Josh's "Green Porn" setting project

[Grek]

Queens Falls should flow upwards due to shinanagens in the mythic past. It should, as a result, be a popular dock far inland.

[Josh_Kablack]

Slave Trading: Yes it happens, but I am not dwelling on or emphasizing it at all - so there are not markets anything like the scale of the real world Zanzibar.

A setting conceit is probably that the various forms of slavery all go by other names. One gets "conscripted" into a militia; one gets "shanghaied" into rowing a galley; convicts are put to "forced labor"; various natives are "paid in company scrip" for their work in the mines.

As I intend for the setting, the humans have not, as of yet, taken to capturing groups of natives (or buying prisoners from native tribes) and then shipping them back home to do menial labor. This is probably due some combination of the availability of unseen servant et al and also to human racial arrogance in regarding the gnolls and such as savages incapable of working a proper human farm as they work in decent, civilized lands.


Upwards Falls I like the idea in the generic, but Victoria Falls is pretty freakin' epic falling downwards - I don't think I need to add a blatant fantasy element. So maybe have the crazy unknown ancient hydromagic generators under the falls used to power massive underground pumps elsewhere in the setting for a river that flows inland - and therefore allows for an unusual shipping port. This could be presented as a nod to at the notion that the Nile flows "backwards" by going North.

[Eikre]

Adventure hook: When humans first made landings on the black coast, Queens Falls was host to a family of boatswains and guides who navigated with such skill that their routes carried travelers not only to the Falls' constituent rivers, but seemingly unconnected waterways further inland. The family no longer dwells there, and a concerned spirit medium in the area dreams of a travesty responsible for their departure. If someone could uncover what happened and render justice, a powerful mudzimu family spirit pledges to bless them with brotherhood and grant them the sublime capacity to travel on all streams, interconnected, and step behind the Queen's falls to exit from behind any other.

A bit less "freaky penis-sticking-in" and more "Zimbabwe is pretty fucking cool" here.

[Ct_Yankee]

Josh --

I've appropriated Enkopja for the game I am MCing, and the players are extremely excited to adventure in this setting. Currently, the party is comprised of seven, 4th level characters.

Elven Fire Mage
Human Paladin
Human Anarcho-primitivist graduate student at magical Princeton (4th level wizard) (part time waitress)
Human Samurai
Elven Rogue
Elven Ranger
Human Cleric

I've established two continents. They begin with standard races in a standard fantasy setting, and when they fly a ship to Enkopja and characters begin to perish, players will have the option of playing the new races.

Have you read Howard's "Red Nails" and "Tower of the Elephant" or Haggard's "She"? Sans racism, they might provide a lot of good ideas for this setting. I am going to employ "Dwellers of the Forbidden City" (the 1e module) for this campaign.

Thanks for this setting. Thanks especially for the reproductive-strategies underpinning. This gaggle of uchicago nerds will certainly find it interesting.

[Josh_Kablack]

Cool.

To find out that someone else is actually using this bossome capstone to an bossome three-day weeked of bosssome gaming and silly word coinages.


Yeah, while I don't remember Tower of the Elephant the way I do Red Nails from my early teen REH binges, it does look like it would fight right in. HR Haggard is right there in my campaign intro

The quick intro: This is a game in a psudeo-African fantasy adventure setting, and for influences it probably owes more to Edgar Rice Burrows, HR Haggard and parts of Jules Verne than to Tolkien and Lieber.

I kinda stopped posting stuff here because I was actually running a game, but I'll resume with some sharing of stuff I've used in the game if you want to swipe any of it.

I guess I could start by editing in the tweaked racial descripts above. Not many changes, just a couple fewer typos and some suggested naming conventions amongst the different races.

[Josh_Kablack]

Some stuff established so far in my game:

• The secret pirate caves on the Green Isle are not entirely natural caverns and the worked parts contain warnings of undersea invaders written in ancient pixie script.
• The Linked Hounds are a human mercenary unit captained by Sir Chainey who serve as auxillery troops to Lord Allen's personal militia. Their logo is a pair of cetlic-ish knotwork hounds, but due to their penchant for rough work and as a pun on their captain's name, locals call them "the Chain Gang"
• Sir Morgan Roth, Vice-Exchequer of the REC and the man who oversees REC profits on the Black Coast, is haunted by dream spirits which may or may not be sent by native magics.
• The Lord Governer Allen was accused in front of his whole court of harbouring a changeling in the form of his wife and conducting an elaborate kidnapping ruse to keep her away from the visiting Inquisitor of Lyonese. The Governor responded by personally executing the Inquisitor in front of a shocked court and then producing witnesses and evidence that the Inquisitor's identity had been usurped since the real inquistor had debarked the airship.
• Someone convinced the goblin gang who had been working as porters at the Foxcliff Skydocks to mutiny and steal an airship, causing enough damage to the Skydocks to render them inoperable for a week.
• James Tate, human prospector and collector of native jewelry has found a potential rich and untapped claudia vein further inland. He is trying to win the backing of the REC and seeking brave souls to mount an expedition to set up a mining camp. But Tate's maps to this claim don't quite add up.

[Josh_Kablack]

the sublime capacity to travel on all streams, interconnected, and step behind the Queen's falls to exit from behind any other.

That's a creative idea, but that whole teleport via waterways idea is bad for D&D games in general, due to the class abilities of D&D characters rendering it either useless or level-inappropriate, but it's a very special type of double-extra horrible for a setting about exploration and having to deal with unfamiliar cultures.

The fancy new transit method in this setting is AIRSHIPS - and as much as airships are opening up the interior to exploration, airships also have a number of ways that they can leave PCs stranded - they can crash, run low on cavorite, be hijacked, miss the rendezvous, or PCs can just be thrown overboard. Being able to strand PCs is important because they are then left having to actually deal with their surrounding and the native peoples instead of merely spirit portalling back to the trading post.

[Josh_Kablack]

You should do something cute with cone snails. Their shells can be used to make a spiral ndoro talisman which were/are attested to have some manner of spiritual power, which says to me that there's an opportunity to have a creature with some overtly magical mechanics that you like but couldn't otherwise find a real-world biological analogue for. And then when you kill one you get, like, I dunno, a holy symbol or something.

Okay, these are actually a good environmetnal fit for the "what's hiding in the mangrove swamp" session coming up:
They get to be a reskinned and slightly tweaked Ixitxachitl (MM2 evil stingrays with energy drain) that get a Roper-like drag mechanic to simulate the harpoons of the real world varieties (less effective on a small critter vs med PCs, but whatever, they hunt fish smaller than themselves but can defend against humans) . They also get to be a threat/ guard-dog type pet amongst lizardfolk and kuo-toa.