Progress and thoughts

The Map So Far

The regional map so far

It's taken a surprising amount of work to get this far, but here we are.  This is the result of drawing a map roughly with gimp, following a few tutorials for drawing coastlines and rivers, tracing it in hexographer, and then reimporting it back into gimp for finer details.

Not shown in this map are the breakdowns of "Civilized" vs. "Borderlands" vs. "Wilderness" Hexes, but going by the recommendations in the back of the book, almost all of this part of the map is civilized.

ACKs breaks market classes down into 6 categories, from I to VI, with I being the largest.  I got burned being too sparse in my last campaign, so I promised my players they would have access to bigger cities.  The capitol of the purple region is a Class II, the capitols of the yellow and blue regions are Class III, and every other named town is Class IV.  The book recommends ignoring Class IV and smaller on the campaign map and class VI in a regional map.  Unfortunately, this particular map is a bit of an inbetweener, it's about the size of what ACKs would consider 4 regional maps.  This felt like the right size since the players would be starting at "Adventurer Tier" which is the first tier higher than level 1.  There will necessarily be a greater degree of mobility, so a bigger map felt right.

That being said, the rules (even the updated ones from Axioms Magazine Issue III) say that anything within 48 miles (aka 8 6 mile hexes) of a city or large town town is civilized.  The core rulebook puts a large town at Class IV, therefore everything within 8 hexes of a town drawn on the map is civilized.  Everything 6 6 mile hexes away from a civilized hex will be borderlands.  Technically this only applies to settled territory, so I may use that to my advantage to make the mountains, forests, and the plains to the east hotbeds of monster activity.  It may be possible that I planned out my regions poorly, but for now I'm rolling with it and hoping it will turn out ok.Fortunately I used layers aggressively, so if I need to change the market classes to have an actual adventurable region, I can.

Naming Conundrum Solved

You may recall from my last post that I was struggling to come up with a decent name.  Ultimately while trying to find inspiration from naming conventions in the real world, I found something that resonated.  Saudi is a subdivision of the Arabia region known for their ruling patriarchs, the Sauds.  Since I knew I wanted this region to be strongly defined by their ruling family, I decided to pursue the convention of <Family Name> <Region>.  The family name quickly shook out to Halveni, but naming the region itself required a bit more thought.  Ultimately, because I had drawn the region with both jungle and grassland, on the border with forest, I decided the region was defined by many shades of green.  From there it was a few permutations out of Verde and Viridian to get to Veralia.

The Political Landscape So Far

This might have warranted it's own post, but I don't want to go overboard with details so I'm hoping cramming it all into one post will force me to be succinct.

Halvani Veralia

This is the main region.  It's independant, and it's culture is presumed to support the players desires to have access to any and every class.  The capital at least is cosmopolitan even if the region itself is predominantly human.

The Ruling Family

There were two ideas I wanted to chew on with the ruling family, the Halvenis.  First, I thought the idea of nobility of humans taking elven spouses in order for their family to live longer but still be able to rule humans was interesting, hence why I made them half elves.  There are no half elves in ACKs, so a half elf is simply either an elf class or a human class, possibly with the elven heritage proficiency, depending on whether they are more human or more elf.  The second idea was in a worldbuilding article about different ways succession and inheritance could be done.  History is rife with tales of bastards, illegitimate children, and uncertain parentage, around which an obsession with chastity and loyalty emerged.  The Halveni family skirts this with matrilineal succession: they are always certain that their daughter is of the royal bloodline.  They are the only group to do that, further adding to the realm's status as a place of outsiders.

Factions

In addition to factions representing influences from neighboring realms, there are two internal factions opposed to each other despite both wanting an independent Veralia.  The Azurists are loyal to the royal family and want the princess to remain powerful and independant. The Statists believe the princess as a singular powerful entity makes the entire realm vulnerable to overtures from foreign powers, and want her to concede some powers to an elected governing body.  Clever observers will have probably figured out by now that I play a good deal of Europa Universalis IV.  I found the interplay of the Dutch Republic mechanic, where a republic and a monarchy coexist while vying for power, very interesting.

The Holy Imperial League

A successor state to the empire that first saw the appearance of the Deva (Nobirans in core ACKs), a powerful Tarkaun (emperor) is elected by several prince electors after each emperor's death.  The Emperor then acts with wide lattitude but is still at least nominally beholden to a senate.  If the players decide they wish to meddle in senate politics like those described in Axioms Issue 3, this will be where they'll do it.  The league is at least partly responsible for a faction operating in Halveni Veralia calling themselves The Federalists.  After several failed campaigns to annex Veralia, the league is attempting to persuade the princess to accept a position as a princess-elector and join the league.  The yellow region on the map is merely a colony of theirs.   The main region is much larger on a continent to the east.

Bael Turath

I hope I don't get in trouble for this one, I have shamelessly stolen the name of the tiefling kingdom from an empire of the same name from 4th edition sourcebooks.  I use the Zaharan race from ACKs as a way to represent Tieflings in my campaign setting and this is their kingdom.  Like The Holy Imperial League, the region is blue is merely a colony of a larger realm elsewhere.  They also have designs on Veralia.  The tiefling king wants the ruling princess to marry him, and abolish their old succession rules, ensuring that any offspring would inherit both realms.

Wrap Up

that's all for now!

A Brief Interlude

I was fortunate enough to start sniffing around Dungeon Crawl Classics right as they were having their 2nd edition kickstarter.  Having none of their books previous, I decided to get the "Newbie" package and man oh man, what a haul!

To Name A Kingdom

Well, technically a principality.

What we have so far

No Names yet, just shapes
and some rough locations

So far we have a region that will be the starting area for my players.  They're going to be starting slightly higher level.  Initial attempts to get them to pick a list of classes to define the region failed miserably, so this is a region where you can be literally any class. Two of them are half-angels, one of them is a lizardman gladiator.  Only one player chose to be a plain old human fighter.  The main capitol of this city is going to be extremely cosmopolitan, a place where anyone could meet anyone.  That city was a punt with Sapphire Bay, but the region it resides in needs some work.

Background Research

I was immediately compelled to search google for why countries are named the way they are and found a very handy wikipedia article. From here I tried to pick out some primary themes.  I am especially interested in south american name origins because I am trying to borrow somewhat from south america for a number of in game reasons.  Here's what I noted down:

• Named for some distinct feature (brazil = brasa/red ember wood)
• Name for the people that live there (Algeria = land of the algiers, Afghanistan = land of the afghans)
• Named for the conqueror/discover (columbia = columbus, bolivia = bolivar)
• Named for geographical feature (Honduras = depths, Haiti = mountainous lands. India = land of the indus river)
• Named for qualities (Costa Rica = rich coast)

Applying it to my region

Once I saw what things were likely to prompt the source of a name, I tried to list out some of the things that might define it:

• Half-elves that conquered/settled the area from the "old world"
• Major geographic features:
• The main river (as yet unnamed)
• jungles
• floodplains
• a lake
• Types of people
• any kind of people, even lizardmen and half-devils and half-angels
• regardless, a singular people under a single, half-elf monarch
• maybe a free people? not sure if that's an angle I want to pursue.

So I'm not sure I have enough to go with on the geographical features, so I'm going to really try and hammer on the half-elves ruling over anyone and everyone. Ideally, whichever name I pick, I should be able to tell someone "Ah, it's just a derivation/deterioration of The Land of Concordant Friends of Half Elves"

Word Salad

Ok, without further ado, here's all the names I've spat out so far:

• Halfelfland, Halland? Halfefenia? Halvenia? Hellania? The riverlands? Riverlandia? Ravenna? Rivenna?
• Unia? Totalia? Holan? Summeria? Concordia? Harmonia? Consonancia? Congrunia?
• Halvenia, Harmonia, Concordia… The Halvenia Concord? The Halmenia Concord? Halvencord? Halvencordia? Halvenhamonia? Halmonia? Halvenia vs. Halvencord vs. Halvencordia… Vencordia? Vencoria? Velcordia? Vermonia? Velmonia? Velmond? Velmondia? Vellondia? Vellond? Velland? Vecland? Vemland? Havenland? Havaland? Halvaland? Vahland? Vahlia? Vahlond? Varlond? Harlond? Harmond? Halvond? Halvondia? Vahlondia? Halvoria? Valoria? Lavoria?

Balance and fulfilling many needs

This is a tough one. The name I ultimately decide on needs to:

• Feel distinct. Boring names like Concordia sound like they belong in Final Fantasy 1
• Be actually pronounceable/spellable by my players. Halvenharmonia sounds kind of cool, but I feel like my players will never get that one.
• Be something I can say over and over again. will I be excited to say Vahlia for the 500th time? Will my players start calling it Valhalla?
• some names from other games that I liked: in ACKs there are believable sounding names like The Auran Empire, Khemesh, and Turos Tem. 4th edition had names like Nerath and Bael Turath.

Wrapping up and not getting stuck

That's all I have for now. Ultimately I may have to pick something and go with it for a bit until it starts to feel good. It may come to be that filling in other details will strike me with some inspiration. I just need a name that I can find+replace later if the mood strikes me.

Introduction

Introduction

Hi there!  I like to play D&D with my friends.  The current version of D&D that we play is called Adventurer Conqueror King.  It takes a slightly houseruled version of B/X D&D and adds a bottom-to-top economic system, upon which a robust domain management system for high level characters can rest.

The last time this group of players and I played, they formed a mercenary company that they called The Book and Bow, and I'm not creative so I called my blog that.

World Building

World building is really freaking hard.  There are so many decisions you have to make, and so many considerations.  It may seem meaningless, but if you don't think about how things work, you might accidentally create hard-to-believe settings.  Sometimes you can get away with just the small stuff.  For the game we are about to run, I've tried to avoid designing an entire world so I don't have to worry about things like tectonic plates.  I started with a rough idea of where in the real world I wanted to imitate: South America, and drew some mountains slightly differently in a way that I thought might create a slightly greater variety in biomes.

This blog is my attempt to document my thought process.  I'll be able to go back and refer to what I was trying to do, and perhaps I can also get feedback from more expert worldbuilders.  If someone finds this blog and gets useful hints for designing a world too, all the better.  More to come later.