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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Agback" data-source="post: 857750" data-attributes="member: 5328">G'dayWell, the centrepiece of my campaign is Gehennum, which is an extensive archipelago of coral-fringed and jungle-covered tropical islands, inhabited by a race physically resembling the Malays. Culture is modelled in considerable part on Ancient Greece, except that the economy is influenced by tropical south-east Asia. In the Archaic Period Gehennum is occupied by a collection of hundreds of small states with a bewildering range of political arrangements, and technology is approximately that of the Eastern Mediterranean in the Fifth Century BC. By the Classical Period Gehennum has been unified under a single Empire ruled from Thekla, the political arrangement is most like the United Kingdom under the Stuarts, and technology will give the Renaissance a run for its money in most respects (except that, given the excessively damp climate, there are no practical firearms). And in the Decadent Period the political setup is like the Tokugawa Shogunate, and beginning to show signs of coming apart. Gehennum is large and populous enough to encompass quite some diversity: the south of Bethany is run by an austere and militaristic aristocracy inspired by the Spartans, who worship a large nickel-iron meteorite (the "Iron Stone Men"); Thekla is bourgeois; the Central Isles are mercantile; the Eastern Provinces feature vast estates and a parochial gentry who are richer than many nobles; the Mela Basin is underdeveloped, backwoodsy, and still full of wildness.4600 km east-north-east is Ramastaarn, a much smaller archipelago of low atolls of sand and porous limestone. The human race are similar to the 'African-Americans' of Tanzania and Uganda, their dress is quasi-Egyptian, their architecture is monumental, and their society is very strange. Women live in matrilineal groups that occupy colossal palaces (or at least family compounds), that expel their sons at the age of 13, and that permit no adult male residents. Women own agriculture (for which they sometime hire male labourers), and also indulge in manufacturing. Matriclans that fall on hard times are sometimes forced into the leisure industry. Men, on the other hand, live in totem groups to which they are assigned on the basis of drug-induced dreams at their coming-of-age ceremonies. Some of these 'men's lodges' own particular bits of hunting and fishing, others own such ways of life as shamanism, heroic monster-fighting, security and bodyguard industries, etc. Men in poor lodges are sometimes forced to hire themselves out as agricultural labourers. [Hetero]sexual contact is supposed to be purely casual, and any lasting romantic relationship between a man and a woman must be conducted clandestinely.1860 km south-south-east is Fairon, a group of windswept and almost treeless islands settled by quasi-Norse people from the Far South. Shortage of arable land forces their excess population into piracy and desperate colonising ventures.2100 km north-north-east are the Blessed Isles. Physically modelled on the Hawaiian Group, they are occupied by a quasi-Polynesian people, the southern outpost of the 'Auroronesian' group. In the Blessed Isles families are matrilineal patriarchies: a family consists of a group of brothers and sisters together with the sisters' children and their (or at least the daughters') children, and the eldest brother is nominally in charge. After infancy in the care of their mothers, boys are raised not by their fathers (who are often unknown) but by their maternal uncles. A man's heirs are not his sons but his nephews. The Blessed Isles is a multiple theocracy, with each god ruling his island through a priest-king who is one of his sons. Each priest-king's eldest sister (or half-sister) is priestess-concubine of the god: her eldest son succeeds his uncle/halfbrother as priest-king. The god of the Blessed Isles maintains two such families: a King of the Land (human) and a King of the Sea (diver). The royal families of the Blessed Isles have almost pure divine ancestry, and are famous for their beauty and good luck.North of the Blessed Isles Auroronesia is scattered over several million square kilometres of ocean. Racially similar to the people of the Blessed Isles, the Auroronesians have a society that differs in that families consist of a core of women with their daughters and their daughters' daughters together with their husbands (not their brothers) and their unmarried sons. The head of a family is either succeeded by the husband of his senior [married daughter] or gets to designate, among his sons-in-law, which one will succeed him. The islands are generally small: hunting and fishing belong to men, gardening belongs to women. Young men with adequate means tend to leave their families for a career adventuring, in which they hope to amass such a reputation that chieftains and kings will consider them eligible as sons-in-law and successors, or at least as nephews-in-law. The husbands of the women of an aristocratic family (or royal family) form the military elite the clan (or tribe), and live lives of comfort and consequence. And ciecumstances of birth are not generally considered to matter in making a suitor eligible (important property belongs to families, not individuals, and therefore a man never inherits from his parents. There is therefore a great deal of competition for reputation among young men in Auroronesia, and the bards who disseminate news are consequently important to them.10350 km due west is Elusion, the homeland of the Leshy (a race like Tolkien's elves): beautiful, gardenlike, and now only sparsely inhabited.Somewhere down near the Antarctic Circle is Jotunheim, a land of roughly the conformation of Ireland, inhabited by giants. Despite the great fertility of their soils, the giants are hard-working subsistence farmers, with little specialisation or divison of labour, and who are correspondingly poor.14650 km due east is Ashikagalon, where the physical culture is Japanese, but the political arrangements are simpler. It is but an example of the wide diversity of distant places that I have developed ad hoc for the needs of particular adventures, or when PCs go travelling.The Methlin culture lives on ships, and supports itself by whaling, fishing, and long-distance commerce. Some Methlin ships are enormous, and occupied by the equivalent of small towns. Most are more modest. Whenever Methlin ships meet there is perforce a flurry of new apprenticeships, rapid courtships, more-or-less arranged marriages, and other, less formal, genetic exchanges. The Methlin are lithe and graceful, with light tan skin and straight reddish-black hair. They do not wear heavy armour (too dangerous) and therefore have developed refined fighting techniques.Regards,Agback</blockquote>

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