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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Libertad" data-source="post: 9534642" data-attributes="member: 6750502"><img src="https://i.imgur.com/ec7XiuK.png" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " data-size="" style="" /> Chapter Two, Part Two: Rest of the WorldAdlawadto is a humid island covered in rainforest where much of the flora is poisonous, the fauna is fiercer than normal, and spirits guard much of the interior from trespassers. But even so, people found ways to live here, be it advanced knowledge of herbalism in identifying the right plants to sticking close to the shorelines. Most of the island remains unexplored, and in the rest of the archipelago it has a reputation of being an unknown frontier. Linawan is the first major settlement, a gathering of hunters that meet once every full moon to share resources and knowledge, and its Bagsakan marketplace eagerly trades rumors as much as they do goods.Tasulog is a mobile community of boats that serve as living residents for its people, who are fishers, pearl divers, and foragers of shellfish, coral, and turtle eggs. They have been known to visit farther shores, but they regularly return to this island. Every boat of Tasulog houses an ancestral spirit who acts as administrators for resources and labor.Badbaran is the third major settlement, located deep in the rainforest which are protected by Sasayaw, a benevolent lake spirit whose presence deters predators.  Descendants of an escaped Tasulog people enslaved by an unnamed group, their current community doesn’t permit the entry of outsiders unless they prove their goodwill by finding and returning rare fruit elsewhere in Adlawadto.The island has four major spirits. The first is Sasayaw the Giant Turtle, who shares a common relationship with Badbaran in having been on the run from hunters, and controls the water level and rain. While people still give offerings the turtle returns in favor, he isn’t very trusting of mortals in general. The other two spirits are Aponipalayok and Huni, the former a little girl who befriended the latter who is a bird spirit. The two met when Aponipalayok was gathering medicinal leaves in a forest. After getting injured, Huni was healed by Aponipalayok over a period of several days, and in gratitude the bird made it so that formerly poisonous fruits would be edible by Aponipalayok and her relatives.Dian Anay is the final spirit, a title rather than a unique being. Dian Anay represents an entity who holds sway over all the termites of the island, and has good relationships with other kinds of insects as well. The first Dian Anay was the child of a human woman and calanget, a spirit of elemental earth. With the human’s community rejecting their relationship, they eloped into the wilderness and were adopted as a found family by a colony of termites. The humans believed that the termites kidnapped the woman. Ever since, humans and termites have been enemies. It’s only been in recent times that individuals among the two groups are finding ways to humanize the other, particularly among children who fostered secret friendships with the other group’s newest generation. Such children learned that the horror stories and propaganda told by their community aren’t founded entirely in truth.The people of Talunan make their living from trade and seafaring, more so than the other islands, as its active volcano makes most people stick to the coast and by rivers. Its bay holds a continuous bounty of fish and thus a source of food. Baga is the first major settlement, a Hidden City on the Water that requires a complicated process of clue-searching among a ghost town to find it. Baga is so hidden due to earning the wrath of a powerful spirit known as the Red Woman. This isolation hasn’t hurt outside relationships with other communities, for its people are still traders despite their hidden nature. Their goods are highly desirable, being pearls, obsidian, and oil and natural gas harvested from undersea volcanic fissures. Iraga is the second settlement, next to a hillside with a castle providing a vantage point of the entire town. The founders were a tribe of the same name who sought to perform daily offerings to pacify the volcano, and other tribes provided them with trade so they can better maintain this duty. Duyan-Duyan is the final settlement, an agricultural village who uses the volcanic ashfall to harvest crops. <img src="https://i.imgur.com/52Syenj.png" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " data-size="" style="" />The three spirits of Talunan are all women of mortal origin. The first two, Panganoran and Pagtuga, were warriors who sought the favor of Magayon, a datu’s daughter, in order to get her hand in marriage. But Pagtuga, the victorious warrior, ended up killing both her rival and Magayon, and from their corpses sprung the natural features that became the spirits. Panganoran is a cold wind that is the manifestation of the suitor grieving for her beloved, and sometimes her winds end up possessing mortals who can only be freed in one of three ways depending on the spirit’s mood. Some babaylan seek to gather up all of Panganoran’s remnants to unify, hoping that this will provide the spirit with some measure of peace. Pagtuga, by contrast, is a being of earth and stone, but is also equally sorrowful and manifests as a giant stone in a forest surrounded by a pool of saltwater. It is unconnected to the ocean and thus the water is believed to be her tears.Galit Ni Magayon is the third spirit, also known as the Red Woman, for her vengeful ways. Manifestations of Magayon swing between overly fawning to those who are kind to her, but can turn to being hateful seemingly on a dime. The islanders appease Magayon twice a week, along with an annual ritual of blood offerings, food, and a marriage between two mortals. But villagers started to sabotage these rituals in recent times, believing that somehow this will earn her favor but in reality will spell disaster.Kotabalon is the final island, the one physically closest to the Underworld’s gateway and thus sees a high proportion of traveling ghosts and dragonborn. It is a rocky, resource-sparse region home to chilly winds and rainfall. Too many ghosts end up lost in Kotabalon, and the island is home to many mortals running from their past or hoping to reunite with their departed loved ones. There’s also merfolk who hunt the ghosts, using magical nets to drag them into the abyssal depths of the ocean for unknown purposes. As though Kotabalon’s reputation couldn’t get any more sinister, Tambanokua, one of the Celestial Eaters, once weaved her web in the sky around here. The silk remains just as strong, and can trap physical bodies as well as souls.There are only two settlements here. The first, Tungkulin, is home to warriors who stand vigil over the volcano of Mount Balaon, watching for signs should Tambanokua rise from it given that the pit within is her last known prison. Like other Celestial Eater locations, it also has lair-style environmental changes, such as less hit points healed from Hit Dice during a short rest. Makusog is the other settlement, located in a trap-filled cavern with an omnipresent silver light from the goddess Mayari. The people here are also guardians standing watch for the Celestial Eaters and other monsters, and have learned much of the ways of spiders in how they construct their traps.Kotabalon is home to three spirits. The first is Dalagang Balaon, a pit far up in the mountains that can create an avatar of a ten foot tall dragonborn. She has given contradictory stories over her origin and purpose, sometimes claiming to be the spouse of the Celestial Eater hoping to keep the spider asleep, being the spider’s mother and hoping they can both take revenge on the gods, or even a captor seeking to prevent the apocalypse. But what is known for sure is that Dalagang Balaon’s presence keeps Tambanokua asleep. The second spirit is Aguahi, an oceanic spirit who watches over the Underworld’s entrance and for any signs of the returning Celestial Eaters. It maintains a close friendly relationship with the people of Makusog. Pagakpak is the final one, a rather optimistic and mischievous wind spirit who seeks to enliven people’s morale in such a forlorn realm. He often takes the form of a rooster and is one of the easiest spirits in Kotabalon to gain access to, as he loves being in the company of mortals although his non-stop talking quickly wears out his welcome.<img src="https://i.imgur.com/Io8IFsl.png" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " data-size="" style="" />The Ocean and Beyond is the final section of Chapter Two, covering the places of the setting beyond known civilization. We first open up with a common overview of sea-dwellers, a broad term for those who spend most of their lives on the waves rather than land and who most often gather in community flotillas. There’s an elite order of warriors known as the Mandaragat who watch over Bakunawa’s Grave, an impossibly calm region of the sea that regularly spawns all manner of monsters which come from the depths to menace the surface world. Should one dive deep enough, one can see the Celestial Eater’s body, or rather its head and throat sticking up from the abyssal plains. The rest of its form is buried in a trench, surrounded by a crater. It is a creepy place, filled with coral that rhythmically glows in tune to the monster’s every unconscious breath, and poison continually leaks from its body and an undertow brings sunken ships to trap and crush unlucky swimmers.Tambanokano’s Basin is another region home to a Celestial Eater of the same name, a giant crab whose movements cause bubbles to rise to the surface. Upon popping when in contact with air, sudden waves and whirlpools cause the otherwise-gentle sea to turn violent. Rocky atolls with cliffs surround the basin, and the trees are strange-looking, warped things unknown elsewhere in the world, and are also home barnacles that sing when people approach. Omnipresent seagrass clings to the body of people swimming inside the atoll, its accumulated weight drags swimmers to a watery grave. Tambanokano fortunately spends most of his existence sleeping, and the seaweed’s disposition (and thus its threat to others) changes depending upon whether the Celestial Eater has nice dreams or fearful nightmares.And even further than that, the Celestial Eater Minokawa makes its nest that is larger than any island. Many believe that the mortal world is fashioned in the likeness of a partially open clamshell, with the bottom half containing the ocean and islands and the top half containing the sky and starry heavens. The sky and sea used to remain close and thus “closed,” but the gods raised the sky after Bakunawa’s rampage in order to prevent the land from being destroyed. The area where the “lips” of the clam are closest is said to be home to Lalangban, and mortal voyagers find all manner of naturally-impossible calamities assaulting their vessel should they come near this threshold. The only things known to safely travel “beyond the clam” are the legendary boat Salimbal, which has since been broken into many pieces, and the Celestial Eater Minoakawa who has a nest and eyrie in a massive tree growing beyond the known world.Thoughts So Far: Concluding the World chapter, one major weakness I notice about the setting is that most of the islands lack substantial sources of conflict. What conflict does exist, such as the termite/human wars of Adlawadto, the covert sabotaging of the Red Woman’s rituals, or the ghost-napping merfolk, are bare-bones in detail. In the first case we might know that these groups hate each other, and that a particular spirit is a dangerous entity in the second case, but we don’t get specific names of instigators or how these troubles can play out in a typical adventure. And in the termite/human case, it’s implied to be a problem that will eventually solve itself via the passage of generational time.Kotabalon is the island with the most danger and thus potential adventuring material, but its inhabitants are instead mostly standing guard for a danger that might come rather than one that is already here. The ghost-napping merfolk are perhaps the most adventurer-worthy material, but they get hardly more than a brief mention in a single paragraph.Regarding highlights, I do like how Sina Una plays up the cosmic horror angle of the Celestial Eaters. Particularly in how the places that they reside are eerily quiet, unnatural territories as though the very land itself is wounded. Where going there is a dangerous ordeal, even should the resident Celestial Eater be asleep or absent.Join us next time as we take a look at character options in Chapter Three, the People of the Islands!</blockquote>

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