Climatology and world-building?

[SkidAce]

Ummm... well, it is probably the calmest and tamest region of my campaign world! It has been resettled for about 150 years (since the fall of the 2nd Empire 400 years ago) by peaceful survivors of the Empire's fall. Ex-slaves, renegade troops of soldiers and lucky townsfolk who avoided death during the fall made up their ancestors, so Greenvalers are a plucky, sturdy folk.

There are some sahuagin outside Silverwater Bay, and a sea-monster in Dragon Bay, to the south, just inside the breakwaters. And a copper dragon is reputed to live on one of the many small islands to the north-east. Also, the local fishermen claim to trade with mer-folk, but most people assume they're making the story up, despite the fine pearls they often bring back from their expeditions.

The town of Saltmarsh is located almost due west of Edgeton; it is famous for the smuggling that is reputed to go on in the region, although the town's leaders protest the tales.

The whole of County Seawall is experiencing some political turmoil; five years ago Count Alharvon, vice-admiral of the Navy, was arrested and convicted of treason - he was accused of attempting to lead a revolt against Prince Starbow, made up of rebel naval units allied with pirates and mercenaries from Harothar. He's been imprisoned ever since, because Prince Starbow, ruler of Greenvale, will not have him executed. Sir Math rules the county as regent for the Count's 7-year-old nephew. Most of the locals and barons in the County dislike Sir Math and quite a few still refuse to believe that Alharvon was guilty.

The pirate village of Mound is some 50+ miles down the coast, on the north shore of Dragon Bay, as well. How they avoid the sea-monster is unclear... perhaps by paying it tribute!

Do you REALLY want me to keep going?

That's plenty. Was fascinated by idea of what was in "my" area.

Thank you!

 

[Desdichado]

Do you REALLY want me to keep going?

My campaign is much more loosely based on a Pleistocene North America--but the geography is a far cry from an exact match; I've gone with a more patchwork approach (these mountains are the Blue Ridge, over here we have the Sierra Nevada, here's the Colorado Plateau, etc.) with areas based on real elements, and stitched together in a different context.

I guess that means that I'm not really following the gist of this thread, or what it means.

I'm curious how much of North America you've actually developed beyond merely Chesapeake Bay.

 

[Nytmare]

Because this is a game, generally speaking, your climate doesn't have to be real, just believable. Believability is a pretty weak standard, particularly because the player's view of the climate is so ground level and sporadic that they lack the perspective to be critical of it.

This is the thing I wanted to say.

Unless the characters are playing the part of scientists who are setting out specifically to pay attention to this kind of detail, I'd assume that defining it would involve wasting a lot of time on something that absolutely no one was going to notice.

 

[Gilladian]

My campaign is much more loosely based on a Pleistocene North America--but the geography is a far cry from an exact match; I've gone with a more patchwork approach (these mountains are the Blue Ridge, over here we have the Sierra Nevada, here's the Colorado Plateau, etc.) with areas based on real elements, and stitched together in a different context.

I guess that means that I'm not really following the gist of this thread, or what it means.

I'm curious how much of North America you've actually developed beyond merely Chesapeake Bay.

I'd love to read something about how you've adapted the "real world" pleistocene for your campaign setting.

I'm debating HOW closely I intend to continue to match the "real world" to my world. I do NOT use real-world physics, etc... as I do have a hollow earth, for example. And I have made some geographic changes; most of upstate NY was blasted by a necromantic ritual - the Grand Canyon is a dwarven empire, and I think the West Coast may be a blasted ruin, tho I'm not sure. Central North America (the great Plains and the Rockies) are inhabited by wild tribesfolk (maybe gnolls) and giants.

I haven't done anything with Eurasia or Africa, except some rough notes on Madagascar Island. I'm thinking I may change them considerably. Then again, I've run 20 years of campaigns and never touched that half of the world. Do I even need to? (Yes! of course!)

Follow the link in my sig to my wiki to Read More...

 

[Desdichado]

I'd love to read something about how you've adapted the "real world" pleistocene for your campaign setting.

In kinda vague terms. Much of it is somewhat esoteric too. It occurred to me that since I play at fairly low level (E6), wild animals are actually extremely dangerous to a party of adventurers in the wilderness, and the Pleistocene fauna of North America would have been keenly so; Columbian mammoths, atrox lions, sabertooths, dire wolves, short-faced bears, giant ground sloths, long-horned bison the size of rhinos, giant camels, etc. I fudge it a little and add some terror birds and giant diurnal bats a la King Kong, and I almost don't need monsters at all, except as a special treat.

Add to that a number of areas that are specifically inspired by places I love in North America--the Rockies, the Smokies, the Colorado Plateau, the Chihuahuan desert and the Chisos mountains, etc., and places that don't exist anymore like Lakes Bonneville, Lahontan, Agassiz, etc. and I feel like I've got a real Pleistocene meets Wild West vibe for much of my setting... even though I don't actually borrow any actual geography directly.

Casual references to the people using Scott's horses or stilt-legged llamas for caravan beasts of burden are a little detail that probably nobody besides me even notices, though.

 

[Balesir]

For D&D I don't sweat any details, since the world is usually pretty much magic-soaked and follows dramatic rather than scientific realism, anyway. For Hárn, though, I take such stuff seriously. The weather parts of the Venarive module - see here:

Venârivè: Northwestern Lýthia | Kelestia.com

...were part of my contribution to it. Atmospheric cells and tidal gyres were used to set up the weather zones, prevailing winds and tide patterns for western Lythia as reflected in this module (and shown in the layered PDF maps).

 

[Gilladian]

Hobo, your campaign world sounds fabulous! I play/run E6 now, too, and would love to discuss how that affects campaign world design and feel. Although maybe it deserves a thread of its own.

The handiest tool I have for "real world" campaign building is a "World weather Guide" from Time magazine. It is SO easy to look up a city near the area of the current adventure and get a complete weather table with average and extreme temperatures, rainfall, and a description of the climatic zone.

That and a World Almanac that shows the landform, the natural resources, the vegetation and crops, make designing new campaign regions or long travel interesting and distinctive. No longer does every city and village feel identical to every other one in the world!

 

[Desdichado]

Hobo, your campaign world sounds fabulous! I play/run E6 now, too, and would love to discuss how that affects campaign world design and feel. Although maybe it deserves a thread of its own.

And I would love such a thread!

But in my case, the flavor came before the mechanics. I liked E6 because they promoted a flavor that I already wanted, not the other way around. I purposefully cultivate a kind of odd mix of swashbuckling and horror. Kind of like Brendan Fraser's The Mummy in a more overtly fantasy setting, if you will.

Which is another reason why I want to keep monsters rare; to make sure that they get the treatment they deserve and remain monstrous; never routine.

 

[Yora]

The implications of an E6 world aren't actually that special. All it really takes is to make a fantasy world that does not include the powerful magic and the frequency of dragon and demon slaying warriors common to the D&D rules. Unless you specifcally put those things into the world, then using the E6 variant doesn't really change much.

 

[Gilladian]

[MENTION=2205]Hobo[/MENTION] - in my case the same is true; I'm a low-magic kind of person, though I love dungeons and monsters. In my current campaign it is a mix of a traditional dungeon, slightly modified up to now, and as my PCs approach 6th level, more and more modified, and a lot of bandits, human villains, orcs and "bestial humans".
[MENTION=6670763]Yora[/MENTION] - I find that E6's limits on the amount of magic in the world DO have a distinct effect on my campaigns. I use fewer monsters and more humans as villains; my plots tend to focus more on political machinations than "gate in an elder evil" plots, and the social implications of magic are much different. When frequent teleportation and easy return from the dead don't have to be accounted for; when fireball is one of the most important battlefield spells, and when traveling to another plane of existence is a thing of rare legend rather than a potentially daily occurrence, the feel of the world is very different from the high-magic-plane-shifting-world shattering-immortal being-on-every-corner feel of the Realms or even Greyhawk.

Not that there's anything WRONG with that feel. It is just different from E6. And that's what I want to talk about. How E6 makes the campaign world feel. So I'll start a thread about it.