Atlas Map of South Western Thivola (WIP) plus Campaign Stuff

With my 5e/ACKS mashup coming in less than a week, I've been taking a lot of the side work I've been doing the last couple of weeks and getting it all together for Session 1. Setting notes, NPCs, towns, people, monsters... I have quite the treasure trove of stuff ready for this game. While I've played 5e, I have only ever run it once, so I haven't gotten into creating my own races and such yet. Still want to get my sea legs with the current ruleset before I start creating. But I imagine it won't take too long.

Below is the Atlas sized map for South Western Thivola, the continent inspired by South America.

This map in particular is inspired by the Chilean-Argentinean area where Santiago is. The north western part becomes a desert due to the coastline mountain range blocking the trade winds and due to it getting ever so closer to those Horse Latitudes. Further north, there is a plateau similar to the Altiplano. I plan on having a variety of deserts up there. The barren wastelands, the dried up lake turned salt flat, and some sandy dunes. The mountain range is Etapu's Spine, named after the people's founder god of the earth and forests, Etapu. I plan on widening it some more as it goes more south. On the other side of it in the north lie the beginnings of sub tropical wet forest. Further north and east, I'll probably put in some more rain forests and swamps.

As you get more south, the terrain, climate, and vegetation changes to be more green and hilly. The mountains get closer to the coast. The climate becomes more temperate with Mediterranean summers. More rivers and some swamps here and there. This is where the players will be starting their adventures. On the other side of Etapu's Spine, I plan on widening the mountain range to be about 200 mi wide. Very much a montane/alpine area. Then, it will lead to a more arid, steppe-like area of nomadic tribes and such before hitting the coast on the other end.

From here, I have a great variety of terrains and climates that will make exploration and travel interesting to the players. While they will be starting in something a bit more familiar, they can end up in some deserts, rainforests, alpine, or even tundra. All in a geographically close area.

I do have more zoomed in maps for campaign use. I have a Regional Map with small 6-mile hexes that create large 24-mile hexes. I also have a Provincial Map with small 1-mile hexes that create a large 6-mile hex. And finally, I have the Local Map, which just focuses on a single 6 mile hex broken up into 43 1-mile hexes and half/third hexes. Below is a mostly finished Provincial Map. The players will be starting in the large triangle.

I'm bad at coloring within the lines

You can see that from the center to the upper left, my style of drawing changed drastically. I went from doing more symbolic mapping to more iconic mapping. I may redo this at a later point to keep the style consistent and to use a hex map that isn't so dark.

While this campaign is using 5e for the basic rules, I've been using ACKS for a lot of the nation building. You'll notice in the Atlas map that there are some pencil marks that encircle certain areas of the map. These are provinces of the empire ruling over the northern area. The cities are the capital holdings of the nobles in charge of these provinces, built up by ACKS's empire building rules. It was pretty interesting putting the rules to work. Setting up populations and big cities and the empire's metropolis capital in the mountains. The players will be adventuring on the frontier area, away from a lot of these big cities. However, with enough travel time and horses, they can get to one of the capitals in four days. Great if they want to buy and sell expensive stuff, or want more urban adventuring and a break from the wilderness.

I'll get more into detail with the mapping and campaign as the week goes by. Till then, let me know what you think about the maps. 

Lunar Cycles and Tides

The moon and the tides have helped to shape human civilization for millenia. From maritime activities to the simple wonder of the bright celestial body in the night sky, we owe a lot to these natural phenomena. So, I want to write up some simple ideas for using them in a campaign. Let's begin with the moon. Mind you, this only really works if you have one moon, but I imagine you can use the concepts presented here for multiple moons (or ditch them entirely).

Moon Cycles

The moon of Earth is a tidally locked satellite that orbits our planet every 27.8 days. We'll simplify this to just 28 days because I hate decimals. Because it is tidally locked, we always see the same face of the moon most nights. For game terms, we'll have only the important four lunar cycles; new moon, first quarter, full moon, last quarter. Every seven days you'll have a different section of the lunar cycle in the night sky and they will loop back into each other endlessly every 28 days. You'll also notice the in-between sections for crescent and gibbous moons. An easy way to remember gibbous is that it's inverted, like a black crescent moon. When the moon is becoming full, then it is waxing, and when it is becoming new, it is waning.

Source: Wikipedia

Tides

As we now know, the tides are controlled by the moon. Depending on the location of the moon will decide whether we have high or low tide. In game terms, the tides come in and out twice a day. So you'll have two high tides and two low tides. We can have these happen at 6 hour intervals of your choosing. For a bit more realistic tides, you can have the next day's tide times happen about 40 minutes later than the previous day's, but it's not necessary. 

When the tide is coming in, we call that the flow tide. When it reaches it's maximum, that is high tide. You'll see a lot of flooded beaches during this. When the water begins to recede, that is the ebbing tide. When this reaches its lowest point, that is low tide. You will see a lot more of the sand and ocean floor revealed to you. When the tides cease to move, usually at the peak of high and low tide, or when the flow and ebb has stopped, that is slack tide. The different between low and high tide can be one of a couple of feet in depth and several feet in distance from the coast to the ocean.

Tides in the UK on the same day

But that's not all. The phase of the moon can make tides weaker or stronger than normal. The stronger tide is called the spring tide and the weaker tide is called the neap tide. The diagram below shows when this happens. Like the lunar phases, it happens every seven days and alternates between spring tide and neap tide. Generally, it'll lag a little behind the phase of the moon by one or two days. For this exercise, we'll say one day. 

Now What?

So now that we know all this, how do we use this? The tides and their link to the lunar phases have been known as far back as ancient Greece. And they have had a great impact on coastal civilizations for centuries. So some ideas for applying it to game terms.

• Great for nautical games that highly depend on the wind and tides to leave and enter bays.
• Low tide can uncover a secret burial area by the coast.
• High tide hides a secret cavern that leads to treasure. When it's low tide, you can enter it, but traversing it is difficult. High tide, you can easily swim to the different chambers, but it'll be hard to bring stuff out. Not to mention what creatures the tide brings in.
• Low tide reveals a land bridge that leads to a set of ruins, or even an island city that is accessible by bridges.
• High tide can empower water and healing magic, while low tide might stymie it, or instead it empowers earth magic.
• Divination using the tides and what they reveal can be used by scryers and seers.
• Different lunar phases can illuminate the night sky, if only up to dim.
• The different phases can empower different types of magic. Full moon could empower healing and holy magic while the new moon powers summoning and divination magic.
• Lycanthropy is the obvious pointer. You can even say that a ritual during the new moon can help to cure it. Or a ritual under the full moon can make the shift controllable.
• Different deities and protectors of the tides and phases can exist and praying to them at that time can elicit boons.
• Different phases of the moon shining on a dungeon can open different portals that lead to other areas.
• Connections between our world and the spirit world are strongest under a full moon, while the new moon brings in demons and monsters into our world.
• Full moons seem to bring out the worst in people as well as animals. Monsters and creatures become more wild and some people can suffer from lunacy.
• A blue moon (the rare fourth moon in a season) can be the perfect time for a terrible ritual to summon demonic creatures or gather great power. You could even get a wish granted.
• Or the moon could hide a terrible moon presence (spoilers for Bloodborne).

Grand Be during low tide at St. Malo, France

These are what I could come up with. I'd love to see what other ideas people have for using the tides and the lunar phases in their games. Truthfully, before I became a chef, I was into meteorology and I've always had a love of the cycles of nature. So admittedly this is a bit of a self indulgence of that for me, but hopefully this will be useful for those that run great nature campaigns. 

Survivor Series I: Weather Forecasting

Fun fact, before I decided to be a chef and go to culinary school, I went to college to be a meteorologist. I have always been enamored by the weather and decided I wanted to do that for a living. Sadly, I wasn't the best at it, mostly the math sections. You'd be surprised how much math we had to take. I think only the mathematicians beat us. But enough about that.

I've always loved tornadoes and got to chase them! (Source: Wikipedia)

When I started DMing 3.5 and later Pathfinder, I would incorporate a lot of OSR survival stuff into my games. I always focused a lot more on the Man vs. Nature battles as players would deal with wildlife, natural disasters, disease, and weather. Weather is awesome and a game changer, and most players don't expect to deal with the blistering heat or cold, let alone storms and tornadoes. One of the most memorable moments in a game was when a PC tied himself to a pole and survived a tornado going over them, all while screaming and shouting obscenities. This earned him a place of honor among the tribes of kobolds that saw what he accomplished and he became a hero to them.

Of course, when adding more survival stuff into your game, it helps to know a little bit about the rules as well as how it works in real life, especially in a world very different from our modern world. For today. it's weather forecasting. In Pathfinder, one can forecast the weather using the Survival skill. And I use this in my ACKS game too, with a 16+ roll to do it, but those with Survival gain a +4 to it. However, many of my players have wondered how, without modern equipment, did our ancestors divine the weather?

We have to remember that people didn't use the scientific methods that we use today. A lot of weather forecasting was pattern recognition, based on astronomy, observing animal behavior, and simply looking at patterns in the sky. This would be compiled into almanacs as weather lore. You can see a pretty good list of them on the Wikipedia article about it. You can use these or have them as inspiration to make up your own weather lore for your game. Remember, it's all based on observations, not rigorous testing. If a bunch of crows gather the night before a rainstorm, you can bet that people will assume that a murder of crows brings the rain. And with running a magical fantasy setting, maybe that is actually the case! There are more magic methods of forecasting the weather, Dowsing and haruspicy are some real world examples. The classical definitions of pyromancy and aeromancy are also good to use for divining the weather (among other things).

Forecasting the weather is an important tool if you make weather a decent obstacle. Players dealing with torrential rainstorms and the flash floods that come with them will value a survivalist's prediction in the future. Or, the players trap an enemy army in a terrible thunderstorm to weaken and gain an advantage on them. Anything is possible! The more you use weather, the more of an impact it will have. I generally use the Pathfinder rules for weather, since they are pretty robust, but use or make up whatever you like! For a generator, I like to use the Dodeca Generator here. I find it is a good weather generator that takes into account the previous day's weather as well as the climate.

Underwater Adventures Part II

So I was brainstorming with some of the good folks on the OSR Google+ community about adventures underwater. A lot of it was how things we take for granted here in the surface world would be different. And it was about what kind of cultures we'd see underwater. Combined with some more brainstorming with my buddy Donald and the guys on OSR, here's what we've all come up with.

Metal Weapons

One of the biggest things I feel would affect cultures is the lack of traditional metal working. Without fire, you can't really do it the traditional method. And then there's the rust. So there were some ideas we all had on how to deal with this. Tod Casasent had a cool idea that metal could be devoured or somehow implanted into some of the natural life and harvested by the underwater denizens. So here are some of his ideas, expanded on.

Silver Marlin

The silver marlin is a special predatory fish, fast as it is dangerous. Like a swordfish, it has a sharp, harpoon-like 'nose' it uses to hunt its prey. The reason it's called the silver marlin is because of the metal it absorbs from special coral reefs it lives in. The metal creates hard deposits in the fish that makes its bones hard as iron. Many of the underwater civilizations hunt these creatures to claim their bones, but only the best hunters can take on these creatures. Silver marlins are incredibly fast and difficult to catch. This could be a rite of passage for warriors, to claim their fish in an almost Hemmingway-esque battle between man and marlin. These would also be popular among nobles that might pay for older, slower marlins that they can easily hunt down and claim as trophies to show off with other nobles.

Citashells

These are giant clams that, like the silver marlin, has iron deposits in its shell. These minerals are absorbed from the ocean floor through filter feeding, only instead of making pearls, it adds the minerals to their shell. This makes it a walking fortress and virtually without any predators, so long as its shell is closed. Still, a canny hunter can wait for the clam to open its shell for feeding to impale it in its soft, fleshy center. Cleaning out the clam is easy and unhinging the bivalve's shells makes for a natural buckler that is durable and surprisingly light weight. I feel with underwater adventures, heavy shield wouldn't really be usable, but a light weight buckler would be useful. And since most of these species wouldn't have hammers or other bludgeoning weapons, that'd make sense.

Oreal Reefs

Coral reefs where the polyps absorb and leave behind iron rich exoskeletons to form these beautiful, metallic homes for animals. These are really hard to carve and most people use these less for weapons and armor and more as natural fortifications. Many canny generals cultivate these coral reefs to make study homes against war. I wonder though, what would artillery be like underwater? Floating ballistas driven by whales? Dragging a ballista on the ocean floor sounds really difficult with the push back from the water. Would we have floating walls, enclosing a whole city? Cities built into underwater mountains? Perhaps these coral reefs become massive and in turn are underwater cities for the deep denizens. A lot of these questions do less with limiting underwater races and option and instead help to carve out a different and alien civilization for those underwater.

The Deep Dark

Beneath the waves, where light fears to tread is the Abyssal Zone, a place of darkness, cold, and fear. The creatures that live down here are things from a horror novel, many of them deadly and vicious, forged by the shivering dark and crushing pressure. But down here, there are spots of immense heat. Geothermal vents and lava flowing and mixing with the water. Using the lava and pressure, these deep creatures have forged a durable steel that surpasses those of the upper dwellers. Lead by jealousy of their surface cousins, these deep dwellers take up arms with their powerful weapons and leviathan war beasts to raid the upperfolk at night for slaves and resources, before descending back down to avoid the light. I definitely want to write more about these guys in another, later post.

Ethereal Things Lurk in the Wilds

The wilderness is a scary place, filled with deadly animals, poisonous plants, and teeming with spirits of nature. I've always loved the innate dangers of exploration beyond terrible monsters. Diseases, natural disasters, and the elements make for great dramatic encounters that the players have to contend with. One can always fight a chimera or bandits, but how does one swing their sword against a flash flood, or a tornado? But that's a good post for another time.

Spirits need to be used more. I love reading about tribal religions, animism, and paganism. There is something more personal yet alien about spirits of natural objects watching you as explore the wilds, or animal spirits racing along side you, hunting their own ethereal prey. Just because they are nature spirits doesn't mean they are inherently good or nice. They aren't a commune of hippies singing koombayah while becoming one with nature. The wilds are brutal and uncaring and cruel and so are many of the spirits. Anger a wolf or a lion and it will just initiate combat with you. Anger the spirits of the wilds, and you have to fight something both intangible and elemental.

Spirits lie in the Spirit World, or the Ethereal Plane, or whatever name one wishes to call it. Here lie spirits of all shapes and types. There are spirits of trees and rivers whose names you can hear as whispers in a forests. Many times these spirits coalesce into a greater consciousness of the land that protects and serves the domain as a genius loci. Animal spirits roam the realm, hunting and playing in the wilds of the ethereal. There are ghosts and all kinds of spirits here. The Spirit World is separate, yet within the Waking World. It intertwines itself around the Waking World and the Dreamlands like a creeper vine over a great oak. There is no separation between our world and the world of the spirits, and these spirits can walk freely between realms. If you find the right area in a secluded grove in a forest, or an isolated peak in the mountains, or a lost oasis in the desert, you too can travel to the Spirit World. These are ley lines that are a bridge and are where the Spirit Realm bleeds into the Waking World the most. It's dangerous to enter physically, so many simply go there spiritually. This requires putting your body in extreme stress to work. Starvation and thirst are common, but a faster (though still dangerous) approach lies in using hallucinogens to achieve a spiritual connection to the Ethereal Plane. Because of the closeness of the Spirit World, the Waking World, and the Dreamlands, dreams can be a convenient way for spirits and people to communicate.

Ghosts and phantoms are trapped here, their emotions and nostalgia for the living world binding them in an eternity of torment, waiting to be freed. Alongside these ghosts are ancestor spirits. These are ghosts of your parents and theirs and so on, who have chosen to stay behind and protect their kin, granting their wisdom of the ages, good fortune, or strength in conflict. Many say that after centuries of good service and reverence, they ascend to heights of power like that of a demigod.

Too spooky!

Canny and clever animals that live beyond the venerable age of their species ascend spiritually and become one with nature and the spirit world. They become smarter, like a human, but still retain ties to their survival instincts. The animals no longer live in nature, but simply are nature. They can live out an eternity in nature until something disturbs their homes. Like spirits of nature, they can call upon animals and plants to attack intruders and their enemies. Many animal spirits become genius loci of their home after centuries of protection. Like ancestor spirits, they can decide to safeguard a person, a clan, or a tribe. In this way, they morph into totems, protectors lending their guidance and strength to overcome life's obstacles. In my setting, the best of these totems ascend spiritually again into the tonalli, creatures that defend people born on a certain day or month.

I swear I don't own a shirt like this!

Most spirits are primal in nature and transcend our own morals, usually helping anyone that gives them the right offering. This depends on the spirit. Some love tobacco or hallucinogenics, others love luxurious items, like jewelry and fine clothing, and more love less tangible treasures, like knowledge or secrets or even a good joke. A spirit always tells the person what they want, and once they receive their offering, spirits always honors your requests. Some spirits lean more to benevolent or malevolent attitudes, but all honor the offering system and honor a spiritually charismatic speaker.

Anyone can try and talk to a spirit, but without any form of spiritual connection, things can get bad very quickly. Spirits love the Waking World, but many are ignorant or apathetic to the people that live there and their customs. As such, they can be easily angered. Imagine two people speaking to each other, but they speak different languages. Each one tries in vain to make the other understand them, and it becomes one big awkward shouting match. That's where spirit talkers come in. Unlike the religions of more reformed, ecclesiastical religions of larger cities, whose deity(ies) is personal and can understand all prayers and worshipers, more tribal religions of the frontier require spirit talkers to handle diplomacy with the spirits of nature and ghosts. Shamans are the common term, but so are witch doctors, witches, mediums, channelers. These people are priests that help connect us to the ghosts and apportions that would vex the uninitiated. Shamans play a large role in tribal and frontier societies where nature is unforgiving, and anyone that can tame the wilds (or at least bargain with them) become highly respected advisers and in some cases, leaders. Sadly enough, the shaman leaders of tribes find that the more they delve into human politics and issues, the harder it is to connect to the Spirit World. This is because to speak with spirits, one much have an incredible amount of discipline and some disassociation from worldly concerns.

Channelers from the old Pokemon games were creepy, but cool.

The spirits in the setting I run are called zemis. Each zemi is a nature spirit of some aspect of the wild. Trees, rivers, rocks.. each one has a zemi attached to it. Zemis love idols and always ask that a shaman creates an idol based on the material they love most. A zemi of the mountains would want a stone idol adorned with rare metals and gems, while one from the forests would want one made of logs and vines, with beautiful flowers decorating them. Each zemi has a different personality and it is up to the bohique, the locals' shaman, to parley with them for safety and good fortune. Some also act as psychopomps, guiding the newly departed into caves that lead to the underworld, or towards ley lines that lead to the Spirit World. Zemis and bohiques are a much needed ecosystem that helps the living, even long after they have passed.

Of course, who says that spirits are only for nature, the frontier, and tribesmen...