Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Yora" data-source="post: 5832891" data-attributes="member: 6670763">An Introduction to the Barbarian LandsNow that the background and goals of the setting have been established, I'd like to give an introduction to the world itself. While the concept and process are interesting, this is what you really get and what the whole thing is actually about:As a visual reference, I have this crude map: <a href="http://s11.postimage.org/mduanzkq9/BLmap03_copy.png" target="_blank">The Barbarian Lands</a>It's not beautiful and the shapes and sizes are all wrong, but it shows where everything is in relation to each other.The Lands of the Barbarian Kings is an ancient world, that is inhabited by very young people. The world itself consists of two primary dimensions, the world or mortals, and the world of spirits. As the names imply, the world of mortals is the home of the humanoid races and common animals. It is primarily a physical world of mortal creatures that possess no magical abilities. While the Spiritworld appears very similar at first glance, it is a world of magical and natural energies and home to all kinds of spirits, like the immortal humanoid shie, the snake-like naga, oni, treants, rakshasa, and djinns, as well as the spirits of the land itself. While the Spiritworld is a hostile place for mortal creatures, which are not accustomed to the violent storms, blistering sun, and chilling cold, that can freeze a man solid in mid-stride, it is very easy for spirits to travel between the two worlds. And for a period that spanned countless centuries, many of the fey people created and lived in magical castles and palaces in both the worlds of spirits and mortals. But eventually, for reasons unknown to even the spirits of the present age, these citadels became abandoned one by one, with the fey people returning back to the Spiritworld or the wilderness of the world of mortals. However, they had left a permanent mark on the world, that would shape the future of its native people.During their time in the world of mortal creatures, the fey people encountered primitive humanoids, living in caves or tiny huts made of reeds, but yet showed an intelligence far above that of all the other animals. It was mostly the lizardfolk and the elves, who became favored as slaves, who would work the fields and mines of the fey lords. For many centuries they lived in servitude, encountering the secrets of farming, writing, and metal. When the fey left, their slaves stayed behind and were abandoned to fend for themselves, and returned back into the wilds, where they rejoined their own people. For well over a thousand years, only a few naga strongholds, that remained in the jungles of the southern lands, where the only form of advanced civilization anywhere in the world of mortal creatures. However, the returned slaves did not forget about the skills they had gained during their servitude and shared them with their new clans, where they survived as closely guarded secrets. Possessing a great advantage over other groups, the small family groups of only a few dozen individuals were absorbed one by one, leading to the rise of clans that number in the thousands. And for the first time in over a hundred generations, a new age of civilization was beginning, the Age of Clans.The Age of Clans was the age of agriculture and bronze, the two technologies that defined life throughout all of the Barbarian Lands. And fertile farming land, as well as mines for copper and tin, became the most valuable possessions that were prized above anything else and would ensure survival for the clans that possessed them. Which in turn meant that war for these invaluable lands was both violent and unavoidable. For many centuries and countless generations, this was the life of the lizardfolk, the wood elves, the dark elves, the gnomes, and the kaas, a race of puma faced humanoids of great strength from the northern lands.But everything would change at the dawn of the Age of Kings, four centuries before the present day. With agriculture maing great leaps forward, the clans could now grow much larger amounts of food even on soils that were far from perfect for it, which brought with it a new and formerly unknown prosperity. Being able to grow more than they would need for their own survival, trade was on the rise between the clans and small farming and fishing villages began to grow into true towns and cities. Also, the secrets of forging steel was shared by the gnomes, which soon became a resource as valuable as gold and those who had access to it gained a great advantage over their enemies. Within only a few generations, the constant wars for land were almost entirely forgotten. Now it was a war for trade and powerful alliances. Merchants traveled to far away places that were formerly known only from legend and returned with goods that had never before been seen by anyone in the Barbarian Lands. The most important and influential trade route was the road through the Kaidis Valley, which connected the lands on the Inner Sea with the lands beyond the Great Plains in the west. The nomads who traveled the plains carried and bartered with goods from the Western Lands, which were invaluable in the Barbarian Lands. With the kings and chieftains constantly raiding each others caravans, as well as regular skirmishes on the borders of their lands as displays of power and dominance, the clans needed larger armies and more troops than they could raise themselves. When wood elf merchants started to hire human guards from the nomads of the Great Plains to accompany their caravans on the trips back to the Inner Sea, they would change the Barbarian Lands forever. The human warriors proved to be such valuable additions to the armies of the elves that entire companies of mercenaries would accompany the nomads on their way to the trade posts and hire themselves out to elven chieftains and often would end in permanent employment for their new masters. Once the humans had decided to permanently settle on the Inner Sea, it was the beginning of a large migration that lasted for several decades, when whole clans from the Western Lands arrived and established themselves as the fifth major race of the Barbarian Lands. This did not remain unnoticed by the local wood elves and started another series of wars, which ended with the newly arrived humans being here to stay.After centuries of wars between the clans, the situation in the Barbarian Lands finally started to stabilize again. Smaller clans had been destroyed or absorbed into larger ones, giving rise to the first true kingdoms, and many of the trading grounds where the clans would come together to trade and negotiate alliances grew into true cities. But with the borders of their land secured, the warriors of the clans returned their gaze back on the huge and unexplored wilderness, that lies beyond their small islands of civilization. The amount of wonders and treasures, that are still hidden under the leaves of the Shenna'hir Forest and the Mahiri Jungles have an irresistible pull on young warriors, who yearn for the fame and glory of their ancestors, and powerful magical artifacts can shift the balance of power in favor of anyone who discovers and possesses them. Even with the Barbarian Kings having united most of the clans, it is still every village for itself in times of crises. When winter closes the mountain passes and makes the river impassable, nobody will come to provide help against monsters that come from the wilderness or angry spirits yearning for revenge against ancient wrongs committed by former generations. More often than not, warriors have to set out on adventures not because they want to, but because they have to.</blockquote>

Verification