Kaendor

Fun with Mapbashing, and perhaps a map for the new Kaendor

Maybe I should just make peace with being that map guy who keeps excitedly posting about new map doodles that I’ll mostly never be using for any campaigns?

I was, once again, feeling unhappy with the latest maps for Kaendor that I made over the last week since the coast lines look too square and there’s too many big blank areas that are just forest with no further detail. So I went looking again for very large maps of the natural geography of the Earth to see if I find any regions with an interesting topography that I could use as references. And I realized that a map of the world looks really weird and barely recognizable when you simply mirror it.

I really like that look (even with the heavy stretching at the poles) and think that this would make a great global map for Kaendor. Zooming in on East (now West) Asia, I noticed that the overall layout of the coastlines already has a very similar general arrangement and my various sketches for Kaendor maps have had for the last two years or so now.

Southeast Asia happens to be where I always placed the huge jungles of Kemesh where the remnants of the ancient naga empires are barely holding on. But making all the small seas between the Indonesian island into dry land (which was once the case), there’s now just precisely the vast jungles that I wanted in that place. The cool thing about this is that I can still use all the mountain ranges in that region as a fast method to have a perfectly plausible topography.

I also decided to greatly simplify the islands of the First Island Chain because I think those would stand out too obviously as being just a mirrored map of Asia. And it also will save me a lot of work with very fiddly details.

A map at the scale above is way too big for any practical uses in any single campaign, and even covering that area on a 30-mile hex map would be ridiculously huge. As a map for Kaendor, I already changed the scale to 75% the lengths of distances (which means 56% the total area), just so that I can fit more interesting squiggly coastlines on the cool A2, 30-mile hex sheets I made. For the Kaendor ’24 campaign, I instead want to focus just on the central area shown below. But having that large, zoomed out map with little detail at hand as a reference will surely come super handy when it comes to adding mentions about distant lands and peoples beyond the known world to the setting. And if at some point in the future I might want to fully map out some of those areas in the same higher detail, it will all already be geographically consistent with whatever mentions and references I had used before.

And this is the area that I plan to turn into a fully worked out 30-mile hex map. Having all the mountain ranges and rivers already in place, and being able to look up images of the real landscapes, really helps a lot with inspiring ideas to what details I could fill this map with. I even can look up climate data if I want to, though with the map now flipped, wind directions and the corresponding rain patterns would not match up perfectly. But I think the climate of Europa and East Asia happens to be similar enough that it doesn’t even bother this one geography mega-nerd who surely is the only person to pay a single thought to this.

I’m having a lot of fun with this, and I am feeling really good (though I always do that) about this maybe being the final geography layout for Kaendor. With the arrangement being so similar to what I already established about the geography in the past, it should be really easy to copy all the locations over on this map without much breaking.

Foundations of a new Kaendor

Having a blast with working on Kaendor and things really falling into place now, and feeling like doing one of my reference pile showoffs again.

Mentally I’m having the image “George Lucas and Jim Henson produced an AD&D movie in 1989, shot in the Sierra Nevada”.

This is quite a departure from the world of my previous campaigns and I feel it’s basically a new setting at this point. But it also is such a strong return to the original ideas that I had in mind when I created the name Kaendor that I want to keep using it anyway. This is now much closer to what I wanted to do all the way back before it ran away from me to turn into a more Conanesque Sword & Sorcery setting.

And looking back up to the cover of the Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting box again, I see why Forgotten Realms/Bloodborne feels like such a nice combination. Galadriel vs. Cthulhu will be the greatest shit ever!

Kaendor ’24

I got big plans for another Kaendor campaign next year. I’ve been sharing bits and pieces on Mastodon, but now I want to put it all together in one place as an overview of what I’m working on.

As far as I’ve been able to trace back, I started developing my own fantasy setting style all the way back in 2009. I’ve been reworking and revising it many times for several different campaigns and planned campaigns, but like Demon’s Souls, Dark Souls, and Elden Ring, I’ve been reusing places, monsters, gods, and names, and the overall cultural and supernatural structure for the world. Originally, everything started with the observation that the ancient history backstory for the northern Sword Coast of the Forgotten Realms setting sounds like a much more exciting place to play in than the world that is actually being described in its current state. This gave me the idea to use what information was available to “recreate” the High Forest from 4,000 years ago as a stand alone setting for my own campaign. This very quickly led to the realization that it would all just be a lot easier to drop the explicit references to the Forgotten Realms and create a new setting from scratch with the same ideas: A northern European environment that is home to great kingdoms of elves and dwarves, where dragons and giants still exist in large numbers and have an active presence in the world, where humans are a minor people of barbarians, and the ancient primeval forest still cover nearly all land between the seas and mountains. At the same time, I had also deeply fallen in love with Morrowind, and how it presents a fantasy world that doesn’t feel at all like medieval Europe, and not even any place on Earth. While most of the Elder Scrolls setting is much more conventional, Morrowind feels like it’s a medieval society that evolved independently on an alien planet. Having a world with giant reptiles and insects, and without horses, dogs, cows, and bears is an idea I find hugely fascinating and compelling.

After several iteration I eventually settled on the name Kaendor, and used that world in a campaign in 2020, which without doubt was the best campaign I ever ran, and one of the longest. But I had been unhappy with the D&D 5th edition rules we’ve been playing, and since that campaign ended three years ago, I’ve been exploring and experimenting with various new ideas to rebuild the world for the next campaign. Various ADHD related factors led to that next campaign being delayed much longer than I had ever expected, but things have finally settled in place enough so that I can commit to plans more than two or three months into the future. And I think spring 2024 is finally going to be the time where I’ll return to that world. Which will hopefully turn out even better than the last time.

The Kaendor 24 campaign will almost certainly be my first run with the new Dragonbane system that came out earlier this year. I’ve been going through plenty of systems in the last 10 years that each have their strengths and shortcoming regarding what I want them to do for my campaigns, but Dragonbane very much seems like the game I wanted to have from the beginning. The idea is to combine this system of character and combat rules with the travel, exploration, and domain rules from the D&D BECMI Expert and Companion sets. I want it to be a West Marches style sandbox game in which the players have a rough map of a region that is filled with ancient ruins, the strongholds of many minor lords, and several factions with hidden plans that they are working on. It is up to the players which of these elements they want to focus on and pursue, and the story of the campaign will consist of whatever consequences that will come from the players’ actions. There will be no script. Only faction leaders with their clearly specified goals, strongholds, and minions at their disposal. To that end, I believe the random tables to generate Court Sites and small ruins and dungeons fom Red Tide will be a fantastic resource.

After a many year infatuation with Frank Frazetta style barbarians and dinosaurs, I am planning a return to that very original idea of imagining a world in the style of 2nd edition Forgotten Realms but at a much earlier points in history. This means a world more in the style of Lerry Elmore and Tim Hildebrandt, full of rich green primeval forests and golden sunlight. But below (and beyond) that vibrant natural world lie the lands and places that predate the light of the sun and stars. These realms of the primordials are much more inspired by the dark blue of Bloodborne, Darkest Dungeon, Hollow Knight, and Thief, and their take on supernatural forces and beings. Which is a pretty strong contrast, but the more I’ve been playing with those ideas the more I think they actually make a very evocative combination. This incarnation of Kaendor has no demons, divine servants, or hells or godly realms. The supernatural world consists of just the primordials that predate the natural environment and the spirits that are part of it. These spirit can be quite demonic in their apearance and often weild powers over fire, but they are still very much beings of the forests and mountains that are their homes.

For a long time I really wanted to run campaigns in a Bronze Age setting, but I feel that concept never actually came across in the campaigns that I have run. With the earlier versions of the Forgotten Realms now being a stronger inspiration again, I am returning to a more medieval style again. But since I played a lot of Age of Empires II last winter, I’ve developed a new obsessive fascination with the 5th century era of Europe, where the last years of Antiquity transition into the start of the early Middle Ages. It’s the time of the Lombards, Goths, and Huns, who are basically Iron Age barbarian peoples who take over control of much of the failing Roman Empire, and create the first medieval societies in the process. It’s not classically ancient and not classically medieval. A bit of both, but also a bit something completely different from either. Which I think makes it a great reference pool for a setting that should feel like a completely separate world instead of generic medieval Europe with magic.

One thing that always strongly evoked the sense of a world being very far back in ancient times is to not have much in the way of classic kingdoms or empires. Instead, the main centers of civilization are a small number of city states whose direct area of control reaches only two or three days’ travel beyond their city walls at the most. Beyond that lies a vast, sparsely settled expanse in which small farming villages cluster around a hill fort town or the stronghold of a local warlord whose men can protect their turf from raids by neighboring domains or brigands. This is very much in the spirit of BECMI and the early Forgotten Realms, but I think that D&D had largely forgotten about that aspect as the fashion of RPGs changed throughout the 90s.

In a world with very few actual armies and fighting mostly taking place between minor lords or chiefs gathering a few dozen of their retainers with their men at arms (who are primarily wealthy farmers for most of the year), mercenaries have a lot of opportunities to make a living. And player characters are very much intended to be actual mercenary bands rather than adventuring parties. Traveling long distances through the wilderness while carrying both all their heavy gear needed to do their jobs and all the supplies for the journey means that it really isn’t an option to travel without several pack animals and camp followers that will wait in the relative safety outside while the PCs descend into dangerous ancient ruins. This is a play format that also works very well with having larger numbers of players who won’t be present to play in every game that is being run. PCs of absent players can always be assumed to be guarding the camp or the group’s temporary base or permanent stronghold, and are ready to drop back into the action at any moment.

One thing that has always been very central to my campaigns is that the world is dominated by wilderness that is not only vast, but also full of ancient ruined towers and strongholds. Since civilization is always very small and the influence of the spirits and the elements is always present and often chaotic, settlements and areas of habitation keep moving around a lot, and have always been. Few settlements are more than a few centuries old, and traces of much older settlements abandoned long ago can be found anywhere. Most towns are build in places that had once been home to a different people that left the area long ago for one reason and another. And sometimes these old remnants are much more ancient than any people alive could even imagine. There are several main layers of habitation that cover the wilderness of Kaendor whose creators are now largely unknown. But the further down one digs, the more inhuman their builders appear to get. Noticing the differences between ruins, and different depths of the same ruins, is something that I want to make a prominent feature in the exploration of ancient places that helps piecing together the places’ histories and getting hints of what strange powers might still be lingering in them.

It’s all a concept I am super excited about and I can’t wait to see this world getting back into action again.

Another Creation Myth

I had a pretty nice story for the origin of primordials, demons, and fey and the different realms of reality in Kaendor three months back, but since then I’ve once again changed my stance on the inclusion of demons. There are a few cool ideas I have for demons, but overall they just don’t have the kind of integration into the larger existing worldbuilding that primordials and fey have. I also feel that having three groups of supernatural beings is diluting the distinguishing boundaries between them and unloads too many overlapping concepts on players who are meant to figure things out largely for themselves. Demons are also heavily associated with Evil and Hell, which are both concepts that don’t really appear in the big picture of Kaendor.

So for the third time now, I believe, I decided that the setting should not have demons at all. Most of the ideas I have for them can quite well be given to either the primordials or the fey, and the remaining ones really don’t need to be jammed into a setting that does not actually need them. But that also means that the old creation story no longer makes any sense. Here’s a new one I also really like.

In the primordial age, the world was all water and darkness. It was the world of the Primordials, who ruled the lightless depths for uncountable aeons. This changed with the arrivial of fire. It is not known how fire came to be, but stars appeared in the eternal blackness of the Void and drove back the darkness around them. Their light and warmth drove the Primordials into the deepest seas and lowest reaches of the earth, or into the eternal emptiness of the void. Where the light of the stars reached the surface of the earth and the sea, its energy brought forth the first elemental spirits, as it did those of the air.

When the darkness was driven away by the radiance of the stars, shards of the sun fell down onto the earth and burried themselves many miles deep into the ground. From these shards emanate the streams of lava that sometimes rise back to the surface, and they gave life to all the fire elementals that roam the world, and many of the spirits of the deeper earth as well. The smallest of these sun shards have cooled down in the aeons that have passed since these earliest days, and have solidified into veins of copper.

The elementals were the first of a new form of life that came to spread throughout the lands touched by the lights of the stars. From them came many other spirits, as well as the ancestors of the earliest plants and animals.

Some Thoughts on Kaendorian Gods and Religion

One aspect of fantasy worlbuilding that I’ve always been struggling with, other than naming things, is the entire aspects of gods and religion. Which I think I am not alone with. I noticed several years ago that most fantasy settings, especially for RPGs, usually tend to have a lot of gods, but no traces of religion. Having a number of gods with names, areas of influence, and perhaps even iconography does not make religions. What do people actually believe? What do they do? How do faith and the gods actually impact life and society? And most importantly, how does it come up in play? The only case I can think of as actual religion in a fantasy world is the Chantry in Dragon Age, and that’s pretty much Christianity with slightly altered window dressing.

For Kaendor, one of the themes that I like to have well integrated at the foundational level of the whole setting, is the idea that in this world, people are not at the top of the food chain. They are not made in god’s image and they are not made the masters of the natural world by divine decree. Some ways in which this manifests is that most of the world is uninhabited and barely explored, that there are ruins of inhuman civilizations that were much larger and more powerful than society in the present, and that there are many huge beasts and strange spirits which will simply crush any people who don’t get out of their way fast enough. Nature does not care about the concerns of people, and in the end it always wins in every contest about control and mastery of the environment. I feel that this aspect also needs to be very visible in the relationship of the people with the divine powers, and that acceptance of that position in the natural hierarchy needs to be central to the religious beliefs.

Since it is central that people are not created in the image of gods and are not in any way comparable to gods, the gods can not factually have the appearance of a person. I think even depictions of a deity as a person should be rare and untypical. Maybe have depictions of important events in which the divine influence of the deity is represented by a radiant figure appearing in the background or handing something symbolic to an important mortal hero? But no stories of gods walking among people in humanoid form and having conversations with them. Instead, I think gods should primarily be cosmic forces. Like the deity of storms, the deity of knowledge, the deity of plant growth, the deity of hunting, and so forth. They are forces that are present and active in the environment and in daily life and that will do their thing that is their nature, regardless of how it affects people and their needs and desires. The gods do not love people. They don’t care about people. They might not even take notice of people.

Religion in Kaendor is not about serving the gods or about hoping for rewards or help from the gods. Religion is first and foremost about not getting in the way of the gods. They are impersonal forces active in the environment regardless of the presence or activities of people. Understanding these forces and what they do is the most important thing to not get accidentally crushed by them. But instead of being fatalistic and simply hoping to evade an inevitable doom one more day, the religion of the people of Kaendor is also about making use of the benefits and opportunities that are created by the actions of these divine forces. Religion is about living with the patterns of nature to avoid the many dangers of the natural world and to make the most of what it has to offer. Religion provides the framework by which people put abstract concepts about the environment and society into concrete actions that they can practice in everyday life. And it is widely understood to be that way by most people. Religious customs and rituals are not things demanded by a deity because it furthers a divine plan or because it pleases its vanity. They are simply sensible things to do.

Religion in Kaendor is less about faith and much more about practice. Which really isn’t that unusual for many great religions throughout human history, though it tends to seem really strange from a Christian perspective, which really is more of an outlier in that regard than the typical norm. Though spirituality does exist in Kaendor, particularly among priests. To many people, the various gods are not simply the abstract, impersonal spirits of natural or social phenomenons. They are also exemplars of different ways to approach life in general. By framing the various problems and challenges of everyday life in the context of growing crops or a hunt, priests believe that it becomes much easier to find the right answers and solution. In that regard, the cults of the various gods are very much like different schools of philosophical thought. With each philosophy claiming that their view of life and the right way of living is being exemplified by the way in which their respective deity manifests itself in the world. Emulating the gods is the path to happiness and prosperity.

Of course, to many people, simply practicing sensible customs or getting well meaning advice from priests on how to reflect on their own troubles and behavior is not the kind of divine aid that they are looking for. What they desire are more personal gods who will listen to their pleas and grant them concrete blessing and rewards for their worship. And there are many powerful beings that are open to such relationships with mortals, though priests would say that these are not true deities. This space is the realm of spirit and demon cults. Cults are very common everywhere where people live. Usually these take the form of small shrines to a spirit of a local river, mountain, or ancient tree where people will leave offerings or make small sacrifices to ask for good growing conditions for their crops or protection from predators from the surrounding woods. These gestures of gratitude to local nature spirits typically are practiced side by side with the rituals and ceremonies happening at the main temple of a town or village and might even be officiated by the temple priests on certain holy days.

Much more unusual are cults that take the form of secret societies that practice their own rights completely separate from the temples in private and often hidden sanctuaries. These cults are typically led by a single high priest who is in regular direct contact with the spirit or demon that the cult worships. They bring tribute and sacrifices to their god on the promise of concrete rewards, often wealth and power, and that the god will use its great magic power to help the cult with its earthly goals. Many of these cults have had long relationships with benevolent local spirits that have been of great benefit to their villages. But others have pledged themselves to the service to far more dangerous and insidious beings to further their own selfish malicious plans, often blind to the fact that they are aiding a being much more ruthless than themselves.

The Dawn of Time

In the Primordial Age, there was only darkness and water. A lightless ocean under an endless black sky. The Primordials roamed these dark waters, preying upon each other and growing ever more powerful and stronger. But there were not yet any cycles, and time itself was meaningless. Only an eternity in complete darkness.

Change first apeared in the world with the arrival of the demons. Their search for power had brought the primordials into contact with other realms and their denizens, and conflict soon followed. In their rage, the demons unleashed fire on the primordials, and with the flames came the first light to lighten up the darkness. Eventually the demons were beaten back, or returned to their own realms on their own. But the primordials had suffered greatly themselves.

While the demons had left, the fires that had seared the primordials had not fully died down yet. The Moon Temis discovered a glowing coal and fanned it back into a roaring great fire that became the Sun, to create a permanent light to push back the darkness. The remaining primordials fled from the light that had hurt them, to hide in the darkest depths of the sea and lowest reaches beneath the earth.

Other sparks that floated in the vast open sky became the stars. And in their dim glow, the Twilight godddes Azuleira came to be. But the sun of Temis shone brightest, and other celestial bodies saw its light and gathered around it for warmth as well.