Chimerical Realm

Now that I’ve taken care of local cartography, the next step in building my world is detailing the towns and villages of the local area.  The area I’m working with is sparsely inhabited, so none of the villages will be remotely large, which should make detailing them slightly easier.  At this point, I’m not actually mapping these villages, and in fact there’s no pressing need to do so.  Later on,  I might do so, but that might be more of an attempt to see what Campaign Cartographer can do with villages than anything else.  The World Builder’s Guidebook breaks down detailing communities into the following steps.  First, size and population, which defines the community in terms of 500 person “blocks.”  Smaller communities, which we’ll probably be dealing with here, have in general 20d20 (20-400) people. Part of this is also coming up with its physical description.  Secondly, there is a fairly detailed chart indicating the services and jobs av...

I've finally sat down at created a map of the initial play area.  Right now, it's still in "beta"--the basic terrain and settlements are there, but it still needs some work before it's ready to be done.  Here's what I have so far. None of these locations would be larger than a village, and some are even barely that.  The largest, Landsberg en Maas, is the home of a minor Galtic noble who is technically the Baron of this land, but his actual authority doesn't extend any further than the few miles around his village.  He's undertaking an ambitious program, both trying to build a proper stone keep as well as beginning to drain the bog to make it more suitable for agriculture.  Landsberg would be the trade hub of the area, and despite it's small size, would have most of the gear and services that a team of adventurers would need. The three Umbrian/Bog People villages would have only a few hundred members each. From north to south they are Doonbeg...

Back in my first post , I explained a little bit about my inspiration for starting this blog and trying to create an AD&D world.  It was accurate as far as it went, but I skipped an additional, yet major, influence—the Knights of the Dinner Table comic. I recently dug out my old and minor collection of these comics and have been rereading them.  For those who don’t know, Knights of the Dinner Table is a comic series that retells the adventures of a group of D&Desqe players and a satirical look at the most extreme and horrible things that happen in the game.  It doesn’t show the characters but instead focuses on the players as they sit around the eponymous table—a bunch of adults sitting around, rolling dice, yelling out things like “I WASTE HIM WITH MY CROSSBOW.”  It’s supposed to show, in a humorous fashion, the WORST aspects of D&D style game play. And I every time I read them, I want to pick up an Old School game and play that.  I LOVE...

As I begin to think about the local adventure area, the first thing I need to come up with is, well, who the heck lives there.  In my last post, I decided to focus on the north eastern part of the map, particularly the Northern Wastes.  The terrain is dominated by a massive bog, and I’ve rolled that the major industry in this location is, well, industry.  My first thought was that this is a liquor producing place (the various berries that naturally grow in bogs have long been converted to sweet and potent alcohol), but Brian sent me an excellent link regarding Norse bog iron production, which is part of a truly fascinating site. So, thanks to that, Wikipedia, and Google, I have some solid ideas.  The average person lives either in a tiny village or a small family farmstead.  The architecture is based around sod walls and turf built longhouses, which contain all of the family’s cattle and goats.  The people survive with their light farming, their herds...

The next step in creating my world is the final zoom--to actually map out the initial play area.  The Kingdom of Galicia has a number of different locations that can serve as adventure sites—from a potential mega-dungeon that was once a mighty dwarven kingdom in the Forsaken Mountains to urban politics and intrigue in the Sea Islands.  Since I’m aiming for a fairly “typical” style of campaign, I’m looking for an area that will allow a decent variety of exploration, combat, brigandage, monsters, with enough of an urban environment to allow some breathing room.  Per the World Builders Guidebook , this should be an area of roughly 40x40 miles.  This is a very small area.  An unencumbered human could easily cross from one point of the map to another is 2 days (24 miles per day per the PHB) and even a lightly or moderately encumbered one wouldn’t be far behind.  At this scale we’re placing specific locations—actual villages, specific monster lairs, etc.  A ...

It appears that my initial plan to zoom into next step of the Kingdom—the actual play area—has been placed on hold while I focus on some more higher level ideas.  This is fine—it’s still interesting to work on, and will give me plenty of stuff to work with when I actually take the next step. First, I want to answer some questions that Drew asked a little while ago and the politics and structure of the Kingdom. I’m going to through each of them, and go over some of my own current thoughts. “Who are the king's subjects within the kingdom? Are there others within the borders over which he has limited jurisdiction (dwarves, forest people, etc)? ” The Kings basic subjects are divided into the three classic classes of medieval society—warriors, priests, and peasants.  The warriors and most priests are ethnically Galts, with the Umbrians making up the majority of the peasantry.  They have an agriculture based society, revolving around tightly knit communal villages ...

All this talk of alignment has got me thinking about something I haven’t really touched on before, but is pretty dang important for a game—the PC’s.  Specifically, who are they supposed to be, and what options they have for creating their characters. Since one of my design goals was to create a “generic” setting, I don’t want to make any radical changes to the core classes.  Fighters, druids, paladins, thieves, mages and all the others will be pretty much in place “as is.”  But based on what I’ve come up with so far, races are something that will need to be addressed. Per my rolls, Galicia has a number of different humans (Galts, Umbrians, and Fairians) as well as Dwarves, Orcs, and Goblins.  Dragons are right out, as a PC race.  There are a couple other races around that could be playable in the setting.  Obviously Elves have a place in this world, and could even be “locals” if they’ve been living blended with the Fairians—Half-Elves even more so....

Brian and Drew brought up some very good ideas/questions about the spontaneous generation idea I mentioned a few posts back, and I wanted to take a moment and focus on those before moving further with the world creation. As a quick reminder, Spontaneous Generation is a now defunct theory that living creatures can develop without descent from similar organisms.  So, fleas can develop from dust, and maggots develop from meat.  It’s obviously bunk to modern people, but it was a fairly respected theory for millennia.  Now, the reason why I like this is that it allows for the creation of evil monsters and creatures without needing to explain how exactly they evolved, or if there are groups of little orcish children being sung to sleep by their orcish mothers before getting up in the morning, being fed a healthy breakfast, and then going off to orcish school and playing with their orcish classmates at recess before a group of heavily armed humans show up and murder their ...

Apparently the maps I've been posting aren't coming through as clean as I would like.  I've gone ahead and resized some of the text to hopefully make it clearer. Let me know if it helps!

Now that I have the rough terrain worked out for my Kingdom, it's time to work out where people live and HOW they live.  Following the World Builder's Guide  the first thing we need to work out is the basic subsistence systems of the Kingdom.  Now, since the Kingdom is fairly large and contains a variety of terrain, there's going to be a number of such systems in place.  First thing I do is print out a copy of the map are mark off various areas of the Kingdom--I figure this Kingdom has 10 distinctive regions, which is a bit on the high side for the WBG (it recommends 1-10 for a Kingdom), but it fits with what we have. For the sake of convenience  I've labeled them as numbers.  Obviously I'll need to come up with cool names for these place, but for now we'll stick with numbers. Area 1 is the islands to the south Area 2 is the hilly and heavily forested west Area 3 is the main coast line Area 4 is the lightly forested plains Area 5 is...