Whizbang Dustyboots
Gnometown Hero
Halfling gondoliers is a great way to embrace the to-me iffy 4E idea of all or most halflings being river halflings. The halflings in this city dominate the gondolier trade.
How would you make a canal city work as a fantasy RPG setting?
bedir than
Full Moon Storyteller
Seriously give them all otters, muskrat, braver, etc
Voadam
Legend
That sounds more like a variant gnome thing. River gnomes who have riparian animal companions and can talk to them instead of forest gnomes who have burrowing mammals.
There is, of course, also Atlantis to consider:
"Poseidon carved the mountain where his love dwelt into a palace and enclosed it with three circular moats of increasing width, varying from one to three stadia and separated by rings of land proportional in size. The Atlanteans then built bridges northward from the mountain, making a route to the rest of the island. They dug a great canal to the sea, and alongside the bridges carved tunnels into the rings of rock so that ships could pass into the city around the mountain; they carved docks from the rock walls of the moats. Every passage to the city was guarded by gates and towers, and a wall surrounded each ring of the city. The walls were constructed of red, white, and black rock, quarried from the moats, and were covered with brass, tin, and the precious metal orichalcum, respectively."
"Poseidon carved the mountain where his love dwelt into a palace and enclosed it with three circular moats of increasing width, varying from one to three stadia and separated by rings of land proportional in size. The Atlanteans then built bridges northward from the mountain, making a route to the rest of the island. They dug a great canal to the sea, and alongside the bridges carved tunnels into the rings of rock so that ships could pass into the city around the mountain; they carved docks from the rock walls of the moats. Every passage to the city was guarded by gates and towers, and a wall surrounded each ring of the city. The walls were constructed of red, white, and black rock, quarried from the moats, and were covered with brass, tin, and the precious metal orichalcum, respectively."
How many halflings on pole jokes could we make.
doctorbadwolf
Heretic of The Seventh Circle
In 5e forest gnomes can speak to all small or smaller beasts.
Voadam
Legend
You are correct. Its been years since I read the specific 5e gnome descriptions and nobody has played a 5e gnome in any of the games I have played in or DMd so my lore base is more heavily informed by my experience with the AD&D and 3e gnome ones where it was burrowing mammal specific.
Cordwainer Fish
Imp. Int. Scout Svc. (Dishon. Ret.)
Lose the elves and wizards, add revolvers and moonshine-fueled outboard engines, and you've got C. J. Cherryh's Merovingen.
Mad_Jack
Legend
I'm getting an image of dozens of mindless zombies and skeletons shuffling around carrying stretchers full of fresh corpses to be filed away in the catacombs, all directed by a very harried necromancer who complains that he didn't become a wizard to play file clerk... And maybe a swarm druid who controls beetles or maybe even fish to clean the bones...
Heh - the party is walking along on one of the walkways beside the canal, and suddenly it starts raining undead from five stories up because the corpses took a wrong turn, and a crumbly old balcony railing gave way... That'd be a hell of a variation on the old hit-with-the-contents-of-a-crap-bucket-thrown-from-a-second-story-window scenario, huh?
My Dungeon23 project is a lost Dwarven settlement that just "resurfaced" (pun intended) out of a huge swamp after a recent earthquake partially drained it. Some of the larger landmasses within the swamp could have been vaguely considered small-scale ruined "canal cities" even before the most recent earthquake, although the buildings mostly went down instead of up...
(All but the very top of the settlement was originally built inside a small mountain that sank completely underground in a previous quake, and it's the very top floor of those uppermost buildings that are once again above the surface.)
Above the surface of the swamp, there's a clan of human swampfolk who run a joint smuggling operation with some pirates from further up the coast...Above and below the surface there's a tribe of relatively civilized lizard men as well as a green hag, and since the swamp becomes a salt marsh and then eventually open sea, there's also some interaction with the aquatic elves who live near an island just off the coast.
(On a more indirect note, the aquatic elves may or may not be the long-lost surface elves who disappeared from the neighboring forest when an ancient magical cataclysm (original cause of the recurring earthquakes) turned it into the "Stonelands". Also, since the Dwarven settlement went from being a mountain to a swamp because the Underdark cavern beneath it collapsed, I'm considering putting an aboleth way down in one of the lowest rooms.)
So there's at least as much going on under the surface as there is above it.
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gamerprinter
Mapper/Publisher
I often considered that since Plato got his description of Atlantis second-hand (he never witnessed Atlantis, himself), what if Atlantis was an orbiting space station, and he just misunderstood the original explanation of it, since he had no context to understanding to know it correctly, and it generally looks like the photo in this post (above) this is a reply to, but a spinning torus in space, instead. And the sinking of Atlantis, is rather it falling out of orbit and crashing into the sea (I came up with this idea before Stargate Atlantis, so no infuence there...) Every time I see a rendering of Atlantis - I think 'space station'...
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