[Proposal] The Transitive Isles

Graf said:

Sorry for my slow response on this... I like the names. I'm struggling to get them into this stupid chart.

I think we have plenty of names for now.

Here's my take:

• I'd like gender to be somewhat flexible...
• Bacarte is really culturally similar to Daunton in religious terms... they're very close to each other, and I see the hobgoblins as being very interested in avoiding overt trouble.

On the second point I took your names for Daunton and made them the "savage" names.
Shifters, savage humanoids will use then.

Is there supposed to be a connection with Hzaka and the Imperium... are they survivors from the sundering minor?
(just curious about your thought process...)

[d]--[/d]
Added a section on life and death to try to foreground our "raising" position. The text is poor...

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Flexible deity genders are fine by me. They're deities, they can be whatever they want.

I'm fine with Bacarte using Dauntonian deity names and the Barcatan names I'd created being used for savage humanoids.

As for the Imperium / Hzaka similarity, aren't they both on the old continent of Allaria? I figured the Hzaka "copied" the Imperium to an extent, in an attempt to seem more civilized.

The section on Lauto allowed Raise Dead works for me.

Graf said:

garyh, I changed Neptari to Netari.... I couldn't get past the similarity to Neptune (which would be fine if it were the Imperium and the Imperium were based on the roman names but... anyway, changed it)

OK, so we need to fold Binder Fred's second set of ideas in, but with the completion of

Languages
Nova Imperium
a new region: Mykonos' Sanctuary

We're basically done. I mean... people need to weigh in on the current version of the regional benefits (which I'm looking forward to like having my toenails pulled with pliers) and it desperately needs to be proofread.... but....

Anyway. Except for incorporating Binder Fred's stuff we're done.

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Netari isn't a huge deal (in fact, the inclusion of "net" in the name promotes an aquatic feel). And yeah, I know the Imperium has Greek-ish names and Daunton has Roman-ish names. If we're keeping the "Roman" Imperium theme strictly, then maybe they should get the Roman-ish names. But I didn't feel like we needed to be that stuck to the analogy. I was really just trying to play with the "these are the same gods with different names" idea, which is obviously most apparent in the real world with Greece/Rome.

Thoughts on the languages... normally, I really like making languages more detailed. With this, we need to make sure we don't shortchange players by making so many languages knowing one isn't likely to ever come up. My thoughts:

- Draconic doesn't list dragonborn.
- I think we should keep language names the same as the PHB to avoid confusion if possible (use "Elven" instead of "Eladrin")
- There are 10 languages in the PHB. We shouldn't have any more than that or we risk making each language less useful, and all of ours should match up roughly with the PHB languages in terms of frequency of use. The ten PHB languages include PC race staples of common, draconic, elven, and dwarven, "monster" race languages of deep speech, giant, and goblin, and the "planar" languages of primordial, abyssal, and supernal (with some monsters speaking those).
- We should make a key, so that if any languages are changed, you can see what L4E languages your character knows based on the default PHB languages (Common = Allarian, Goblin = Hzakan, etc.).
- Finally, if a region has a prevelant language, perhaps knowing that language should be a regional benifit. Orcs normally know common and giant, but orcs from Hzaka also know goblin, due to the hobgoblin rulers using it as an official language, for example. Native goblin speakers would know the language of one of the other Hzakan races, instead.

The more I think about it, the more I think not messing with the languages (outside maybe the regional idea) might be best. Much simpler, and I'm not sure what we gain by changing a bunch of stuff in making it harder for PC's to talk to each other (languages for the Valley of Bone and such).

Mykonos and Nova Imperium look good.

As for regional benefits, Jade and Bone still seem off to me. My suggestions:

Jade - +1 insight, and +5 to saves vs powers with the shadow keyword (similar to the halfling "Bold" feature). Okay, so there doesn't appear to be a shadow keyword. Maybe necrotic, then?

Bone - +1 endurance, and +4 to religion checks to identify undead (more likely to be useful than diplomacy with undead, but not a huge benefit. Still situational).

Graf said:

I think that I like the idea of sunken cities, as well as the shifting seas being
1. apparently different in different places
2. hard to evaluate in an objective fashion

So some places it seems like the "floating seas" (i.e. great columns that go down for as far as anyone has dared to try to go); others have shallower near oceans. People who go down sometimes find rock, and sometimes find great submerged cities (and sunken isles) or immense creatures* whose backs are made of stone and whose blood is lava; other places you can't get down very fall before you "fall" into strange elemental realms of water, or worse.

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Design philosophies will vary, of course. My feeling is that a setting should provide a general framework even (especially?) for its more chaotic building blocks -- and few can question the centrality of the Sea itself here. I do therefore think the Sea needs a firm coat of paint, even if all it encloses is chaos, so to speak. And, actually, the Floating Sea idea can provide all of the things you list above if we incorporate into it the idea of Ethereal Storms (which you just sparked (LOVE this sort of thing, by the way ):

ETHEREAL STORMS : The interface between true ethereal "matter" and "ordinary" sea water is far from a quiet place. That assemblage is a state which should not exist, an unstable thing that must be perpetually enforced (hence the islands themselves)! The contact surface slowly roils, boils up, thins or thickens like a giant underwater sea. At what depth does
the interface begins here today? Is the shallow reef you explored last week there below your swimming feet or do you hover over infinite depths instead, ready to swallow you up if you should prove foolish enough to dive down? Or is the interface high today, the ethereal thin? Does it rise towards you as we speak, a world of teeth swimming right on the other side?

The sunken cities have plenty of place to exist in the shallows that surround to varying extent the main isles (with the occasional change of height inherent in the Floating Sea concept, they'd pretty much *have* to be sunken cities under there somewhere . "Shallow" for me means 200m or less, i.e. the photic zone where the light of the sun can still be seen. To compare, that's the average maximum depth of the continental shelves in our own world. If you want cities in the eternal dark, you can always add another, deeper, "ring" of land around that island (i.e. widen/ bulge/overhang the column deeper down)...

Did I forget anything?

Anyway, in short I think with this you have a strong, self-consistant concept that still allows DMs to do pretty much everything they like. One rule though, for flavor : "Sea gates are not free standing portals but take instead the shape of progressive change over distance. Your character could, for example, sink into darker and ever murkier waters, penetrating the ethereal murk, after a single or a thousand stroke the taste of water could then return, except not salt this time (a lake?); then your head breaks the surface -- even though you're *sure* you've been swimming down all this time..."

Binder Fred, hope I'm not holding you guys back from your lauch date.

Personally I think that

1. The setting is about as "done" as I want to make it. I can't think of anything I want to develop more before playing.
2. the whole "lipstick on a pig" thing. It is what it is. If people don't like it now more editing and minor tweaks aren't going to change anyone's opinion.

ps my response above was solely dire ted to cov regarding starting voting. Not meant to cut off ideas/brainstorming (which I also love )

Breifly, (holding sick baby while typing...)
BF the issue with locking it down in this setting is that the odds are good that mNy/most dms won't really grok something complex (and/or they will decide they dislike it and ignore/change it). So if we say "it works like this" I'm not really sure we get much out of it.
Plus a more scientific (or insufficnetly scientific) suggestion will invariably put off someone.

Inot disagreeing with your points; I think I'm just fixated on a different issue.

Gary,

The location of the imperium is not defined. But I didnt see them on allaria. I really see them as being (from the stand point of daunton) off in space somewhere. With that portal closed there is no way to get back there...

I'm bilingual and I learned my second language late in life so I freely admit to being very simulationist. Your point about language communication among pcs is well made and well supported. I agree we need a matrix and should include "free" lanuages in the regional benefits to insure people can communicate.

I agree that the regional benefits need improvement. I stand by my arguement to cov that
1. There needs to be a system that clearly enforces some degree of parity between the benefits.

I think giving +5 to saves vs x effect is just much too powerful. If we do that for one region everyone else needs a powerup.

Graf said:

Gary,

The location of the imperium is not defined. But I didnt see them on allaria. I really see them as being (from the stand point of daunton) off in space somewhere. With that portal closed there is no way to get back there...

I'm bilingual and I learned my second language late in life so I freely admit to being very simulationist. Your point about language communication among pcs is well made and well supported. I agree we need a matrix and should include "free" lanuages in the regional benefits to insure people can communicate.

I agree that the regional benefits need improvement. I stand by my arguement to cov that
1. There needs to be a system that clearly enforces some degree of parity between the benefits.

I think giving +5 to saves vs x effect is just much too powerful. If we do that for one region everyone else needs a powerup.

Click to expand...

I see what you mean on the Imperium. That's fine. Hzaka could still have copied them, since they're the pinnacle of civilization, basically.

Glad my language comments were well recieved.

As for the regional benefits, how about a +2 bonus to necrotic saving throws? That's less than Halflings "Bold." Plus, remember, these are for 4e saving throws - i.e., to shake off a lasting effect. It doesn't help defenses againt being hit in the first place.

Okay I've had a chance to read all the Transitive Isles wiki and this discussion. The biggest sticking point for me was the naming convention of the various groups of lands.

The Main Isle
The Proximate Isles
The Near Lands
The Far Lands

All got me so confused. As it is I understand that there is a main Island on which Daunton, the starting city exists. From the map I understand there are 4 close islands which are referred to as the Proximate Isles. And from the discussion of portals closing and opening I get that the Far Lands are just somewhere out there beyond the seas. Where does that leave the Near Lands? Are they on the Main Isle? or are they on other islands close by but not Proximate?

Good question. I'm not terribly clear on that myself. I have this idea that both the Near Lands and the Far Lands are beyond the seas somehow, i.e. their geographical relation to Daunton is unspecified and subject to change, but there are a number of accessible, reliable portals to the Near Lands. Getting to the Far Lands requires more work, such as portals that are only intermittently available or require rare/expensive components to activate, or a series of portals with overland journeys between them, or something.

But that's just what's in my head. If there's a better explanation that I've missed, I hope someone will point it out to me.

I also think that once we work that question out, we could better name those geographical regions to be more explicit (and flavourful?).

originally there were "daunton and the near isles, "everything else" and the far lands.
The "everything else" was understood (by me) to be accessable by boat on the shifting seas where travel times and actual geography is undefined. The Far lands are not accessable by the seas.

This had the problem of making people feel like daunton and the near isles were "the whole setting" and try to squeeze in everything.
In an attempt to show what I was talking about I rebuilt the setting at the last minute to create, effectively three zones. Daunton and the proximate isles (proximate sounding closer to me than near), near lands (acessable by the seas) and far lands (unchanged).

If you have concrete suggestions Ere (or anyone else) I'd love to hear them.