I was going to suggest that the Jungle of Incoherent Savages definitely was the result of bad anthropology degrees, but I see that's been taken care of.
Yeah there's degrees of chauvinism inside the Imperial Court. Celestial Draconic is the Court's only recognized language which requires understanding of celestial and draconic to understand. Common is a descendant of draconic, with each city having their own dialect. The further away from SE Capital the more the dialect reflects local languages, with the SE Capital common almost being identical to draconic, whilst the people in the mountains / jungles / far grasslands speaking their relatively uninfluenced / completely uninfluenced native languages of tiyenese, conglish and fanpanese respectively.
Winelake and Meatforest should be their appropriate colors.
Good call
Tell me of the Spicy Ocean and its secrets.
Honestly I haven't fleshed it out well. I feel like the name and mystery is better than anything I could come up with. If I had to give it form, I'd say it's a place where the ocean is split into shelves of oceanic civilisations living in an actual spicy ocean. The ocean here is made spicy by its unusual spicy salt content, which is sourced from a spicy vent in the Rempah Trench. Various spicy fauna grow beneath, on and above the waves. Dense underwater jungles of sargasso saffron wave about, schools of coriander fish swimming between. The mermen tend to their crops of kelpmint, whilst above archipelagos are inhabited by countless mangroves of spicy spices - cinnamon, cardamon, white, red, black and green pepper. Magical spices like holy moly, devil's root and Jain's tears all provide a taste of what is on offer.
Now that I'm thinking about it, weather manipulation is probably one of the most OP powers a preindustrial civilization could have. The harvests are on-time all year, every year. And probably also incomparable ecological devastation around the rest of the planet, which might go a long way to explaining the rebel grass and rainwater, but still man, those harvests. Which probably also means that if The Party were to fuck with the control towers that they could easily kill millions of people and permanantly destroy this civilization without even meaning to!
Literal Heaven's Mandate. If the rivers flood, if the rains dry, if the storms blow - the government and the Emperor are directly accountable and failure
demands a change in administration. So in times of peace the weather is idyllic all year round, in times of chaos the adventuring party has to start stocking up on storm/heat/cold protection, as nature tries to restore a natural cycle in a realm where the seasons are on a government schedule
These monetary laws speak to the existence of a hardcore gold standard-based rebel organization who will not submit to the tyranny of fiat currency, and that scares me.
HOIST THE GOLD STANDARD HIGH
THE GOLD TURBAN REBELLION WILL PREVAIL
If you want some added authenticity, place names in Chinese are very geographical and descriptive. Horsetown, for example, might be more like Brown Horse (Town). The cardinal directions, descriptive colors, and physical traits are the go to for generic naming.
Guangzhou (Wide Area)
Shanghai (Above Sea)
Shenzhen (Deep Ditch)
Brownhorse is a great one, which I think I'll use. Cardinal directions I feel are mandatory for naming ever since I found out Beijing means north capital, Nanjing south capital and Dongjing east capital. That is functional and adorable naming, whilst a lot of generic naming is easily forgotten in the UK (off the top of my head, cheapside, southbank, westminster, newcastle, portsmouth, innsmouth, london bridge, wessex, essex, sussex, middlesex, a lot of the x-woods). Literal descriptions of the local area / landmark sounds very natural when you say it in one word, and I think it's even more immersive than if I gave everything dwarvish/elvish/draconic names, because the players read the names as if they were locals instead of outsiders
Yeah, but I think the idea was that the players aren't supposed to realize it's actually Asia, and naming it in non-English might give it away.
Same as when FASA named the forest in Earthdawn the Wyrmwood instead of Wormwood (in the local language), and carefully cropped the map so the Black Sea wasn't easily recognizable.
My favourite ones are the ones where it's just Earth but flipped upside down, or the land and ocean have been inverted. In the latter case it took me three years to realise the sea I was looking at looked suspiciously like the British Isles coastline
My favourite part is the weather regulation. Is it true or just propaganda? Who knows, it's great either way.
When the system runs as intended, the government uses the six capital towers to cast
control weather, which normally has a 5 mile radius. So they use these gargantuan towers sprinkled across Tiyen Sha to spread their control across most of the country
It gets less reliable the further away from a tower you get, and the further away from the radius you get. This is why the Warlords of Jiyang June get autonomy / protectorship over the Cliffs of Amber, why the inhabitants of the jungles of incoherent savages / cannibals can get away with paying no taxes and openly ignoring the Emperor's sovereignty, and why the Empire hasn't bothered trying to change the desert of bad prices.
If even one of the six towers of elemental regulation are damaged or destroyed, the whole system could shut down. Each of the towers, including the relay towers, needs incredibly high level druids/clerics/wizards to function. As these boys and girls can be counted with fingers and toes, losing them to assassination, retirement or industrial action could be devastating if it occurs at the same time. In addition, the towers are garrisoned by elite troops loyal to the capital. However, corruption, demoralization, rebellion can all occur, with the Lonely Tower a particular hotspot for trouble, and local lords wielding great influence over nearby towers.
This is basically to explain narratively why rebellions are so rare (the government controls the weather and can turn your rebellion into a nightmare of storms), but when they do occur, it quickly devolves into regional warlordism (the government foolishly empowers local polities to raise armies and take control of their local towers in order to put down the rebels, ignoring the fact that this makes the local polity immune to hostile weather actions and gives them control of the local weather, making them the de facto sovereign of their demense).
If all goes well, the campaign should have a nice progression of:
1. Everything is working as intended, but there are signs of weakness in the land (players have to deal with corrupt officials from time to time, peasants request their help dealing with problems the government
normally deals with, like wild boars raiding their farms and menacing their village. It's Imperial Examination season, and the players are going to get the option of taking the exams - if they succeed, they get promoted.
2. Everything is not working exactly as intended, but things are still fine for now. Players are tasked by local magistrates to locate an isolated zombie plague outbreak before it reaches the megacities. They can retake the Imperial Examination, but whatever their success/failure, they will be demoted, as the Court employed too many civil servants. A trainee-graduate warlock accidentally made a pact with an enemy of the state (the fiddling fiend), and needs the party's help to
cheat pass the Imperial Examination without being discovered (they now have devil horns and a tail, and also show up as evil in detect spells).
3. Shit's about to go down. Someone murdered the Weather Wizard of the Lonely Tower, and in the 30 minutes the Lonely Tower was unmanned, a raincloud full of seditious rainwater made it over the wall. The players can either try clean up the puddles of seditious water / contaminated tea leaves, or go after whoever assassinated the weather wizard. Either way, the players will discover rumours that a Gold Standard is being raised high.
4. Oh fuck it's all fucked. Plague, storms, unregulated weather, rebellions, local warlord factionalism, armies from beyond the wall, apocalyptic rumours and the Shah mountain is erupting. This is when I get to throw all sorts of high level critters at my players :]
I'm trying to set it up so that no matter what my players want to do, they get a feel of how things should be and get emotionally invested in some characters, before things get dark and full of terrors. Also I'm using the horde template some legend homebrewed to greatly streamline hundreds of soldiers and peasants running around, so can roll 1 dice for 1 horde instead of 120 dice for 120 peasants. I'm trying to stay away from railroading, so I hope my skill for improv and off the shelf bullshit will serve me well. Any tips on off-rail DMing is appreciated though
My punk band in this setting would be called the Little Wayward Cloud Puff
Can I add the Wayward Cloud into my setting? It's a fucking great name, I can totally imagine a bard group running around with such a name
Anyway it looks great LW. I was going to say I noticed the bigdong but I see you brought it up yourself in at the end. I'm hoping there's a mountain really big hill (but the locals insist it is a mountain) called Bigdong Mountain in the area.
Yep, the Riverlands is full of hills and mountains, I think I can include that. I love the idea of the locals getting defensive if they refer to it as a hill
How do a meat forest look, exactly? Both in real life and in-game? Is it a fake thing like a normal wood that's continuously decorated with meat by human hands, or is it a real (as in self-growing, if through magical means) forest where bone trees and meat fruit grow? Do they have to continuously employ adventurers to deal with their constant goblin infestation problem?
In real life it was said to be a collection of trees covered in skewers of roast meat. I like to envision it as a more stylistic version of a meat drying rack.
In game I want it to be a bit more fantastic, with the meat forest being a magical invention of one of the more decadent Dragon Emperors. In times of peace the meat forest looks like a bunch of plants, only meatier. Instead of green leaves, the leaves are skin, and you can see the veins underneath. If you cut them they bleed, and the trunks of meat trees have a continuously growing spine in the middle, flesh and fat in the outer layers and incredibly tough hide for the outermost layer. Eating one of the meat plants is a decidedly unpleasant experience, unless you enjoy raw meat. When it is harvest season however, the pseudoplants produce branches that ripen into dried meats good to eat for most humanoids. If left alone, these branches break off and form a new meat tree, meet bush or meat grass. The meat pseudoplants are incredibly inactive to conserve energy, and are omnivorous, feeding from root mouths (that look like lamprey eel mouths). They are tended to by stewards of the meat forest, who keep all of the fauna well-fed with vegetables and kitchen waste.
Low-level threat ideas include packs of wild wolves, small bands of meat bandits
Mid-level threat ideas include the camp of the meat bandits
High-level threat ideas include the stewards going AWOL, and as a result, the meat forest becoming hungry
Poll
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Topic: Re: Dungeons & Dragons / PNP games thread: COBRA!!! (Read 936344 times)