helps to do navigation.
- Post-cataclysm "civilization" extends to the Islands; as far as the people know, they're the only part of civilization that survived the upheaval that occurred 500 - 1000 years ago (still honing in on the date.) Most people don't even really believe there was a pre-Cataclysm civilization; that's more the stuff of myths and legends. Some of the longer-lived races, such as Elves, are only 2 1/2 to 5 generations away from the event and have a better grasp of history. As the people in the Islands clawed their way out of the Dark Age that followed the Cataclysm and their "technology" improved (which includes magic), they went exploring and looking for resources. That started about 150 to 100 years ago. To the South they found an area populated by the savage sahuagin who swarmed over their ships and torn their crews apart. Ships sent to the East and West found nothing or just failed to return, depending on how far they went. After a while, they stopped sending them in those directions. Ships sent to the North found the tip of a peninsula after a voyage of about 500 miles or so over open ocean -- a scary prospect for the Islanders! The peninsula was rich with needed resources and no native peoples, and the Islanders (I need some kingdom names) set up an outpost there and started to ship the resources back. About 80 to 100 years ago, a permanent settlement/shipping port was established and some of the islanders began to settle on the Peninsula. That area is still fairly rough and frontier-like, unlike the Islands, which are, all things considered, a pretty sophisticated and developed place. If you go too far North on Peninsula, you run into bad things that want to kill you ... monsters and orcs and other horrible things. It's likely the the half orcs are not native to the islands, but some as a result of contact between the Islanders and the orcs of the northern land mass. If you manage to push your way through the bad things and continue farther north on the land mass, you just don't come back ... it's assumed that you get killed by tougher things.
There might well be a colony of dwarves who lived/survived in the mountains of the Peninsula and have made contact with the Islanders and trade with them, but they'd likely be a small and dying outpost of dwarven kind who's energy and survival got rekindled by contact with the dwarves of the Islands. Again, the mountain dwarves would be 2 1/2 to 5 generations removed from the Cataclysm and memories/records of those times are more legend and myth than real knowledge.
