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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tristissima" data-source="post: 8002691" data-attributes="member: 6162">lbatross is a nice, little town, all cliffs and ports isolated in the mists of Conqueror’s Bay. Imagine the stereotype of the stern yet cozy English fisherman, and that’s kind of the image I get of the Nidalese in Albatross. At the moment, when I think of that image, the primary association I have with it is the installments of Susan Cooper’s Dark is Rising series that were set in Cornwall. Imagining that series in Nidal takes my imagination many intriguing places. The people of Albatross practice a no-doubt homey version of augury, tracking the motions and activities of the town’s namesake birds. This is where the Umbral Court imprisons its agents who have done something against them but who can’t just be offed. Worse than the questionable nutrition of the town’s flavorless cuisine and the townsfolks’ barely monosyllabic conversation is the prohibition the Court has placed upon hurting the people here. No relief from one’s punishment can be found in sadism here.Albatross makes me think of nothing more than The Prisoner, that treasure of British postmodern Cold War paranoia. If I were ever to run an adventure in or passing through Albatross, I think this blend of elements ~ Dark is Rising, The Prisoner, France-by-way-of-Conan-and-Hellraiser ~ would be plenty to give it an unforgettably unique flavor.There’s a caligni druid here by the name of Alkaiva of the Uskwood. She lost a political tussle with Eloiander of Ridwan and was only saved by two of her aunts in the Umbral Court. For some reason, her white wolf is given a name that doesn’t feel very Nidalese to me at all. It doesn’t seem to mimic the linguistic conventions of any of the languages I would expect to feed into Nidalese (French, Gaelic, Scythian, maybe some English, even Greek, perhaps with French, Italian, Spanish, or Latin loanwords from Cheliax). “Xiaq” reads to me as more like . . . Inuit or Tlingit, maybe with some Chinese influence. It’s actually kind of interesting in an understated way. Famously, Golarion has often felt kind of threadbare when it came to international politics, due to the manner of its development. The many realms were treated as the personal project of the various high-level designers, with a not-insurmountable-but-still-a resistance to encroach on another’s turf. Little bits like a druid of the Uskwood having an animal companion that seems to imply some connection to the Crown of the World, a connection which might maybe have had something to do with her conflict with Eloiander, give DMs a platform to build that international diplomacy for their campaigns.I would actually absolutely adore playing a Pathfinder campaign of international diplomacy, roaming Avistan and maybe greater Golarion, too, shaping history with our words and relationships.Alkaiva is given an impressive number of adventure hooks in just 100 words or so ~ everything from her messing around with the town’s augury tradition by using her powers to train the whitr albatrosses to dance, to her having secrets that could damage Eloiander’s political position by revealing that his anti-Cheliax stance isn’t just words, to Eloiander not being okay with leaving her alive.I recently saw someone describe the Mindspin Mountains as the most Tolkienian area of Golarion. Which, I suppose, might make Nidal Mordor? Regardless, there is a small coal-mining village tucked into their foothills where two rivers converge called Ash Hollow. OK, so Nidal burns coal, evidently. Which changes some of my mental image of its culture ~ I had before imagined them more as something like Westeros or a grim version of Early Modern, Renaissance, or even medieval France and England. Large echoing rooms of castle-stone for the nobles with dramatic fireplaces fighting back any chill while providing a lovely stage for wineglass brooding. But coal shifts that image to one inspired by some years later; now I have to import some imagery of, like, 19th-century London.Of course, it makes sense that they need coal, since the land is kept in shadow.Thousands make a pilgrimage to Ash Hollow every year, however, for the Festival of Nigh’s Return, completely changing the town for that week (after all, it increases the population by multiple dozenfolds). They come to gather in the valley and on the hillsides near the mountain Aghor Thal to watch a giant, rose-shaped black iron crucible heated with a massive bonfire. It literally fills a cave mouth. Once it is good and hot at duck, the sacrifices begin and do not end until dawn. Millennia of use has awakened the cauldron as an evil idol served by a group of reclusive ascetics known as the Watchers on the Hill.The Watchers on the Hill are led by a human oracle named Baegloth, a name which shows up in chronicles written many centuries ago in the founding documents and original historical references to the cult. This has led the villagers to believe that he and the rest of the Watchers are effectively immortal, their destruction only possible by destroying the Black Rose.</blockquote>

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