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Message: <blockquote data-quote="GreatLemur" data-source="post: 3841071" data-attributes="member: 28553">Okay, I should be doing other stuff, but this is too much fun for me to say no.  I'll try and forget about all the big, thriving city settings I'm always thinking of, and do something new in the "points of light" vein.Interim is a frontier town established by the small but dynamically opportunistic nation of Krenst upon the recently-discovered continent of Baliath.  The whole of northern Baliath--the only region of the continent that has been explored by any living nation--is treeless, punishing desert, but dotted with the ruins and artifacts of dead civilizations, and both great riches and powerful magic can be found by those who dare to brave the wilderness.  The exotic fauna of the new continent is largely undocumented, and sometimes dangerous in the extreme, but can be valuable in its own right, especially if captured alive.  Inhospitable as Baliath is, at least it's thoroughly unclaimed: So far, no one's seen any proof of surviving native cultures.Originally intended as a temporary settlement until more familiar building materials could be found or imported, Interim started as a rabble of wagons, shacks, and hastily-erected barricades strewn throughout the red stone ruins of a nameless elder metropolis.  The town is partially shaded by the red cliff from which the Old City was quarried, and straddles a precious river, which opens onto a makeshift harbor not far to the north.  Finally, the whole Baliath frontier is receiving less support from Krenst than expect, and those building materials haven't quite shown up.All of this has lead to "Interim" becoming increasingly misnamed with each year.  Wagons--and even some ships--have been cannibalized for wood to create homes and shops in some semblance of the Krenst style, while the sand-choked buildings of the Old City have been dug out and reinhabited.  New, more formidable walls have been erected around Interim's ever-widening border, cobbled together from both newly-quarried slabs and the tumbled stones of the ruins.  Simple watchtowers have been stationed on the walls, and along the river all the way to the harbor, built of old ships' masts and equipped with signal flares and military-grade crossbows.Those who come to Interim are the best and worst Krenst has to offer: Hardy, adaptable, resourceful, savagely ambitious, and often lawless.  Greed, individualism, desperation, and wanderlust drive are the forces that drive them.  The exploitation of Baliath is no sure thing, its dangers still too undefined and its rewards too uncertain, and its frontier is dared only by those who see some special opportunity or escape there: The younger sons of magnates and nobles, risking it all to make a name for themselves.  Criminals either running from the law or indentured to labor crews.  Derelicts and eccentrics with no hope or no place back in Krenst.  Crackpots and geniuses with a thousand schemes to build a new kind of society or business or religion, new ways to exploit Baliath or exploit their fellow settlers.  Brave or foolhardy scholars who seek to study lost cultures or strange wildlife.  Armies of enterprising adventurers willing to do almost anything for enough coin.And while Krenst was the first power to gain a foothold on Baliath, it is not the only one.  The rival nations of Chamast, Usis, and Powla have all begun to stake their own claims, spurred on by rumors of potent war magics recovered from Baliath's ruins.  Their settlements are smaller, but sometimes better supported than Interim, and the way the various groups will interact with each other will depend both on local economic and diplomatic conditions, and on the political situation between the nations themselves.  Chamast is Krenst's neighbor, similar in culture and power, and with a long history of hostility.  Usis is a larger, more distant country, politically neutral towards Krenst, but culturally alien and often difficult to deal with.  The Powla are less a nation than a strangely equitable conquering horde.  No one knows what they'd want on an uninhabited continent.The lost civilizations of Baliath have barely been investigated, so far.  Some ambiguous carvings and unusual bones have lead to debate about whether or not they were even human.  The scale and craftsmanship of many of their buildings suggest a superior level of magical advancement, as do the powerful artifacts and lingering (if sometimes weirdly malfunctioning) enchantments that have been found in their ruins.  Theories abound as to what happened to them--war, plague, and magical cataclysm being the most popular--but little concrete evidence has been found.  There are rumors of wraith-like throngs haunting the ruins at night, and fleeting mirages of flawless, intact cities, but they are not widely believed.  Baliath seems to have marginally higher magic levels than the expected norm, a phenomenon that some say either results from or has caused its present lack of human inhabitants, or is either the cause or effect of those vanished peoples' arcane development.The animal life of Baliath tends has a startling tendency towards the large, bizarre, and dangerous, and it's something of a mystery how such a barren environment could sustain it all.  Scholars are already investigating the possibility that the wildlife might subsist partially on things such as sand, sunlight, or ambient arcane energy.  Krenst is a nation of no great magical achievement, but its alchemists are world-renowned, and it is this industry that drives much of the scholarly and entrepreneurial interest in Baliath's wildlife.Deities in this world are small things, the word "god" being effectively interchangeable with "spirit" and "demon".  They are also beings of a strictly local nature, bound to a certain community, geographical area, or object.  The settlers of Interim, therefor, had to leave many of their gods behind, but also carried some with them, anchored to altars and fetishes.  These immigrant gods have found Baliath's high-magic environment extremely agreeable, but are generally somewhat unnerved by the apparent lack of local deities.Okay, so there it is: A theoretically-all-human setting, with high alchemy (making all kinds of quasi-modern conveniences possible, for a price) and low magic (meaning that PC Wizards will be learning more from the ruins they explore than from colleges or purchased scrolls).  Clerics and Paladins will have a drastically more personal relationship with their gods, who would themselves be individuals without connections to any pantheon.  The setting fits the "points of light" shtick in a slightly different way, has a built-in reason for "adventuring" and even dungeon-delving, accommodates all kinds of magical and (non-sentient) monstrous threats, and includes the possibility of foreign humans as both threats and allies.  Exploration, mysteries, political and economic maneuvering, ad hoc communities with weak authority and lots of characters, and plenty of ways both for a DM to drop adventure hooks and for players to find their own way.  I'll probably never do anything with it, but it could definitely work.Aw, nice environment.  I really dig the terraced buildings, funicular, and mosaics.  Very cool image.</blockquote>

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