[Setting] Saturated Colors and Deep Shadow: The Sky Lands

[RiotGearEpsilon]

I wrote up this we little setting document for Nihlin's upcoming Red Hand Of Doom campaign hack. This is pure fluff, but I hope it's enjoyable.

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Our Greece, known as 'The Sky-Lands'

IN A NUTSHELL
Ancient greek social structure in jungle terrain and a Final Fantasy Bollywood aesthetic.

THE TERRAIN AND CLIMATE: JUNGLE LIKE A MOTHERFUCKER
The Sky-lands are a stormy land with dramatic weather that wobbles between dry heat and torrential rains, lush green terrain that has a habit of overgrowing all but the most vigorously paved roads. Cities are walled and warded to keep the green from raging through. Clothing and armor tends to be light, because it's really hot, and the local humanoids range from deeply tanned to ebony-skinned. It is HOT, TORRENTIAL, and URBAN.

URBAN SOCIETY: THE MIDDLE CLASS DOESN'T DO SHIT
Because of the voracious fertility of the terrain, fairly large cities are maintained with only 2/3rd of the population devoted to agriculture rather than 9/10th. This allows them to support a middle class devoted to things like magical theory, artisans, and luxuries such as operas, sculpture, poets, philosophers, cults, and so on.

ECONOMY: FUCK YOU, I'VE GOT MINE
City states tend to be isolated by long roads and wanton jungle. The jungle kills you with disease, the road kills you with bandits (who are diseased, because of the jungle), and sometimes a monster pops up and blocks off a transit route. So city states tend to be insular and self-sufficient.
City states frequently raid each other's surrounding farmland, primarily to steal wives and husbands, leading to intermarriage and familial feuding.

CRIME: ALSO, I'M GONNA GET HIS
The crime rate is some fifty times higher than what we're used to in America.

LITERACY: I CAN'T READ THIS DOCUMENT
The society is literate, but not particularly. Generally, only book-magicians, accountants, bureaucrats, and aristocrats are literate.

SLAVERY: PLEASE DON'T WHIP ME AGAIN, SIR
Slavery is common, but tends to be the sort of thing you can work your way out of unless you are a non-person according to the law of whatever city state you're in. We probably all qualify as non-people, legally.

SPECIFIC EXAMPLES: GREAT PLACES TO VISIT
The proud walled city of Cadeia (kah-DAY-uh) is ruled by the Tyrant Sura, an absolute dictator who is said to be able to sway the minds of men.

The high walled city of Agataea stands atop an earthen mound, warded by elementals as well as men, controlled by the conjurer Ephetus.

The buried city of Argentusmain enjoys walls of solid silver, said to be enchanted long ago by a wise and brilliant artificer so that no monster can approach the city.

[baduin]

There is no need to do this twice. Read Gor.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gor

[RiotGearEpsilon]

...No. No, this is not fantasy rapeland. Jesus christ.

[Nihlin]

What has been seen cannot be unseen!

Okay, seriously, any fantasy setting that employs a pastiche of real-world cultures has probably been done before, so yeah, this Gor thing and prior art and all, and it in turn was derivative of prior art, but... wow. You may as well use /b/ as a setting.

[Cynic]

so you are basically going for this ultra-hardcore land where only the elite-ultra hardcore adventurers have any right to do anything? What's different from current day d&d

[Nihlin]

Not much, really, but Riot basically picked "human-dominated lands" to be in charge of for the setting, and he basically likes to plan a bit so when the whole table looks at him and asks "who the hell are these dudes in the town over there?" he has a ready answer. The guy who wanted to do religious traditions and practices prefers to make stuff up on the spot.

[RiotGearEpsilon]

Indeed, it's pretty bog-standard DnD. Social license stems from either nobility (blood relation to a family with levels in a PC class) or power (I can fight all your peons to a standstill, do you really want to try and push me around?)

[RiotGearEpsilon]

GNOMES

Gnomes were originally the masters of the jungle - spooky little bastards who men feared. Time has cooled the antipathy between man and forest-folk, and now some of the gnomes - called 'metro-gnomes' by the witty - ply their magical craft within the cities, living within self-separated gnomish ghettos.

GODS AND TITANS

The setting includes one known titan and one known god.

Titans are not active beings - they are merely forces in the world, as impersonal and unlikely to respond to prayer as the sun is in the real world. They are, however, beings, and sometimes strange things happen.
The Titan Nyx is the night. She spawned love, hate, dreams, terror, madness, darkness, and some other things I can't recall.

Gods are active beings. They respond to prayer in some form, send omens, blessings, curses, and occasionally walk the world in some form. The skylands are littered with divine by-blows.
The Goddess Ate (AH-tey) is the goddess of destruction. She is that who declares the proper time for a thing to be unmade, and she whose hand moves the pestle that grinds that thing away. She has benevolent aspects, as that who wards away unjust destruction and annihilates the wicked, and malevolent aspects, as that which destroys whatever it is you wish to remain whole, such as your throat.

[RiotGearEpsilon]

FARMING

Farming in jungle is hard, so people don't. A lot of farms are built alongside rivers, set up so as to flood rice paddies. Other farms are built through strip-clearing jungle and using magical rituals to compost it in to good soil. This isn't really sustainable because horrible things will come out of the jungle en masse and ruin you if you try, and in the long run fighting all those high CR creatures for no reward but more farmland isn't worth it.

LIVESTOCK

The most common livestock is the hexalope, a six-legged, long-legged fuzzy horned critter adapted to living in marshland and rivers. They make a great roast and they give milk. You can raise them alongside rice paddies quite nicely.

[Cynic]

Are you being droll with the "people don't farm in jungles comment" or am I missing something?

[RiotGearEpsilon]

I'm being droll, mostly. It was tricky to figure out why we were in a farming village, but some quick thinking on the part of the lot of us worked out a reason for the place given the rest of the setting. Derrin's Ferry fits awkwardly in to the Skylands.