My Fantasy RPG World, Feedback and Ideas appreciated

Redrawing the Map, Part One

I have much graph paper to play with. I'm working on Scarterra 1.0 right now, the Pangea-like continent.

Once I get this finalized I'm going to go to Scarterra 2.0 (after the First Unmaking) and Scarterra 3.0 (after the Second Unmaking.)

My goal is to break the Pangea-like continent into pieces that would fit back together relatively cleanly making it obvious that the main continents are pieces of a greater, though I do plan to rough up the coastlines a bit with peninsulas and inlets, so the new configuration won't fit together too cleanly.

My graph paper is 26 x 54 squares, but I like simple math and I already determined that ScarAquaTerra is going to be three times as "long" as it is "tall." I like simple math, so I'm allocating 48 squares on the x-axis and 16 squares on the y axis. The equator is going to be "8." The Prime Meridian is going to be 24 which will bisect Mera's Lake on Scarterra 1.0 which is going to be at the dead center of my graph paper.

You'll notice on my earlier sketch that Mera's Lake is actually north of the equator. I'm probably going to change this on mynew map, unless someone provides me with a compelling reason why Mera's lake would gradually migrate north between Scarterra 1.0 and Scarterra 3.0.

Mera's Lake would not have been called "Mera's Lake" during the First Age. It was only during Scarterra 2.0 that people began to associate Mera's Lake with Mera that forcefully. The lake was certainly called something else, but I'm keeping the name Mera's Lake for simplicity.

The continents are probably going to look largely the same. In Scarterra 1.0 Mera's Lake is going to be the dead center. Since Scarterra 1.0 was basically a pastoral paradise to lure mortals into being docile farm animals, to me it makes sense that the land would be fairly symmetrical, aesthetically pleasing, and above all, peaceful and safe...(until Turoch eats you of course).

I promise I'll scan some of my graph paper sketches soonish, but in the meantime I attached some crude facsimiles I made on Microsoft Paint of of Scarterra 1.0.

(if you check this out in the first twenty minutes of me posting this, there are probably technical difficulties with my attachments, because that's how I roll)

Whether I make Mera's Lake a circle or an oval the net result is that my rough sketches end up looking like an eyeball with a tiny pupil to me. Instead of resisting the eye imagery, I plan to lean into it. I'm probably going to name the primordial landmass something eye based instead of Pangea. "Turoch's Eye" or the "Primordial Eye" or "The Great Earthen Eye".

I could just leave the Eyegea as flat rough oval with a lake in the middle forming an isolated pupil, or I could give the pupil an iris. Maybe a mountain or hill range. Maybe a plateau. Maybe a thick forest.

Besides adding an Iris, another option is to make Turoch's Eye "cry." In other words adding major rivers. My first instinct is to bisect the world in fairly close to equally sized quarters. This would lend Scarterra 1.0 looking very to @Lord Agragax of Lunaxoatl's fantasy realm of Escalonia where the land is thematically split between northeast, northwest, southeast, and southwest sections.

Another option I am toying with is what I call "The Beholder Model" Mera's Lake is the primary source of fresh water in the interior BUT there are lots of satellite lakes (which sort of look like smaller eyes) which feed into smaller rivers and streams (which sort of look like eye stalks). Most of these lakes and rivers would be claimed by the sea, dried up, or rerouted on Scarterra 3.0 but they would leave some kind of primordial mark on the land. Among other things, any land that exists where a mighty ancient lake used to be would be saturated with the magical essence of water, so water based magic would be easy there, it would probably rain a lot, and humanoids in the area would manifest water based racial traits.

Since Beholders are nightmarish aberrations in Dungeons and Dragons, I'm tempted to rewrite my history a little bit to make Beholders sort of a primordial rival to the gods. If the original version of Scarterra looked like a bunch of eyeballs, or even just one eye they could use this as justification for their belief that they used to rule the world (or at least were meant to rule the world and denied their rightful prize).



I'm open to suggestions to make Scarterra 1.0 more interesting and more believable. While Scarterra 3.0 is probably going to mostly resemble the first map I made (reposted above), this is not set in stone. It will not hurt my feeling if the new map ends up looking substantially different. I want Scarterra 3.0 to be a logical evolution of Scarterra 1.0.

Since the main force causing Eyegea to break into smaller pieces is because earth elementals are going to war with air, fire, and above all else, water elementals; it is logical that continental fractures occur where the great rivers and lakes are. Unless someone can give me a SCIENCE argument otherwise.

That's not going to be the only determinate of land masses. While the net effect of the First Unmaking is that large portions of land are claimed by the sea, various "marches" of earth elementals will create new mountain ranges and where these mountain ranges hit the sea the mountains become island chains.

I also need to figure out where the most dragon friendly areas of Scarterra 1.0 are because these are the places lucrative First Age ruins are likely to be, though thousands of years of magical chaos (and thousands of years of looters) could move artifacts and relics far from their original locations.



As I work on refining my sketches, what direction do you think I should go with. Is the eyeball a good motiff or should I use something else? I'm sort of operating on the assumption that eyeball is acceptable, but if it's not, let me know.

Should the eyeball have an iris? What about rivers and smaller lakes? Any thoughts on how SCIENCE dictates Eyegea would logically break apart?


Going back to my 16 x 48 grid (768 squares). If I go on a 4,000 x 12,000 mile world, that would make each square a 250 x 250 square. That's roughly as big as the surface area of Mars. If I want to make ScarAquaTerra roughly as big as Earth, than I up the squares to being 500 x 500.

Climate is going to be determined primarily by the y axis (mountains, proximity to oceans and magical nodes of elemental power will also impact climate a little bit). 0 to 2.5 and 13.5 to 16 is going to be where the arctic biome is. 6 to 10 is going to be where the tropical biome is. 2.5 to 6 and 10 to 13.5 is going to be my temperate zones. So 5 squares (32%) of arctic, 4 squares (25%) of tropical, and 7 squares (43%) of temperate. Not in set in stone, but this is a good baseline for now.

Off the edge of the map is going to be about 10-100 miles of snow covered ice vaguely similar to the North Pole. Beyond this about 1-20 miles of the Near Void. The Near Void is miserable, but mortals can survive there for a few days at least without magical assistance. Past this, depending on which magical theoretician or theologian you ask, there is somewhere between a 100 and infinity miles of the Far Void, where a mortal will die in under two minutes and have their soul obliterated in under ten minutes without powerful magic.

My goal is for most of Scarterra's land mass is going to stretch over the temperate zone. Land in the tropical zone is going to be relatively rare. Land in the artic zones is going to be moderately common.


Most of Scaraqua's most habitable territory is going to be in the tropical zone, especially the shallows. Anything ocean that is close to land masses or areas that used to be land during Scarterra 1.0 is going to be fairly shallow, which is going to biased in favor of the tropical zone because the primordial continent of Eyegea was centered around the equator.

Scaraqua doesn't have a lot of habitable temperate waters. They have a fair amount of theoretically habitable arctic shallows, but these are unpopular places to live. The only real reasons Scaraquans normally come here is if they are outcasts or criminals hoping to disappear though a few adventurers may swim here because the polar waters of Scaraqua house most of ScarAquaTerra's remaining relics and treasures left over from the First Age.


We'll see how bored I get counting squares, but my current vision is that Scarterra 1.0 will be about two thirds land and one third water, while Scarterra 3.0 will possess a roughly 1:1 water to land ratio.


Scarterra 2.0 is going to look virtually identical to Scarterra 3.0. The main difference is that Scarterra 2.0 has the continent of Colassia and Scarterra 3.0 has East Colassia and West Colassia. Scarterra 3.0 has a lot more deserts, swamps and other desolate spots where Void Demons blighted the land (or sea floor), but the addition of blighted land doesn't actually reshape the continents much.

 

IIRC they have +1 save against slashing and piercing in D&D.
Edit: wait... it might even have been damage reduction...

And that's one of the points where that damage system makes not a whole lot of sense. ALL swords except those solely meant for piercing (smallswords and the like) can do percussive damage as well, even rapiers.
Bones are not _that_ hard to damage with a sword when there isn't flesh around them protecting them.
And skeletons are light. An adult male human skeleton is only around 10kg heavy. So they can be knocked around easily by sword blows.
A longsword or even a shortsword will do significant damage to a skeleton.

 

It was damage reduction in D&D 3rd edition. In second edition, damage of the suboptimal type was reduced by half, or reduced to one point of damage.

Anyway I use the White Wolf d10 system for D&D10 system

Spoiler: How dice combat works in my game

Basic combat works like this

Attacker rolls Dexterity + Melee (or Archery, or Brawl) to hit his opponent, by rolling a bunch of ten sided side. Dexterity 4, Melee 3, that's seven dice. Usually difficulty 6. A die that comes up as a "6" or better is a "success." A die that comes up with a "1" is a negative success.

The defender may roll defense, if they declared defense they can roll Dexterity + Dodge or Dexterity + Melee (to parry). Every success the defender rolls negates an attackers successes.

If the attacker failed to score any successes or the defender force his successes to zero, the attacks misses.

If the attacker hits, any success in excess of one is added as a bonus die to damage. Then the attacker rolls a bunch of d10s (usually aiming for "6"s or better) based on the weapons damage plus any bonuses.

Then the defender rolls a soak which consists of the dice rating of his army and/or supernatural soak effect. Again the defender negates successes on a one for one basis.

Heroic humans have ten health levels. Upon taking his fourth level of damage, the human starts taking dice penalties. Upon his tenth level of damage he is unconscious. Upon his eleventh level of damage he dies.

Ordinary humans have five health levels, same basic principle though.

Human skeleton warriors and zombies also have five health levels. Again same basic principle, but most undead don't feel any pain so they don't suffer any wounded penalties till their bodies are so mangled that this impairs their movement at which point they are almost dead anyway. So a human's health levels look like this.

Living Human: OK, -1, -1, -3, -5 DEAD
Human Skeleton Warrior: OK, OK, OK, OK, -3 DESTROYED

They both require six levels of damage inflicted on them to be killed, but the living person will rapidly accrue wound penalties and the skeleton won't get penalties till he's on death's door.

Living bones and freshly killed bones are fairly brittle. Calcified bones are really hard. For simplicity, necromancy that animates a skeleton warrior also magically calcifies their bones, even on the freshly dead. Not that it matters a whole lot, the magical process is faster if the bones are already calicified. Freshly dead corpses take twenty minutes to animate rather than ten. The time difference rarely maters though. It's not the soft bones that slow down the spell of a freshly killed corpse it's the residual life energy...that's more detail than we really need.

Anyway, calicified bones. They are hard enough that I justify giving skeleton warriors a three dice soak pool against most bladed weapons with moderate concussive force and a five dice soak pool against piercing weapons with relatively little concussive force. They have a zero dice soak pool against heavy concussive attacks like falls, maces, clubs, and warhammers.

Note, soak pools are relatively rare. Without magical augmentation or artificial armor a living human has no soak against most damage except bashing damage (which is mostly punches and kicks).

I think my system is relatively realistic for skeleton damage. Especially when you consider that skeletons shouldn't be able to move with muscle and sinew.

Yes, significant damage. Mathematically speaking a typical warrior with moderate or above strength, such as Aranil the elf will need to hit a skeleton with a longsword twice to kill it. If they are rolling poorly, maybe three hits. Svetlana the half-orc with club and maxed out Strength stats should be able to one-shot skeletons.

Wimpy Neshik will probably have to hit a skeleton twice with his mace. Three or four times with his blade. Neshik doesn't normally fights. He turtles up and casts support magic for Aranil or Svetlana. I haven't playtested it, but healing magic can be used to smite undead. Neshik's player would probably try that out just for the novelty.

It would probably take three or four arrows to bring a skeleton warrior down unless the attacker got a very good to-hit roll (representing an arrow through the skull).

My rules system is not detailed enough to have characters pushed back from ordinary weapon strikes, but if a player tells me, "I want to throw the skeleton!" or "I want to push the skeleton off that ledge" I make the difficulty much lower to perform the maneuver than it would be against a living opponent.

A lot of my game rules are improvised. If a skeleton were to raise a shield to fend off a blow, I would probably make the skeleton make a saving throw to avoid being knocked down, but it's not formally part of the rules.

Well Jason and the Argonauts were especially strong and skilled warriors.

That and potentially rain shadows.

They tend to make seasonal variation less extreme.

Normally weak, but every once in a while you want to have a tropical jungle hidden in the arctic...

I chose it because our real world continents used to be part of Pangea. It was easy for me to visualize for Scarterra because of this.

Of course, if you go back further, Pangea split up and crashed together multiple times in Earth's history, but I'm ignoring that.

Agreed. Though before Turoch's death, salt didn't exist. Because I have semi-random elemental fonts, an easily bored weather goddess, and a benevolent goddess of fresh water, it's not hard for me to hand wave magical means of water being continuously refreshed.

 

I studied Greek mythology in great depth. Other mythologies less so. I barely dipped my toe in the water on Mesoptamian mythology, but now I'm thinking I need to look into it more.

One thing that both the Mesoptamians and the Ancient Greeks had that I really like but decided I didn't want to use in my setting is to have is successive generations of gods showing refined.

Aphrodite, the love goddess had a sons such as Eros who represented more specific types of love. Eros and Psyche had a daughter who was the goddess of pleasure. It sorts of makes sense that since gods representing sex would create Pleasure.

Likewise, the god of war Ares' two most well-known sons are Phobos and Demos who represent Fear and Terror, by products of war.

I chose not to have this be a mechanic in my cosmology because I want to keep my cast of characters small. I imagine Nine deities is more than enough to ask players and readers to keep track of. Also, if the Nine had children who represented more refined specific concepts of nature and/or civilization, I'd never stop. I'd probably start pushing into triple digit deities in the span of a few weeks.

There are a lot of similarities with Mesopotamian creation myths and Scarterran myths. At least in that we both have cycles where the new gods emerge after killing and essentially eating or reshaping the god that came before.

-The Nine built their empires on Turoch's corpse.
-The Elves built their empires on the Dragons' corpses.
-The Humans built their empires on the Elves' corpses.



Anyway, this video has got me thinking of how Scarterrans or Scaraquans would look to the Nine for values much like the Mesopotamian have an extensive mythology to showcase "What makes a good king."

I guess my setting has nine quarreling frenenemies in a perpetual deadlock. That sort of goes into my preference for having lots of feuding nations rather than having single Rome-like states.

Now I'm hyper aware of imprinting my own values on my cosmology. Mostly this is shielded by me trying to impose D&D mechanics on my cosmology, adventuring is good, the alignments are actually valid ways to describe outlooks, etc.

One view I do hold politically is that one should not get bent out of shape when an evil person does a good deed for selfish motives. I also am not very forgiving of good people doing evil deeds for good motives.

Turoch was a savage tyrant that deserved to be overthrown. The Good and Neutral deities were motivated primarily by altruism but the Evil deities were motivated by self-preservation and greed. Arguably their contributions to the Divine Rebellion were more valuable than the Good ones.

Anyway, back to map scribbling.

 

Btw just so you know:
I blame you personally for the fact that I spent four hours of yesterday looking at D&D rules (5e in that case, and their difference to 3.5e which I know best).

 

I ALMOST played a game of 5th edition a friend of mine was going to run over Skype but every player who wasn't me pulled out. 5th edition seems like a solid system though I know 3.5 edition and 2nd edition very well, so we usually play these legacy systems. Unlike 3rd and 4th edition, D&D's publisher put a lot of effort into giving the fanbase what they wants. Lots of play testing, lots of surveys, lots of reading player feedback.

If you want to waste a few more hours, I can show my rulebook. It's got ~40 Microsoft Word pages of fluff, and ~120 pages of crunch (~30 pages of character creation/advancement, ~4 pages of core rules, ~26 pages of combat, ~15 pages of dramatic rules, ~55 pages of magic rules and spell lists.). That's not counting my creature book which I feel is woefully incomplete at only 183 pages.

It's slowly growing. Every time my players come up with a major situation I haven't anticipated, this usually ends up me adding a few paragraphs to the rule book.

The nice thing about the d10 system is it's easy to improvise. "Pick a difficulty and roll it!" So if Svetlana's player says "I want to dump my barrel of pickled fish towards the invisible guy so he leaves fishy foot prints," I don't need to look up a pre-existing chart for dumping barrels of fish. I can say, "Roll Perception + Alertness difficulty 8 to guess where you should dump the barrel."

In my opinion, the d10 system is far more efficient than D&D's system for actions outside of combat and is somewhat less efficient for combat. Which is fine, because my old group has been playing RPGs for almost 30 years. These days, we prefer to keep combat relatively light.

Comparing apples to apples. Low level characters fight a bunch of goblins in 3.5 and low level character fights a bunch of Goblins in D&D10. Same thing for PCs fight an ankheg or a bunch of street thugs. D&D10 combat takes about 25% longer.

Because D&D10 doesn't just have "miss" or "hit" like D&D10. D&D10 rewards accuracy, so if you roll better than than minimum required to hit, you get to inflict extra damage. The upside is that players feel warm and fuzzy when they roll high. The downside is that because of this, it's not practical to roll your damage and to-hit roll in the same handful of dice. Also, because every die is a d10 that's another reason you cannot roll for two things in the same handful of dice because your dice will get mixed up.

 

After reading through the 5e rules I think I might actually prefer it to my beloved 3.5e rules, because it got streamlined without getting dumbed down it seems.

My main problem with 3.5e was that I DMed a group of a whopping six players. Minimum. The maximum was eight players in one group.
At that point I basically ditched some elements of the system because it was just impossible.

To this day I am very proud that everyone had fun that evening, although that was more than ten years ago and what I mostly remember about it is how frickin' exhausted I was after it.
I eyeballed a lot of stuff in a similar way how it is now officially done in 5e.

Man, I would love to play a session of 5e with 2-4 players, just to get to know it.
I always liked D&D, but since I often focused on telling a story, the 3.5e system was a bit too complex so it sometimes got in the way. But I wanted to have the clarity and _potential_ complexity, just in case I needed it.
All other systems I tried were either too simple and restrictive (4e), too time consuming (The Dark Eye, Pathfinder) to be fun, or required miniatures.

 

It did occur to me recently that if Scaraquans artificially created cultivated pearls for set periods of time, these cultivated pearls would be fairly uniform and interchangeable making them a solid currency.

I could still use my original concept of Scaraquans wearing their money on necklaces and adding or removing pearls from their necklaces and bracelets when making purchases.

 

I added a table of contents to my first post. Mainly for my benefit, but if it helps my faithful readers and fans, that's good too.



I have a small and growing pile of graph paper with new sketches. I don't have a smart phone, I have a dumb phone so I can't just snap a high quality picture, so I cannot post something immediately.

But the real reason is I'm not 100% satisfied with my work. I feel like my continents look like boring blobs with fake looking unrealistic coastlines. That's part of the problem of putting an entire WORLD into 16 by 48 squares.

I guess the best workaround is to use the world wide blobbish continents to establish scale (each square is 250 x 250 miles) and relative position. I can make more detailed and aesthetically pleasing maps of the continents and regions.

A continent map would probably use 25 mile squares and use most of piece of graph paper instead of half of it. Smaller regions could use smaller scales. The Border Barony region is going to roughly 900 miles east to west and about 300 miles north to south.

 

You could also pick a continent or two and add some fjords.

 

Scarterra 1.0 is my simple, perhaps overly simple sketch of Scarterra during the First Age, where Scarterra was one large vaguely oval shaped mega-continent with a large lake in the center making it look like an eyeball.

Scarterra 3.0 is my sketch of what Scarterra looks like after the First and Second Unmaking.

The top and bottom sketches are two slightly different sketches of the same thing. Because my map scale means TWO maps conveniently one page of graph paper

In both cases the equator is at point 8 of the y-axis and the prime merdian is at 24 of the x-axis. I put a four-by-four square in the corner because I was not 100% the graph paper grid would show up with my friend's cheap scanner. It's just for scale. Each little square represents 250 miles. The big square is 1000 x 1000 miles

Here is my original map to compare and contrast with.



I am keeping the names of my islands and continents from the original map.

Northern half of the cylinder is West and East Colassia. South of them east to west you have Lunatus, Umera, Khemarok, and Penarchia.

West Colassia is going to be a hotbed of political bickering between very strong nations. Kantoc, Stahlhiem, Loren, Meckelorn, Uskala, and Swynfaredia. A few smaller nations are tenaciously clinging to life. Especially Fumaya where my PCs are currently dwelling (though not for long! More on that later). This also includes the Border Baronieses sandwiched in the mountains between Stahlheim and Meckelorn. I’m open to adding a few other smaller nations if and when I come up with good concepts. Swynfaredia and Uskala are the trouble makers.

East Colassia has a bunch of tiny human nations on the southern coast, Dark Elves on the northern coast, and mountains and desert in the middle. The human nations are independent but they are bound by mutual defense treaties against the Dark Elves and Uskala (though the latter is in theory only).

Lunatus is the homeland of the Elven Empire. They control most of the islands in their general vicinity and they very weak toeholds on the southern coastline of East Colassia. They lost all their Umeran holdings and are bitter about it.

Umera is where I break out my friend’s Eastern Setting D&D book for ideas. Samurai, ninjas, kappas, kitsune, terracotta golem warriors, etc. I haven’t put a lot of detail into this though they did have a lot of bad history with the Elven Empire.

Khemarok is the smallest continent. They are a Khemra-worshipping theocracy that is loosely based on Ancient Egypt.

Penarchia is a rugged place of mountains, hills, and jagged coastline. Loosely based on Ancient Greece, there are a lot of small nation states with constantly shifting alliances and rivalries.


I may rename West and East Colassia into something different because east and west are relative. If Mera’s Lake is the Prime Meridian that the map is oriented around. If hypothetically, you made the Prime Merdian Lunatus, then West Colassia is subjective East Colassia and visa versa.


Most sailors use Mera’s Lake as the Prime Merdian, except for the Elven Empire who are very narcissistic and insist on making Lunatus the spiritual center of the world rather than Mera’s Lake.


I am not married to this sketch. Nothing is set in stone, even my core principles of map design. I plan to make more sketches at some future date. I am open to seeing what other people suggest I sketch before I make a new set of sketches. I am open to seeing what other people sketch if they are so inclined.

If you make a suggestion though, tell me why you think something should be different, and the answer could be as simple as “it looks better that way” though if you think I should toss out one of my core principles of map design, I want at least 22 words explaining your position.


At the moment, I don’t feel like putting rivers, lakes or tiny islands on this map. That doesn’t mean my world doesn’t have these things. Far from it. It’s just that on a map of this scale, it’s not practical to include them. Barring magical fonts of the elemental force of water, most sources of rivers are going to be from mountain snow melting like in the real world.


Core principles
-Mera’s Lake is the figurative center of the map

-The general world map looks like the Mediterranean with a bunch of land surrounding a central sea.

-If the land masses were pushed together, it would make a fairly uniform looking mega continent

-Just like in the real world, mountain ranges and island chains tend to follow each other linearly. In the real world this is because of plate tectonics. In Scarterra it’s because the primordial earth elementals generally moved in straight lines.

-The map is exactly three times as long east-west as it is wide north-south. This has the net effect of making a fairly uniform looking cylinder when folded into a 3D model.

-In general, the climate gets warmer the closer you get to the equator. The climate gets colder the closer you get to the poles. In general people born near the equator look “fiery”. People born near the poles look “airy”. People born far inland look “earthy” and people born near the coasts look “watery.” Mixed race people are fairly common. Details on page 9 of this thread if you want a recap.


Stuff I’m on the fence about

-Scarterra is 4000 miles from the North Void to the South Void. To circumnavigate the cylinder, one would have to fly or sail 12,000 miles. This makes ScarAquaTerra roughly as large as Mars in terms of surface area. The size of the world is negotiable. Note to make it roughly Earth-sized I would need to make 8,000 x 24,000 miles. I’d prefer not to make the world bigger than Earth barring a very compelling reason.


-My continents are generally long and skinny. I do want most of my land masses to be longer east-west than they are north-south, but there is a little voice in my head telling me my land masses (especially the Colassias) could be fatter north-south.


-The artic seas (far north and far south). Are pretty small. I could make these bigger. This would either require me to give a haircut to my continents, taking a little off the top. Or I could make the arctic seas bigger by pushing the continents towards the equator and Mera’s Lake. Or I could leave the arctic seas as is. And of course there is no rule that I have to be symmetrical. I could have a large southern polar sea and a small northern polar sea or visa versa.

-Connected to the notion of how big the polar seas are going to be, I am on the fence with how many islands are going to be north of the Colassia or south of Umera and Penarchia. I want there to be far more islands closer to the equator than close to the poles but I still could add more islands. While they look nice on a map, I’m not sure what to do with an artic climate island storywise. Such a location is going to be tough for farming and tough for sailing. On top of normal survival concerns, such a location is going to have a lot of Void Demons and monsters. Why would anyone sane visit there, much less live there?


-Marked on this map, Mera’s Lake is only slightly smaller than it used to be, with a radius of about 250 miles (formerly about 300 miles). That makes Mera’s Lake about 200,000 square miles in surface which is considerably larger than Caspian Sea which is the largest lake on real world Earth. It’s even bigger when you consider that ScarAquaTerra is half the size as Earth. I am tempted to make the modern incarnation of Mera’s Lake much smaller, either 50 or 100 miles in radius. Still a healthy size, but not crazy in size. (especially since fresh water lakes don’t normally exist in the middle of the ocean). Maybe even smaller than that.


-Notice on the top map, Umera touches the Void on the south. A long time ago, my first crude map of Scarterra had Umera (which was in southeast in this picture) touching the Void. I also have the option of extending a small part of West and/or East Colassia to touch the Void, or put a connecting island like I have in the bottom sketch. Void Demons can fly and swim, but even still, a continent that touches the Void is going to have noticeably more Void Demon incursions than one that does not.

The top map has an island that touches the north pole. I’m not sure if I want to have a Void touched island or not. Sane living people wouldn’t go there, but such a place would be a nice place for an infernalist to set up a base or for nigh-suicidal demon slayers to set up a base.


-The map lines are pretty smooth. When I get around to making continent maps, I plan to make the coastlines bumper with more inlets and peninsulas. The question is do I want to make these coastal textures relatively mild or fairly extreme? Not that Scarterra 1.0 is very important but I am half tempted to make Scarterra 1.0 surrounded with inlets and peninsulas like medusa’s head or since I’m going with an eye theme for Scarterra 1.0 that would make it more beholder like.


-Look at the top version of Umera and then look at the bottom. The bottom map has an extra island, a sort of mini-me or sliver of Umera. I am not sure which I like better. Also a part of me wants to keep adding fingers or slivers and make Umera kind of look like a hand, claw, or paw. I don’t remember which language I use but I’m 90% I originally chose the name for Umera based on a foreign language word for “finger.” Penarchia was named after “wing,” I’m 99% sure of that.

Story wise, I’m not sure what to do if I give Umera one or more very large islands. Umera is dominated by human cultures loosely based on Feudal Japan and Classical China. I could put some other faux-Asian culture on the islands or I could make the Finger Islands colonies of the Elven Empire. Maybe these islands would be hotly contested with the islands changing ownership over and over again and lots of blood being spilled. Maybe I should put Lizardmen or Snake People here given that any islands north of Umera would probably have a warm climate. Though if I do create a bunch of large tropical islands with reptilian humanoids on them, I need a plausible reason why the numerous humans or elves didn't wipe them out and take their islands. I imagine tropical islands are a land many people would like to own.

Storywise, I have so many options here that it is hard to choose.


-During the Second Age, West Colassia and East Colassia was one large landmass called Colassia. The mega-continent was split in two when a cabal of legendary wizard blasted a Demon Lord to dust. The body of water separating East and West Colassia is known as the Demon Strait. I have no strong opinion on where the Demon Strait should be (west or east of the Prime Merdian) and I have no strong opinion how straight or jagged it should be. Likewise I have no strong opinion how wide or narrow it should be or how uniform or varied it should be. Along those lines, I have no strong opinion on how easy or hard it is to sail through the Demon Strait. I will say that there is relatively few economic incentive to sail through the strait because most of the valuable ports in West and East Colassia are clustered along the southern coast.


-I have the basic idea that mountain ranges and island chains should be roughly linear. I could add more “tectonic lines” or I could move them. So right, now a horse shoe or waxing crescent moon of a tectonic line that connects East Colassia and Penarchia. That doesn’t mean that all the land not marked with a mountain on this map is perfectly flat, it just means the hills are not that impressive on a global scale.

A waning crescent moon or backwards “J” tectonic lines connects West Colassia and Umera. A much less obvious tectonic line connects the east side of West Colassia to Kehmarok. You cannot see it on this map, but the area between them near Mera’s Lake has some Scaraquan mountains connected to this “J” that are almost tall enough to be dry land during low tide. Sailors beware.

As far as Scaraquans are concerned, this mountain range is their best source of mineral resources. Might throw a few volcanos in here for funsies. Also, there might be a few rocks that poke above the water where mermaids like to sun themselves to the delight of the occasional sailor, but these tiny rocks be too small to appear on the world map.

I could also though in some canyons or trenches. Scaraqua is definitely going to have a few trenches somewhere. I’m not sure where to put large areas below sea level on Scarterra, if anywhere.

Given the warm waters, shallow waters, and access to varied resources. Although Scaraqua technically encompasses everything beneath the sea, a majority of Scaraquans live within a thousand miles of Mera’s Lake. I may or may not set up secondary locations farther abroad that also have above average population density under the sea.


-If I choose to add more large mountain ranges, I may be highly tempted to add more dwarf nations. As of right now, Stahlheim and Meckelorn are both in West Colassia. The location of Mondert is negotiable but I’m probably going to stick in the island cluster northwest of Penarchia. That said, there are plenty of creatures I can stick in the mountains that are not dwarves.


-I know Scarterra is going to be cold near the poles and warm near equator. What I’m less certain about is how cold should the polar region and how warm should be the equatorial region. Related question. Is it safe to sail the polar seas north of Colassia or south of Umera and Penarchia? Even if it is safe is it economically viable? What about fishing? Fishermen can use smaller more nimble boats but if there aren’t many fish to catch, why bother?

Along those lines, even if the polar seas are going to be tiny, unless someone gives me a compelling reason to do otherwise, the polar seas are mostly liquid water. Maybe this area freezes solid during the winter months, but it would then thaw out in the summer and be passable (though risky) for boats and ships. There is a layer of permanent ice between ScarAquaTerra and the Void, but the eternal ice is off the edge of this map. Note, if a professional illustrator drew my world map all pretty-like, I would ask him or her to draw a nice snowy frame on the north and south edge of the map for decoration.



So the world is 4000 (sixteen 250-mile squares) miles tall. There is 2000 miles above the equator and 2000 miles below it.

Large temperate zone: 500 miles polar (both sides), 500 miles tropical (250 miles north and south of the equator). 1250 miles of temperate zone both sides of the equator (2500 total).

Small temperate zone. 750 miles polar (both sides), 1000 miles of tropical zone (500 miles north and south of the equator). 750 miles of temperate both sides of the equator (1500 total)

I don’t know which version I like better. Even if I pick a small temperate zone, most Scarterrans will live in the temperate region just because of how the major land masses are laid out. Even if I pick a small tropical one, most Scaraquans would live in the tropical region because that’s where most of the open sea is.

 

Neshik the gnome, Aranil the elf, and Svetlana the half-orc have completed a chapter in my RPG campaign!

So for quite a while, my PCs Neshik and Aranil have been working to take a bite out of crime in the capital of Fumaya, King's Lake.

Neshik and Aranil's players are more cautious. Once Svetlana's player joined, she pulled the group to being less risk averse (that and the group can handle straight up fights now).

Anyway, last session the player characters gave the crime syndicate an embarrassing defeat, but not a crippling one. The triumvirate of Wenham the human stealth fighter, Etch the doppelganger, and Vusnitt the evil gnome was unsure how to handle these powerful adventurers that seemed to come out of nowhere to fight them. They plotted to poison Neshik with a powerful odorless poison that would kill him before he could use his healing powers. Without their magical healer, the other two would be relatively easy to kill with a mundane attack.

Anyway, while Aranil and Neshik were slow and methodical, but they had made a lot of friends and contacts during their initial investigations. One of these warned Neshik that mysterious na'erdowells were seeking a poison nicknamed "gnome bane." Another contact found out where and when Wenham was going to buy some poison.

While they were waiting for the poison buy, they used some more information they dug up. At this point they believed that the Black Hand and Guild of Shadows were separate organizations. Wenham was driven underground and the PCs knew the name of Wenham's less skilled counterpart in the other group, Arakady. Aranil befriended Arkady with free drinks (a favorite tactic) and Arkady is an alcoholic so this was easy. They were able to trick Arkady into saying when he would meet his boss (who of courses was really Etch).

The player characters tailed Arkady to Etch (who was pretending to be one of the two "opposing" crime lords.) Etch figured out that the PCs were nearby but he played dumb. He explained in painstaking detail to Arkady how he should get ready to take a big illegal shipment of necromancy magical items to set bait for the PCs to stop it.



The PCs surprised Etch (and me). Until this point, the PCs never brought in outside muscle but this time they pulled strings to get some town guard that Neshik's priestly superior vetted as trustworthy. Eight red shirts in total.

The crate of necromantic magical items was actually a magical bomb. This killed two red shirts and wounded two.

After the bomb went off, the PCs were jumped by roughly two dozen common thugs (one of them was Etch in disguise) and Wenham while Vusnitt invisibly provided aid (among other things making most the ambushers invisible pre-attack. Etch also hired a mercenary Invoker wizard. Invokers are mages that specialize in blasting things.

When the battle was over. Four redshirts were dead. About a dozen thugs were dead (the soldiers were vengeful that ther friends were killed so they gave very little quarter). Three or four thugs were captured alive. Wenham was dead, Etch was unconscious and captured. Vusnitt and the mercenary Invoker escaped. The game changer is that in both previous encounters with Wenham, he made frequent use of invisibility potions, so this time they came armed with scrolls to counteract invisibility. Vusnitt and the unnamed Invoker may come back as recurring villains later. Maybe not. I never even came up with a detailed background or full stats for the Invoker, I never even named him. These two wizards certainly lost, but they didn't lose much, and they still got paid. They aren't exactly vengeful, and they are pragmatic. Both wizards have made it a point to get as far away from Fumaya as possible.


They looted their captive foes. After paying the surviving soldiers 250 gold pieces each (a year's pay for them) and the families of the dead soldiers 500 gold pieces each. After this, the PCs were roughly 3000 gp richer. They also gained a Bag of Holding, a low level Ring of Protection, 400 gp worth of regents, and about 1000 gp worth of assorted potions. (though they ended drinking about 600 gp of their own potions and scrolls in the battle).

The PCs found out they caught a doppelganger. They found out that Etch the doppelganger was BOTH rival crime lords. Etch wouldn't talk much but they found some of his notes. These notes (and their previous investigations) let the authorities round up a bunch of the lesser criminals although Vusnitt the evil gnome took all the money he accumulated to this point and skipped town. Etch was subjected to a short trial tried by King Henryk himself. Etch was executed for his many crimes.

King Henryk was glad the adventurers helped crush organized crime in his capitol, but he doesn't have much money to reward them, so the PCs got a nice banquet and some medals of heroism. In theory, the PCs can ask the king for a favor later if they are so inclined.

The player characters found some leads on noblemen and women acting naughty, but the players themselves are not especially interested in this kind of adventure, so I'm putting the Fumaya noble house stuff on ice. All my copious notes on Fumaya's noble houses and families are unlikely to ever be used in this RPG campaign, but I'll save it for later just in case.

Given that Neshik likes to go hunting for regents in the wilderness, it's likely the PCs will travel overland through the wilderness very slowly. That means the PCs will probably be away from civilization for months of game time.

Who knows what will happen in Fumaya while the PCs are away? It could get worse, it could get better. At the very least, King Henyrk is not going to be bogged down fighting organized crime in his own backyard, so King Henryk is going to have more resources to deal with his other problems now. On the other hand, King Henyrk's other problems are quite daunting.

The players have communicated that they like the idea I floated before of seeking out a dungeon in the deep wilderness and looking for treasure. So that's what I'm going to plan out now. This recent chapter play tested a lot of social interaction mechanics and a lot of urban setting rules. Now we are going 180 degrees. The PCs are going to trek deep into the wilderness far from civilization, and then dive into a musty dungeon. Less tricking enemies to get drunk in bars, more avoiding traps.

I have lots of options, but I'm likely to make the dungeon filled with assorted undead, unless I come up with some other unified theme for the dungeon. (I'm open to suggestions for interesting dungeons btw, but I am aware that the online D&D community has created hundreds of dungeons I can steal).

I don't know what I'll throw at the PCs after the dungeon, but between the wilderness treks, assorted random encounters, and the dungeon itself, I should have enough material for at least four or five gaming sessions which should take two or three months of real time to complete at the rate we typically gather to play RPGs. I have lots of time to come up with the next chapter, but I'm still open to ideas you guys suggest.

Also, don't forget to provide feedback on my map in the post above!

 

Well I'm probably going to be spending the next couple days with my mom with spotty or no Internet so I'm not going to be dumping much new stuff on this thread this week. So you have a few days before I text dump some random unrelated tangent on Squid people or something similar.

Actually my next planned tangent is whether I want to include nonfictional but extinct mega fauna such as dire wolves, megladon sharks, cave bears, saber tooth tigers, dinosaurs etc or if I should stick with real world animals and classical magical creatures like dragons and unicorns.

I guess I can cover my possibilities now in relatively short word chunks.

-I could not have these megafauna exist at all.
-They could be an extinct remnant from the Age of Dragons and say that nearly all animals were bigger and stronger back then.
-These megafauna could exist in isolated pockets, Dinosaur Island, Mammoth Valley, etc.
-These megafauna could be native to or forced to migrate to the Fae Realm. They would mostly be a danger to mortals traveling to the Fae Realm but a few enterprising Fae might bring individuals into the mortal plane as muscle.
-The megafauna could be native to or forced to migrate to the Meta-Sky. In this case, they would probably be shepherded by the god Korus or his minions.

The main upside of including these megafauna is that they are cool.
The main downside is that they may overcrowd all the creatures I have in my world.

I am leading towards no tilt or a very small tilt. The main drive of the seasons isn't axial title. It's the Void, or the Barrier anyway. The Barrier is constantly being battered down by the Void creating micro-fractures. Every Spring and Summer, Phidas and the rest of the Nine reinforce the Barrier and repair the damage. Winter represents the weakest the Barrier gets. During the Winter, and occasionally the Fall, small holes pop up in the Barrier allowing small numbers of Void Demons to sneak through. That means Demon attacks usually spike during the winter months, but if an especially brainy demon sneaks through, the brainy demon will often order the others nearby to dig their heels in to make a surprise attack during the Summer months.

This is not set in stone, but I'm leaning towards no. My thoughts are that sailing the artic seas is very dangerous in the winter but not impossible for very experienced sailors, fishermen and whalers (or the fantasy equivalent of whalers).

I suppose if there is any permanent ice, it would probably melt in the Summer which would mean there would icebergs to worry about during the warm months. That means it would pretty rough sailing year round.

It does sound like a good idea to have near permanent storm conditions, at least by the rule of cool, but I don't need to use real world weather to justify it. The Void is extremely supernatural, and Nami the patroness of weather is a fickle goddess, so I can use my setting's established lore to justify a wide variety of weather effects.

That works. I would need to come up with how the wizards feed themselves, unless they are undead. My magic system has a lot of room to grow but as of now there are three things I do not want magic to be able to do under any circumstances.

1-Magic cannot make food from nothing
2-Magic cannot resurrect the dead
3-Magic cannot allow teleportation over great distances or any form of mobility that is clearly superior to what real world humans enjoy in the 21st century with cars and planes.

Rules 1 and 3 cannot be broken but they can be bent. Magic can increase crop yields or lengthen the period of time food can be stored. Magic can summon fish or game for easy hunting.

5 dot spell casters can manage overland travel at speeds comparable to modern automobiles or at the very least, 1940s automobiles.

I could make 4th and 5th absolute statements for what magic can not do, but I don't have any ideas at this time. Basically any magic that would utterly twist a medieval agrarian society into something unrecognizable cannot be allowed.

That is a very good idea. There is a downside, but it's a manageable downside. If I make the world almost double the size, I'm going to need to either make all my existing nations bigger or I need to add more nations. It would require me to play around with don jon's medieval demographics calculator some more.

Alternatively I suppose I could make the world more untamed and make most of the extra space "Here There Be Monsters" territory.

Though I guess that's not much of a downside because I derive enjoyment out of figuring out those things though if I keep re-engineering the meta-setting I will keep procrastinating writing actual stories with characters and arcs.