AD&D thoughts, Part Seven: The Campaign World
2012-Apr-26, Thursday 23:14![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dorchadas
Long-awaited, but here it is. This will be quite long.
First, the canon countries that are part of the Forgotten Realms:
Well, first first, a map!
Not the best one, but that's the biggest size I can find at the moment. The sea in the upper middle is the Sea of Fallen Stars. Northwest of that is Cormanthor, northwest of Cormanthor is Netheril, and northwest of Netheril is Delzoun. Ammarindar is south of Delzoun. Jhaamdaath is on that plain on the southern arm of the Sea of Fallen Stars. Narfell is to the northeast, Unther and Mulhorand are to the southeast. Evereska is west of Cormanthor and south of Netheril, and Earlann northwest of that, west of Ammarindar and Delzoun.
Cormanthyr: Yes, the forest is Cormanthor, the country is Cormanthyr, and the capital is Cormanthor (emphasis on the last syllable instead of the first). This is played off as the subtleties of the elven language at work, but I think it's more evidence that someone couldn't come up with a good name and just needed an excuse.
Cormanthyr is a magical elf paradise, where they live in harmony with each other and nature and zealously defend it from outsiders. Canonically, it eventually becomes a haven of tolerance before collapsing due to elven dickishness and then getting invaded by a huge horde of goblinoids, after which the elves all fuck off to the west the way elves do.
The game takes place during the more isolationist phase, though, where the elves don't really trade very often with Netheril (because they think Netheril is misusing magic like crazy) or Narfall (because of the demon thing). There is some trade with Jhaamdaath and the other elven realms (q.v.), though. One useful thing that lets me do is start out with local threats. If the players are all elves, I can have them come from the same small village and deal with things like a band of goblins or giant spiders or something that's moved in too close. Being a huge forest ruled by elves, huge portions of it are basically totally uninhabited and wild. The humanoids or monsters there rarely get to close to elven settlements because they don't want to die, but it does sometimes happen. Plus there's millennia of civilization there, so plenty of ruins to go wander around.
Delzoun: I'm throwing Ammarindar in here two because they're right next to each other.
There isn't that much info about Delzoun, other than that the architecture was quintessentially dwarven (1% form, 99% function) and they were under tons of attack from goblinoid tribes pretty much all the time. That's good, because I can make up whatever I want! I don't really know what I want to go here, but at the moment I'm leaning towards having it be the stereotypical dwarf kingdom. After all, if everywhere breaks the stereotype, it's just as ridiculous as if everthing's a cardboard cutout. Somewhere, there's got to be kingdoms of dwarves where they live underground, work hard, play seldom, have renowned craftsmanship and long beards. This is a good place for that.
I just found a fan supplement about Ammarindar, so that gives me a bit more to say about that. Apparently Ammarindar is built right over a dark elf city, so they suffer a lot of attacks from dark elves, and actually had to move to strip mining or open pit mining. It also mentions that Ammarindar actually had some dwarf wizards and wasn't entirely anti-magic like a lot of dwarf communities are. I can use that. Dwarf wizards will do a lot to separate Ammarindar from Delzoun.
Earlann: You've seen one magical elf kingdom in the forest, you've seen them all. This one is smaller and the elves are less arrogant, but that's all that's canon. That does give me a pretty wide range of stuff to do with it, if the players ever go here, but at the moment nothing really springs to mind.
They were allied with Ammarindar, which is a nice touch that breaks the whole "elves and dwarves hate each other because dammit, they just do thing."
Evereska: Evereska is FR's Gondolin expy. Set in a valley among a bunch of hills, hidden to anyone but elves, has a hidden underground path with secret gate to get in, the works. If everyone's an elf, I can use this, otherwise they'd never let anyone get in unless I want to run an epic plot involving its destruction by ripping off the Fall of Gondolin. That could be neat, but it's a long way in the future.
Jhaamdath: Renowned (or reviled, based on how most people felt about the 2nd ed. psionics rules) as the only human nation in Forgotten Realms to ever make extensive use of psionics, Jhaamdaath is ruled by the "bladelords," who are members of the psychic noble families that are the most skilled in combat. They're so well-known for their fighting prowess that the twelve city-states in Jhaamdath are collectively known as the "Cities of the Sword." That's actually a pretty neat bit of imagery, and reminds me a lot of Darkover, which I suspect I'll liberally steal from when portraying Jhaamdath. You can tell the bladelords because they're always the ones with flame-colored hair. :p
Canonically, Jhaamdath lasted a couple thousand years until they started clear-cutting huge portions of Nikerymath forest and killing all the elves they found in those portions, so four (yeah, four) High Mages got together and cast a ritual that smashed all of the Cities of the Sword with a gigantic tidal wave, basically destroying the entire country in a single stroke. Fuckin' elves, man.
I'm including Jhaamdath partially because of the Darkover connections, and partially because it's different. Forgotten Realms is positively littered with magocracies, but a psiocracy[1] is something interesting. Especially if the PCs are all elves (which is looking likely), or even humans from Netheril, they won't have any real cultural context for psionics. Jhaamdath is, to them, what a place like Netheril would be to people from the real world--a nation where people can do inexplicable things that don't fit into their understanding of how the world works. It's nice to have something like that in a kitchen-sink setting like FR.
!Mulhorand: Fantasy Egypt. Literally fantasy Egypt, as in the people were magically kidnapped from Earth and transported to FR to be used as slaves. I don't necessarily mind inspiration, but when you have clerics of Heru-ur and Re and Ptah and Djehuti running around and your kingdom is run by a pharaoh and mummies are buried in pyramids and blah blah, it gets a bit much for me. I don't mind the idea of people displaced from our world, and Earth has enough cultural heritage that you can tell stories for aeons without ever getting into fantasy, but it's not really something I'm looking for in this game.
Unther kind of fits in here, too, since it's fantasy Sumeria, including the gods (Nergal, Inanna, Enlil, Enki, etc.) and locked in eternal struggle with Mulhorand because...because, that's why!
Apparently, they were originally included because in Ed Greenwood's conception of the Forgotten Realms, it was linked to Earth through portals which had since been "forgotten," hence the name. I've heard that TSR de-emphasized this because they were worried about kids crawling around the woods looking for portals and getting hurt, and back during the height of the "D&D is satanic!" days, that would have been the last thing they needed. Anyway, I don't mind portals to other worlds, and even countries that came from elsewhere, but portals to Earth is getting a bit too far into the "Japanese teenager in a magical land" thing for modern geek audiences, and I'd like to avoid that. I don't think Mulhorand or Unther will make the cut.
Narfell: As far as I can tell, Narfell's shtick is that they summoned demons. Like, all the time. Their cities were all squat, black fortress-palaces with extensive underground areas, including at least one summoning chamber. They're basically the eeeeeeevil empire that collapsed and conveniented structured their cultural practices so they would leave a ton of demon-haunted ruins for the PCs to plunder. That's pretty helpful if you're setting a game in the modern Realms, but a bit less useful in the kind of game I want to run.
One idea I had was to give them a more Exalted-style practice of demon summoning. They summon demons because they need workers, and slavery of sentient races is unacceptable. Summoning archons, solars, planatars, or other angelic beings means they're too busy building your squat, black fortress-palaces to go around do-gooding, while every pit fiend who has to haul bricks is one fewer torturing puppies in the Nine Hells. I realize that, in a world with alignment as an objective measure of morality, having an eeeeeeeeeeevil society that is eeeeeeeeeeeeeeevil just to be eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee (well, you get the point) kind of makes sense, but it's boring and leads into the orc baby problem. I greatly prefer it when cultures have a reason for what they do that makes sense at least to someone, even if few people agree with it.
Admittedly, summoning demons for personal power is the kind of thing that wizards do all the time in myth, and FR already has plenty of precedent for countries full of evil wizards, but it'd be a nice twist to meet a country full of demon-summoning archmages who aren't cackling fiends.
Netheril: I already wrote a lot about this in previous entries, so I'll just direct you to those if you want to know about it. (^_^)
There is one thing I didn't mention, though. Netheril has chattel slavery of gnomes for doing basically any mechanical task more complicated than levers and pulleys. Forging armor and weapons, making mechanisms, all that kind of thing. Netheril doesn't actually have very advanced technology, since their magic is so powerful.
Nikerymath: I really need to do something to differentiate all these magical elf paradises from each other.
Vastar: This is on the map. In canon it's an orc kingdom that seems to exist solely to attack Cormanthor, so I might just make it an area of barbarian humanoid (and human) tribes between Cormanthor and Narfell. That makes it a good "wild" area to go looking for trouble in.
Yuirshanyaar: In canon, this is another magical elf paradise, but I've had enough of that. It specifically says it has a high population of green elves (the back-to-nature, live in tents or houses in the trees ones), so I'll make it an arrows in the dark, perilous forest that most people fear to enter. The Yuirshanyaari are almost never seen, and few people trade with them. Settlers into the forest just disappear, or are lost forever. People who go looking for the Yuirshanyaari's villages never find them. The few human villages on its borders tell stories about their children being stolen and changelings left in their place. You know, that kind of thing.
And now, the changes and additions I'm likely to make from elsewhere:
Evermeet: I'm tempted to strip out Evermeet (the magical elf paradise in the western ocean, a straight rip-off of every other magical elf paradise ever) from the setting, both for dramatic tension (the elves don't actually have anywhere they can flee to), and because unless you're running an evil game, there's not much to actual do there. It has the same problem all utopias do--they'd be great places to live, but boring to read about or game in.
The Jagged Cliffs: Originally from Dark Sun, the Jagged Cliffs are a cliff area over a thousand miles long and about 1500 feet high that are inhabited by halflings who know the ancient secrets of bioengineering, or as they call it, "life shaping." I have a soft spot for the whole "organic technology" thing, and I've always wanted to use these in a game. They don't really fit in Dark Sun unless you buy into the backstory (and a lot of people hate it), but the more kitchen-sink FR could hold them. They aren't that weird next to the stuff that's canonically in the setting, anyway.
If I put it off to the southeast, where Mulhorand is on the map, that would help explain why the area around the Sea of Fallen Stars and points west doesn't have much contact with the east--they have to go hundreds or thousands of miles out of their way, either north through icy tundra or far south through steaming jungle, or sail, so the cliffs don't get much traffic and almost no one knows the halflings live there. I can add in the swamp at the bottom and the rising mist, too, to give a further reason why no one wants to climb or even fly down the cliff.
Halfings on life-shaped insectoid mounts, or wearing clingpads to cliff the slick cliffs, or living in houses that look like living coral. Strange dog-like things as companions and guards. Living furniture. It's a great image, especially as a contrast to the more traditional high-fantasy area around the Sea of Fallen Stars. It rewards exploration, kind of like Matera and Patera do (q.v.), and I love putting in weird setting bits and figuring out how they mesh together.
Matera: Matera isn't from the Forgotten Realms specifically--it's actually from Mystara, aka the Known World--but someone did a fan expansion where they made the moon hollow and filled it full of all kinds of neat civilizations like bat people, telepathic pterosaurs who think telepathy is the only true sign of sapience, elemental "desert ghosts" who die in water, a few transplanted (demi)human civilizations, fungal ecology, seas with crystal bottoms where the sun shines up from the floor for part of the 336-hour Materan "night"... I can borrow that. FR has a moon, so I just have to make it hollow. Will the PCs ever get there? Maybe, maybe not. If they do, I have a surprise for them. (^_^)v
Orsinium: Originally from the Elder Scrolls games, but inspired by the Latinate name and by this picture, I think I could do with a hobgoblin empire, inhabited by hobgoblin "citizens" and orc and goblin "allies" as well as some humans and demihumans (and, of course slaves), defended by the superbly-trained and disciplined legions, etc. It would help break the problem in base 2nd edition FR that basically all the nations that aren't in the Underdark are either human or demihuman. Evil humanoids (giants, ogres, orcs, etc.) aren't allowed to have nations, only evil humans can. And honestly, the Roman Empire thought nothing of a ton of stuff we now consider evil, like widespread slavery, so I wouldn't really have to change anything about hobgoblin culture.
I can stick it west of Jhaamdath where Orogoth and Arunduth are at the moment, stretching south and west to the border of Calimshan (which I haven't mentioned because it's too far away to matter at the moment), and probably in a near-permanent state of war with Netheril. Netheril's archwizards maintained their immortality using a spell that required you to kill others, and their favorite targets were the various barbarian humanoid tribes on Netheril's borders (and inside them, but those got wiped out pretty quickly). Some of them tribes were probably foederati of Orsinium, so that provides a good basis for conflict. I just need to make sure the Legions have some way of dealing with a nation whose rulers can create volcanos and shear mountains in half using their spells.
I can probably steal from the Oath of Empire series and make the Orsinian sortiari extremely good at countering and dispelling magic, the better to neutralize all those pesky wizards and bring the battle back to a slog between ground troops, which the Orsinii favor because they're really, really good at it. Maybe make the major legion aquilae radiate dispel magic like paladin holy swords do as well. It's not like there are that many archwizards (one per floating city, so a couple dozen or so) anyway.
It's a great image, though. Rank on rank of hobgoblins in lorica segmentata wielding spathae, with goblin auxilia with pila, hobgoblin alae on horses and orc lupites on dire wolves. Massive, slave-built construction projects. Hobgoblin patricii in togas debating issues in the Senate. SPQO. Hobgoblins and orcs with names like "Felix" and "Gaius" and "Titus." Plus, then I can make the Orsinian language Latin (if you hadn't been able to tell...), and that's a nice twist.
Patera: Like Matera, isn't from FR, but it's so D&D-gonzo that I can't not use it. It's an invisible moon populated by giant sabertoothed-cat riding ninja samurai cat-people and pseudo-Buddhist elephant-people. Fantasy Orientalism, hooooooooo!
On the other hand, I've actually lived in Japan, and I own a copy of Sengoku, so on the offchance that the PCs actually go there, I can do it justice, at least.
[1]: Is that even a word? And since "Mage" is Farsi, wouldn't it be "Thaumocracy" anyway? Hmm...nope, according to wiki, the Greeks stole "Magos" from the Persians. Had they not, it would have been a "Goeocracy." The more you know!
...oh, that's where "Goetic" comes from. >.>
I added a bit more about rangers to the last post I wrote, if you want to go check that out too. :)
And I may add more to this article later, but I'll post if I do. Next entry will be about what the players are supposed to do with all this.
First, the canon countries that are part of the Forgotten Realms:
Well, first first, a map!
Not the best one, but that's the biggest size I can find at the moment. The sea in the upper middle is the Sea of Fallen Stars. Northwest of that is Cormanthor, northwest of Cormanthor is Netheril, and northwest of Netheril is Delzoun. Ammarindar is south of Delzoun. Jhaamdaath is on that plain on the southern arm of the Sea of Fallen Stars. Narfell is to the northeast, Unther and Mulhorand are to the southeast. Evereska is west of Cormanthor and south of Netheril, and Earlann northwest of that, west of Ammarindar and Delzoun.
Cormanthyr: Yes, the forest is Cormanthor, the country is Cormanthyr, and the capital is Cormanthor (emphasis on the last syllable instead of the first). This is played off as the subtleties of the elven language at work, but I think it's more evidence that someone couldn't come up with a good name and just needed an excuse.
Cormanthyr is a magical elf paradise, where they live in harmony with each other and nature and zealously defend it from outsiders. Canonically, it eventually becomes a haven of tolerance before collapsing due to elven dickishness and then getting invaded by a huge horde of goblinoids, after which the elves all fuck off to the west the way elves do.
The game takes place during the more isolationist phase, though, where the elves don't really trade very often with Netheril (because they think Netheril is misusing magic like crazy) or Narfall (because of the demon thing). There is some trade with Jhaamdaath and the other elven realms (q.v.), though. One useful thing that lets me do is start out with local threats. If the players are all elves, I can have them come from the same small village and deal with things like a band of goblins or giant spiders or something that's moved in too close. Being a huge forest ruled by elves, huge portions of it are basically totally uninhabited and wild. The humanoids or monsters there rarely get to close to elven settlements because they don't want to die, but it does sometimes happen. Plus there's millennia of civilization there, so plenty of ruins to go wander around.
Delzoun: I'm throwing Ammarindar in here two because they're right next to each other.
There isn't that much info about Delzoun, other than that the architecture was quintessentially dwarven (1% form, 99% function) and they were under tons of attack from goblinoid tribes pretty much all the time. That's good, because I can make up whatever I want! I don't really know what I want to go here, but at the moment I'm leaning towards having it be the stereotypical dwarf kingdom. After all, if everywhere breaks the stereotype, it's just as ridiculous as if everthing's a cardboard cutout. Somewhere, there's got to be kingdoms of dwarves where they live underground, work hard, play seldom, have renowned craftsmanship and long beards. This is a good place for that.
I just found a fan supplement about Ammarindar, so that gives me a bit more to say about that. Apparently Ammarindar is built right over a dark elf city, so they suffer a lot of attacks from dark elves, and actually had to move to strip mining or open pit mining. It also mentions that Ammarindar actually had some dwarf wizards and wasn't entirely anti-magic like a lot of dwarf communities are. I can use that. Dwarf wizards will do a lot to separate Ammarindar from Delzoun.
Earlann: You've seen one magical elf kingdom in the forest, you've seen them all. This one is smaller and the elves are less arrogant, but that's all that's canon. That does give me a pretty wide range of stuff to do with it, if the players ever go here, but at the moment nothing really springs to mind.
They were allied with Ammarindar, which is a nice touch that breaks the whole "elves and dwarves hate each other because dammit, they just do thing."
Evereska: Evereska is FR's Gondolin expy. Set in a valley among a bunch of hills, hidden to anyone but elves, has a hidden underground path with secret gate to get in, the works. If everyone's an elf, I can use this, otherwise they'd never let anyone get in unless I want to run an epic plot involving its destruction by ripping off the Fall of Gondolin. That could be neat, but it's a long way in the future.
Jhaamdath: Renowned (or reviled, based on how most people felt about the 2nd ed. psionics rules) as the only human nation in Forgotten Realms to ever make extensive use of psionics, Jhaamdaath is ruled by the "bladelords," who are members of the psychic noble families that are the most skilled in combat. They're so well-known for their fighting prowess that the twelve city-states in Jhaamdath are collectively known as the "Cities of the Sword." That's actually a pretty neat bit of imagery, and reminds me a lot of Darkover, which I suspect I'll liberally steal from when portraying Jhaamdath. You can tell the bladelords because they're always the ones with flame-colored hair. :p
Canonically, Jhaamdath lasted a couple thousand years until they started clear-cutting huge portions of Nikerymath forest and killing all the elves they found in those portions, so four (yeah, four) High Mages got together and cast a ritual that smashed all of the Cities of the Sword with a gigantic tidal wave, basically destroying the entire country in a single stroke. Fuckin' elves, man.
I'm including Jhaamdath partially because of the Darkover connections, and partially because it's different. Forgotten Realms is positively littered with magocracies, but a psiocracy[1] is something interesting. Especially if the PCs are all elves (which is looking likely), or even humans from Netheril, they won't have any real cultural context for psionics. Jhaamdath is, to them, what a place like Netheril would be to people from the real world--a nation where people can do inexplicable things that don't fit into their understanding of how the world works. It's nice to have something like that in a kitchen-sink setting like FR.
!Mulhorand: Fantasy Egypt. Literally fantasy Egypt, as in the people were magically kidnapped from Earth and transported to FR to be used as slaves. I don't necessarily mind inspiration, but when you have clerics of Heru-ur and Re and Ptah and Djehuti running around and your kingdom is run by a pharaoh and mummies are buried in pyramids and blah blah, it gets a bit much for me. I don't mind the idea of people displaced from our world, and Earth has enough cultural heritage that you can tell stories for aeons without ever getting into fantasy, but it's not really something I'm looking for in this game.
Unther kind of fits in here, too, since it's fantasy Sumeria, including the gods (Nergal, Inanna, Enlil, Enki, etc.) and locked in eternal struggle with Mulhorand because...because, that's why!
Apparently, they were originally included because in Ed Greenwood's conception of the Forgotten Realms, it was linked to Earth through portals which had since been "forgotten," hence the name. I've heard that TSR de-emphasized this because they were worried about kids crawling around the woods looking for portals and getting hurt, and back during the height of the "D&D is satanic!" days, that would have been the last thing they needed. Anyway, I don't mind portals to other worlds, and even countries that came from elsewhere, but portals to Earth is getting a bit too far into the "Japanese teenager in a magical land" thing for modern geek audiences, and I'd like to avoid that. I don't think Mulhorand or Unther will make the cut.
Narfell: As far as I can tell, Narfell's shtick is that they summoned demons. Like, all the time. Their cities were all squat, black fortress-palaces with extensive underground areas, including at least one summoning chamber. They're basically the eeeeeeevil empire that collapsed and conveniented structured their cultural practices so they would leave a ton of demon-haunted ruins for the PCs to plunder. That's pretty helpful if you're setting a game in the modern Realms, but a bit less useful in the kind of game I want to run.
One idea I had was to give them a more Exalted-style practice of demon summoning. They summon demons because they need workers, and slavery of sentient races is unacceptable. Summoning archons, solars, planatars, or other angelic beings means they're too busy building your squat, black fortress-palaces to go around do-gooding, while every pit fiend who has to haul bricks is one fewer torturing puppies in the Nine Hells. I realize that, in a world with alignment as an objective measure of morality, having an eeeeeeeeeeevil society that is eeeeeeeeeeeeeeevil just to be eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee (well, you get the point) kind of makes sense, but it's boring and leads into the orc baby problem. I greatly prefer it when cultures have a reason for what they do that makes sense at least to someone, even if few people agree with it.
Admittedly, summoning demons for personal power is the kind of thing that wizards do all the time in myth, and FR already has plenty of precedent for countries full of evil wizards, but it'd be a nice twist to meet a country full of demon-summoning archmages who aren't cackling fiends.
Netheril: I already wrote a lot about this in previous entries, so I'll just direct you to those if you want to know about it. (^_^)
There is one thing I didn't mention, though. Netheril has chattel slavery of gnomes for doing basically any mechanical task more complicated than levers and pulleys. Forging armor and weapons, making mechanisms, all that kind of thing. Netheril doesn't actually have very advanced technology, since their magic is so powerful.
Nikerymath: I really need to do something to differentiate all these magical elf paradises from each other.
Vastar: This is on the map. In canon it's an orc kingdom that seems to exist solely to attack Cormanthor, so I might just make it an area of barbarian humanoid (and human) tribes between Cormanthor and Narfell. That makes it a good "wild" area to go looking for trouble in.
Yuirshanyaar: In canon, this is another magical elf paradise, but I've had enough of that. It specifically says it has a high population of green elves (the back-to-nature, live in tents or houses in the trees ones), so I'll make it an arrows in the dark, perilous forest that most people fear to enter. The Yuirshanyaari are almost never seen, and few people trade with them. Settlers into the forest just disappear, or are lost forever. People who go looking for the Yuirshanyaari's villages never find them. The few human villages on its borders tell stories about their children being stolen and changelings left in their place. You know, that kind of thing.
And now, the changes and additions I'm likely to make from elsewhere:
Evermeet: I'm tempted to strip out Evermeet (the magical elf paradise in the western ocean, a straight rip-off of every other magical elf paradise ever) from the setting, both for dramatic tension (the elves don't actually have anywhere they can flee to), and because unless you're running an evil game, there's not much to actual do there. It has the same problem all utopias do--they'd be great places to live, but boring to read about or game in.
The Jagged Cliffs: Originally from Dark Sun, the Jagged Cliffs are a cliff area over a thousand miles long and about 1500 feet high that are inhabited by halflings who know the ancient secrets of bioengineering, or as they call it, "life shaping." I have a soft spot for the whole "organic technology" thing, and I've always wanted to use these in a game. They don't really fit in Dark Sun unless you buy into the backstory (and a lot of people hate it), but the more kitchen-sink FR could hold them. They aren't that weird next to the stuff that's canonically in the setting, anyway.
If I put it off to the southeast, where Mulhorand is on the map, that would help explain why the area around the Sea of Fallen Stars and points west doesn't have much contact with the east--they have to go hundreds or thousands of miles out of their way, either north through icy tundra or far south through steaming jungle, or sail, so the cliffs don't get much traffic and almost no one knows the halflings live there. I can add in the swamp at the bottom and the rising mist, too, to give a further reason why no one wants to climb or even fly down the cliff.
Halfings on life-shaped insectoid mounts, or wearing clingpads to cliff the slick cliffs, or living in houses that look like living coral. Strange dog-like things as companions and guards. Living furniture. It's a great image, especially as a contrast to the more traditional high-fantasy area around the Sea of Fallen Stars. It rewards exploration, kind of like Matera and Patera do (q.v.), and I love putting in weird setting bits and figuring out how they mesh together.
Matera: Matera isn't from the Forgotten Realms specifically--it's actually from Mystara, aka the Known World--but someone did a fan expansion where they made the moon hollow and filled it full of all kinds of neat civilizations like bat people, telepathic pterosaurs who think telepathy is the only true sign of sapience, elemental "desert ghosts" who die in water, a few transplanted (demi)human civilizations, fungal ecology, seas with crystal bottoms where the sun shines up from the floor for part of the 336-hour Materan "night"... I can borrow that. FR has a moon, so I just have to make it hollow. Will the PCs ever get there? Maybe, maybe not. If they do, I have a surprise for them. (^_^)v
Orsinium: Originally from the Elder Scrolls games, but inspired by the Latinate name and by this picture, I think I could do with a hobgoblin empire, inhabited by hobgoblin "citizens" and orc and goblin "allies" as well as some humans and demihumans (and, of course slaves), defended by the superbly-trained and disciplined legions, etc. It would help break the problem in base 2nd edition FR that basically all the nations that aren't in the Underdark are either human or demihuman. Evil humanoids (giants, ogres, orcs, etc.) aren't allowed to have nations, only evil humans can. And honestly, the Roman Empire thought nothing of a ton of stuff we now consider evil, like widespread slavery, so I wouldn't really have to change anything about hobgoblin culture.
I can stick it west of Jhaamdath where Orogoth and Arunduth are at the moment, stretching south and west to the border of Calimshan (which I haven't mentioned because it's too far away to matter at the moment), and probably in a near-permanent state of war with Netheril. Netheril's archwizards maintained their immortality using a spell that required you to kill others, and their favorite targets were the various barbarian humanoid tribes on Netheril's borders (and inside them, but those got wiped out pretty quickly). Some of them tribes were probably foederati of Orsinium, so that provides a good basis for conflict. I just need to make sure the Legions have some way of dealing with a nation whose rulers can create volcanos and shear mountains in half using their spells.
I can probably steal from the Oath of Empire series and make the Orsinian sortiari extremely good at countering and dispelling magic, the better to neutralize all those pesky wizards and bring the battle back to a slog between ground troops, which the Orsinii favor because they're really, really good at it. Maybe make the major legion aquilae radiate dispel magic like paladin holy swords do as well. It's not like there are that many archwizards (one per floating city, so a couple dozen or so) anyway.
It's a great image, though. Rank on rank of hobgoblins in lorica segmentata wielding spathae, with goblin auxilia with pila, hobgoblin alae on horses and orc lupites on dire wolves. Massive, slave-built construction projects. Hobgoblin patricii in togas debating issues in the Senate. SPQO. Hobgoblins and orcs with names like "Felix" and "Gaius" and "Titus." Plus, then I can make the Orsinian language Latin (if you hadn't been able to tell...), and that's a nice twist.
Patera: Like Matera, isn't from FR, but it's so D&D-gonzo that I can't not use it. It's an invisible moon populated by giant sabertoothed-cat riding ninja samurai cat-people and pseudo-Buddhist elephant-people. Fantasy Orientalism, hooooooooo!
On the other hand, I've actually lived in Japan, and I own a copy of Sengoku, so on the offchance that the PCs actually go there, I can do it justice, at least.
[1]: Is that even a word? And since "Mage" is Farsi, wouldn't it be "Thaumocracy" anyway? Hmm...nope, according to wiki, the Greeks stole "Magos" from the Persians. Had they not, it would have been a "Goeocracy." The more you know!
...oh, that's where "Goetic" comes from. >.>
I added a bit more about rangers to the last post I wrote, if you want to go check that out too. :)
And I may add more to this article later, but I'll post if I do. Next entry will be about what the players are supposed to do with all this.
