Ancient Lands

Ancient Lands: Humans

Humans are one of the minor people who live in the Ancient Lands. They consist of four major tribes that are very different from each other and live separated by many hundreds of miles from one another. They have been few in numbers and of little importance in the history of the Ancient Lands for the most time, but in recent centuries Vandren from the Vestanen Mountains have been coming into the lands on the Inner Sea in increasing numbers and started to settle in some parts of the lowlands. There are still many Falden or Ruyaki who have never seen a human in their entire life, and with the exception of the Amakari in Sunvanea they are almost unknown to the lizardmen of the Mahiri Jungles and Kemesh. Humans are very similar in height and stature to elves, though usually somewhat bulkier build. By the age of 20 they are fully grown, but rarely live for more than 80 years and even that is very rare except for some powerful shamans and witches.
Even though humans are not as strong as kaas or lizardmen and lack the speed and agility of elves, they have an endurance toughness that beats that of all the other humanoid people. As long as they have sufficient water, humans can travel almost an entire day with very little rest, even in heat that brings the strongest kaas or elves down within an hour and they can keep doing so for many days with only little food. Humans who are traveling light can easily cover as much distance in a day as a horse, and even outdistance them on a hot day. Scouts and patrols of other people rarely attempt to pursue humans who have a good head start as the chances for catching them are slim. And outrunning human pursuers on foot is a situation in which even the most experienced and toughened never wish to find themselves. Skeyn may have a similar ability to keep up hard physical work for long time, but nobody outruns even a moderately healthy human over long distances. In addition to that, humans are also exceptionally hardy when it comes to dealing with malnutrition and the various diseases that often accompany it. They are able to survive on a wider range of food sources than almost anyone else and it’s often said that there is nothing sold as food in the markets of the Ancient Lands that humans couldn’t digest. Their bodies are also able to deal reasonably well with food that has been partly spoiled and become inedible to other people without becoming thick. In the centuries in which human mercenaries have been hired by elven warlords, it has become well known that they will almost always outlast nonhuman enemies in a siege, regardless of which side of the walls they are on. Unsurprisingly, this has made them highly valued as mercenaries for the wood elven tribes and Amakari slaves often bring the best prices for Takari slavers. In recent generations they have even started to be hired as sailors on Keyren ships.

Amakari

The Amakari are one of the two tribes that inhabit the countless islands of Suvanea in the eastern waters of the Inner Sea. They are taller and broader build than humans of the other tribes and have deep brown skin with dark earth and sand colored hair and beards. They are not very numerous, even in their home islands, which they are sharing with the Gandju lizardmen. Amakari technology is very similar to that of the Gandju and uses almost no metal except for a few small ornaments. They travel between islands and catch fish in small but very fast boats that can be both sailed and rowed. They have the fewest similarities to other human tribes and some think that they might actually be neither humans nor elves, but something else entirely.

Kaska

The Kaska are a small tribe that is very similar in appearance to the Vandren of the Vestanen Mountains and speaks a similar language, but as at home many hundreds of miles to the north in the Witchfens between the great Nareven forest and the Rayalka Moutains. They are of similar height to Vandren and wood elves and have straight black hair and light brown skin. The Kaska are very reclusive and usually hostile to people of any other tribes, but many of the neighboring people believe that they are fighting just as much among themselves. Not much is known about them by people from other lands, as the Witchfens are a highly inhospitable place and nobody is sure what drive the Kaska to make their homes there in the first place. Kaska warparties regularly creep through the hills of the Erhait to raid villages in the valley of the Kaldaven for weapons, grain, and slaves. Within the Witchfens, the true power over the Kaska clans lies in the hands of their witches. Most of them are women who have great power over the clan chiefs, but they also have their own hierarchies and rivalries of which even the common Kaska understand very little.

Mari

The cold northern land of Venlad on the coast of the Northern Sea is the home of the Mari, a small human tribe that has lived mostly in isolation from the rest of the Ancient Lands for countless centuries. Unlike other humans or elves they have relatively light skin and brown hair and they tend to be somewhat taller than most of these people, though not as big as the Amakari. Most Mari are reindeer herders or fishermen, since the cold land doesn’t lend itself well to growing crops. Villages are small and most houses built partly into the ground to be protected from the fierce winter storms, but there are also a few small towns of wooden houses on the coast where ships from the South come during the summer to trade for pelts, whalebone, and dried fish.

Vandren

The Vandren are the largest of the human tribes that live in the Ancient Lands and have their traditional homeland in the Vestanen Mountains between the forests of Nareven and the Red River. They are similar in height to most elves with black hair and light brown skin and make many of their clothes and armor from leather, as they keep many herds of goats, sheep, and mountain horses to survive in a land where growing crops is hard and difficult work. Though gold, silver, and copper can be found in the mountains, the greatest treasure of the Vandren is salt, which they trade with merchants from all over the Ancient Lands. For several centuries elven merchants have been hiring Vandren warriors to protect the valuable caravans from bandits and the warriors of hostile clans, and they soon began to employ large numbers of Vandren mercenaries in their wars against each other. Vandren have been migrating from the mountains to the borders of the elven lands ever since, and while still mostly disorganized and relatively few in numbers, they are becoming a new powerful tribe on the coast of the Inner Sea.

The most famous of the Vandren mercenaries are the Sakaya, who began as a religious group in the Vestanen Mountains that had its own warriors to protects its great monasteries and farming villages. During times of peace, these warrior monks took up mercenary work to hone their skills of combat, but some never returned to the mountains and instead made their new homes in the conquered fortresses of their defeated enemies. Though the Sakaya of the lowlands accept warriors of any tribe or clan into their ranks, the majority of them are still Vandren, and for many people on the Inner Sea there is very little difference between the two.

Ancient Lands: Dark Elves

Dark elves are at home in the Mahiri Jungles between the Red River and the Mayaka Kingdom on the southern shores of the Inner Sea. They resemble wood elves of the northern lands in stature, but their skin is a dark ashen gray and their hair ranges in colors from white to light blond and various shaded of silvery gray. The color of their eyes is usually in shades from dark ember or copper to a deep dark red and they have excellent vision in the night, even under the dark shadows of the thick jungles. Being well adapted to the dark, dark elves often make their homes in caves or live in homes with small windows, and life in the villages and towns usually starts only in the afternoon when the trees of the surrounding jungles provide plenty of shade and continues deep into the night. Like wood elves, dark elves are fully grown at around 24 years of age and often live well over 300 years if they don’t fall victim to disease, war, or accident.

Ruyaki

The Ruyaki are the smallest of the three tribes of dark elves that lives in the Ancient Lands. They inhabit the northernmost parts of the Mahiri Jungles and the lands along the Red River south of the Vestanen Mountains. They often wear shawls and hoods to protect themselves from the sand that gets blown up from the dry banks of the Red River and to provide some shade for their eyes in more sparsely forested northern reaches of the Mahiri Jungles. They are also known for their armor, which is often made from the hides of giant insects that live in the region. Ruyaki clans are often rather small, often numbering just several hundred people or a few thousand. Vandren from the Vestanen Mountains rarely travel into Ruyaki territory, but the relations between clans most commonly depend on the past history between specific clans. There are few Ruyaki towns of remarkable size and some clans are almost entirely nomadic and live from hunting and keeping antelope-like mountain goats.

Takari

The Takari clans live along the coast of the western Mahiri Jungles between the Kuremo swamps at the mouth of the Red River and the territory controlled by the Mayaka. Like the Neshanen on the northern shores of the Inner Sea, their culture is centered around several major port cities and towns that have come to considerable wealth through trade with other cities. Highborn Takari often live in great city mansions or villas in the surrounding villages. In addition to the valuable goods from the jungles, the Takari also trade in slaves, which are usually captured from the Yagashi clans deeper in the jungles or Amakari and Gandju villages in Sunvanea.

Yagashi

The Yagashi are the largest tribe of dark elves and are spread throughout a vast region of jungle south of the Takari coast and west of the Mayaka Kingdom. Most live in small villages that have little contact with the people from other land, but there is also a number of great temple cities deep within the jungles, which are ruled by powerful shaman queens. The Yagashi use little worked metal and most bronze is used for spear blades and arrow tips. Their warriors wear simple armor made from corded tree fibers and reinforced with animal bones that serves them well in the hot and humid jungles of their homeland. Their warriors are also painted in complex swirling runes made from a mixture of white clay and the ground bones of monsters, which binds the spirits of those creatures to them and gives them some of their powers. As much as they revere and honor the creatures of the jungles, they rarely wear more than two or three such runes on their body at the same time, as they fear the spirits might be able to possess them fully if they use too many at once and for a long time. Sleeping without washing off the runes is regarded as highly dangerous and warriors will often destroy the runes on an ally who falls unconscious in battle even before treating his wounds.

Idols for Sword & Sorcery BECMI

Reading in the Dungeons & Dragons Rules Cylopedia today, I got reminded of the relics again, which had been introduced in the Companion Set. In B/X and BECMI, only humans can take the cleric and thief classes. All dwarf and halfling characters and NPCs have the abilities of fighters and all elves the abilities of both fighters and magic-users. AD&D made the concession that these demihuman races can have NPC clerics, but in the Basic and Expert sets they have no access to cleric magic at all. To get them access to healing magic and protection against undead, the Companion Set introduced the relics. For the elves, the relic is a Tree of Life, for the dwarves it’s a magic force, and for the halflings a magic fire bowl.

Each relic has a single keeper, who is a regular NPC of that race, but who has access to special powers provided by the relic. He is able to cast spells that heal wounds, cure blindness and disease, neutralize poisons, and identify magic items. In addition to that, the relic is constantly using the Turn Undead ability of a 15th level cleric with a radius of 360 feet. Which is powerful to turn everything except for lichs and instantly destroys everything up to and including vampires. The keeper can use the spells almost unlimited, but every time he does the radius of the Turn Undead area shrinks by 5 feet and only returns by 5 feet per day. So the keeper has a very strong incentive to always try to keep the power of the relic close to its maximum and not cast cure serious wounds on every little bruise.

For my Ancient Lands setting I’ve never been happy with clerics, as their abilities really don’t fit as stand-ins for tribal shamans at all. Keepers are a totally different story though. They recieve their powers from a specifc object tied to a specific place, which serves as a conduit for divine powers. And it has a strong resemblance to many animistic religions and traditions. In the technical terms of antropology, the relics are idols. They are physical objects in which the divine force resides and which priests and worshipers visit in person to communicate with the deity. It is a temporary or permanent home of the deity and in some cases it’s actual body. I belive even in Greek religion it was believed that the deity is actually present in the statue that represents it in its temple. In other places, these idols are natural features, like mountains, springs, or unusual large trees or rocks.

In the RC, all elven relics are Trees of Life and all dwarven relics forges, and they all grant the same spells to their keepers. But that really doesn’t have to be that way. Not only can you easily change the appearance of each relic, you can also easily add a few more spells to their reportoire. Also, the Turn Undead effect could be replaced with a different power that is permanently active. The wonderful thing about it is, that it works at every level. It works for a small village shrine that simply has an idol for the spirit of the lake that lies next to it, and you can also have an idol inside a huge temple within a large city, which channels the divine power of the sun to the high priests. By chosing different appearances and powers for each idol, every local cult becomes unique and can have quite different means to protect itself against harm. Instead of a Turn Undead aura, the keeper could be given the ability to raise ring of growth of plants with a 360 feet radius around the idol, to raise and lower an impenetrable wall of briars as it is needed. You could have a shrine in a fortress that constantly puts a bless spell on any defenders on its walls. An a deranged cult that worships a horrific entity from the Underworld might have an idol that utterly defies description. In wilderness locations, an idol could take the form of a magic spring, a waterfall, or a giant tree. Or really anything you can imagine.

I think these idols probably work best if you don’t have any cleric characters at all in the setting. I personally would allow mages to learn cure light wounds as a 2nd level spell and neutralize poison as a 4th level spell, since player characters tend to get into trouble far away from any settlement and you generally don’t want to have the party constantly commuting back and forth during adventures. But any other cleric spells, like restoration, cure blindness, and raise dead, should only be available as miracles granted by the gods if a ritual is performed before their idol. And since most of these gods would just be relatively minor spirits of the land, not even all of them might be able to perform all of these. To raise someone from death, it wouldn’t be out of place to have the party travel to visit the archdruid at the oldest tree in the heart of the forest, or to descent into the Underworld to find an ancient shrine where a powerful demon is being held imprisoned.

The Ancient Lands as a Frontier Setting

I’ve been interested in making my own campaign setting for probably 10 years or so, originally starting with the idea of detailing the elven realms of Eaerlann and Illefarn from the Forgotten Realms as they would have been 4,000 years in the past. I had been playing a Neverwinter Nights campaign online, which was set around the High Forest and involved some 100 regular players. I also became one of the assistant DMs and main map builder for the forest areas. My own character belonged to a gang of elven and half-elven rangers and druids (which had a bit of a nonviolent feud with another group of elven wizards and clerics that was much more LG high elves compared to our CN scoundrels), and since then it’s always been my goal to make a true wilderness campaign that deals entirely with druids, rangers, spirits, and monsters.

And I have to admit, in all these years I never really found an answer to the question how one would actually pull that off well. Now I feel that I’ve reached the conclusion that the actual answer is: You don’t.

The wilderness does offer plenty of challenges and obstacles to overcome, but it’s really poorly equipped to provide the players with goals. The wilderness is something you move through, but neither the source of adventures nor the destination. There might be ways to actually pull it off, but for the kinds of heroic activities I have in mind, each adventure needs to start in the frontier. It would be very difficult to have an ocean campaign without ports or a desert campaign without a single oasis. No matter how interesting your wilderness is, it does not create adventures. People create adventures. Anything that happens in the wilderness isn’t really of any concern to the players until it starts to affect people. The forest is on fire? The whole valley drowned by a flood? Move out of the way, crisis averted, threat overcome. Nothing to see here. Move along.

I’ve been of the opinion that good settings are not defined by their environment, any locations, or their history, but entirely by the people who currently inhabit it and the way they interact. You could call it the Mass Effect paradigm, as that’s usually the example I give as a perfect execution of this principle. You don’t know anything about the planets you visit and almost no specifics about their history, but you pretty soon figure out what makes the people tick and that leads to the best videogame RPGs I’ve ever come across. It’s obvious in hindsight, but if this is what interests and fascinates me the most about settings then it obviously should also be part of the approach to adventures. If the world is about the people, then the adventures also need to be about people. And the next closest place to the wilderness that has good numbers of people is the frontier.

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Reworking the Ancient Lands: The Red River

One of the major changes I made when I shuffled around some parts of the Ancient Lands earlier this month, was the completely removal of the grass covered plains of Senkand on both sides of the Red River, which formed the border between the more classic fantasy style North and the Southeast Asian inspired South.. One reason was that it broke up the single continous, world-spanning forest I had in mind for the setting, but I also learned that you usually don’t have any large dry regions on the eastern coasts of continents. (Arabia and Texas being exceptions because both Persia and the Southern United States are somehow interfering with oceanic winds going from the equator to the pole, as they would have to go over land instead of following the coast.) I wasn’t really sure what to do with this region instead, and in a way that supports the style and the themes of the setting. But I think I got it now.

The Grand Canyon seems like a perfect match for the kind of environment I need. It’s huge. It’s impressive. It’s exotic looking. And it also is majestic while still being quite desolate and quiet. At least it looks like that in pictures. Not quite sure if would be actually possible to have vast forest growing right up to the canyons edges, but I don’t think there are a lot of people who would know that either. And it looks cool. So what? It also makes for a nice homeland for the Ruyaki dark elves, for which I still didn’t have a lot of ideas other than somehow basing them on the Redoran from Morrowind.

Another change I decided to make is to drop the idea of an overland route from the Falden lands on the Inner Sea to the Eylahen lands in the North. Since it would cut directly through the giant, mystical, and unexplored forest of the northern lands, it wouldn’t really seem that giant, mystical, and unexplored anymore. Not a big loss, since I didn’t rally have any ideas what to do with this huge major highway stright through pretty much blank space on the map.

This means that all contact between the Falden and the Eylahen would now have to happen by taking ships all the way around the ocean coast. It also means that the Kaas tribes would only have any contact with the rest of the Ancient Lands through the Eylahen territories, which is an interesting new development for me. One could reasonably say that I am way overthinking things here and putting way too much detail into things nobody will ever notice, but I really like it when I have such high degrees of consistency. And it also happens to help me come up with ideas. Working with complete freedom is quite hard. Once you have several geographic and cultural limitations in place, good ideas actually come a lot easier, as you can build on something that is already there. Where there used to be a white void on the map, staring up and you and waiting for you to do something, the map now is starting to ask specific questions that it wants you to answer. And that’s usually when I come up with my best ideas.

Ancient Lands: Factions

As much attention is usually given to races, cities, and countries when it comes to fantasy settings, I think the most important thing that has a much bigger impact on the overall feel and dynamics of the world are the power groups and other factions that inhabit it. You rarely have dealings with a race or a country, and these don’t really have any shared goals as a whole. In a work about the politics and wars of kings and other rulers, you kind of have things happen between countries, but in practice it’s almost all happening between members of different courts, which really are just one of many types of factions. There are many classic types of generic organizations in fantasy, such as thieves guilds, wizard colleges, great churches, lorekeepers/spies, or medieval megacorporations (Forgotten Realms has a lot of those.) For the Ancient Lands, many of these standard factions don’t really work, as it’s a bronze age setting primarily inhabited by tribal people living in remote villages in the wilds. Can’t really have a thieves guild in a 200 people village or a continent spanning state church when everyone is worshiping the spirits of the land they live on. Coming up with ideas for factions that do work in such a setting was a bit challenging at first and I had been creating a number of groups that I’ve since discarded again. But taking a count of the groups I already have, I realized that this is already quite extensive and easily enough for a setting of this scale.

Druids

Probably as close as you can get to a real good guys faction. The Druids are a lose and informal association of hundreds of shamans north of the Inner Sea. Most of them belong to the elven Falden, but the influence of the group reaches to all the neighboring tribes, which includes the Eylahen, the northern and southern Skeyn, the human Vandren, and even some Brana kaas and Takari dark elves. The goal of the Druids is to fight the spread of sorcery. Sorcery is a very potent form of magic that can defy the normal rules of nature, but its use sickens the lands and all creatures that inhabit it. To the druids that price is much too high for all the great wonders sorcerers can create, and they are doing everything in their power to prevent the sorcerous arts from spreading and if possible end the practice of all sorcery in the Ancient Lands forever. While in some regions almost all shamans are affiliated with the Druids, their actual numbers are relatively low. But all of them can call upon all the warriors of their clans if they feel the need is great enough to risk the protection of their villages, which makes them potentially one of the greatest powers in the Ancient Lands. But usually most druids simply exchange information with each other and only deal with sorcery that directly threatens their homes. However, when the threat seems great, they often call together druids from neighboring clans to face the danger together, before it grows too big to be able to destroy them one by one.

Sorcerers

Sorcerers are even fewer in numbers than the Druids and have even much less organization or shared goals. Most of the time it’s just a single sorcerer and his apprentices working entirely alone, with perhaps some friendly but distant contact with other sorcerers to compare their work. As most people fear them and the Druids have a strong presence in many regions, sorcerers are usually very secretive, living in isolation from the rest of society or practicing their art in secret. Few people are able to tell the difference between a sorcerer and a reclusive, but ordinary witch, as long as they keep the destructive effects from becoming too apparent. Sorcerers are not inherently evil, but all of them are highly ambitious and at least to some degree reckless, and very well aware that many people would prefer to see them dead if they could get an opportunity. Fear of their sorcerous powers is what keeps most common people from turning against them, and most sorcerers cultivate a reputation of being very dangerous opponents.

While sorcerers usually live in secret or are feared enough to become untouchable, the elven Neshanen of Senkand are one of the very few tribes where sorcerers have some form of acceptance and often wield considerable respect and power. Almost all sorcerers come from noble families and are frequently involved in local politics and and members of courts. Unsurprisingly, the Neshanen have a somewhat doubious reputation among the other tribes, but are also among the most educated and sophisticated people who produce many of the finest goods in the Ancient Lands. And since some of that knowledge comes from the work of sorcerers, the common Neshanen are much more willing to accept their presence in their towns and cities. Continue reading “Ancient Lands: Factions”