My Fantasy RPG World, Feedback and Ideas appreciated

I continue overhauling Scarterra's economy

I am reasonable satisfied with my revisions to my old article:

How much money do Scarterrans make? Where I go into the weeds to figure out how much income an unskilled laborer makes in a day and how much a ●●●●● Craftsmen with a rare skill makes in a day and every permutation in between.

A new article I made, covers expenses Cost of living at different lifestyles.

A great many fantasy world use the system of

One gold coin = 10 silver coins = 100 copper coins.

Scarterra does as well. I am not changing this. I have recently used the Purple Cow of Death to deflate Scarterra's economy by a factor of ten. In other words, copper pieces now buy what silver pieces used to buy Silver pieces now buy what gold pieces used to buy. Gold is now a super currency that generally only wealthy people trade in.

So a common laborer used to make two silver pieces a day which used to be barely enough to buy basic food and shelter for a day. Now he makes two copper pieces a day which now is enough to buy basic food and shelter for a day.

It also means that a basic magic sword that once cost 500 gold pieces, now costs 50 gold pieces.

Fortunately, I didn't have to update too many magic item articles because I usually measured costs in drams of reagents. The price of a dram has changed from one gold to one silver, but the drams needed to make a +1 die magic armor is still 300.

Why did I go through the trouble of updating the costs in every article I made in order to deflate my economy. I accomplished four things:

1) There were so few things that cost a copper piece before, that player characters treated copper almost like garbage. Now this is not a problem.
2) Characters no longer have to be weighed down by their coins in order to buy nice things.
3) This is relatively close to the buying power of silver and gold coins in real world history.
4) This differentiates Scarterra from other fantasy worlds.

I am slowly piecing together a detailed catalog of how much stuff costs in Scarterra, as I make the catalog, I have three articles for a point of reference, "I'd buy THAT for a _____!"


I'd buy THAT for a copper piece! WIP

-A hot meal on the road including a bit of common meat or fish with fresh bread, noodles or fried rice and some kind of seasonal fruit or vegetable, seasoned with common herbs.
-two "nines" of chicken eggs (18)
-a duck
-two flint and steel fire starters
-three hour alchemist's torch
-one crossbow bolt or two arrows


I'd buy THAT for a silver piece! WIP

-a healthy adult goat
-a dram of reagents
-a dagger or knife
-a woodsmen axe

I'd buy THAT for a gold piece! WIP

-A sturdy oxen
-a pound of beeswax
-a short sword or cutlass
-a one handed battle axe
-a morning star
-a halberd


The daunting task ahead of me is to figure out how much money landed nobility such as counts, dukes, and kings make in a year, and how much tax money they can realistically pull from one peasant, one burgher, and one vassal.

On the reverse side, how many soldiers, servants, and clever advisors can a nobleman afford to keep?

I do know that soldiers on campaign in distant lands generally cost more money than soldiers on retainer at home. Sun Tzu's Art of War stated that it takes twenty people at home to support one soldier in the field, and this rough ballpark seemed to hold up until the introduction of reliable artillery made this number shoot up.

 

I just 34,000 words. They haven't updated the leaderboard since I was at 23,000, so I don't know where I stand. I have obviously not been putting ALL my Worldember articles here, just the ones I am most proud of. If you are curious, my Worldember 2023 competition page is here.

This next link advances kalazotz as a whole and organically evolved out of the RPG campaign I'm running. I don't usually like the "Document" template in World Anvil, but the muses pushed me to make this entry for the Document category.

The Proclamation of Welcoming to the Kalazotz

 

Make new friends, but keep the old

I have been binge writing a lot of new stuff, but sometimes I am prompted by what I'm writing now to revise or add on old stuff.

A long time ago, I was discussing how mineral ores in Scarterra come to be and @pendrake gave me this lovely drawing.



I wrote this article about the concept.

Because I have recently written a lot of articles about specific mines, I have expanded this article a little bit.

A "hot mine" looks like the picture above. A "cold mine" is basically like a real world mine. There are also "luke warm". They are cold most of the time but erupt with hot metal every couple decades or once a century, give or take.

In many cases, the label of a "luke warm" is wishful thinking because the owner is hoping to receive a new influx of easy riches, though when a lukewarm mine turns hot you get a nasty earthquake in the short term.

I wrote about bonecracker eggs, laid by heavily domesticated pterradacyls.



After several tries and me changing the wording of my requests, I got an AI result I'm satisfied with, bonecrackers has a new header image.

 

Inspired by this utterly by this utterly silly video



I have made my own humble article on Scarterran rabbits.


rabbits and hares

Inspired by Runesmith's video, I am pondering a crazy Scarterran legend about rabbits that no one believes but people love to tell but nothing comes to mind yet.

Note, there is a surprising amount of real world medieval art depicting very violent rabbits.

 

When I name place, if it's a political headquarters, I frequently name it after the current ruler or the first ruler. If it is ethnically unique, I'll name the place after the people who live there.

The rest of the time, I usually name a place after a distinct landmark. This led me coming up with the idea of "What if this place had purple trees" and at lot of tangential ideas spun off from that and I got some lovely AI art to go with it.





And here is what the ruler of the Duchy of Amethysts wears.




I submitted amethyst trees as my entry for the species template on Worldember.

 

As far as I can Midjourney is the best AI program around that isn't super expensive.

Midjourney has some blockers on terms allowed. They have blockers on nudity, which I'm okay with. Aesthetically, I'm okay with tasteful nudity, but I don't trust AI to produce it, and I don't really need it for Scarterra.

I'm getting better at coaxing Midjourney AI to do what I want, but I hit something of a wall.

I have a lot of articles where I cover a period of political assassination and Byzantine politics in broad strokes because Scarterra has a lot of that. Rather than make specific pictures of every specific situation I was hoping to make a symbolic representation such as a blood stained dagger or a crown sitting on a pool of blood to represent Byzantine politics in the abstract.

But apparently, any text request I make that includes "blood" is automatically shut down, but piles of human skulls are apparently okay.

But I have been writing a lot of articles for individual territories controlled by the Kingdom Swynfaredia, the institutional villain of my RPG campaign and their four ruling houses were each founded by a dragon. Now I good approximation of each dragon's portrait and/or standard. I am not happy with any of their eyes, but perfection is the enemy of the good.



Gorisonad the Wise, House Gorisonad has a personal grudge against my protagonist.

Numaness the Mystic. House Numaness is the house the royal family is, so technically they are the proximate cause of my protagonist's problems. This one was created by Worldspinner, not Midjourney. I might try to make a Numaness portrait on Midjourney later but I like how this combines a dragon icon with the Swynfaredian national coat of arms.



Kovenoth the Builder. House Kovenoth is one of the major houses having problems. They sort of organically evolved into a house of bumblers. Even if I stat them out as competent characters, Kovenoth NPCs tend to roll very badly at critical and often amusing moments. At least their uniforms are pretty, my friend made this with Hero Forge.





Then we got Fremiss the Vibrant, House Fremiss is currently split into Fremiss-Angharad, Fremiss-Bryallan, and Fremiss-Caedwin.

As of yet, there haven't been any important Fremiss NPCs in my campaign. There are a lot of Fremiss-Angharads that are nominally allied with my protagonist's enemies and there are a lot of Fremiss-Caedwins that are nominally against my protagonist's enemies, so the potential is there.

I just am posting this it made me feel warm and fuzzy seeing all four dragons' likenesses in the attached article section of the southeast region of Swynfaredia.

I'm sure I have graphic design and layout aspects I can improve on still, but I came a long way from my website's beginnings. I don't post mere walls of texts anymore.

I am currently putting out feelers to see if I can get an artist to make suitable illustrations of the Nine for me.

 

I wrote a lot of small articles for this Worldember, but I have been working on this article summarizing many aspects of my world building into one comprehensive article.

I put in lots of visuals so it's not just a solid wall of text.

How ordinary Mortals Worship the Nine

I like to say that "perfection is the enemy of the good" but this article is intended to be a tent pole article for Scarterra, so I want it to be as close to perfect as possible.

 

Worldember is winding down. I didn't get anywhere near 100,000 (I had more adult things to do this month than previous months) but I'm still among the top posters, and I think my overall quality is higher.

The contest wraps up in about 48 hours but I'm concerned with last minute edits on submissions than I am with frantically upping my word count. Plus, tomorrow is my birth day and I intended to take it easy.

I'm editing some pieces for special categories now. I'm more interested with using the categories to draw eyeballs and subscribers to my webpage than I am with the actual prizes.

Why names that start with "D" are politically charged in Swynfaredia At six likes, this is one of my best received articles ever and certainly the best received article this Worldember.

Sir Pie Eater for the character category.

Potionomics for the generic category

Tapukeah Nicola Memorial Temple for building category

Order of Nicola for organization category

Tapukeah for title category

Proclamation of Welcoming for the Kalazotz for document category

Amethyst Trees for species category

County of Klarica for settlement category

Satyr Footwear for technology category

Crown Time Drain for condition category

Grey Forest Gilgren Kobolds for ethnicity category

Last year, there was a 10 category limit. I didn't see a similar rule this year, but I want to double check. If there is one, I have to drop one of these. Probably the building entry, it's not my strongest article and that category has a HUGE number of submissions from other people.

I might try another category or two if there is no limit.

 

Here's my last commissioned art from 2023, a tengku vulture named Lartup. Lartup was actually an entry from World Anvil's Spooktober 2023 event way back in October.

Big lag time, but Lartup kind of grew on me on a villain, and I figured as long as long Zeta Gardner was creating seven good looking upstanding members of tengku society, I figured I could run with one dreg from tengku society.

Now Lartup's portrait gets to grace the header of his own article, but the article on vulturism and the general article on Cannibal Sickness.

I've looked for other fantasy artist, but I haven't found anyone as talented as Zeta Gardner is who is currently taking independent commissions and not charging an arm and a leg. And Zeta is happy to to make small adjustments and corrections and seems to be okay with reading blocks of Scarterra lore.

I guess he is the official illustrator of Scarterra for the time being. If I ever publish anything on Scarterra, I'm going to have to have pay him more money and I'm okay with that.

He has begun the noble endeavor of making portraits for the Nine themselves.

 

I've been having some fun with Midjourney. It's very good at making goblins.

Onk, goblin wise woman, only has one quote in an article so far but her picture turned out so well I want to work her commentary in more.



Here's a pretty badass looking goblin warrior.



A plurality of Scarterran humans have either light or dark brown skin and that is relatively easy to produce with Midjourney, but more unnatural skin tones are harder. It seems to have no problem making blue skinned humans but it cannot seem to do grey and that is the second most common in Scarterra.

Anyway. AI art leans heavily towards attractive people. I find if I use no descriptors it will default towards very attractive people. If I use descriptors like "attractive" or "beautiful" it will be unnecessary sexual.

I already said that Queen Janah Wiern was famously beautiful and it worked out. It did take me several tries and rewordings to get her to look like what I wanted. Often it would give me auburn hair or brown skin, not both. Often she was showing too much skin for royalty. Often her crown was either missing or too garish.



No wonder her evil younger sister is jealous of her and not just because she got to marry the king. (I have yet to get a AI result for King Henryk that I like).

This is what the sister Felijca Wiern looks like in the Hero Forge medium. My friend made the portrait after he thwarted her evil scheme and got her banished from the realm.

 

Here is Felijca and Janah's somewhat dim brother Lord Bohdan Wiern. Heir apparent to the Duchy of Wiern.



Here is the smarter but less trustworthy brother who not being in line to inherit his title managed to finagle rulership of a Border Barony (with PC assistance)



And here is the duke who sired all these Wierns.



The next guy is NOT a Wiern. He is the young Duke Simba Vern Palbuc who recently inherited the ducal title after his father's unexpected hunting accident. But don't worthy, he is being advised by his trustworthy uncle.

I wanted a teenaged duke and Midjourney gave me a teen hearth throb. His duchy has lots of forest and he was born under Korus' zodiac sign so the falling leaf background is pretty badass.

 

I'm still working on heraldry for the Swynfaredian houses. I have since decided that imperfect heraldry is better than no heraldry but I had really good luck recently after a couple tries with AI getting almost exactly what I want.

Just a recap that the Swynfaredian houses were founded by four dragons that liked sleeping with humans and creating half-dragon offspring who became the nobility of a new nation.

The four founding dragons, ideally in the finished form, their heraldry will be a large stately dragon. It is difficult to make a full dragon that isn't full of gaping flaws so I'm settling with headshots. If I could afford to have professional artists do this, I would want the four major houses to have full body dragon shots showing their limbs, claws, heads, tails, wings, and accoutrements.

By law the lesser houses of Swynfaredian get incomplete dragons. Two or three body parts at most and the minor houses or bloodlines get one body part.

House Gorisonad is the main villain. The house is 900 years old and has well over a hundred living sorcery wielding members. Ideally I would want a full body stately gray dragon holding a book and surrounded by other symbols of wisdom.



House Gruffyl is a much smaller house but it has a personal tie to the main hero. About 200 years ago, a half dragon marched into Swynfaredia and demanded a seat at the table. He got let in because they were pretty desperate for fresh dragon blood. Here is the portrait my friend made.



I figured Gruffyl was most proud of his face and wings so his heraldry would only show that. Notice that his left eye and right eye don't match. Even as his descendants have mostly reverted back to full human, a great many of them have heterochromia. I could not figure out a way to phrase that so not as to confuse the AI program so I drew that in by hand fairly crudely but it is still one of the best AI dragons I've gotten since.

 

So I am a big fan of World Anvil's family tree feature. It's one thing to have a character get remarried after their spouse dies but more than a few of my characters cheat on their spouses, especially in Swynfaredia which use Welsh as a base for names.

The Welsh word for anonymous is "anhysbys" I can't pronounce that so I created Lady Anhylwen and Lord Anhylron as a stand-in for mystery bastard parents.

I noticed many female Welsh names end in "wen" and many male names end in "ron"

In any event, Lady Anhylwen and Lord Anhylron now have official portraits!





Some things are easier to do with AI art programs than others. It hit my description example, great level of detail.

 

I've been poking around my older articles seeing if I can spruce them up with some artwork and I had so much fun producing Twig Blight art that I updated and expanded the original article.

The pictures are good but they don't show scale very well. They are usually three feet tall and attack in swarms. But consider these large pictures a "gnome's eye view".

 

The main World Anvil events are in July and December but they have little writing events pretty much every month. February 2024 is "Cabinet of Curiosities" where authors are encouraged to write a bunch of articles using the item article template based on 21 one-word prompts. I've written five thus far, each paired with lovely AI art. Five is more than enough to get the participation badge, but I'll probably create a few more because this is fun.

Prompt: "Music", Satyr Clop Dancing Floors, (stage prop)

Prompt: "Sticky", Rowraek jelly packs (stage prop)


Rowraek the satyr alchemist is a new character I created two days ago. While other alchemists made weapons, medicines, and poisons, Rowraek expanded the horizons of non-magical stagecraft. He invented portable clop dancing floors and Rowraek jelly packs. He doesn't have a portrait yet, but I plan to remedy this eventually.

Prompt: "Light" Faux Torches (common magical item)

Prompt: "Swift", Swift Shoes (uncommon magical item)

Prompt: "Pointy" Spear of Mordock (unique magical item)


I wrote a note in passing in my RPG campaign about a Kovenoth Countess selling Kovenoth heirloom magical items for money to pay her debts (not illegal but controversial) just as a flavor element, but my buddy is concocting a plan to quietly steal the Kovenoth and sell the items back to Kovenoth for non-monetary political favors so I had to specify what heirlooms were stolen. So I thought I might as well knock out a prompt for the Cabinet of Curiosities in the process.

Prompt: "Proud", Ceron's Cloak (unique magical item).

I also wrote a backstory for the lady who sold the cloak, Countess Erian ap Kovenoth III

 

I wrote some more prompts. So ten in total for Scarterra and one for my World Anvil Lustria page.



Everytool, benign common magical item. I think it's cool, but the players haven't used their Everytool even once to my recollection. Prompt "Memories"

Prison Lantern, horrifying and rare magical item. Prompt "Sentient"

Rowraek Dragons, a somewhat dangerous children's toy/stage prop. Prompt "Weak"

Bracers of Throwing, magical item that enhances thrown weapons. Because I wanted a villainess that was good at throwing knives. Prompt "Luck"

Bracers of Shielding, magical item that summons floating shields, aka the Shield spell. Not the most exciting thing I came up with, but the players are fond of using this item. Prompt "Protection"

Feather Amulet, Pretty utilitarian magical item. Prompt "Soft"

 

Kalazotz seem to be a fan favorite here on Lustria-Online, or at least a @Warden favorite. My kalazotz related articles on World Anvil tend to get more views and likes than my average articles, so I can assume that they have some universal appeal beyond L-O.

That's why I as I'm putting together a full RPG book for Scarterra d10, I now included kalazotz as an official PC race list.

The official list is now dwarves, elves, half elves, gnomes, humans, kalazotz, satyrs, and tengku.

Half-orcs got removed from the standard PC races list and moved to "Non-Standard PC list" (which is huge and will continue to grow).

In my main RPG Campaign, Torches in the Twilight, Kormatin the protagonist, hired some Kalazotz to run messages for him during a frontier military campaign.

It worked really well, so Kormatin's liege, King Henryk of Fumaya. invited the kalazotz to serve him as messengers offering them good pay. About two dozen bold and enterprising kalazotz took up his offer and began running messages between the king and his vassals.

When King Henryk's enemies hired around 50 camazotz mercenaries to kill the kalazotz, Kormatin and the king's rangers brutally murdered about 20 camazotz of them and spooked the rest into leaving and never returning. The King then issued a formal proclamation of welcoming, listed below.

The fact that the king's men killed a bunch of hostile camazotz proved that the king back up his word. Now about four dozen more kalazotz are coming to Fumaya and the king is pleased. He wouldn't mind a thousand kalazotz. The first wave of kalazot immigrants are also pleased. The first wave of immigrants is mostly happy that the second wave of immigrants includes many single females.

Right now the first two dozen kalazotz have a converted warehouse near the wharf as their home. In their makeshift home, they can hang upside in the rafters a window-less building during the daylight hours.

Now I need to figure out what an emerging kalazotz settlement would look like. I'm not sure if it would make more sense to set up a rural village or create a district in the capital. The king is happy to happy to have them, but not all of his subjects are happy to see a growing influx of gross looking bat people.

I figure every one of the initial kalazotz immigrants are willing and eager to be messenger bats. I figure only some of the second wave of immigrants are going to be messengers. Most of them are going to be support: cooks, weavers, a priest or priestess, etc.

Now I need to figure how a settlement of kalazotz would naturally evolve within human lands.

The king would want them nearby so he can easily summon messengers.

The kalazotz are content with darkness and quiet. They wouldn't mind space and privacy from the humans. They haven't forgotten that their last attempt to live among humans en masse didn't go well.

The general human population don't want to be displaced from their home for "some winged little monsters" and would probably prefer them to be out of sight though the staunch Mera worshipers are probably happy to welcome kalazotz due to their shared principle goddess and the fact that humans and kalazotz living in harmony would be a living embodiment of Mera's ideals.

I got a lot of options. Rural village, big city ghetto, abandoned mine, ancient catacombs, tree house cluster.

 

I created a minor dwarf NPC named Hallmar Snowview for my Torches in the Twilight campaign to serve as a font of information for the heroes.

Meckelorn has about 100 dwarf clans. I don't plan to detail all the clans, the idea if a player (or Game Master) wants to homebrew a dwarf clan of their own, they can.

I went overboard and gave a very detailed article for Clan Snowview and I had a lot of fun doing it. Now I have detailed eight of the 100ish clans.

I wanted to create a pro-Zarthus dwarf clan, but I determined everything else with a randomizer I made for just this very occasion.

My randomizer said the clan is especially proud of "their great wealth" and the clan especially shamed by "their lack of wealth". A lesser man would have rerolled but not I.

So I created a dwarf clan that is good at making money but is not good at holding on to it. Which dovetails nicely into the Zarthus thing since Zarthus' chief rival among the Nine is the god of commerce.

I also randomized the clan name "Snowview" via this third party website, so I made a backstory for what the clan has to do with snow.

I already had art images for large piles of coin, but I wanted to create an art image for a lonely copper coin lying in the dirt and by dumb luck...the AI made a coin with a snowflake on it!

The art is very good for this article but you'll have to click on the article link to see it.

 

Long ago, I named the scrappy nation that is main setting for my first Scarterran campaign was named Fumaya. That was a loooong time ago, I do not remember how or why I came up with "Fumaya"

Now I have deployed the Purple Cow to retcon a reason. meet the barbarian hero, Fumaya the Half Elf.

 

I revamped the ethnicity articles for the two human societies that my stories revolve the most with a lot of detail on everything from food, fashion, class differences, religious customs, etc.
Fumayan humans
Swynfaredian humans

And the two most player character friendly elven cultures with a fair number of pictures.
Wood Elves
Grey Elves
My sense of completionism will drive me to write up dark elves eventually. I'm not exactly sure what to do for dark elf culture. They are defined by their magic wielding elite and slave owning upper class. Most dark elves aren't magic users and don't own slaves. I have given very little thought on to what they do.