Crossbow Joe's Guide to Fibber Island

[paigeoliver]

Ok, for the second setting book in my series (the first which is finished was all the rules portions of the setting), I am having each island in the island chain explained by a colorful NPC. But I am not sure how well it is really going to work.

How does this (unfinished) section read to you? Crossbow Joe (your average big dumb fighter), explains Fibber Island.

Fibber Island
Your tour guide for Fibber Island is Crossbow Joe, mercenary and well known moron. Originally from Ruskavek, Crossbow Joe came to Fibber Island to seek his fortune and has never looked back.

Lay of the Land

Thanks a lot for picking me to be the tour guide, Crossbow Joe isn't the kind of guy to let you down, so this will be good.

First let me say how awesome Fibber Island is, you are going to want to come here, and you will probably stay forever. Fibber Island has pretty women, Donkey Pits, cat racing, and some of the best bars in the world.

When you first get off your boat you will usually be welcomed by donkey carts with these hot native girls on them. Now don't let them fool you like they fooled Crossbow Joe. Those hot chicks aren't even real native girls, and they don't want to date you, they are just trying to get you on their donkey cart to go to one of the expensive hotels. Now don't get me wrong, the expensive hotels are awesome, but if you are trying to save your coin then you might just want to stay at the Ruddy Pigeon or something.

Most of the island is this nice open countryside with the houses all scattered far apart from each other. But around the dock area the buildings are all really close together just like they are in my old home of Provo. Except here almost all the buildings are full and aren't mostly abandoned like they are in Provo.
If you go to the northern part of the island you will find this totally awesome giant wall that was here before anybody even moved here. On the other side of the wall are all kinds of animals that you can hunt. They have bears and penguins and all kinds of dinosaurs and other mammals. You do have to pay a hunting fee to the dwarves who guard the wall, but it is pretty cheap. Last time I went I caught this four legged penguin that had a long bushy tail, and I had it turned into a hat.

Power Bases

The most powerful people on the island are the dwarves. The have this building called the Gendarm Holding Company, and it seems like they own almost everything, and are in charge of everything that they don't own. They put me in jail for almost a whole week when we had a misunderstanding about my bids at the Fibber Island Auction.

Even though they put me in jail they are still fairly nice guys. They keep the elves off the island, which is pretty important if you ask me. They buy almost everything that comes in off the various boats, and then they put it all in their warehouses, and then it all gets sent out on different boats. I don't really understand how all of that works though.

The dwarves own all the land on the island, but they don't own all the buildings. They just charge people rent for the land. From what I have heard they are very particular about what kind of building gets built in what area. I tried to build my own house right next to the brothel and I barely had 4 pieces of wood nailed together before they came over and made me stop. They explained that for now and the foreseeable future that they were not allowing any new buildings within sight of any existing buildings. I guess that explains why the old town is so crowded and the rest of the island is so spread out. I never did end up building a house because I couldn't find anyplace within 5 miles of town that you couldn't see a building from. Every time I thought I found a place I would notice that I could just barely see someone else's farm or cottage.

The people that run the fancy hotels seem to be sort of powerful as well, from what people have told me they make sure that all the other restaurants and stuff are only open at certain times, and not just open all the time like they are. My friend Gern Blarneystone owns two bars on the island, and he says it is easier just to be open when they say than it is to go against them.

[paigeoliver]

Second section. Merrick Stonecutter (one of those over-talkative dwarves who love ale, you know the type), explains the Imperial Elven Island, which is a place that is technically never supposed to see any gameplay. I may have went overboard on this one. I must note though, that elves are not valid choices for PCs in this campaign setting as they are the BBEGs (despite largely being LG/LN).


Imperial Elven Isle

Your tour guide for the Imperial Elven Isle is one Merrick Stonecutter, Dwarven adventurer, entrepreneur and famous drunk, who has never set foot on the Imperial Elven Isle. The author makes no claim as to how accurate Merrick's information is, as no non-elf has ever been to the Imperial Elven Isle and returned.

Lay of the Land

It is a well known fact that the Imperial Elven Island (which I will be referring to as the elf pit from now on) is completely filled with trees and flowers from one end to the other. They don't even have a proper beach because that would require sand, and sand is made out of rocks, and no self respecting rock would go anywhere near the elf pit.

When you first arrive in the elf pit you will have to wade through the mud to get from your boat to the town. This is normal in elven lands because they haven't quite figured out how to build a proper dock.

Once you are on the island you may be overwhelmed with the stench of flowers and trees, but if you wait a little while you should be able to get used to it and operate normally.

You will probably have some trouble figuring out where the buildings are, this is because elves don't have any rocks to make proper dwellings with and are far too in love with trees to even make a decent wooden structure. Most elves just live up in the trees, with the wealthiest elves living in areas cut out underneath the trees in an effort to emulate dwarves.

Once on the island you are going to have to keep a tight grip on your money pouch, backpack, and anything else you brought with you. Now everyone knows that adult elves are well known thieves, that doesn't even need to be discussed. What isn't common knowledge is how elves just let their children run wild all over the island, and elven children will steal anything. One time when I was in the elf pit my donkey had a bowel movement, and an elven child grabbed it and ran off with it before it even hit the ground. It is best to just bring a whip with you and use that to scare them away. They are also frightened by deep voices, probably because even the manliest elves all have voices like preadolescent halfling girls.

Speaking of donkeys you may just want to leave yours at home, as there are no valuables to be found in the elf pit, and I have had terrible problems in the past with elves making romantic advances towards my donkey, trying to start conversations with it and proposing marriage to it. I say that is more trouble than it is worth.

You should probably bring your own food with you, because the elves don't eat anything other than weak berries and they consider 3 or 4 of those to be a whole meal. The only time they ever eat any meat is when dead fish wash up on the shore, and then they just eat those without even properly preparing them. Of course most adult elves never get any fish because of the huge gangs of elven children prowling through the mud waiting for the fish to die.

Power Bases

The most powerful thing in the elf pit is the elven emperor. It is said that he is as strong as a halfling child and nearly as smart. He spends most of his time perched up in a tree telling the other elves what to do. He (like all elves) is jealous of the dwarves and all our success, and thus constantly directs his subjects to attempt to emulate the dwarves, but none of them are smart enough to do so. He is in charge of all the elves on the island and they all have to do whatever he says. You can use this to your advantage by purchasing cardboard elf ears, putting them on and then bossing the other elves around while claiming to be the emperor. To date I have never encountered an elf smart enough to see through that disguise.

The elven emperor is 2000 years old and has been married to a tree for the past 200 years. He and his wife have 17 male children all of which are scheduled to marry trees in arranged marriages once they reach adulthood.
Squirrels and rabbits are next in pecking order in the elf pit, and own most of the property on the island. The elves worship them like they were gods and run after them screaming and wetting themselves like a developmentally disabled goblin.

Next comes the elven wizard council. These elves wander the island looking for magic twigs that they can use to cast evil magic spells on dwarves. It is a well known fact that the wizard council consists of 34 wizards who are only able to cast spells because they have a stolen dwarven spellbook in one of their trees. Of course everybody knows that dwarven wizards are the best in the world, thus this spellbook is potent indeed, and has far more spells than any human spellbook. While they are on the island the wizards mostly just cast spells to make them look like anything that isn't an elf, although off the island they often cast treacherous fireball spells.

The next most powerful group of elves in the elf pit is the Imperial Elven Navy. These elves spend hundreds of years of their lives building wooden copies of dwarven boats, and then attempting to sail them around and collect taxes from people. No one is even sure why they do this, since there is nothing that elves can even spend money on, since there are no stores in the elf pit, and no elf is refined enough to possibly appreciate the natural beauty of gold.

Now your average elf in the elf pit wears nothing but mud and leaves. However the Imperial Elven Naval officers like to steal clothing from humans and dwarves and wear those instead. They do this not only to try and look more like dwarves, but they also do it to mask their stench on the ocean and to hide the fact that they are elves.

The elven church is the next more powerful group. As I mentioned before they worship rabbits and squirrels. Whenever an elf gets a hold of anything decent (like a keg of ale or a warhammer) they end up sacrificing it to the squirrels and rabbits in a big ceremony where they all cry and talk about their feelings. Most of the elven priests are married to rabbits, but there are not enough rabbits to go around so some of them are married to dead rabbits.

Locations

The Imperial Elven Palace is a tree (and as I mentioned before that tree is also the Imperial Elven Empress) located in the very center of the island. This is where the Emperor lives along with his sons, and his 32 badger concubines. They are guarded by a force of 50 elves armed with sharp sticks and several stolen rocks. The guards are constantly being replaced because most of them get killed by wild boars (they won't fight back against the boars because elves worship all animals). Underneath the Empress is the great elven treasure hoard, which consists of nearly 100 copper pieces and the elves' greatest treasure, a Belt of Dwarvenkind. Indeed, that very belt was the reason I came to the island, no elf should ever have such an item. Unfortunately the stench of flowers and elven children was so thick near the center of the island that I had to turn back. The elves treasure that belt above everything else and have been trying to find a way to duplicate it for over 1000 years. Once a year the Emperor selects one elf from the elf pit and allows him to wear the belt for a day and see what it is like to be a dwarf. These elves always kill themselves from despair afterwards, knowing that they can never be happy again.

The western mud beach of the island is home to the naval base. Lots of off-duty elven sailors can be found wallowing in the mud and sleeping in the nearby trees. None of the elven sailors have any children because they trade them all away as slaves to the Agyptians for old used sewer pipes that they use to make crude cannons.

They have the remains of an ancient abandoned dwarven ship here and part of a book on shipbuilding, and they use those as a guide for building their feeble wooden ships. Most elven ships sink as soon as they are launched, but a few of them are accidentally built watertight, and those are the ones you see out there on the ocean.

The rest of the island is just a huge elven tree slum. The elves have to change trees all the time because they rank below the birds, and if a bird or other animal sits on their tree they have to move to another tree.

Local Flavor

Most of the elves in the elf pit spend most of their time trying to mate with trees and writing poems about flowers. Conventional wisdom says that is all the elves ever do, but it is a little known fact that elves also spend their time in other pursuits as well.

Elves wake up every morning when they fall out of their tree. They usually spend the first few hours of the day waiting for the birds and rabbits to wander away from the berries so they can eat some as well. After that the elves usually sit around and write a song and a poem about the berry that they ate, and then they spend at least an hour apologizing to the bush that the berry came from.

After breakfast most elves will construct themselves a fake beard made out of leaves. The elves will all put these on and pretend to be dwarves for the rest of the morning. Of course they aren't really smart enough to be dwarves, so they mostly sit around in the dirt drinking old pond water and calling it ale.
Elves usually dedicate their afternoons to their own personal hobbies. Popular hobbies in the elf pit include talking to hedgehogs, mud tossing competitions and pretending to be deer or other animals.

Most elves spend their nights and evenings huddled up in trees afraid that they are going to be eaten. They usually go up in the trees very early in the evening because they won't use fire because it burns up wood, and they can't see in the dark like decent dwarves.