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Heliomance
2011-04-25, 04:03 PM
So I'm developing a campaign setting for my upcoming campaign, and over an evening down the pub, I sat down with a geographer and a geologist friend, and hashed out a world map. It's a very pretty world map, and being geeks, and what with two of them being well educated in that sort of thing, it's internally consistent and contains detail on climate, and even such things as currents, trade winds, and plate tectonics. I then went and populated the world, deciding what races go where and such.

My trouble is that I'm fairly sure I've fallen into a very common trap: The countries are too big. Far too big. In a couple of instances I've got one race entirely ruling a small continent. The biggest continent, roughly equivalent to mainland Eurasia, although probably not quite that big, has five main "countries" in it, and a sub-arctic tribe of shamanic orcs.

I want to avoid the world feeling small. I want to try and impart the proper sense of scale, but I'm not sure how. The human mind finds it very hard to grasp the distances actually involved in something the size of a planet, and mine's no exception. How do I avoid shrinking the entire world to the effective size of one country?

Seerow
2011-04-25, 04:08 PM
Try making multiple nations within a given race's land. Elves may rule the entirety of that small continent, but what makes you think they're all happy living together as a single entity? Break that into several countries that are competing with each other.

Really, that same advice can be applied across the board. Think a country is too big? Simply break it up.

Lapak
2011-04-25, 04:12 PM
The first response my mind generated was pretty simple: you've done the right thing by starting with constructing the geography on a global scale; that's how geography works. Now kick the politics down to a local level. Take all the material you've generated so far and push it down to the smallest continental area, or even to one of the countries. Obviously, you need to throw away anything that outright doesn't fit like seafaring raiders in a landlocked country, but adapt where you can - sub-arctic orcs could turn into arid wasteland orcs without too much reworking, say. Assuming a pre-industrial level of transportation and government, it sounds like you should be able to crunch what you've got into that space!

Then use the amount of material you generated on this pass of the globe as your standard for the next country/continent over. But what you've already built should work for the starting area. :smallwink:

Oracle_Hunter
2011-04-25, 04:17 PM
Here's a handy rule of thumb: look at your geological map and pick out all the natural barriers. Make those the borders of nations.

By "natural barriers" I mean mountain ranges, major rivers, oceans, lakes, and the like. Anything that would slow the movement of people will slow the movement of armies and therefore serve as excellent fences to keep out angry neighbors. This should increase the number of nations in your world tenfold.

That will help you mimic a "real world." Now you need to add supernatural barriers to make it a fantasy world :smallamused:

NMBLNG
2011-04-25, 04:17 PM
Instead of trying to map out nations and borders, you may want to simply map out 'regions' and only draw borders where there is conflict of some sort; military, trade, cultural or whatever. Also, do not assume that cities or towns share any common government or law, or are even on friendly terms with each other. The players may find that burning the tavern down will get them kicked out of one city, and praised in another.

Odin the Ignoble
2011-04-25, 04:24 PM
It's also helpful to establish some areas as blank areas of the map with only loose descriptions. An area might be dominated by "Warring Warlords" or "Nomadic Tribes" or "A loose amalgamation of City-States"

Until the PCs get there you don't have to tell them that the orcish plains are home to 5 large clans with a handful of unaligned tribes, all with distinct territories, philosophies, traditions and specializations.

For example if the players are starting off in a continent analogous to Europe. They might only get vague descriptions of areas like the far east or the Western Hemisphere, if anything is known about them at all. They only find out the real nuances when they get there and experience it first hand.

Oracle_Hunter
2011-04-25, 04:33 PM
Instead of trying to map out nations and borders, you may want to simply map out 'regions' and only draw borders where there is conflict of some sort; military, trade, cultural or whatever. Also, do not assume that cities or towns share any common government or law, or are even on friendly terms with each other. The players may find that burning the tavern down will get them kicked out of one city, and praised in another.
I proposed drawing out national borders in that fashion because it's easier. Understanding the whys of conflict requires a full understanding of what motivates each nation, and even why nations are formed and maintain. It's complicated; far easier to just put nations where (given sufficiently unified government) they would exist.

If the OP wants to break down nations later on, he can devolve "nations" into "regions" easily enough.

BRC
2011-04-25, 04:38 PM
Remember that just because two places are inside the same border, that does not mean they are the same. Many of your "Nations" may be loose confederations of city states, feudal kingdoms with powerful lords. In addition, a single centralized nation is not homogeneous. Regions, Cities, and even neighborhoods within cities may be distinctive. Maybe you have a dwarven nation, and in one place you've got a group of hardy miners who live deep underground, in another you have dwarves who live barely below the surface and have a big cultural emphasis on artwork, making, if not the best metalwork, certainly the most beautiful. Nearby you have a dwarven city that lies on the border with Orc territory, the dwarves there are rigedly millitaristic, and their city is laid out like a fortress, it's sentries standing ever vigilant against incursion. Elsewhere in the nation there is the Historians Labyrinth, a mountain where Dwarven acolytes have been carving out tunnels and recording Dwarven history on the walls for centuries. Etching in stone an account of each battle fought, discovery made, harvest brought in, hero celebrated, or book written. The Dwarves there are obsessed with knowledge, and consider it their duty to record everything in case it it one day needed. Perhaps the PC's witness a Dwarf taking a record of their visit even as it occurs.

Elsewhere you may have the capital, an opulent testament to Dwarven ingenuity and power, not far outside you have Mudtown, a sprawling slum of dwarves who live on the surface toil away on farms. Told by their leaders that a true Dwarf lives underground, but forced by necessity to farm, growing the food that makes the "True" dwarven life possible for others.

A City can be bigger than an Empire, a World can be smaller than a Village. It's not about how many miles there are, it's about how many places the players remember.

kieza
2011-04-25, 04:42 PM
Toss in uninhabited regions or places that haven't been discovered or fully explored yet. It provides plenty of area for your players to adventure.

Place unincorporated city-states along the borders between nations. This gives you lots of options for wars and political upsets without drastically changing the status-quo with regard to the major powers. My next campaign is probably going to involve the politics surrounding a bunch of city-states caught between two nations in a cold war--I can let the players have an effect without having to worry about rewriting my setting like I would if major countries were changing allegiances because of them.

Add areas that are controlled by small numbers of powerful beings (or just one) like elder dragons, fey lords, or vampire counts.

In general, the trick is to come up with minor players--power groups that don't have a major effect on the game unless you specifically want them to. Not only does it perform a game function, it adds verisimillitude to your setting. The "city-states caught between two sides" bit? Based on the parallel of the real-world Cold War. Think Vienna or maybe East/West Germany.

EDIT: Or, if you've played Civilization IV or V, think of them as City-States.

Heliomance
2011-04-25, 06:02 PM
This is a very rough sketch of the world as it stands at the moment. The original is much more detailed and 50 miles away!

http://i13.photobucket.com/albums/a265/Heliomance/Sketchmap.png
A: Inhabited mostly by gnolls and other savage humanoids. Occasionally sends raiding parties across the sea.
B: The human "empire": A collection of loosely affiliated nations nominally under the control of a single emperor. Far bigger than it has any right to be; I should probably cut it down a lot. Highly eclectic and cosmopolitan - over the years, they've taken slaves from just about everywhere, some of whom have been released and started breeding, so you can find just about any species here.
C: Tribes of orcs, semi-nomadic, in a shaman-led culture. Vaguely Inuit. Every 15 or so years, an ice bridge forms between the island and the mainland, and the orcs have a gigantic party/jamboree/ceremony/brawl. Anyone that's not an orc stays away from that part of the world when that happens.
D: The Dark Forest. Heavily populated by lycanthropes, extremely dangerous. The orcs have a tentative peace - or at least, a pact of mutual non-aggression.
E: Highly lawful, highly militaristic empire. No cultural taboo on undead, after you die your body belongs to the state to raise and use as they please.
F: Sweeping plains, inhabited by nomadic halflings and centaurs, who have a symbiotic relationship, living and working together.
G: A raised, icy plateau, this is where the high elves live. Very haughty, very advanced, they're at a Renaissance level of tech while the rest of the world is at the standard pseudo-mediaeval level. Cut off from the rest of the world by mountains, very xenophobic. Think Imperial China. They have the best universities of magic in the world, but very few non-elves have ever been allowed to study at them. There is also a highly oppressed caste of dwarves acting as a servant class.
H: The dwarf nations, largely populated by escapees from G.
I: Cut off from the rest of the world by a storm belt and particularly treacherous seas, most people don't know this continent exists. Holds an ancient Giant civilisation, still going strong.
J: Volcanic island chain, very fertile. Natives are tribal gnomes, vaguely indonesian. Humans have turned up because of high fertility and mineral wealth.
K: Haven't decided what's here. Top contenders are Mayincatec gnomes (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Mayincatec), Raptorans, or ratmen.

Noneoyabizzness
2011-04-25, 06:29 PM
Kinda cool.

But find a birthright map. There is some kind of world

The Cat Goddess
2011-04-25, 07:12 PM
I found that, rather than mapping out the entire world at once (at least for the players)... I would provide a small map that showed the country they were in and the countries nearby that interacted with theirs.

As the players grew more "global", I added more map. I also, generally, kept in mind what the other countries were like and what kinds of things were going on. When travelling, the players would often run into events that were already happening or even hear about events that had happened before they got there (or while they were away).

Having a living calendar of events (King of country X will die in the Summer of 112, Civil war starts in country L in the Spring of 114, etc.) pre-planned allows for a full-scale world that some might even see as overwhelming! Just knowing that things are going on in other parts of the world causes the perception of the world itself to grow. Knowing that they can either go help the young princess of country X, or go solve the riddle of the increasing number of ships being sunk in the far sea... or any number of things... and, more importantly, knowing that either they go and do these things or find someone else to do them (or see things go from bad to worse because they just ignored it).

These are the kinds of things that make the world "big".

LibraryOgre
2011-04-25, 07:23 PM
A consideration I find a lot of people miss when building giant countries is communication... how do you talk from one side of the country to another. To an extent, this can be solved with semi-autonomous regions (i.e. states or provinces), but that's also going to mean those areas are going to have pronouncedly different political priorities. Even if you fix the problem with magic, unless that magic is ubiquitous, you're going to have a lot of compartmentalization of culture.

Also, start small. One of the things I find works well is to keep most of the area outside of the home zone somewhat unreliable... while things written about Hometown are true, anything they hear about Nexttown might be a little suspect, and Fartown can be downright fanciful.

Oracle_Hunter
2011-04-25, 07:29 PM
This is a very rough sketch of the world as it stands at the moment. The original is much more detailed and 50 miles away!

http://i13.photobucket.com/albums/a265/Heliomance/Sketchmap.png
A: Inhabited mostly by gnolls and other savage humanoids. Occasionally sends raiding parties across the sea.
B: The human "empire": A collection of loosely affiliated nations nominally under the control of a single emperor. Far bigger than it has any right to be; I should probably cut it down a lot. Highly eclectic and cosmopolitan - over the years, they've taken slaves from just about everywhere, some of whom have been released and started breeding, so you can find just about any species here.
C: Tribes of orcs, semi-nomadic, in a shaman-led culture. Vaguely Inuit. Every 15 or so years, an ice bridge forms between the island and the mainland, and the orcs have a gigantic party/jamboree/ceremony/brawl. Anyone that's not an orc stays away from that part of the world when that happens.
D: The Dark Forest. Heavily populated by lycanthropes, extremely dangerous. The orcs have a tentative peace - or at least, a pact of mutual non-aggression.
E: Highly lawful, highly militaristic empire. No cultural taboo on undead, after you die your body belongs to the state to raise and use as they please.
F: Sweeping plains, inhabited by nomadic halflings and centaurs, who have a symbiotic relationship, living and working together.
G: A raised, icy plateau, this is where the high elves live. Very haughty, very advanced, they're at a Renaissance level of tech while the rest of the world is at the standard pseudo-mediaeval level. Cut off from the rest of the world by mountains, very xenophobic. Think Imperial China. They have the best universities of magic in the world, but very few non-elves have ever been allowed to study at them. There is also a highly oppressed caste of dwarves acting as a servant class.
H: The dwarf nations, largely populated by escapees from G.
I: Cut off from the rest of the world by a storm belt and particularly treacherous seas, most people don't know this continent exists. Holds an ancient Giant civilisation, still going strong.
J: Volcanic island chain, very fertile. Natives are tribal gnomes, vaguely indonesian. Humans have turned up because of high fertility and mineral wealth.
K: Haven't decided what's here. Top contenders are Mayincatec gnomes (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Mayincatec), Raptorans, or ratmen.
Huh.

Well, "F" shouldn't exist. They live in a plains next to a militaristic government with Universal Soldiers. Why hasn't "E" swept them off the face of the planet? :smallconfused:

"H" is also a problem. Why do escaped slaves control so much territory? "F" should have been pushed into that area by the forces of "E." Also, why do the Elves of "G" live in such hostile territory when there is a sweeping plains on the other side of the mountains? If they have a tech advantage they should at least set up a colony along the North Sea in order to have a less-awful existence.

You're right that "B" is larger than it should be. Unless the Raiders of "A" are really badass, there is no external threat that would cause them to ally under a single emperor for any period of time. If it's an "Empire In Name Only" then you shouldn't think of it as a single nation; it's a collection of provinces each of which is ruled by a man who thinks he should be King.

Aside from that, you should think about access to water. Look at The Giant's Map (http://www.giantitp.com/articles/xO3dVM8EDKJPlKxmVoG.html) and see how he uses rivers to help define civilization. In part that's because he wanted to have a lot of rivers but it is also because people need water to grow crops and otherwise survive - and rivers make great roads for trade. From what I can see, your world has no major bodies of potable water. Distressing.

Kalirren
2011-04-25, 07:37 PM
The best way I've found to avoid the "small world" vision, given that you have a geology that makes sense, is to make your world a product of its own history. Don't just write one map. Draw a map, call it map A. Then fast-forward that map 200 years and call it map B. Then fast-forward that 200 years, etc. Countries split, nationalities develop, people migrate, all that stuff. Not all at the same time, either. By the time you get to map N you'll have had plenty of opportunities to say, "what happened here?" for any given "here" on the map.

Heliomance
2011-04-26, 02:43 AM
Huh.

Well, "F" shouldn't exist. They live in a plains next to a militaristic government with Universal Soldiers. Why hasn't "E" swept them off the face of the planet? :smallconfused:

It's the Russia problem. That's a huge area of sparsely populated land, and the halflings are nomads. When E gets expansionist ideas, the halflings pack up and move elsewhere, and come back once the concentration of forces has moved. Also, E spends a lot of military force defending its border with the Dark Forest.


"H" is also a problem. Why do escaped slaves control so much territory? "F" should have been pushed into that area by the forces of "E." Also, why do the Elves of "G" live in such hostile territory when there is a sweeping plains on the other side of the mountains? If they have a tech advantage they should at least set up a colony along the North Sea in order to have a less-awful existence.H is relatively inaccessible; there's only a narrow band of non-mountainous land connecting it to the main continent. They escaped through the mountains, dwarves being good at that sort of thing, and the elves found it too much trouble to go and get them.

The elves of G are xenophobic and isolationist. By the time they advanced to the point they realised there was a world on the other side of the mountains, they'd culturally got to the point where they decided they didn't want anything to do with it. Their fathers' fathers' land is perfectly good enough for them, thank you very much. They get less of those disgusting lesser races up there. If they expanded the other side of the mountains, they'd have to... mingle *shudder*


You're right that "B" is larger than it should be. Unless the Raiders of "A" are really badass, there is no external threat that would cause them to ally under a single emperor for any period of time. If it's an "Empire In Name Only" then you shouldn't think of it as a single nation; it's a collection of provinces each of which is ruled by a man who thinks he should be King.

Aside from that, you should think about access to water. Look at The Giant's Map (http://www.giantitp.com/articles/xO3dVM8EDKJPlKxmVoG.html) and see how he uses rivers to help define civilization. In part that's because he wanted to have a lot of rivers but it is also because people need water to grow crops and otherwise survive - and rivers make great roads for trade. From what I can see, your world has no major bodies of potable water. Distressing.

I imagine there are rivers and lakes and such, but (with a few exceptions) such things aren't generally visible at the world map scale, so we didn't plot them out.

Reverent-One
2011-04-26, 08:21 AM
You're right that "B" is larger than it should be. Unless the Raiders of "A" are really badass, there is no external threat that would cause them to ally under a single emperor for any period of time. If it's an "Empire In Name Only" then you shouldn't think of it as a single nation; it's a collection of provinces each of which is ruled by a man who thinks he should be King.

Well, they don't have to have united for some external threat. It could just be that one province got the upper hand and conquered that section of the continent.

Yora
2011-04-26, 09:29 AM
Here's what I do: Leave large areas completely empty.

If you'd start with a real world map, you could leave almost all of kanada, russian, and antarcitca as "almost uninhabited". Maybe two or three families of reindeer herders, but without any towns and cities or something resembling a government.

When I started with my setting I went to the extreme and designated 90% of the land as "uninhabited". All forms of civilization gets crammed into those small dots of the remaining 10%. Also the "world map" covers only about 20 to 30% of the globe. On all those other continents of the planet, the setting just doesn't have any information. Still in 1480, nobody knew about the existance of America and Antarctica in Eurasia and Africa. Assuming that a fantasy society has the whole globe mapped out seems quite unlikely.

And suddenly, you're on a planet that is just huge.

LibraryOgre
2011-04-26, 10:24 AM
The elves of G are xenophobic and isolationist. By the time they advanced to the point they realised there was a world on the other side of the mountains, they'd culturally got to the point where they decided they didn't want anything to do with it. Their fathers' fathers' land is perfectly good enough for them, thank you very much. They get less of those disgusting lesser races up there. If they expanded the other side of the mountains, they'd have to... mingle *shudder*

You might also make the land "sacred". Ancient prophecy deeding them all lands in the arms of the great mountains and suchlike, along with dire penalties for anyone who violates their sanctity. Because of the dire penalties for violating the mountains, they felt secure enslaving the dwarves they caught coming out of them (who had obviously violated that sanctity, and thus were fair game). OTOH, it also means that any elf who violates their cultural taboos gets "sent to the mountains", as do their dead.

Cyrion
2011-04-26, 10:40 AM
I imagine there are rivers and lakes and such, but (with a few exceptions) such things aren't generally visible at the world map scale, so we didn't plot them out.

That's simply because we choose not to clutter our maps with them and because when we look at a world map we frequently aren't worried about the geologic and geographic forces that shaped history- most of our world maps are political world maps.

Put your big rivers (and a bunch of your smaller ones) on the map.

Also keep in mind, that the birth of large, relatively culturally homogeneous nations is a relatively recent development- facilitated by improvements in transportation and communication. Prior to that, most nations were defined by the space you could defend with your armies, often supported by natural barriers (as pointed out by folks previously).

For a variation on what Lapak said earlier, take your map and triple the scale. What was 10 miles is now 30 miles. Then consider the sizes of your countries and regions. You'll probably shrink many of them and leave yourself with a lot of empty space. Do the changes you made make sense on your original scale? if so, and if you like them, incorporate them. Or, simply keep the larger scale.

LibraryOgre
2011-04-26, 11:40 AM
Another thought on "countries". Consider, for a moment, the American West. For a long time... decades, easily... the United States claimed everything from the Mississippi to the Pacific. However, we didn't do a lot of settlement there... they were just kinda there.

In this analogy, "E" might be the young United States, technically claiming the territory of "F", but without the ability to actually control it. Given a larger technological parity (i.e. magic makes everyone equal), and lower population pressures in "E" (their population being bled off in border wars with D, rather than increasing), taking over "F" isn't that big of a priority.

One thing to consider, in building your world: Where does everyone come from? Have the elves always lived in one spot? Are dwarves the descendents of dimensional travelers, or did their deities construct them "in situ"? The nature of everyone's origins... and, perhaps more importantly, their beliefs about their origins, is really going to impact the dynamics of the system.

Heliomance
2011-04-26, 12:25 PM
I figured I'd go with the good old fantasy standby of having deities create their chosen races and plonk them down in their own bits of land. E isn't having particular population shrinkage though - most of their armies are undead. There are enough losses that they're not suffering from everyone having two lives though.

As for history, the only thing I've instantiated so far is that there was a now-defunct elven empire that was taken over/destroyed by E probably about 200 years ago - part of one of my PCs' backstories.

LibraryOgre
2011-04-26, 01:22 PM
I figured I'd go with the good old fantasy standby of having deities create their chosen races and plonk them down in their own bits of land. E isn't having particular population shrinkage though - most of their armies are undead. There are enough losses that they're not suffering from everyone having two lives though.

Ideally, I wasn't talking about shrinkage, but stasis. If E were having growth, they'd be putting more pressure on the plainsmen... they'd need the resources. If they're largely static, especially over the length of a generation, then they're probably just happy to have a quiet border with the plainsmen, so they can concentrate on fighting the lycanthropes (who, I imagine, are doing some "covert subversion"... turning normal E-ites into lycanthropes).

McSmack
2011-04-26, 01:57 PM
I have a degree in Geography. Woo Geography!:smallbiggrin:
One thing that's been mentioned before but bears repeating is the idea of space. Up until the about the Industrial Age the Earth wasn't all that crowded, even today with approximately 7,000,000,000 people there's plenty of empty space.

Even in a high magic world you're probably not going to have anything close to the transportation/communication networks that you have today. So while fun, there's no real need to develop the culture of the the gnoll prophets of The Southern Islands or whatnot, if they aren't going to figure into the game.

Information about things far away are mostly going to be hearsay or rumor at best.

Also when world building keep in mind how great water is. There's a reason all major civilizations grew up around the coast or along riverine systems, water is great for development. Overland travel is costly and time consuming. Traveling by boat is typically safer, cheaper, and faster. Oceans and rivers provide a steady source of food from either fishing or irrigation, and they typically have fertile land around them. People really only move inland to get the things they can't find on the coast typically metals, timber and other raw materials.

I'm not saying you can't make your world big. But a bigger world has more stuff in it, and that stuff requires more work for you to develop. At the end of the day you have to consider how much you can realistically do with the time that's given to you. and odds are your players are only going to explore and interact with a small fraction of a game world.

That's why many homebrews start small. There DM's can focus on things the PC's interact with directly, and make those areas more robust and hopefully more memorable for the players.

Your world will naturally grow as you adventure in it, in the end its the players that really flesh out the world. Don't forget that the most memorable published campaign settings have been growing and developing for years or even decades in many cases.

Oracle_Hunter
2011-04-26, 02:38 PM
Responses in Detail

It's the Russia problem. That's a huge area of sparsely populated land, and the halflings are nomads. When E gets expansionist ideas, the halflings pack up and move elsewhere, and come back once the concentration of forces has moved. Also, E spends a lot of military force defending its border with the Dark Forest.
The difference here is that "E" is Napoleonic France with unlimited armies! Every dead soldier (or civilian) is turned into a soldier-undead of some sort. Their best soldiers are probably preemptively turned into Death Knights or other superior undead. At the very least, all the mines and crops are worked by tireless, mindless undead - leaving the majority of the population free to war.

And, instead of Russia, they're invading the Gaul - a wilderness populated by tribes of low-tech people. Better for Russia, it's a Gaul without the pesky forests and mountains that slow down foot-sloggers. If "E" hasn't figured out how to win that fight, they're doing it wrong.

If nothing else, "E" should be treating "F" like the American West: free land for those who can take it. That border should be slowly but steadily getting nibbled away by freemen setting up homesteads. The problems with "D" are not problems - you set up an all-undead picket along the forest and fortify it as best you can. Undead can't be turned into lycanthropes, and if "E" isn't invading the forest (and why would they?) it seems unlikely that "D" would be working on invading "E."


The elves of G are xenophobic and isolationist. By the time they advanced to the point they realised there was a world on the other side of the mountains, they'd culturally got to the point where they decided they didn't want anything to do with it. Their fathers' fathers' land is perfectly good enough for them, thank you very much. They get less of those disgusting lesser races up there. If they expanded the other side of the mountains, they'd have to... mingle *shudder*
Mingle? Who said anything about mingling? When you're a superior civilization, you sail to a nicer part of the world and take it over. If you don't want to enslave the locals, you murder them. Simple as pie.

I just don't see why anyone who needs fresh food and warmth to survive would willingly confine themselves to inhospitable lands when richer lands are there for the taking. In particular, if "G" has a huge tech advantage on the other nations they should be exploiting it to their advantage - not just sitting on their butts in the frozen North. You can go with the "The Gods Said So" of course, but that is going to relegate them to the distant background of your campaign world. Players aren't going to respect any "advance" civilization which sits on its butt and does nothing while things are going on all around the world.
More generally...

@Reverent-One: If one province got the upper hand at one point, that's fine, but every other would-be king should be struggling to take over the empire. Empires without power-struggles are lazy empires that are easy pickings for some other guy who cares.

@Mark Hall: "E" has to be expanding or dying - it depends on the percentage of undead in their population. Since people are constantly being born and dying, the supply of potential undead is always growing. Undead are superior laborers for pretty much everything a medieval society can ask for and they're relatively cheap considering the lifetime upkeep on a peasant. As undead take over more jobs, the living need to find new jobs and places to be - and that means expansion.

The alternative is a dying civilization, in which their birth-rate is so low (or their death-rate is so high) that the living percentage of their population is steadily decreasing. Since undead can't reproduce, you will eventually find a hollow slave civilization run by a couple of living necromancers that can get knocked over by a Holy Crusade or a competent assassin.

Analytica
2011-04-26, 02:49 PM
Most people recommend starting small, and for most groups that may be a good recommendation.

I prefer the other approach myself, however, such as starting with a fractally generated continent map or some such. I will then make a number of "root cultures" of a scale like the indoeuropeans or maybe the roman empire, that present-day cultures are descended from, which also means that different cultures may be related with regards to things like language or religious practices. Then I would break the world down into regions, and break the regions down further into countries or similar.

One way of making this work in practice is exception-based design and maybe cultural keywords. That is, define traits for the culture of entire races. Then define how each regional settlement (i.e. europe, asia) differs from that. Then define how each country differs from the region. Create diversity and opposition at each level. There may be an evil empire, but some regions of it are depopulated desert, others are in rebellion. All the regions that are not evil empires have some sub-region that wants to be, and so forth.

Cultural keywords is designing cultural building blocks that you can just add and subtract from a culture when writing it. I found it a good way to create diversity quickly.

Also, fantasy name generators.

I have a draft world build like this that I could send you as inspiration, if you want.

Heliomance
2011-04-26, 02:57 PM
The difference here is that "E" is Napoleonic France with unlimited armies! Every dead soldier (or civilian) is turned into a soldier-undead of some sort. Their best soldiers are probably preemptively turned into Death Knights or other superior undead. At the very least, all the mines and crops are worked by tireless, mindless undead - leaving the majority of the population free to war.

And, instead of Russia, they're invading the Gaul - a wilderness populated by tribes of low-tech people. Better for Russia, it's a Gaul without the pesky forests and mountains that slow down foot-sloggers. If "E" hasn't figured out how to win that fight, they're doing it wrong.
How do you fight the land? Cavalry is amazing for hit and run. The halflings come out of nowhere, slice up an isolated unit, and gallop off to nowhere. They don't care about giving up land, because they can just come and take it back later.


If nothing else, "E" should be treating "F" like the American West: free land for those who can take it. That border should be slowly but steadily getting nibbled away by freemen setting up homesteads.
And then the homesteads get destroyed as soon as the armies are looking the other way. When the armies come to investigate, the halflings are nowhere to be seen.

The problems with "D" are not problems - you set up an all-undead picket along the forest and fortify it as best you can. Undead can't be turned into lycanthropes, and if "E" isn't invading the forest (and why would they?) it seems unlikely that "D" would be working on invading "E."
That's more or less what I envisioned happening. There's still going to be losses on that picket, though.



Mingle? Who said anything about mingling? When you're a superior civilization, you sail to a nicer part of the world and take it over. If you don't want to enslave the locals, you murder them. Simple as pie.

I just don't see why anyone who needs fresh food and warmth to survive would willingly confine themselves to inhospitable lands when richer lands are there for the taking. In particular, if "G" has a huge tech advantage on the other nations they should be exploiting it to their advantage - not just sitting on their butts in the frozen North. You can go with the "The Gods Said So" of course, but that is going to relegate them to the distant background of your campaign world. Players aren't going to respect any "advance" civilization which sits on its butt and does nothing while things are going on all around the world.
Hmm. Mystical confluences or something. Also, that mountain range is quite formidable and does make launching a campaign over it quite daunting.

Oracle_Hunter
2011-04-26, 03:07 PM
How do you fight the land? Cavalry is amazing for hit and run. The halflings come out of nowhere, slice up an isolated unit, and gallop off to nowhere. They don't care about giving up land, because they can just come and take it back later.
You don't "come out of nowhere" when you're fighting on a vast, trackless plain. And Undead Pickets don't "look the other way" - you set them up in a fort on skeleton horses and make sure that the few living people inside have enough food to survive. Seriously, the US did this just fine in the 19th Century without the benefit of tireless soldiers.



Hmm. Mystical confluences or something. Also, that mountain range is quite formidable and does make launching a campaign over it quite daunting.
Not "over the mountains" - across the seas! Look at your map - the "G" share a coastline with "C," "E," and "F" - all lands that are perfectly habitable for less advanced races. Renaissance Ships (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ships#Renaissance) were more than sufficient to sail the coast, and even if "H" is inaccessible, there is no reason why "G" couldn't land in any of those other countries and bite off a piece.

Heliomance
2011-04-26, 03:32 PM
You don't "come out of nowhere" when you're fighting on a vast, trackless plain. And Undead Pickets don't "look the other way" - you set them up in a fort on skeleton horses and make sure that the few living people inside have enough food to survive. Seriously, the US did this just fine in the 19th Century without the benefit of tireless soldiers. They did it just fine in the 19th century with vastly superior technology, tactics, and bacteriological immunity. In this case, there isn't nearly such a disparity in the two nations' relative advancement. Nomadic does not automatically equal primitive, especially in a world with magic.




Not "over the mountains" - across the seas! Look at your map - the "G" share a coastline with "C," "E," and "F" - all lands that are perfectly habitable for less advanced races. Renaissance Ships (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ships#Renaissance) were more than sufficient to sail the coast, and even if "H" is inaccessible, there is no reason why "G" couldn't land in any of those other countries and bite off a piece.
We had pictured G as being a raised plateau/ice shelf, quite a bit higher than the surrounding area due to an active constructive margin. Getting any reasonable force down to sea level would be an undertaking in itself.

LibraryOgre
2011-04-26, 03:56 PM
"E" has to be expanding or dying - it depends on the percentage of undead in their population. Since people are constantly being born and dying, the supply of potential undead is always growing. Undead are superior laborers for pretty much everything a medieval society can ask for and they're relatively cheap considering the lifetime upkeep on a peasant. As undead take over more jobs, the living need to find new jobs and places to be - and that means expansion.

The alternative is a dying civilization, in which their birth-rate is so low (or their death-rate is so high) that the living percentage of their population is steadily decreasing. Since undead can't reproduce, you will eventually find a hollow slave civilization run by a couple of living necromancers that can get knocked over by a Holy Crusade or a competent assassin.

Usually, yes, until you consider the war on their north-western border. That can exert enough downward pressure on a population that would otherwise be growing to keep it largely static. Even with the undead, if the monsters are sufficiently advanced to keep the Etians at bay... especially given their presumptive ability to "convert" living soldiers to Dian ways. I view the conflict as going something like this:

Dians (being lycanthropes, are mostly evil, leading me to cast them as aggressors) make a raid on Etian lands. They kill maybe 20%, and covert 2% (either as "sleeper agents" who recover from injuries, or through capture). Etian priests come in (or are in place) and revive the dead as zombies.

The problem with zombies, however, is that they aren't significantly better than living soldiers. They're sacks of HP, sure, but they can't use tactics and are terribly slow. So while the Etians haven't lost any numbers, they haven't gained much of a tactical advantage. The Dians continue to raid, and the presence of undead ablates the death of the living population, the undead also do not contribute to the continuance of the living... they cannot make skill checks (i.e. they aren't farm labor, except as draft animals), and they certainly cannot reproduce. Unless the Etians switch into full-on evil and try to wightocalpyse the undead (which could easily backfire), they might (depending on numbers, including birth/death rate amongst the Dians) have enough downward pressure to be static, but not really consider expansion into the F-lands. Since this scenario assumes the Dians are the aggressors, it's not like the Etians can just step away from the war, and look east instead.

Oracle_Hunter
2011-04-26, 04:21 PM
They did it just fine in the 19th century with vastly superior technology, tactics, and bacteriological immunity. In this case, there isn't nearly such a disparity in the two nations' relative advancement. Nomadic does not automatically equal primitive, especially in a world with magic.
I'll not get into an argument regarding the impact of technology (minimal, on the war-fighting front) and tactics (questionable advantage at best), though it is handy to note that Undead are immune to all diseases and excellent plague carriers :smallamused:

That said, you have painted "F" as a nomadic "nation" that is populating their land at very low density. Unless "F" has superior magical abilities for some reason, the nation with immortal wizards and tireless soldiers is going to win the war of attrition. You should either shift "F" east into conflict with "H" or come up with some Killer App that prevents "E" from salami-slicing (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salami_slicing) the "F" territory.


We had pictured G as being a raised plateau/ice shelf, quite a bit higher than the surrounding area due to an active constructive margin. Getting any reasonable force down to sea level would be an undertaking in itself.
Haven't the elves built a port city? Y'know, by carving a harbor out of the cliffs so that they can get access to the fruits of the sea?

Actually, how do these Elves feed themselves high up in the icy tundra? If food is really hard to get, how did they find the time to advance their technology so far ahead of everyone else?




Usually, yes, until you consider the war on their north-western border. That can exert enough downward pressure on a population that would otherwise be growing to keep it largely static. Even with the undead, if the monsters are sufficiently advanced to keep the Etians at bay... especially given their presumptive ability to "convert" living soldiers to Dian ways. I view the conflict as going something like this:

Dians (being lycanthropes, are mostly evil, leading me to cast them as aggressors) make a raid on Etian lands. They kill maybe 20%, and covert 2% (either as "sleeper agents" who recover from injuries, or through capture). Etian priests come in (or are in place) and revive the dead as zombies.

The problem with zombies, however, is that they aren't significantly better than living soldiers. They're sacks of HP, sure, but they can't use tactics and are terribly slow. So while the Etians haven't lost any numbers, they haven't gained much of a tactical advantage. The Dians continue to raid, and the presence of undead ablates the death of the living population, the undead also do not contribute to the continuance of the living... they cannot make skill checks (i.e. they aren't farm labor, except as draft animals), and they certainly cannot reproduce. Unless the Etians switch into full-on evil and try to wightocalpyse the undead (which could easily backfire), they might (depending on numbers, including birth/death rate amongst the Dians) have enough downward pressure to be static, but not really consider expansion into the F-lands. Since this scenario assumes the Dians are the aggressors, it's not like the Etians can just step away from the war, and look east instead.
Can mindless Undead not make skill checks? If so, what's the good of having Undead Servants? :smallconfused:

If Undead are only good for soldiers, then "E" is going to be much less powerful - but not that much worse.

To start with, you don't man fixed defenses with Zombies - you use Skeleton Archers, armed with Silver Arrows. While the "D" Forest presents a large border, it can be contained with a massive series of earthworks that blocks off easy access to the population centers of "E."

Of course, if the "D" are as vicious as you say, it would make much more sense for "E" to expand south into "F" territory, where they only have to deal with the more mundane threat of nomads. Most of northern "E" would become a no-man's land, but the extra breathing space would take off a lot of the pressure off of the people of "E."

Heliomance
2011-04-26, 05:25 PM
I'll not get into an argument regarding the impact of technology (minimal, on the war-fighting front) and tactics (questionable advantage at best), though it is handy to note that Undead are immune to all diseases and excellent plague carriers :smallamused:

That said, you have painted "F" as a nomadic "nation" that is populating their land at very low density. Unless "F" has superior magical abilities for some reason, the nation with immortal wizards and tireless soldiers is going to win the war of attrition. You should either shift "F" east into conflict with "H" or come up with some Killer App that prevents "E" from salami-slicing (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salami_slicing) the "F" territory.
I suppose there isn't much, other than the fact that, to be honest, E have already got a very large chunk of land, and we're down to, again, how much area can one nation feasibly hold? If I succeed in making the world feel big, then that's less of an issue.

Actually, I'd figured that F and H were on fairly good terms. The gap between mountains and sea is narrower in the original map, and forms something of a bottleneck. Any travellers going either way have to pass through a fairly narrow strip of land, so we figured there's a pretty large free trade city on the coast there, a merchant hub. It's also quite convenient by the sea currents.



Haven't the elves built a port city? Y'know, by carving a harbor out of the cliffs so that they can get access to the fruits of the sea?

Actually, how do these Elves feed themselves high up in the icy tundra? If food is really hard to get, how did they find the time to advance their technology so far ahead of everyone else?

Uh... I hadn't really thought about it in that much detail :smallredface:
I just felt like having haughty high elves in the setting, and when we pencilled in those giant mountain ranges, we looked at it and went "Okay, that's Imperial China."

The southern end of the plateau does extend far enough that it's easily temperate, and could well be quite fertile.

LibraryOgre
2011-04-26, 05:40 PM
Can mindless Undead not make skill checks? If so, what's the good of having Undead Servants? :smallconfused:

From the SRD (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/specialAbilities.htm#nonabilities)


Intelligence

Any creature that can think, learn, or remember has at least 1 point of Intelligence. A creature with no Intelligence score is mindless, an automaton operating on simple instincts or programmed instructions. It has immunity to mind-affecting effects (charms, compulsions, phantasms, patterns, and morale effects) and automatically fails Intelligence checks.

Mindless creatures do not gain feats or skills, although they may have bonus feats or racial skill bonuses.

They can, apparently, make skill checks. However, if they are based on Intelligence, they automatically fail. They also gain no skill points, meaning they are untrained in everything they do, and their lack of intelligence score means they need constant supervision. Because you can't take 10 on "Aid Another" checks, they can't even effectively help... as often as not, they'll get in the way.

Depending on how you read Disguise, almost any disguise is good enough to fool the animated undead. Even if you CAN instruct them to be "suspicious" (for the purpose of getting a Spot check against disguise), their constant take 10 (10) will be beaten by anything short of a kender trying to pretend to be a dragon.

As for skeleton archers outfitted with silver arrows, consider cost again. You've already spent 25gp to raise each 1HD skeleton. You are now spending 2gp/arrow to give them silver arrows along a long border. While earthworks are useful, they are much less so when your enemies have Climb speeds (wererats), to say nothing of Dig or Fly speeds (more exotic lycanthropes, or magic). While a human can formulate responses to this, this human either needs the capability to command the undead (even on the order of "Undead, follow this guy"), and you've mostly just replaced the grunts with skeletons.... your sergeants still have to be human, and your officers all need to be spellcasters... 5th level clerics, at least, if not 9th level wizards.



Of course, if the "D" are as vicious as you say, it would make much more sense for "E" to expand south into "F" territory, where they only have to deal with the more mundane threat of nomads. Most of northern "E" would become a no-man's land, but the extra breathing space would take off a lot of the pressure off of the people of "E."

People don't always make sense, though. Why do the Etians stay? It's their home. It's where the Gods put them. They are successful enough on a daily basis to not see that it's keeping them from expanding (remember, my argument is NOT that they are losing... it's that they're not winning). They have a charge to keep the lycanthropes at bay. They can't back down from a fight.

It may also be that F isn't suited to large-scale settlement. It may be Western Kansas, which is more or less a tallgrass desert until they irrigated it... fine for nomads, but hard on settlers, especially if a group with rough parity of technology is strongly contesting it (the difference between steel spear + magic vs. stone spear + magic is miniscule compared to Industrial Revolution vs. Late Stone Age... especially when you consider that half the force you're opposing is natural cavalry). Especially when there's no guarantee that the Dians will STAY in their dark forests... the plains can easily be home to wolves, rats, tigers and boars, after all.

It's a workable situation as is, but it's going to be a rough one on everyone concerned.

EDIT: I will say, I'm thoroughly enjoying this argument.

Oracle_Hunter
2011-04-26, 06:22 PM
Responses to Heliomance

I suppose there isn't much, other than the fact that, to be honest, E have already got a very large chunk of land, and we're down to, again, how much area can one nation feasibly hold? If I succeed in making the world feel big, then that's less of an issue.
Undead Soldiers can stretch a nation's military to tremendous lengths. I don't know if you have thought about how much ready access to undead increases the strength of a nation.


Actually, I'd figured that F and H were on fairly good terms. The gap between mountains and sea is narrower in the original map, and forms something of a bottleneck. Any travellers going either way have to pass through a fairly narrow strip of land, so we figured there's a pretty large free trade city on the coast there, a merchant hub. It's also quite convenient by the sea currents.
Bottlenecks only matter if you can put something there. Nomads aren't going to build a city, much less a fortress, on the outskirts of their hunting grounds. They're nomads, after all. Also, nomads don't have major industries so who is building all these ships? :smallconfused:

A trade city run by "H" would be interesting, but you need to consider the pressures involved on "F." "F" is going to be pressed by "E" for several reasons - an expanding population, tremendous military might, and a hostile & unreasoning enemy to the north - so you'll need to figure out how "F" reacts to that. Nomads do not live "efficiently;" they need a lot of space to hunt and forage to survive. Pressure by people who are converting grazing land into cultivated land is going to force them to react somehow.

Of course, if you've decided that "F" is - for some reason - immune to aggression by the undead-fueled military empire on its border then I guess you have a stable set-up, but not a reasonable one.


Uh... I hadn't really thought about it in that much detail :smallredface:
I just felt like having haughty high elves in the setting, and when we pencilled in those giant mountain ranges, we looked at it and went "Okay, that's Imperial China."

The southern end of the plateau does extend far enough that it's easily temperate, and could well be quite fertile.
A small, isolated kingdom pushed against the mountains is certainly reasonable, but how did they reach such heights of power with such a crappy endowment? Remember that China has access to powerful rivers and - as a result - lots of fertile land. They had a lot of resources to use to get to be an Imperial State; it's not something that 'just happens.'

Now, you could go with them being a "remnant of a remnant" - refugees from some catastrophe that destroyed the Elves that used to live in E/F. They are going to be a lot less imposing, but more reasonable.

Responses to Mark Hall

They can, apparently, make skill checks. However, if they are based on Intelligence, they automatically fail. They also gain no skill points, meaning they are untrained in everything they do, and their lack of intelligence score means they need constant supervision. Because you can't take 10 on "Aid Another" checks, they can't even effectively help... as often as not, they'll get in the way.
Fortunately, this means they can still make Profession Checks (WIS, baby! :smallbiggrin:) which means they can be Doctors, Lawyers, and, importantly, Farmers.

Heck, they even have WIS 10 by default (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/monsters/skeleton.htm) which means they have a 50/50 chance of giving a Living Overseer at +2 on his Farmer Check.

...or we can be playing in a system which doesn't do such a terrible job of modeling economies :smalltongue:

I'd argue from a world-building perspective that simple manual labor (e.g. digging ditches, tilling fields, and moving rocks) is something that an undead workforce would be ideal for. This gives any nation with ready access to mindless undead a huge step-up in the world.


People don't always make sense, though. Why do the Etians stay? It's their home. It's where the Gods put them. They are successful enough on a daily basis to not see that it's keeping them from expanding (remember, my argument is NOT that they are losing... it's that they're not winning). They have a charge to keep the lycanthropes at bay. They can't back down from a fight.

It may also be that F isn't suited to large-scale settlement. It may be Western Kansas, which is more or less a tallgrass desert until they irrigated it... fine for nomads, but hard on settlers, especially if a group with rough parity of technology is strongly contesting it (the difference between steel spear + magic vs. stone spear + magic is miniscule compared to Industrial Revolution vs. Late Stone Age... especially when you consider that half the force you're opposing is natural cavalry). Especially when there's no guarantee that the Dians will STAY in their dark forests... the plains can easily be home to wolves, rats, tigers and boars, after all.

It's a workable situation as is, but it's going to be a rough one on everyone concerned.
This is a recipe for a dying civilization, not a "Highly lawful, highly militaristic empire" as the OP suggests. If they decide to 'stand their ground' against opponents resistant to non-magical weapons that are capable of converting living soldiers into enemy soldiers, they are simply going to die. They can't expand, and they can't afford the resources to control even a tenth of the territory they've claimed.

Empires don't survive by dying; they survive by adapting. If you have a disorganized force that is destroying your people you move away. There's plenty of land around and even just moving a few miles away will reduce the frequency of the raids on your people. I'm not arguing that people are always rational, but there are consequences for acting irrationally. Here, it means a dying nation sustained by turning their wealth into more undead rather than building for the living.

In general...

The OP needs to figure out how "D," "E," and "F" interact. The world is not a static place; nations and peoples are changed by those they interact with. If "D" is an all-powerful aggressor, then "E" either needs to be dying or running away. If "E" can hold the line against "D" without substantial loss, then "E" is going to work on expanding into areas which are less dangerous. If "E" is able to do better than holding the line, then "D" should be a smoking ruin, not a forest.

Depending on how "D" and "E" work out, "F" is going to be impacted. In general, nomads don't do as well - as a civilization - versus settled nations that can use technology (and magic) to force-multiply the efforts of their population. In particular, "militaristic" nations are going to expand into less-fortified and more bountiful areas in order to get more resources for their war machine. The main power of nomads is that they can more easily move away from invading armies - but they need to move someplace.

Heliomance
2011-04-26, 06:59 PM
Thoughts:
The northernmost several miles of E are a fully militarised zone, almost entirely undead, no civvies at all. Holding the line is expensive in terms of bodies, but they're not losing. They are attempting to expand east, but the relative uselessness of the land, and the hit-and-run tactics of the nomads, mean that progress is very slow.
Side note: Why do they need living sergeants? What's wrong with awakened undead?

The F nomads have a strong trade alliance going with the H dwarves. H supplies metals and craftsmanship, F supplies animals, both for food and draft. Their husbandry is second to none. This neatly puts F back on an equal footing, technology wise.

E and F are the only factions that I'm entirely comfortable with having as much land as that map gives them - E because their undead forces let them hold land much more easily, and F because of their roaming, sparse population.

Most of the reason why E don't just abandon the area is because the lycanthropes are not the only danger. The forest itself is at least partially sentient, and malevolent. Left to its own devices, it would expand. And it really doesn't take kindly to attempts to chop down its existing area.

Oracle_Hunter
2011-04-26, 07:55 PM
Most of the reason why E don't just abandon the area is because the lycanthropes are not the only danger. The forest itself is at least partially sentient, and malevolent. Left to its own devices, it would expand. And it really doesn't take kindly to attempts to chop down its existing area.
Huh. So why have the people of "E" decided to live next door to the Evil Forest? And if the Evil Forest is so Evil and aggressive, how is there a non-aggression pact between them and the Orcs?

Everything else sounds fine, as long as you recognize that you've changed "E" from an Empire into a dying civilization which is risking civil war if the Undead North ever decides to take over.

Heliomance
2011-04-27, 01:39 AM
The orcs are Druid led, so have managed to broker toleration. As for why E is still there, call it a divine charge to stand between the forest and the rest of the world.

Oracle_Hunter
2011-04-27, 02:29 AM
The orcs are Druid led, so have managed to broker toleration. As for why E is still there, call it a divine charge to stand between the forest and the rest of the world.
Figured that'd be the case.

OK, they're not expansionist then. Let's assume they're some sort of nation of warrior-monks and they treat their territory as one giant monastery.

Hrm. With that kind of focus they wouldn't be interested in controlling as much territory as they do. Give them a "Black Wall" the extends around the Evil Forest and is crewed entirely with undead. Then place all their habitation in the northern portion of "E" and make it one big cooperative farming & mining exercise designed to keep the Living fed and the Undead equipped.

The rest of the lands will be claimed up by "F" such as "F" claims anything.

* * * *

If you want another nation, here's a good place to put it: the lower half of "E" becomes "L," an offshoot of the Warrior-Monks of "E" who reject the harsh teachings of their god. They'd be a more conventional kingdom and one that can compete with "F" for land. They both hate "E" for representing the harsh teachings that condemned them to a cycle of eternal war but respect them for keeping the Evil Forest at bay."E" on the other hand would like to take "L" back into the fold but lack the resources to do that without abandoning their Sacred Charge.

Thoughts?

Heliomance
2011-04-27, 03:26 AM
That works really quite well, and makes one country a more reasonable size. And I get to keep my parade drilling skeleton legions :smallbiggrin:

What do you think should go on K?

Oracle_Hunter
2011-04-27, 04:33 AM
What do you think should go on K?
For your next trick, I recommend dividing up "B" into 3-5 provinces and to treat each like a single nation - each has its own leader, culture, etc.

Then pick one province to be the seat of the Empire. Figure out why that province is currently ruling and what the leaders of each of the other provinces are trying to do to change that - if anything.

After that, block out some "thar be dragons" spaces in "H" and "G" to represent the true spread of the nations. I would also divide up "C" into "continental orcs" and "island orcs" since those two cultures are likely to diverge quite a bit if they only link-up once every 15 years.

That's the easy stuff. Then you need to tackle "A" - there's no way a bunch of "savage humanoids" can be unified on an island of that size.

mint
2011-04-27, 05:33 AM
E animates a lot of undead so they need a lot of obsidian. You find obsidian in regions that have had volcanic activity. Maybe this area is in northern E, near the forest and close to the mountain ridge? They need to hold the obsidian fields to maintain their undead based economy or collapse as a civilization. And maybe E can make undead with a bit more int? Solves some of your hurdles.

For B, maybe the region had a glorious emperor in the last 100-ish years who united the splintered nations and city states in a common goal. Maybe to push the gnolls and monsters out into the sea. The common enemy is gone and the singular individual who managed to unite the lands is dead.
Anyway, now the empire is splintering. Trade en unity are still factors but the emperors throne projects power only to its heartland, further and further from the capital, the imperial rule means less and less.

Cyrion
2011-04-27, 09:23 AM
Thinking about the elves- They could be the ones who are responsible for all of the Create Food and Water variants that generate real, edible food that tastes good. You could perhaps make the whole culture somewhat sybaritic, living in the cold tundra just because they can. They're haughty enough that they have a point to prove, and they're going to do it with style!

Alternately, you could have a dedicated socail class of some sort who devote their time and energy to sustaining the society. You could pitch this as either a servant class (because they deal with the base requirements) or as an elite class (because they provide in a very literal way for their households). Making them an elite class would really exaggerate a vertical class structure- it's not what you do, how much money you make, etc. that establishes your social standing- it's who feeds you.

LibraryOgre
2011-04-27, 10:43 AM
Fortunately, this means they can still make Profession Checks (WIS, baby! :smallbiggrin:) which means they can be Doctors, Lawyers, and, importantly, Farmers.

Heck, they even have WIS 10 by default (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/monsters/skeleton.htm) which means they have a 50/50 chance of giving a Living Overseer at +2 on his Farmer Check.

...or we can be playing in a system which doesn't do such a terrible job of modeling economies :smalltongue:

Actually, I'll argue that. Aid Another specifically forbids you from aiding checks to achieve things you can't achieve on your own. I'd argue that they simply can't achieve any results on a profession check on their own... but I may have been thinking of the rule where a failed "Aid Another" check results in a penalty (as you get in the way).



I'd argue from a world-building perspective that simple manual labor (e.g. digging ditches, tilling fields, and moving rocks) is something that an undead workforce would be ideal for. This gives any nation with ready access to mindless undead a huge step-up in the world.

Sure, but how are they different from horses in that respect? Giving them the opportunity to "aid another" is like saying that your draft horse and chickens should all be able to "aid another" your Profession: Farmer check. After all, they have intelligence scores... they may even have ranks in Profession: Farmer.



This is a recipe for a dying civilization, not a "Highly lawful, highly militaristic empire" as the OP suggests. If they decide to 'stand their ground' against opponents resistant to non-magical weapons that are capable of converting living soldiers into enemy soldiers, they are simply going to die. They can't expand, and they can't afford the resources to control even a tenth of the territory they've claimed.

It depends on the length of the conflict... and, for that matter, how long is the death going to be? How long have the orcs been organized? How long have the lycanthropes been raiding in problematically large numbers (on a large scale; lycanthrope raids are obviously always a problem for the people in Hamlet X, but the Empire can survive the loss of Hamlet X)? Since ~100 BCE, Rome was seldom ever in a situation where they did not have at least 1 foreign war, and frequently more (look at the career of Sulla before he became dictator... a decade out of the war with Jugurtha and the Germans, a war with Pontus, Greece and its own Asia Province interrupted by the Social War, and that doesn't include the constant conflict with the Iberians and the Illryians). And Rome would last almost 600 years after that, through upheaval and constant attrition. The difference was that their attrition rate remained acceptable enough that their population was not dropping precipitously... it may have been growing, but that's also partially because they had people giving them more land, in addition to any they conquered.

What the resistance to non-magical weapons does is act as a force multiplier, but, unless I'm misreading the OP, this isn't AD&D where it's a nigh-sovereign one. A man with a non-silver weapon can damage a lycanthrope. I imagine that, with human troops, a great many would invest in silver weapons if being sent to the front lines. But once you're talking about outfitting the undead with them... the ones that necessarily need state outfitting... you're talking an exorbitant cost.


Empires don't survive by dying; they survive by adapting. If you have a disorganized force that is destroying your people you move away.

This is seldom the case, though. How many people cede land when they're being faced with a disorganized force that's destroying their people? On a very small scale? Sure. But Pompeii gets rebuilt, even with Vesuvius right there, and ocean-front property doesn't go out of style even with hurricanes and tsunamis.


There's plenty of land around and even just moving a few miles away will reduce the frequency of the raids on your people. I'm not arguing that people are always rational, but there are consequences for acting irrationally. Here, it means a dying nation sustained by turning their wealth into more undead rather than building for the living.

Yes, there are consequences for acting irrationally. But the consequences are not necessarily civilization-ending... which means that some people will stay. While there may be a move away from the border zone by some, others will look at military protection and a profit to be made and say "Yeah, I can take some werewhatevers".

Conners
2011-04-27, 11:51 AM
This is sounding like Evolution and Natural Selection o.o".


@Undead Stuff: I think Oracle_Hunter is really giving undead too much credit... They're unthinking, in DnD--they can only follow simple orders (possibly with a limited number of commands). Also, aren't they generally fodder for adventurers? Centaurs and halfling raiding-parties, and lycanthrope raiding parties sound pretty tough...
If you have your force of undead, stretched across a gigantic number of miles (depending on how many miles that map represents) around the dark forest.... even if you use all your undead, I'd say they'll be stretched VERY thin. Heck, they won't be a defence any more--they'll be like a rock you can stub your toe on if you're not careful, silver arrows or no.

As for stuff like Deathknights and litches etc.. I can see a nation having a few of those as right-hand men/women/eunuchs.

Aux-Ash
2011-04-27, 11:54 AM
Something worth poiting out is that it goes a lot faster to travel across waterways than across land. Over land you are limited by walking speed (horses can ride fast in short bursts, but if you travel far you won't travel faster than walking speed) whereas by water the traveltime is only limited by how fast you can row/sail.

This is what makes vast open spaces into unconquerable wilderness. It is just as impassible terrain as mountains are. Meaning you need to build provisions to cross it and you need a guide so you won't get lost.

Rivers and coasts is therefore what trade and civilisation spreads along. Noone crosses overland if they have a choice (just like noone crosses a mountain if they have a choice).

As a rule of thumb, a new culture will develop whenever two groups are separated by an obstacle that needs preparation to overcome. With active and regular communication they can blend together again (such as active trade), but if they don't have that they'll become more and more different.
Waterways allow the distance between cultures to be greater than land.

Mind however that most pre-modern nations consist of a lot of cultures, most fairly similar. But for instance... until the unification... there were no less than 11 different italian languages.

Oracle_Hunter
2011-04-27, 04:23 PM
Yeah, I'm not going to argue 3.5 mechanics when building reasonable worlds :smalltongue:

Responses to Mark Hall

It depends on the length of the conflict... and, for that matter, how long is the death going to be? How long have the orcs been organized? How long have the lycanthropes been raiding in problematically large numbers (on a large scale; lycanthrope raids are obviously always a problem for the people in Hamlet X, but the Empire can survive the loss of Hamlet X)? Since ~100 BCE, Rome was seldom ever in a situation where they did not have at least 1 foreign war, and frequently more (look at the career of Sulla before he became dictator... a decade out of the war with Jugurtha and the Germans, a war with Pontus, Greece and its own Asia Province interrupted by the Social War, and that doesn't include the constant conflict with the Iberians and the Illryians). And Rome would last almost 600 years after that, through upheaval and constant attrition. The difference was that their attrition rate remained acceptable enough that their population was not dropping precipitously... it may have been growing, but that's also partially because they had people giving them more land, in addition to any they conquered.
Rome didn't have to deal with hordes that are
(1) Literally relentless - no in-fighting among chieftains to take pressure off of Rome
(2) Capable of converting loyal citizens into unholy abominations at-will
(3) Highly resistant to conventional weapons

All it would take is a single werewolf with an intent to wound to demolish a hamlet. Even if they fought incredibly stupidly the Empire would need to purge all of their border villages every time or risk having a fresh breakout of lycanthropy every full moon.

That's not engaging in "foreign wars," that's fighting a deadly enemy on their home ground.


Yes, there are consequences for acting irrationally. But the consequences are not necessarily civilization-ending... which means that some people will stay. While there may be a move away from the border zone by some, others will look at military protection and a profit to be made and say "Yeah, I can take some werewhatevers".
Anyone who stays on the border with a lycanthrope nation without significant military protection is dead or converted before the next full moon. A nation that spends all of its blood & treasure fighting an unwinnable war is going to die.

Lycanthropes are an extremely dangerous enemy to a mundane empire. Either the Undead are capable of stopping lycanthrope marauders or they're not. If they're not, then the mundane forces lose as long as they are willing to throw themselves into the meatgrinder.
Of course this is all moot thanks to changes made by the OP :smallwink:

Heliomance
2011-04-28, 02:48 AM
So how do you think A is likely to be organised? My first thought is tribal, but that doesn't seem to gel well with being able to form raiding parties. I might try and make that culture somewhat Viking-inspired.

Oracle_Hunter
2011-04-28, 02:57 AM
So how do you think A is likely to be organised?
I'd go with "not" :smalltongue:

Have a bunch of tribes settled in different biomes within "A" - lizardmen in the swamp, gnolls in the plains, etc. - and leave them be. No tribe can expand outside its biome and they occasionally raid each other for resources or slaves. There might be limited trade, but little other interaction; everyone has enough to sustain their current status and insufficient infrastructure to seek growth.

If you want "savage raiders" you need to give them a reason to be seagoing. Vikings were a seafaring people because the sea was bountiful and the land was less so (among other reasons). On such a large land-mass as "A" it is unlikely that anyone would be driven to long sea-raids unless their territory was on a shoreline adjacent to a great forest and they were cramped. A somewhat easier route is to add a small archipelago off the eastern coast of "A" and make them your Vikings.

Aux-Ash
2011-04-28, 11:16 AM
Here in Scandinavia we weren't as much sea-going because the land isn't very bountiful (it isn't, but it can sustain a population) but rather because travelling by sea is a very natural way to get around.
Norway is a big rock sloping towards the sea, but the fjords form thousands of natural harbours all along the coastline.
Denmark is a series of islands and a very narrow peninsula.
Sweden is comparatively huge but criss-crossed by rivers and lakes (same applies to Finland really... ).

No matter where you are, you're always close to a waterway and there's no shortage of wood to make ships of. It's a lot easier to get around by ship than overland (especially considering all the forests and mountains). The ships served the same purpose horses does on a steppe.

I imagine this also contributed to the raiding culture. Vikings raided for the same reason horse-cultures did. Because it was easy to get away with it (just ride/sail off) and the reward was greater than being more peaceful.

As long as A has a similiar access to water, seaborne raiders should be able to develop.

Also, Heliomance. Tribal and raiding goes hand in hand. All the "great raiders" were tribal. Vikings. Asian steppe horse cultures. Barbary states (essentially loose confederations of city-states/pirate lords). Germanic and slavic tribes. Highlanders. Irish. A couple of hundred more cultures I imagine.

randomhero00
2011-04-28, 11:30 AM
The best way to avoid small world feel I found is to include news from really far away, basically gossip at that point. Because well that's realistic for one, for two that's how in real life, in such a situation, you'd get a feel of the wider world. So make up some news, and gossip.

"In Rykerville their champion beat Farame from Jotown in under a minute!"

etc

Heliomance
2011-05-02, 04:22 AM
Okay, this is the actual world map:
http://i13.photobucket.com/albums/a265/Heliomance/Worldmap.jpg
I haven't marked the borders on it and such, it's a WIP, but thoughts?

Conners
2011-05-02, 06:22 AM
Wow, nice work on that map.

Oracle_Hunter
2011-05-02, 11:39 AM
Okay, this is the actual world map:
http://i13.photobucket.com/albums/a265/Heliomance/Worldmap.jpg
I haven't marked the borders on it and such, it's a WIP, but thoughts?
Oooo, pretty :smallbiggrin:

You absolutely need to mark rivers on this map. For comparison, here's a map of the US with major rivers and state lines (http://www.wall-maps.com/Classroom/US/3-623-33155SimpUSPhysO.gif). Look at how political borders form along major waterways.

If it's too much for the whole world, then a blow-up map of "A" and "B" would be very helpful. At the moment they're just huge, blank landmasses.

Additionally: Deserts? Swamps? Flood-plains?

Heliomance
2011-05-02, 12:13 PM
According to my geographer friend, the only place there's likely to be any particular desert is that small island near the equator. There's very little equatorial land in the world.

Oracle_Hunter
2011-05-02, 12:40 PM
According to my geographer friend, the only place there's likely to be any particular desert is that small island near the equator. There's very little equatorial land in the world.
Actually, all you need for a desert is a rain shadow (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rain_shadow); note, for example, that the Great Basin Desert (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Basin_Desert) (10th largest in the world!) is nowhere near the equator. Deserts make for fine natural barriers and can be home to desert-themed creatures, if you want them.

Likewise, think on swamps and hydrology in general. Water is essential to the formation of civilizations and life in general; it is far too important to be left as a footnote when world-building.

Ormur
2011-05-02, 01:35 PM
Having a few large empires claiming most of the continent isn't necessarily unrealistic. In the 16th century a few large empires claimed most of the civilized areas of Eurasia. The Hapsburg Empire ruled large territories in Europe and South America, The Ottomans most of the Middle East and North Africa, then there was Persia, Mughal India and Ming China.

However there were still large areas in northern and central Eurasia that weren't organized into states and plenty of smaller states on the periphery or functionally independent states claimed by the empire and many largely independent provinces and feudal fiefdoms within the states that might have had different cultures, laws and customs from other areas of the empire.

If your players are limited to a single province of some empire and aren't engaged in some seriously high level politics they might not even know there was a higher authority than the local suzerain or duke or whatever.

Oracle_Hunter
2011-05-02, 02:14 PM
Having a few large empires claiming most of the continent isn't necessarily unrealistic. In the 16th century a few large empires claimed most of the civilized areas of Eurasia. The Hapsburg Empire ruled large territories in Europe and South America, The Ottomans most of the Middle East and North Africa, then there was Persia, Mughal India and Ming China.
It's a bit unrealistic when you're aiming for a 5th to 11th century world (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_Middle_Ages) :smalltongue:

More importantly, big countries imply strong governments; and strong governments tend to frown upon adventurers. Even if they don't actively discourage private individuals going about killing bad guys, governments strong enough to claim vast territories also manage to take care of traditional adventure hooks on their own - saving villages from goblins, rescuing princesses, and so on. One reason the "points of light" approach to world-building is popular is that they lack sufficient organized power to produce bands of "government adventurers" to troubleshoot the big problems facing their nations.

randomhero00
2011-05-02, 02:19 PM
1st step- pick out the geographical landmarks. These are huge, like mountain ranges, and say a a major spring in the middle of the desert.

2nd step- think of how the races might have warred over such natural resources. For instance the dwarves would have been interested in the mountains because of all the the caves.

3rd step. Think about history and how powerful each race is. If dwarves are the most powerful then they rule all the mountains and deep caverns.

etc

Dilb
2011-05-02, 03:20 PM
Oooo, pretty :smallbiggrin:

You absolutely need to mark rivers on this map. For comparison, here's a map of the US with major rivers and state lines (http://www.wall-maps.com/Classroom/US/3-623-33155SimpUSPhysO.gif). Look at how political borders form along major waterways.

I don't think rivers, at least not world-map sized rivers, are very good boundaries for early-middle-ages empires. The USA has very artificial boundaries: they were set by a fairly peaceful, homogeneous group, who generally didn't live in those regions when the land was being divided up.

Rivers are extremely desirable for farming, so you'd expect a group to want to settle both sides rather than using it as a border. Big famous rivers, like the Nile and the Yellow river are the centres of kingdoms, and the Yangtze was only sometimes a between northern China and southern China.

Oracle_Hunter
2011-05-02, 03:29 PM
Rivers are extremely desirable for farming, so you'd expect a group to want to settle both sides rather than using it as a border. Big famous rivers, like the Nile and the Yellow river are the centres of kingdoms, and the Yangtze was only sometimes a between northern China and southern China.
You may want to settle both sides - but so will your enemies :smallamused:

I'm not talking about creeks either, I'm talking about sizable rivers that would either need a good bridge or a ferry to cross. These are difficult for armies to cross, giving the "defenders" on the far side a significant advantage in regards to any attempt to invade. As both nations will be the "defenders" on their respective sides of the river, nations of roughly equal power will "choose" those rivers as natural borders.

As for rivers-being-borders you can look at Europe then - particularly France & Germany. There is a reason that Alsace-Lorraine has changed hands so many times.

Dilb
2011-05-02, 04:36 PM
What, you're picturing bigger rivers than the Yangtze?

France and Germany isn't a great example either: those borders are the result of lots of lots of fighting, mingling, and politics as empires rise and fall. This is nothing at all like kingdoms made up of different, unmingled species.

And rivers are really quite easy to traverse. Sure, it's not easy if you're in the middle of a battle, but it's not the sort of thing that lends itself to long term use like an ocean, or even a big lake. A lot of the reconquering of the Alsace-Lorraine region happened from the 15th century onwards, with some exchanges being supported or opposed because people weren't quite sure if the people there were French or German. There's no similar confusion between humans and centaurs.

It could be useful for borders inside the B empire, representing where someone drew a line to make up provinces, or split an inheritance, but for racially distinct regions I can't see them both stumbling on the river at the same time, then building forts and glaring at each other for hundreds of years.

Aux-Ash
2011-05-02, 04:52 PM
bout creeks either, I'm talking about sizable rivers that would either need a good bridge or a ferry to cross. These are difficult for armies to cross, giving the "defenders" on the far side a significant advantage in regards to any attempt to invade. As both nations will be the "defenders" on their respective sides of the river, nations of roughly equal power will "choose" those rivers as natural borders

As for rivers-being-borders you can look at Europe then - particularly France & Germany. There is a reason that Alsace-Lorraine has changed hands so many times.

It actually varies. There's more to borders than a river. While the rhine, the po and the donau certainly created borders of nations. The vistula didn't. It runs straight through Poland and is essentially a trade highway. Same thing with Daugava/dvina. The tiber have also never figured as a major border-river. Nor have any river in Scandinavia.
The nile, the most famous river of them all... have also never served as a natural border. But rather a lifeline. Eufrat and tigris is also not borders and never were.

The early Rus kingdoms in the Ukraine were even built "on" the rivers. Every major city connected to the same river-networks (including cities such as Kiev, Novgorod and Tver. What later became the grand principalities).

As for Alsace and Lorraine. Sure, the Rhine crosses through the provinces. But it's also the region which in the early HRE was called upper Lorraine (lower Lorraine is the netherlands), the burgundian highlands... moreover... Alsace and Lorraine is also in/bordering Schwartzwald. The densest forest in central Europe.

Border rivers tend to be very close to very difficult terrain in general. The Schwarzwald. The Carpathians. The Snowdonians. The prussian marshes. The lombardian marshes. The central anatolian highlands.
But calm wide rivers seem to be the core of many kingdoms, as opposed to it's borders. The largest trade cities in northern Europe... are all built on the mouths of large rivers... both sides.

Heliomance
2011-05-02, 05:51 PM
Anyone want to help me pencil in some rivers? I've got no idea where they should go.

RS14
2011-05-02, 05:55 PM
You may want to settle both sides - but so will your enemies :smallamused:

I'm not talking about creeks either, I'm talking about sizable rivers that would either need a good bridge or a ferry to cross. These are difficult for armies to cross, giving the "defenders" on the far side a significant advantage in regards to any attempt to invade. As both nations will be the "defenders" on their respective sides of the river, nations of roughly equal power will "choose" those rivers as natural borders.

As for rivers-being-borders you can look at Europe then - particularly France & Germany. There is a reason that Alsace-Lorraine has changed hands so many times.

The idea of a standing army is very new. In peacetime, the area around a river would be locally homogeneous.In wartime, a crossing is likely to take place before a large army can be mustered to oppose. Besides, rivercraft are generally faster than infantry, and crossing unopposed should generally just be a matter of mustering enough rivercraft to effect an unopposed landing with sufficient troops to establish a beachhead. Rivers will serve as borders for highly extended forces, which have difficulty constructing the crossing, difficulty keeping it open for logistics, and for which the marginal utility of marching on is likely to be low.

Check out pre-unification Germany (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a2/German_Reich1.png): there aren't many river borders, except between Reichsland Elsass-Lothringen and Grossherzogtum Baden.

--

To Heliomance, I feel like you're minimizing to a large degree the differences within racial groups. To some extent you manage this with B, which as you note is a collection of loosely affiliated groups, but the rest of the proper empires seem to be rather homogenious--e.g. Orcs, elves, dwarves. Yes, there have been great empires historically--Rome, Macedonia, China, Mongolia--but I would be hard pressed to think of such an occurrence that didn't result from someone killing lots of people. This tends to result in empires that have their own ethnic and cultural differences that are potentially important. In the absence of such an empire, you can get stuff like the pre-unification Germany map I posed above. G and H should both be either fragmented, or forcibly unified.

The Orcish region should probably have more variety; check out this map (http://www.emersonkent.com/images/indian_tribes.jpg) of US Native American linguistic groups. Things tend to get fragmented near the coast.

I think overall you have a tendency to make all your kingdoms roughly the same size, which is not entirely justified.

With all that said about breaking things up more, doing so does induce a large degree of detail that you probably don't want to mess with for much of the world. Pick an area of detail and flesh it out, but don't worry about specifying every petty kingdom, as long as you can create them when needed.


Anyone want to help me pencil in some rivers? I've got no idea where they should go.

Pick points with density in proportion to local precipitation. Squiggle downhill towards coast or nearest large river. Generally every non-desert coastline will have short rivers more or less perpendicular to the coast, with larger ones being more dependant on contentental geography. Check out

http://www.edulinks.stcronans.ie/images/europe%20rivers3.gif

and

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_jKZL_XBc5BY/TPVmStaZVSI/AAAAAAAAAQg/apc_gJ8UQgs/s1600/us_maps_rivers.gif

Heliomance
2011-05-02, 06:12 PM
The Orcish region does have a fair bit of variety - the population there is composed of entirely autonomous tribes of probably no more than 100 orcs each. They have no particular commonality other than tech level and a similar religion - mostly totemistic, with a sideline on a Gruumsh-analogue.

I'm thinking the northern stretches of H are almost entirely uninhabited - think Siberia. The vast majority of the dwarven population there is in the south, so there's less area to spread out in.

As for G, what I'm picturing at the moment is almost feudal - a noble class of elf lords who rule as much land as they can hold for themselves, with less fortunate elves to help run the place and dwarves to do the unpleasant jobs. Each lord has a citadel of his own - I think that awesthetics will be very important in their architecture, and probably fierce competition occurs, with each lord trying to one-up his neighbours. Universities are probably declared neutral ground, and anyone trying to move militarily or politically on an academy will find himself the subject of extreme displeasure from every other lord in the vicinity.

LibraryOgre
2011-05-02, 07:30 PM
Eufrat and tigris is also not borders and never were.

Actually, Sulla established the border between "Rome's World" and "Parthia's World" at the Euphrates when he was governor of Cilicia.

Admitedly, this was a purely artificial border, between two countries who didn't QUITE reach that far, rather than a more "natural" border, like, say, the border between Maryland and Virginia (Potomac).

conaniscool
2011-05-02, 08:02 PM
{Scrubbed} can other people submit their world ideas here for c&c? Or should I just make a new thread for my own world?

Oracle_Hunter
2011-05-02, 08:24 PM
Anyone want to help me pencil in some rivers? I've got no idea where they should go.
Consult The Giant's article (http://www.giantitp.com/articles/xO3dVM8EDKJPlKxmVoG.html) for great justice :smallcool:

Heliomance
2011-05-03, 02:02 AM
{Scrubbed} can other people submit their world ideas here for c&c? Or should I just make a new thread for my own world?

Probably best to make your own thread.

I've added in some rivers now, on the main continent.
http://i13.photobucket.com/albums/a265/Heliomance/Worldmapwithrivers.jpg

Lostintransit
2011-05-03, 09:09 AM
Probably best to make your own thread.

I've added in some rivers now, on the main continent.
http://i13.photobucket.com/albums/a265/Heliomance/Worldmapwithrivers.jpg

Okay that is a really cool map, what program did you use to create it? I've been looking for a program like that for ages! :smallbiggrin:

Also as a world builder myself, I think you have done an excellent job so far!

Regards

Heliomance
2011-05-03, 10:43 AM
Campaign Cartographer 3, really nifty little CAD program specifically for RPG worldbuilding.

randomhero00
2011-05-03, 11:23 AM
OP: this is where history comes in. You can't have a proper map without history. Say there was a civil war among humans and there were 4 warring states Hence 4 human countries appear on your map. Say the orcs lost vs elves in a major battle a long time ago, which is why they live in the mountains. Make up clans for the dwarves. Decide where natural resources are (such as mithril deposits for dwarves, gold for humans, etc.)

randomhero00
2011-05-03, 11:31 AM
OP: this is where history comes in. You can't have a proper map without history. Say there was a civil war among humans and there were 4 warring states Hence 4 human countries appear on your map. Say the orcs lost vs elves in a major battle a long time ago, which is why they live in the mountains. Make up clans for the dwarves. Decide where natural resources are (such as mithril deposits for dwarves, gold for humans, etc.)

Basically look at your current map and imagine how history might have progressed to that point and why.

Oracle_Hunter
2011-05-03, 02:16 PM
I've added in some rivers now, on the main continent.
http://i13.photobucket.com/albums/a265/Heliomance/Worldmapwithrivers.jpg
Much better :smallbiggrin:

Looking this over, I see a lot more "empty space" in your world than your hand-drawn map suggested.

For example, the supply line between the forest-fighters and the mines is going to be prohibitive for one nation to do both. Place the undead forest-fighters as a "thin black line" right on the border of the Evil Forest and concentrate the Rebels in that tasty slice of land south of the river that flows from the mountains to the west. They can trade with a town set up by living members of the forest-fighters at the mouth of the river that flows from the Evil Forest.

Have you started to carve up "B" yet? Those rivers suggest some fine natural lines.

Heliomance
2011-05-03, 06:47 PM
I've not really divvied up B much. All I know is that there's a port city probably at the mouth of the southernmost river, big enough to have a decent university.

Aux-Ash
2011-05-04, 01:16 AM
I agree with Oracle hunter that B should be divided up. But I disagree that the rivers are perfect borders. For the simple reason of the scale in the corner. The western/northernmost river in B is almost one and a half thousand (km or miles?) long. Crossing the same area overland would take 50-75 days (20-30 km a day). 7-10 weeks.

The byrivers that run by the "two-cliff" southern-pointing mountain range in the centre works as borders. Since the mountains north and south form a bottleneck. but the other 3 should be focal points of nations, rather than the limits.

However. I see 5 bays on the B peninsulas. One in the north, one in the west facing the large island, one more enclosed to the south between the two peninsulas, one in the west, just north of the mountains and one in the north between the peninsula and the rest of the continent. Those are natural starting points of cultures (decently separated, calm seas that easens fishing).
I'd start the cultures there and work myself inland along the rivers until a major obstacle or another nation is encountered. Major obstacles are: Marshes. Deserts. Mountains. Bottlenecks. Vast open plains. Deep forests.
That's where the border would lie. If a river is very close, the border will adjust itself along it. If not, then it won't.

Fill any remaining space as wilderness. Possibly claimed by one of the nations, but uncontrolled and largely unsettled. Any unfilled area by the coast will be a separate nation instead.

Heliomance
2011-05-04, 02:36 AM
Sorry, I can't quite work out which bits you're describing there.

Oracle_Hunter
2011-05-04, 08:22 AM
I agree with Oracle hunter that B should be divided up. But I disagree that the rivers are perfect borders. For the simple reason of the scale in the corner. The western/northernmost river in B is almost one and a half thousand (km or miles?) long. Crossing the same area overland would take 50-75 days (20-30 km a day). 7-10 weeks.
A relevant point (I didn't even notice the scale :smallredface:) but don't forget that rivers make great roads. This is another reason why river-based civilizations work so well.

I agree that bays serve as good places for "native" civilizations to be born, but now we come to the question: how did the people of "B" get there? If their God just dropped them down, where did He put them? Does that spot still have special relevance to them? If they spread from elsewhere, where did they come from?

If "B" is as large as Aux-Ash says, then there is room for 2 Empire-class civilizations alone. I'd put the capitol of B-1 at the mouth of the river that flows into the western sea and the capitol of B-2 at the mouth of the river that flows into the bay roughly in the center of "B." If you want warring empires, that's a great place to have them.

Otherwise, you have at least a dozen provinces filling "B."

Aux-Ash
2011-05-04, 09:27 AM
Sorry, I can't quite work out which bits you're describing there.

Right then... I'll try to be more precise. I'd mark them for you, but I don't have access to a proper image-editing program at the moment.

With bay I mean where the water sort of bulges inwards towards the land.

First of all. I'm limiting myself only to the B-region, which is to say the western bit of the continent from the mountain range (which I'll refer to as border mountains) and westward but including the peninsula (looking a bit like an boot) sticking out towards the southeast.

In the north, just west of the mountains and south of the snow covered island. North of the long river. That is bay number 1.

Going around counterclockwise along the coast we reach bay number 2. The long river reaches the ocean here and straight across the water is a large island/continent.

Onwards, counterclockwise, we pass the short river and come to a large bay facing south. This would be number three. The second river running from the border mountains reaches the sea here. Just south of a small mountain range, east of a large bulk of land and west of the peninsula. This is bay number 3. It kind of looks like a knife of water stabbed into the land.

Continuing eastward we now round the southern tip of the continent, pass the river and the tiny mountain range and reach a small island. Here is bay number 4.

Bay number 5 is "just around the corner", between the peninsula and the main continent. The river from the southern mountains reaches the sea here and it ends at the foot of the border mountains. It too looks a bit like a dagger of water stabbed into the landmass.

Now we have gone full circle around the B-region, from the norther foot of the border mountains to it's southern foot. Did that make sense or do I have to find a better way to show it? :smallsmile:

Heliomance
2011-05-04, 10:19 AM
With you now, makes sense :)

Aux-Ash
2011-05-04, 10:44 AM
Great, that's the areas I think cultures would have sprung up in. One of each... except bay 3 which might even have one culture on either side of the bay (since they're separated by that short mountain range and the water after all) and also possibly one upriver along the long river (by the foot of the border mountains).

Each of these cultures will at one point in history have had their own nations. They could certainly be united under one throne now, thus making separate provinces within the empire, but they'd still be fairly distinct culturally.

I'd even suggest using that... if you really want to give a sense of the world is big. Have that entire region truly separated into a bunch of languages. Make one part of region B feel different from another, based on those 4-7 base cultures.
If you do split them into several nations, you can done it down a bit. But if it's just one or two empire, tone up the regionalism. Have the northerners be different from the westerners, the westerners be different from the southerners. And while the official state language would work with dealing with authority... 90 % of the population would speak it poorly, at best.

Heliomance
2011-05-04, 08:08 PM
Playing with languages like that requires playing with one of the core assumptions of D&D though - everyone speaks Common.

LibraryOgre
2011-05-04, 09:58 PM
Playing with languages like that requires playing with one of the core assumptions of D&D though - everyone speaks Common.

One option I like, especially with a world you're cutting into chunks like this is have different "Commons". Most people from A speak Aish, a common language of the area derived from local root languages and pidgins. But most people also speak their own language... Aprime, Abera, and Achak. These may be somewhat related to Aish, and have some words in common, but really, Aish is the Common of that area. When you go over to B, most speak Berish, which was the language of the people who once united B. However, their native language is likely to be Balph, Babak'r, or Belta... the local languages that Berish replaced for official use, but were still used at home.

So, in B, "common" is Berish. Everyone speaks Berish, at least a little bit. However, if you travel to A, you're going run into very few people who speak Berish... but Aish would be a good language to learn, because most people speak a little bit, at least.

a_humble_lich
2011-05-04, 10:56 PM
Playing with languages like that requires playing with one of the core assumptions of D&D though - everyone speaks Common.

First, I think that is a good assumption to break, having multiple human languages makes a lot of sense. With that said, you can have both. Looking at Earth there have been many "Commons" for different times and regions: Latin, Greek, Aramaic, French, English, Russian, German, Sanskrit, Manderin... have all served as a lingua franca for different regions. So for example you could say everybody speaks Bish (or at least everybody who is educated). However everyone outside B also speaks the local language. I think having local languages helps avoid the "small world" problem.

Aux-Ash
2011-05-05, 12:49 AM
Playing with languages like that requires playing with one of the core assumptions of D&D though - everyone speaks Common.

Languages is just the easiest way to show difference in culture, not the only way (allthough with the same language you may have to up the differences to make them more noticeable).

But I'd echo the sentiments of Mark Hall and a_humble_lich, if you really feel you want a common. Make it more than one and make most people speak it poorly (since they don't use it at home or in everyday conversation). The only people you could expect speak it well would be the highly educated (priests, mages, nobility) or the more succesful merchants.
So that when the players come to this remote village, have them encounter some lingual difficulties until the villagers just give up, tell the party to wait and goes to fetch the village priest :smallbiggrin:

Personally I'd get rid of common alltogether. I think it is a silly concept.

Oracle_Hunter
2011-05-05, 08:20 AM
Personally I'd get rid of common alltogether. I think it is a silly concept.
Silly, but also intensely useful in a multiracial cooperative RPG. Trust me, I've played games of AD&D with "the Elf that only speaks Elvish" and it gets old, fast :smallyuk:

Instead, you can go with Aux-Ash's initial thought - a Common that is poorly spoken by everyone. It can be a relic of an "ancient empire" that unified everyone and had great teachings. Now it is mostly used as a trade language ("Low" Common) with the aristocrats and scholars still speaking the original form ("High" Common). Game-wise, you can have each Player decide whether their character speaks High or Low Common with each carrying certain social implications while still being mutually intelligible.

Also: You might want to decide whether language is going to be an important part of the world. While it is nice and fluffy to figure out distinctive languages for every portion of the world, D&D has never handled "languages" particularly well. Unless you want to make language central to your campaign, it might be better to not spend too much time on this part of world-building.

Heliomance
2011-05-05, 08:41 AM
Language isn't particularly important to the campaign. Also, one of the characters speaks like 10 languages already.

Oracle_Hunter
2011-05-05, 08:54 AM
Language isn't particularly important to the campaign. Also, one of the characters speaks like 10 languages already.
Then I would suggest making the Ancient Empire of "B" the originator of Common and be done with it. If you'd like to sprinkle a bit of flavor, have PCs that hail from "B" choose to speak either "High" or "Low" Common - with people everywhere else speaking "Low" Common by default. It makes "B" more culturally important to the world and is easy to implement.