Hey folks,
Daztur: Thanks for that! And boy, what a lot of maps.
Now that Sanglorian's back let's discuss how to resort stuff to make it easier to get into. To throw some ideas at the wall:
-Take my compilation and Sanglorian's appendixes and yank a bunch of text out of my compilation and dump it in the appendix. Basically take any text that is discussing big overarching stuff and send it to the appendixes. For example put all of the religious information about the King in the Splendor in one place and any time the lion priests get mentioned just have a little notation like (A1) (A being religion, 1 being the first entry under religion, just as a hypothetical) sort of like all of the hex notations we already have. That'd make finding general information easier and slim down a lot of hexes but would still make it hard to use the doc as an in-game reference.
-Boil down the text a lot and write up a more traditional hexcrawl write up using something like:
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ddSGAUgU9g...sa_format.tiff or
http://matt-landofnod.blogspot.kr/p/free-downloads.html (the Land of Nod free download). This'd have to be more utilitarian with less asides about hundred year old history and more stuff like encounter information and population numbers (use the Land of Nod quasi-edition neutral stat lines as a guide?). The problem here is that most hexes are still blank and that it'd require boiling off a lot of what makes the settling unique.
-Write things out in a more traditional settling source book style instead of being completely wed to a hex-based format? Write one small book for each region while merging in the smaller regions?
-Keep the current set-up in all of its bloated glory and make some smaller spin-offs. For example a "Monsters of the Shrouded Lands" book heavy on monster ecology?
Ideas? The amount of information we have is pretty overwhelming but the sheer amount of detail isn't something I want to lose...
I vote for option one, dissecting the work. However, I wouldn't always put that stuff in the appendix. Some stuff could be put in a general section at the start of the description of a region.
Maybe I use game supplements differently to you folks, but I actually don't find the lengths of the hexes unmanagable. In my games, players would pass through most hexes no faster than say one an hour, which is plenty of time to skim the hex description.
I think sourcebooks that spring off of the canonical hex descriptions could work well.
If we ever 'finished' the Shrouded Lands, I'd do a sweep of hex consolidation, putting multiple hex entries in the same hex and making the whole map a fair bit smaller. Six mile hexes are
huge, but we've so far been using hexes more to represent relative placement than actual distance.
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I thought I'd make a start on Appendix N, inspirations:
Appendix N
Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series
George RR Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series
Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy
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Strike the Earth (49.03)
The ambitions of the Hoard know no bounds. They have sent several expeditions over the Edge to establish trading posts beneath the ground.
The rugged dwarves that undertake these duties bring their wagons out of Titan’s Skull and lower them by the Misplaced Obelisk (46.01). They then spread out through the jungles and hills of the World Beyond.
One of these settlements is called Barca Enmordet. It compromises a mass of settlements clumped aboveground on a large, sandy hill that juts from the jungle like a boil. Rather than strike the earth and sink their own shafts into the earth, the dwarves discovered a network of tunnels already burrowed. In silent cells, the hollowed out exoskeletons of beetlefolk – very like the homonculi of the Delasars (08.03) – remained, frozen in the motions of feeding, burrowing and breeding.
The central shaft has taken the dwarves hundreds of feet into the earth. The shaft then suffenly opens out into a chamber that extends farther than torchlight. The floor of the chamber is a stone the dwarves are unfamiliar with: shiny and black, it flakes like chitin.
Upon being told of the discovery, the Hoard longbeards overseeing the settlement ordered all dwarves aboveground. Over the last six months, the dwarves have tried to make the best of life under the Sun, but clearing the jungle is difficult and some sneak into the tunnels for a taste of the Gigantic Dark (16.01). Others have let the Dreaming Dark into their minds, driving them to create masterpieces or die trying.
Deep in the jungles, a herd of hoarlephants have voided their bowels in a great midden and eye the exposed dwarven settlement hungrily.
Hooks:
Why is the Hoard exploring beyond the Edge?
What forgotten beast have the dwarves discovered?
What masterpieces have the dwarves created?
Is there a connection between the beetle folk and the homonculi?
The Goblin Markets (33.04)
The art of pactmaking has come far since the early days when lizardfolk shamans bumbled through dealings with beings of dust and wind, of vine and feather, and of chalk and salt. Warlocks in training learn with horror of ad hoc agreements, enforced sporadically and interpretted by ‘custom’. Parties exchanged what warlock lecturers now call the ‘three Is’: intangibles, like the loss of innocence; impossibilities, like a virgin’s firstborn; and eyes (along with other body parts).
Such shoddy packmaking does still occur today, but only by the untrained, for workings of great significance, or in times of great need. The majority of dealings with dark powers today use standardised currencies and boons traded on the open market. One example of these ritual currencies is the bone shards of Tiamat (03.13)
But of course these currencies must be backed by real exchanges, and the Goblin Market is the busiest and most diverse market for these exchanges in the North – at least for those who know not how to find the Unseelie.
Stalls – most but not all of them run by goblins – pop up somewhere in the North every new moon. Where the market is changes with the months, but the market comes to this series of glades in the Kingswood at least once a year. And it is here that those who truck with spirits exchange intangibles, impossibilities and organs (their own or those of others) for bone shards, orichalcum coins, dinosaur feathers, pixie dust and other ritual currencies.
One merchant is a goblin child who appeared one day and lay his bundle on the ground. He claims that the shrunken white head of Tiamat is in the sack, within another bag. He will allow any person to look inside the sack – so far all have reeled away and said they no longer doubt that it is Tiamat’s head that the child has.
The most powerful merchant is a willowy mercane named Geddar. Her gaudy tents fill fully a third of the entire market. She has promised she will give over all of her wealth if someone can bring her a tail feather from the mockingbird.
Hooks:
Where does one get orichalcum coins, dinosaur feathers and pixie dust, other than here?
Where do warlocks lecture about pactmaking? Is it really as safe as they say?
What intangibles, impossibilities and organs could the heroes bring to the markets?
Why do goblins run this? Where are their trees?
This market is the largest in the North. Which is the largest in the South?
Who, if anyone, was responsible for the standardisation of pactmaking?
Inspired by Roles, Rules and Rolls's
Hester’s Exacting Accountancy:
Numinomancy (33.00)
Twenty years ago, the Hoard longbeards introduced an ‘eons-old custom’: the gifting of each dwarven child with a coin from the vaults. The smoothchins are to speak to their coin each night before bed.
Some dwarves suspect that the Hoard have enchanted the coins so that they can hear everything that the children of powerful dwarves say. This is untrue. The Hoard have no interest in what is said to the coins. They care only if the coins speak back.
Two decades ago, a dwarf was born with strange power over coins: he-she could speak to them, and they would speak back – in the voice of whatever sovereign or creature appeared on their faces. If cajoled, they would perform small tasks, like ordering or stacking themselves, rolling somewhere or describing the circumstances by which they last changed hands.
Such a skill is of course of tremendous value to the Hoard, but they have so far found only five dwarves with the talent.
Hooks:
Who are the five dwarves?
What has caused the recent development (or at least discovery) of this skill?
To what uses has the skill been put?
Simone’s Aviary (29.14)
To show his beneficence towards his fellow birds, Doge Simone’s minders had a great gilt aviary built and placed in the city. The Doge who followed him had the aviary lifted by ten tremendous balloons so the birds would better feel the wind and the sky.
The plan was doomed to fail, and as layers of guano have accumulated on the many floors of the palatial aviary, it has sunk lower and lower until now it bumps occasionally into even middling-tall towers – each bump sending flights of squawking, distressed birds into the upper reaches of the aviary (this, of course, lifts the aviary again).
It is a superstition in the Barrier Ranges that the first bird a man sees on the first full moon following his sixteenth birthday indicates who he shall marry: if a bluejay, a poor girl; if a robin, a well-humoured one; if a hummingbird, an energetic lady; and if a penguin, a well-adjusted woman. Each month, a dozen or so Barrier Range boys are left in the aviary by their tearful fathers. Though usually from different clans and unknown to one another, the boys often bond during the night. Of concern to some of the parents, rather a lot of the boys leave without seeing any birds and end up marrying one another.
Like any migrants in a big city, the Barrier Ranges families are keen to preserve some of their traditions and the aviary has become a key part of their culture. They pay to have the lowest levels clean, but the upper ones are knee-high in guano.
Hooks:
What other sub-cultures still exist in Shuttered?
Are migrants well integrated?
What does the Temple think of same-sex marriage?
What strange birds can be found in the aviary?
Where would you see a penguin?
Inspired by Monsters & Manuals,
‘Sabaw’:
Riparia (39.08)
In the last parts of the Witchwater before the Edge, humans may travel the waterways without fear of elven arrow. These lands are firmly under the control of the giant talking beavers, who have built vast city-dams and canals to tame the Kingswood.
They also manage rows of trees to feed their hunger for timber, each row ending with a hawthorn bush.
Beavers are hospitable and will welcome travellers into their homes, which are under the lakes but able to be reached from dry land. The largest dam, Riparia, is a fortress in itself, jutting with sharpened sticks and various traps.
Watchtowers stationed at the earliest dam mark the limits of beaver control, but there are lodges all along rivers in the Kingswod. Beavers transmit messages by striking the water with their broad, flat tails: those messages can be relayed all the way to the other side of the Kingswood.
Beavers keep mute but clever muskrats as pets.
Hooks:
Why have the elves permitted this intrusion? Do they have a choice?
Why are some animals able to talk?
What urgent messages might be sent by beaver relay?
What would one trade with a beaver?
The Grey Comedy (24.12)
Inspired by My Chemical Romance's
‘Welcome to the Black Parade’, Fall Out Boy's
‘I Write Sins not Tragedies’, Kanye West's
‘Runaway’ and the Commedia dell’Arte.
The Grey Comedy is a weird circus troupe that roams the country, picking up greaks and foundlings and performing strange, compelling shows wherever they stop over. It’s said that every lost soul finds the Grey Comedy, but perhaps it is fairer to say that the Comedy finds them.
The ringmaster is a young woman of Gore named Bella. She was snatched by the Comedy off the streets of Shuttered against her will, and still resents Rosetta, the fork-tongued (15.13) beastmaster who truly controls the Comedy. She was bequeathed the duty by her father, the Collector, who had promised to take on the mantle in exchange for a carnival mask of the tarrasque that used an actual tarrasque skull.
Also in the troupe are seven dancers of the Shadow Ballet. Rosetta claims that they were firebirds turned to stone by the Basilisk that she spoke life into. Bella is not convinced, but when the girls do speak their voices are high and fluting.
There are also three bugbear stage magicians, whose main act consists of pulling off their heads and replacing them wtih all manner of strange objects. The bugbears hate the Comedy, but will not leave until they can find their original pumpkin heads. The heads were unwisely launched by catapult out of the tent and into the alleys of the Shuttered City in what was their first and was supposed to be thier last performance.
The bugbears, embittered by their long service, will try to manufacture pranks that humiliate or maim in every settlement that the Comedy comes to. By some magic, people do not recognise the bugbears if they use different heads for their sabotage and their performances.
The Comedy also performs marriage ceremonies for those who fear official or parental retribution. The ceremony itself is a noisy and rambunctuous party where members of the circus attempt to seduce the married couple, and delight in loudly retelling every sexual misdeed and peccadillo of the couple to the audience.
Tonight, the Comedy perform on the commons outide Winds. This will be the first time that the Comedy performs by the White Road. Word has it that an elf noble intends to sneak in and watch the show.
Hooks:
Does the Sack Man know that some of his bugbears are missing?
Who now has their pumpkin heads?
Who has been married by the Comedy?
What terrible ‘accidents’ have the bugbears arranged?
Are the dancers really firebirds restored from stone?
Why does the Grey Comedy need a ringmaster?
What does Bella think of her father?
Who did the Collector have a child with?
