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Old Dragon Joined: 30 Aug 2007 Posts: 577

So, by default Bonethrall's landscape looks like the typical post-apocalyptic lifeless place. What else have you established in your games?

At the moment, areas that have been defined:

-The Daemonscar: As this is ground zero, yes, blasted wasteland. Dotted with ruins of Loyalist cities and Liberator war camps. Ringed by a mountain range, ala Mordor. Notable settlements: Waypoint, Traitor's Gate.
-The Ruined Sea: Blasted wasteland, but formerly a sea. Ruins of port cities and occasional ship or wreck? Notable settlements: The Fort
-The South Coast: unsure about climate, but there's still an ocean out there. Ask AAS for details. Notable settlements: Fishsticks. Confederation of city-states.
-The Hartland: Insanely prolific mutant jungle, filled with aberrants and mutant animals. Notable settlements: The Vale of Thorns.

Old Dragon Joined: 23 Mar 2007 Posts: 413 Location: Limbo

I suggest areas of perfect order too... not the human sort of order, but godly order. Since gods of law and order are dead too, the whole concept has been a bit twisted. There are places of order where there shouldn't be one, and places of disorder where they shouldn't be present.

Taken from my Multiply. http://phelanw0lf.multiply.com/journal/item/5/Bonethrall_Gazzetter_The_Hartland_Or_this_world_has_more_than_just_barren_wasteland

Bonethrall Gazzetter: The Hartland (Or, this world has more than just barren wasteland)

Bonethrall Project weirdness

Well, in-game development of UPHGC's Bonethrall setting for D&D seems to be rolling along fine. The Nagthar are getting a fair amount of attention in-game, both as antagonists and antagonists. There's just something about bloody-handed sun-worshipping slavers, I guess.

One of my recent concerns however is geography...Or our lack of it. At the moment, the Bonethrall's world, Creation, seems to have one default terrain: barren wasteland. In every game we've run so far, we've been in freezing tundra, rocky badlands, and endless sand dunes. There seems to be so much sand, dust, gravel and grit in the setting that it seems a wonder that there's any form of plant or animal life at all, let alone the kind of ecosystem required to support high-order life forms (aka Player Characters). I wanted a wild, chaotic, and dangerous world abandoned by the touch of the divine, not a dustball. Frank Herbert's planet Arrakis already does "dustball" so much better Razz

(and yes, if I had a Fremen's eye for the desert, I'd be able to say that it's more than just a dustball, that they have more words for sand then Esquimaux have for snow, etc etc).

So my own little project for this little post of the Bonethrall Gazzetter is to create a wild, dangerous, and interesting environment without making it a barren waste. In fact let's go in the exact opposite direction. Let's create an environment that is so incredibly vibrant, fecund, and alive that the entire place turns into a nucking futs hellhole. Inspirations include The Andelain Hills and Garroting Deep from Donaldson's Thomas Covenant books, the prison planet Chimera in Jyu-oh-sei, and just about any jungle/forest stuffed with mad plant and animal life in fantasy and sci-fi. And throw in a little of Princess Mononoke in just for the hell of it.

The Hartland

The Horned King, the god of the wilds, was destroyed during the Godfall War, and it seemed as if much of the land itself died with it. Plant life withered and died, and the backlash of protean magics slew countless living creatures, and warped many of those that survived into things that had never before seen the light of Creation. The natural rhythms of plant and animal life and the seasons themselves were disrupted all across Creation. In many places, this resulted in the creation of barren wastelands, and the reshaping of the land itself. To many, desolation is the new face of the world, post-Godfall. Those few who are aware of the Hartland and other places of uncontrolled fey magic know that nothing could be further from the truth. In many places, the land did not die. The land itself went mad.

The Hartland is an enormous cancerous boil of a forest, anomalously standing in the middle of a blasted waste. Rumored to have been the site of the Horned King's last stronghold during the Godfall War, the forests of the Hartland were first rediscovered barely a century after the Song of Destruction ended the war. Once merely an incongruous patch of greenery, the forests began to rapidly expand in the years after the Godfall. In the chaotic years after the disruption of the natural and supernatural order, there were those who saw in the forests a rare resource, a source of food, fuel, and building material. Expeditions were sent out to the Hartland. Those that returned told a nightmarish tale of carnivorous plants, packs of wild beasts, of the earth itself turning against them. Later visitors would speak of misshapen creatures twisted from their natural forms, and their scars were mute testimony to the ferocity of the beasts that dwelt within the forest. Still, the lure of resources and powerful reagents from these strange beasts was a powerful incentive for many expeditions.

And then, an expedition returned with the strangest tale of all. Fleeing for their lives, hounded by chimaera and gorgons, harried by swarms of stirges and vile lamias, the remnants of the expedition stumbled into a clearing in the forest, seeking to make a last stand against the beasts that pursued them. The clearing however, was quiet. None of the beasts followed them into the still glade. And then they saw it, standing in the midst of the clearing: a white hart. It simply stood there, resplendent in the clearing, bathing in a shaft of sunlight. Untouched by the protean mutations that had consumed the rest of the forest, the white hart radiated an aura of peace and serenity. In a daze, the expedition followed after the hart. Where the hart went, the fecund chaos and malignant cancers of the forest seemed to recede. The expedition emerged unscathed. None of them however dared to return.

Others too began to encounter the White Hart, and their experiences have not always been so benign. The White Hart has at times attacked trappers, loggers, though it seems to have a certain restraint in dealing with elves and eladrin, apparently preferring to drive them away rather than kill them.

As the tales of the White Hart spread, the forest itself began to take on the name of the Hartland.

Flora and Fauna:
The Hartland is populated with a wildly diverse and unnaturally aggressive ecosystem. Basically, if its a magical beast or creep in the D&D Monster Manual, you can find it in here, with special emphasis on plant horrors and dire animals. Shambling mounds of sentient vegetation, berserk dryads, misshapen chimaera, and others dot the landscape. Only in those places that the White Hart frequents are there samples of anything even closely resembling "normal" plant and animal life.

The White Hart, Elves and Eladrin
The White Hart was once a powerful exarch of the Horned King, and when the nature god passed away, the natural order began to collapse. The White Hart, its powers diminished, nevertheless attempted to maintain some sort of order, its mere presence serving as a buffer against the wild decay and mutation that swept the known world. But the White Hart is fighting a losing battle. The fecund chaos of the Hartland expands ever outward, and the exarch can only do so much. Eventually, its hold will slip, its power will weaken. Unless something is done to change the balance of power, eventually the last bastion of uncorrupted nature will fall, and the cancerous boil that is the Hartland will continue to expand unchecked.

The White Hart still remembers that the Elves and the Eladrin were descended from the Eldariel race, the mortal servants of the Horned King, and so still extends them a measure of respect, but should any sentient intentionally damage the fragile islands of uncorrupted life within the Hartland, then the Hart mercilessly does everything in its power to destroy them.

***

Dang, this isn't turning out as well as I want to. I've got images in my head, but I can't quite bring them out fully. Whatever. I'll post this up as is and tweak it up more.
***
Comments:

Not sure if I should make a new thread about this. Questions.

1. Is there a way to have protection from a sunstorm? Some sort of pillar or something that generally deviates the sunstorm from coming to a city/area. Or probably a ritual. Just asking.

It could be possibly used as some sort of tradable something; Nagthar sell/trade this to other village/areas. Or could be a devise they only have, that they would never give to others, so that they wouldn't get hit by sunstorms.

2. Is there a way that the Sinagthari could control where sunstorms strike?

I had this idea about a place called Maelstrom, or probably something synonymous. It's where they 'dumped' the sunstorms. It's was thinking it's somewhere in the middle of an ocean/large body mass of water. The result of this is weird climate that it induce, thus it always has thunderstorms/lightning clouds/tornadoes/ any natural disaster involving the weather. Possibly strange creatures lurk there, those that adapt to its unnatural climate.

The concept is unpolished, but it has been on my mind since I've done my Defend the Ships campaign, where the PCs are stricken(?) by a sunstorm while seafaring. I think it has potential, so i think.