Author: Yora

More Species of Known Space

Tubaki

The Tubaki are one of several species whose presence in space is greatly dependent on technologies and inrastructures of other powers. There is only a small number of Tubaki shipyards and most of them are primarily specialized on converting old purchased ships from other manufacturers to provide greater comfort to Tubaki crews. Those shipyards that do build their own ships still rely on imported hyperspace drives and gravity generators from other more established companies. Despite Tubaki worlds being generally seen as more low tech planets, Tubaki have been travelling through space for centuries and founded several dozen of colonies in other sectors. Even though most of them are of no interest or relevance for major interstellar companies.

Tubaki are humanoids quite similar in size and proportions to Enkai and Mahir, which is generally attributed to the very similar gravity and climatic conditions on the Tubaki and Enkai homeworlds producing a similar optimal body shape for upright walking humanoids. On average, Tubaki tend to be slightly taller and more muscular, but mostly stand apart due to their sand to brown colored fur and thick manes. Tubaki found outside their own system are usually employed as manual labor, primarily in mining and agriculture and also various low-level mechanic jobs. Tubaki colonies are usually too small to have advanced engineering and science schools and those individuals with advanced degrees typically find their calling in contributing to the development of their planets rather than seeking their luck among the stars.

Chosa

Chosa are tall humanoids with tough green-gray hides and sharp teeth that give them a reptilian appearance. They are among the physically strongest of the species travelling space and fight fiercely and with little hesitation. Prejudices are widely spread among the other species of Chosa being violent brutes, but their homeworld actually ranks among the most technologically advanced planets in Known Space. Their ships tends towards blocky and practical designs typically ragarded as looking blunt with little thought for decorations, but compare in their capabilities to all but the most sophisticated Damalin and Netik ships.

Chosa encountered in space are often mercenaries, an occupation that their physical toughness and familiarity with advanced space technologies makes them well suited for. Chosa culture as a whole is not overly militaristic though, and their prominent presence in the mercenary business comes more from the high demand for Chosa in that line of work. There are typically not a lot of opportunities for Chosa engineers or pilots outside of Chosa systems.

Amai

The Amai are one of the newest species that have gained the ability to travel between the stars. Even just 200 years ago, the Amai had no contact of any kind with any other species and only performed a few crewed exploration missions within their home system. Being native to a mostly aquatic world with relatively few islands above the surface, Amai civilization has always been greatly limited by the available amount of land for agriculture, and even after becoming industrialized the total population has only barely surpassed one billion, which is much smaller than for any other species in Known Space. Given their relatively small number and only recent arrival among the stars, Amai are only rarely encountered by any other species and usually releatively close to their home system. Being only in contact with small frontier colonies and minor outposts and knowing about the home systems of other species only through tales, Amai tend to be quite cautious when encountering aliens or visiting unknown planets in a region of space that appear rather lawless and chaotic.

Major Species of Known Space

Known Space is home to several intelligent species that possess the capabilities for interstellar flight and have colonized worlds outside their home systems. With the vast distances of interstellar space, and communication between systems being limited to the speed with which messages can be carried by ships, there are few true interstellar governments and colony worlds are usually highly autonomous or fully independent. Though compared to the homeworlds, even the largest colony worlds have populations in the size of small countries, and most are little more than a single major city. The Esekar Sector is far away from any homeworlds or major colonies, but has become home to numerous settlements and outposts of various species from all over Known Space.

Enkai

The Enkai home system is one of the great powers of Known Space, even though it is more a confederation of several nations on the homeworld and various other planets throughout the system than a truly unified state. The Enkai homeworld is one of the most technologically advanced in Known Space, which has enabled its people to establish hundreds of colonies of various sizes over the course of many centuries. Today, the Enkai are one of the three most dominant species in the Esekar Sector.

Enkai are a primate species with skin in various shades of dull red and with black hair. Among the planets on which intelligent life has evolved, their homeworld is comperatively warm and dry, though dominated more by steppes and savann than actual deserts. This makes Enkai quite well adapted to deal with high air temperatures but they generally cope poorly with high humidity. With the exception of small outposts that have economically collapsed and never managed to recover, Enkai  worlds have generally quite advanced technological equipment.

Among other species, Enkai are known to be both ambitious and exiteable, often to the point of being reckless. Both the Damalin and Netik consider this unbecomming of such a highly technologically advanced civilization, but their ability to seize on opportunities quickly without relying on the hierarchies of established institutions has served their species well in their journey to the stars.

Damalin

The Damalin are one of the oldest species travelling and coloizing space that is still in existence. They gained access to hyperspace drive technology from the presumably extinct Udur over 4,000 years ago and since then have colonized dozens of systems in the space surrounding their home system, many of which have constantly been inhabited for thousands of years by now. Damalin sates are usually in control of or at least laying claim to entire star systems.

Damalin are a amphibian species with pale blue-white skin, large dark eyes, and thin mouths. While they can survive underwater indefinitely, the practical necessities of industrial production and food preservation have forced their civilization to become almost completely land based. But still most Damalin settlements of any significant size include many large underwater “parks” in rivers and lakes, and the houses any moderately well off individuals include a pool instead of a veranda, large enough for entire families.

Damalin have a reputation among other races for chosing their words carefully and being very deliberate in their actions, which sometimes comes off as indecisive, but they often have a much greater awareness of what’s going on around them and being prepared for most eventualities than they are letting on. While their thin bodies don’t provide them with much strength, they are known to shot well and quick and rarely allow themselves to be surprised unprepared.

Netik

Long before the Damalin first left their homeworld to travel to the stars, the Netik had already settled dozens of planets throughout all the space then known to them. Like the Damalin, they did not develop hyperspace drive technology themselves but had gained it from Udur explorers and traders arriving on their homeworld almost 6,000 years ago. During the first centuries of their expansion into interstellar space, Netik colonies were established as vassal states to the Udur, making use of their existing transportation infrastucture. Correspondingly, the decline and eventual collapse of the Udur civilization had incredible impacts on the widely dispersed Netik colonies, many of which lost all contact with each other as they did not have the industrial capacity to maintain regular transportation of messages across the great distances. At the lowest point, the largest remaning cluster of Netik worlds consisted of only three major colonies and a few outposts, with a combined population of only a few hundred million. Eventually the three colonies developed industrially to a point where they could reestablish contact with a number of other colonies, though many of them had completely collapsed in the centuries of complete isolation. Most strikingly, the Netik have never been able to determine the location of their homeworld and to this day it is unknown if any kind of Netik civilization still survives on that planet. Though they are lacking a homeworld, many Netik colony worlds have exceptionally large populations in the high millions, and they numerous smaller outposts everywhere throughout Known Space.

The Netik are an insectoid race and one of the most alien in appearance to most other species. But many people who encounter them in person for the first time are quite surprised at how effortlessly they interact with members of other species. While their body language is close to impossible to read for other species, Netik are usually very skilled at picking up on social clues and picking their words well to create a common sense of understanding with other people. Among space travellers, Netik have a reputation to be generally welcoming and quite fun to be around, which often is quite mystifying to people who have never encountered them themselves.

Mahir

Among all the species travelling throughout Known Space, the Mahir stand out uniquely for not actually being native to what is considered their homeworld. Genetically, the Mahir are nearly identical to the Enkai, having split off from their original species only some 20,000 years ago. For reasons that will likely remain unknown forever, an alien species visited the Enkai homeworld during the stone age and collected an estimated 80 to 100,000 people which they settled on a planet several hundreds of lightyears away. Archeological discoveries and genetic studies by Mahir scientists had determined long ago that they are evolutionarily unrelated to any other life on their home world and had left no evidence of their existance on prior to the established date anywhere on the planet. It was only when the Mahir gained access to hyperspace drives and encountered the Enkai 400 years ago that the true origin of their species was revealed.

Mahir are physically nearly identical to Enkai, with the most evident difference being in their coloration. Unlike the Enkai, the skin and hair of Mahir is nearly white. There are however various minor adaptations to the much colder environment on their new home planet, primarily in regards to temperature tollerance. These differences appear to be the result of genetic changes introduced by the aliens that originally settled the Mahir on their new planet, but the purpose of that projects remains a complete mystery.

Even though the Mahir gained access to hyperspace travel only fairly recently, their homeworld is otherwise technologically very advanced and they have become a considerable economic and industrial power in known space since they gained access to cheap raw material from other systems.

Ghouls

The undead are creatures who were once alive, have died, and then brought back as something else under the influence of sorcerous corruption and demonic possession. While often regarded among them by most people, ghouls are not actually undead, since even though they have become warped by the corrupting influence of sorcerous energies, they never died and in many ways continue to be what they were in life.

Ghouls are people who have been exposed to strong sorcerous energies for long durations of time. Many ghouls are the servants of powerful sorcerers or demon-possessed anathema who assisted their masters in numerous demonic rituals or haved served in their inner sanctums for many years. Others are the survivors of great sorcerous attacks or disasters that permanently poisoned their devastated towns and the surrounding land. But there are also stories of foolish explorers who got lost in the Underworld, turning into ghouls in a matter or weeks or even days as they wandered too close to demonic lairs or the remains of slain demons. But usually the transformation into ghouls is a slow and gradual one. Typically the skin becomer paler and turning grey, hair becoming thin and stringy, and eyes turning all black. Eventually their hands become claws and their teeth fangs, alongside a growing instinct to tear and bite at those who provoke their easily irritated anger. An instinct that eventually grows to start feeding on the flesh of the slain. Another side effect of people who are turning into ghouls is that they stop to age and recover even from the most grievous wounds. It is nearly unheard of for a ghoul to escape from a fight and later die from sustained injury. Often, this is the first hard proof that a person has not just been corrupted by the effects of sorcerey but turned into an actual ghoul.

Unlike what many people believe, the corruption into a ghoul does not turn a person into a mindless beast that hunts the living. This descent into savagery and madness is primarily caused by the continuing exposure to demonic corruption. The transformation into ghouls can not be reversed (though there are legends of magical springs that might have such a power), but ghouls that have managed to escape the dark places that corrupted them are often able to retain their intelligence and most of their sanity if they are able to maintain the discipline to control their bestial urges. Ghouls found in the ruins of destroyed cities or the crumbling towers of long dead sorcerers are rarely much more than wild beast that quickly attack any potential prey they think they can take down. But ghouls who are wandering the lands might be quite difficult to spot as such without taking a close up look at their faces. Traveling ghouls usually wrap themselves in cloaks and hoods, or wear masks to conceal their distorted features.

Ghoul
Armour Class 13
Hit Dice 2* (3-15 hp)
Attacks 3 claws and bites +1 (1d3 + paralysis)
or Weapon +1 (1d6+1)
Movement 40’
Saving Throws D12, W13, P14, B15, S16 (2)
Morale 9
XP 25
Number Appearing 1d6 (2d8)

Infravision: 90′.

Paralysis: For 2d4 turns (save versus paralysis). Creatures larger than giants are unaffected. After paralyzing a target, ghouls will attack others.

Undead: Immune to effects that affect living creatures (e.g. poison). Immune to mind-affecting or mind-reading spells (e.g. charm, hold, sleep).

Source

Wizards of the Coast are shitheads!

I was thinking about an appropriate title for this post, but since I am hosting this site on my own rented web space in Germany, I can call it what it is.

Anyone who’s been following WotC’s history of social sensitivity and awareness to any degree knows that it’s always been an embarrassing shitshow. I am giving them the benefit of the doubt and assume they are just totally oblivious of what they do and have no conception that there might be anything wrong about it.

I usually don’t bother getting involved with these things about who use this or that insensitive or loaded word and all the drama around it, but this takes the cake.

For the annual marketing event of queer pride month, WotC is releasing queer themed downloads to show their proud support of queers. Content that is region locked. So as to not offend foreign markets where they would like to continue doing business without impact to their profits.

You fucking shitheads!

I’ve never been involved in any of this queer pride stuff, but the whole supposed idea behind queer pride month is to stand up against discrimination. And they bow down to kiss the feet of those who are discriminating.

I just don’t have words. Scummy comes to mind, but that’s not even in the right ballpark. That’s more like Nestle making selfies handing out a bottle of their own branded water to people dying of thirst. Or the NRA trying to console the relatives of shooting victims by handing out free guns so they can feel safer now. Though the later sounds like something that they probably do.

But Wizards of the Coast are fucking shitheads. I don’t see them anyone getting fired tomorrow over this stunt.

Pathcrawls

We are now resuming our irregular schedule.

I’ve never been friends with the idea of hexcrawling. Lots of people fill the term with all kinds of different meanings as long as there is at least one hex map involved somewhere, but to me it always carries the clear meaning of being the same concept as dungeoncrawling, translated from dungeon rooms to wilderness hexes. Which means the players are going from hex to hex, color in the new hex on their map as the terrain type they discover, and ask the GM if they see anything that they can check out. Like the player map for The Isle of Dread.

Some people will say that hexcrawling is much more than that, but there’s plenty of people around who strongly assert that every single hex should have something in it to discover, so the idea is there. That just doesn’t sound very fun to me, as it easily turns into wandering around aimlessly waiting for something to happen. I also think it breaks the believability of the world as a 24 square mile area is massive and you could spend month exploring just a single 6-mile hex without ever spotting a cave, statue, or tower that is somewhere between the hills and trees. As I outlined in a previous post, I think it is much more plausible for PCs to find new sites when they either have instructions for how to reach them, or they are visible from a road or river the party is travelling on. In many ways, this is simply a pointcrawl. But there are various things about the pointcrawl map as originally proposed that I find inconvenient for how I want to run my campaigns. Where do you put boxes for new sites that are added to the world as a consequence of players tracking randomly encountered creatures to their lair or base without messing up the map? What if players decide to take shortcuts through woodlands or swamps where there are no roads or rivers to follow? These issues can be quite easily fixed without really overturning the whole system, so consider this a tweak on pointcrawl maps.

First thing is to draw the map for the area in freehand with no grid. (Even the hexmaps I posted recently started that way before I added the hex grid.) Primarily coastlines, mountains, rivers, lakes, and swamps, and such things.

Second, add the major settlements, strongholds, and ruined cities to the map.

Third, draw the roads that people build to connected these settlements.

Now that we have the main rivers and major roads, as the fourth step, add any other sites that people in the area might have discovered already and could give the players instructions on how to find them.

Fifth, add the secondary paths that connect these sites to the main roads and rivers.

Now we know all the paths through the region that parties are likely to travel on. As the sixth step, add sites that could be spotted by simply traveling on one of the primary and secondary paths.

Seventh, mark paths that connect those tertiary sites to the road and river network. Since characters can see those sites from the road, they don’t need any kind of trail to follow. Just keep it in your sight and move towards it. Depending on the granularity you want with distances, these can even be marked as being right on the trail from which they can be spotted.

Only now comes the step to add a hex grid to the whole map. This hex grid is not to divide the wilderness into segments, but simply as a visual aid to easily estimate the length of swirling paths as they meander through the environment. If you’d want to, you could just note the distances between two points next to the path of the map and remove the grid again if you’re working with a digital map. Back in the day, the 2nd edition Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting box had a hex grid printed on a sheet of clear plastic at the same scale as the maps in the box for just that purpose. I think any print shop would still be able to make such a sheet for you if you have an apprpropriately scaled file of a hex grid on a USB stick.

The advantage of making a wilderness map like this is that I can easily add more dots and more lines to the map, and since the map is based on physical geography instead of a flow-chart abstraction, I can determine the length of any new path easily by counting the number of hexes it passes through. If the players say “You know what, we get off the trail here and just keep heading straight south until we reach the river and then follow it downstream to the town”, it’s trivial to figure out the length of the path, though it would be something you’d have to purely handwave on a default pointcrawl map.

Which might of course be a complete non-issue for many people. This is simply my method that I am using to get the mix of abstraction and precision that I find ideal for my campaigns.

The Cold Lands of the Unapproachable East

I know I shouldn’t…

So many campaign ideas, so little time. Actually, I have lots of time, I just like tinkering with new ideas so much I rarely really commit to seeing them through.

Back in November, I had taken the time to sit down and actually fully read through the original 1st edition Campaign Set for Forgotten Realms. And I found the world presented in it to really be much more inspiring and exciting in how it provides hooks for the GM to work with, in contrast to the bloated mess of pastoral quaintness and cartoony heroics it balooned into over the years and decades that followed. The first edition Campaign Set and sourcebook are really quite sparse on specific details, but that’s precisely what makes them useful tools for a GM to create a campaign, rather than big piles of homework you have to read and memorize to run your campaign correctly. Back then I was tinkering with some ideas to run another campaign in the Savage Frontier of the northern Sword Coast, but when it came to actually creating adventure content for players to play with, I found it somewhat lacking in actual stuff to do. All the stuff that I thought was really cool about the area seemed like it would be good for higher level parties, but I couldn’t really think about anything interesting to for a group of fresh explorers coming into the area for the first time, and so lost interest in the idea pretty quickly.

But reading the entire Campaign Set did also get me interested again in the Northeast region of Faerûn. And of all the campaign sourcebooks I ever had, the Unapproachable East for 3rd edition is a strong contender for my favorite sourcebook ever. I’ve loved it since I first got it when it came out, and it’s one of the few books I’ve kept around the entire time since getting rid of the big pile of D&D crap I had gathered over the years. But I never actually got around to use it and run any adventures in that part of the Forgotten Realms. Preparing myself for the worst, I checked the inside cover today. This book came out in 2003! I’ve never got around to use this setting in 19 years. I mean, I still got decades of campaigns ahead of me, but it’s really getting time to finally do this!

The area I am eying covers the regions called the Unapproachable East, the Cold Lands, and the Bloodstone Lands in various sources from different editions. There are Aglarond, Damara, the Great Vale, Impiltur, Narfell, Rashemen, Thay, and Thesk. There are good reasons why one could also include Vaasa and the Vast as being in this part of the world, but I think they are much more culturally oriented towards the Moonsea and Sembia and you have to make the cut somewhere.

Two thousand years ago, most of this area except for Aglarond and most of Thay made up the territory of the ancient Demonbinders of Narfell. To the East lay the lands of their great rivals of Raumathar, and after centuries of war the to civilizations completely destroyed each other with their dark sorcerous magic. Civilization never really returned to these lands in the centuries that followed and nearly all major settlements in this part of the world are found on the shores of the Sea of Fallen Stars and southern Thay.

Based on the map and the description of the peoples, I interpret this region as being stongly influenced by Southeast Europe around the Black Sea and Caspian Sea and the Carpathian and Caucasus Mountains. The Rashemi are a vague blend of Norse and Slavic influences, which actually does resemble the Rus who lived along the Dneipr in the Middle Ages. And the Nar tribes in the very north have some resemblance to Tartars. And the Endless Wastes to the east of the region are an explicit stand-in for the Eurasian Steppe, at one point having a big Mongol Horde adventure based around it. Staying with these cultural and geographic influences, I think it would be interesting to base the Great Dale on Lithuania, and the port cities of Impiltur or German merchant settlements on the Baltic Sea. The big elephant in the room is of course Thay. I think the best source for influences for Thay would actually be Persia, but I don’t really want to have a campaign in which the single Iranian nation is the evil empire threatening all their European neighbors. But instead I think it could be really cool to present Thay as an evil magocratic version of Byzantium. Not quite 100% sure how that would look like, but I think it sounds really quite fun.

The main media influence that pops to my mind when imagining this setting is The 13th Warrior. And you can never go wrong with this one! It is the most pure essence of oldschool D&D you’ll ever see on film. I also imagine it in ways very similar to my mental image of most of the Elric stories I’ve read, but I think they are pretty sparse on environment descriptions so other people might be imagining something very different. While I was looking at the cropped out map above for a long while, I was starting to see the vague outlines of Skyrim. Which I think actually fits perfectly as a reference point. I can absolutely see Whiterun as Thesk and Falkreath as the Great Vale. Solitude would work as a city in Impiltur and Riften as Telflamm. Wight infested Nord tombs would be perfect as the graves of Nar sorcerers, with Dragon Priests taking the role of undead Nar demonbinders. Oh, and the Companions are totally a Rashemi berserker lodge. And Red Wizards are like Thalmor, just saying.

To sum it up, my interpretation of this setting is The 13th Warrior in Skyrim on the Dneipr.

Even though I don’t want to set up this campaign as an oldschool hexcrawl, I also really don’t want to go back to the dark days of writing the players a big epic fantasy novel to act out. It still has to be a sandbox. While I was somewhat lost regarding what a new party of low level PCs could be doing in The Savage Frontier, I think this part of the Realms actually has some really good potential as a setting for just roaming around and exploring while having run-ins with the locals along the way. I wasn’t really sure what to do with ruins of ancient Illefarn in the great river valleys of the North that have been farmland for thousands of years. But the East comes across to me as a region that is much more remote and drastically less populated. Once you leave the coastal port cities behind, you’re out in the wilderness. And once you step off the few big trade roads, there’s no telling what you might run into. Even though they are long gone, the remains of ancient Narfell looms over everything. The source material conveniently describes a typical Nar ruin as small squat fortifications on the surface with massive labyrinths of underground tunnels beneath them, many of which still hold captured demons. With a great land that was never really resettled, these are perfect for extensive dungeon exploration. And as I mentioned above, old tombs of Nar sorcerers also fit in very well. In addition to that, there’s lots of marshes and swamps (though not shown on the map) and dark forests for hags and mysterious druids.

One thing that I noticed in the 1st edtion Campaign Set is how greatly focused on just humans Forgotten Realms originally was. In the East this is even more the case. Except for Aglarond, there’s never been any elven civilzations in this part of the world. There are a few small dwarf kingdoms in the Earthspur Mountains on the very western edge of the area that I defined, but that’s basically it. There is a population of half-elves deep in the forests of Aglarond that is culturally separate from the human cities on the coast, and there is mention of a few halflings having migrated to the port cities of Impiltur, but that’s the extend of nonhuman peoples in the area. The only exception being several tribes of gnolls who have been serving as mercenaries in the armies of Thay for many generations. There’s not even really mentions of orcs, except for some settled down Zhentarim mercenaries that arrived later in the official timeline (that I am ignoring). While I generally like the idea, having at least some nonhuman people to clash with is always a nice change. Not much mentioned in the sources, but a perfect fit in my opinion are ogers, trolls, and giants. A land of cold plains seems like just the place where you would find fog giants, my favorite kind of giant that I actually never had an opportunity to use. The Sea of Fallen Stars is well known as being home to Sahuagin. I’ve never really seen anything noteworthy done with them, so I think they would be really cool to use as enemies in adventures on the coast. I guess you can never go wrong with goblins either. You can always believe that they are around somewhere without ever deserving explicit mention. Since any kind of reptile people would feel out of place, and chitines are culturally connected to drow, which I really don’t want to have in this campaign, I was thinking of what other kind of cool pulpy humanoids might work here. And I think bullywugs could actually make for really cool main monstrous humanoids in this setting. Not quite as popular and famous as snake-men, ape-man, and mushroom-men, but frog-men are still classic pulp monsters. You just have to present them right. I think in more recent material, bullywugs have often been interpreted as particularly goofy looking goblins. But in their earlier incarnations they had stats basically matching orcs. Frog-orcs who are hiding in the swampy waters and attack with big mouths full of spiky teetch feel like awesome humanoid enemies to me.