The Land of Aquerria
The land is
dotted with ruins, once a kingdom of the same name, now a shattered and
abandoned realm that has survived the encroachment of the armies of Chaos,
but all it’s highways and knightly orders are just tales and memories. To
the east lie the Dunstrand Mountains where boggards and grues dwell. To
the north, the twisted and overgrown Arkenwood spans. To the west, jagged
rocks line the coast of the Hungry Sea.
The folk
of Aquerria have for the most part huddled within their towns, keeps
and villages and do not know what lies beyond a day or two’s travel from their
homes. The art of reading and writing has all but been forgotten to
common folk, wizards and witches have a tenuous understanding of magic, and
clerics prostrate themselves to uncaring gods.
The City-State of Anzagort
A grand
rambling city built on either side of the meandering River Elshaveer, with
seven bridges guarded by seven stone golems, the City State of Anzagort is
ruled by the tyrannical Overlord Belchor Ironfist in name, but the Beggar’s
Brotherhood and the their nemeses the White Adepts of Garu-tet the Staring Eye
of Night who convene in secret, have turned the city into their own
battleground, and there are dark alleys that the Firedrake Guard fear to tread.
While life is
cheap in the dark alleys of The City of Seven Bridges, the Causeway of the Gods
offers some meagre hope to those who need it, and dozens of demagogues offer
prayers to gods that mortals fear to name – Azetdahak Duke of the Scouring
Wind, Shaaleer of the Thousand Eyes, Cademon the Golden Herald, Yddgrrl the
World Tree, and more...
Elves of the
Arkenwood and Dwarves of the Dunstrand Mountains sometimes come to Anzagort
peddling minor trinkets in the bazaars of the Gibbet Rows, and fine mithral
blades for nobles of The Spires who can spare the gold from their purse, and
Halflings sometimes come forth from the Undercrofts to walk underfoot amongst
men. These furtive races are often mistrusted and misunderstood.
The Village of Uxcrump
Two days wagon
travel north of Anzagort along a rutted dirt road lies the sodden homes of the
villagers of Uxcrump. The run-down Groaning Well Inn has more than one
hole in the roof, and the surly innkeeper serves watered down ale, telling
stories about the senile Lord Mayor Milus Ambercroft and the strange cyclopean
ruins on Blackvole Hill that once might have been a protective keep but now is
a place where wandering children and homeless beggars go missing. Deacon
Balto has suggested that sacrifices at the shrine of Shaaleer of the Thousand
Eyes might be the solution, but no one ever listens to him, anyway.
The Wounded Sky
You know that travelling storytellers
talk of the great battles of Law and Chaos, and you know that there are evil
things that live in the dark corners of the world, but nothing is more evident
of the old battles of eons past than ragged wounds in the sky itself, faintly
visible during the day, and starkly visible at night. Through these
tears, you can see alien stars of the sky of Chaos, and sometimes, even a blood
red moon staring balefully through the rent. On nights of the blood moon,
sacrificial victims are missing their internal organs, swarms of locusts crawl
on the statutes of Garru-Tet, and oracles fear to assay the runestones.
Chaos is still present in the world.
This, and the scribbled map
above were my complete ‘gazeteer’ when I started my DCC campaign and ran
Sailors of the Starless Sea. I went completely
old school, building out from a single village, and created not a whole world,
but a small area for the players to explore.
I treated it more like an excerpt from a paperback S&S novel than an
RPG device – write the prose first, figure out what it all means later.
I wanted to hit certain pulp
sword and sorcery notes with my world, and a fair amount of thought went into
this initial plan.
I wanted the big, old, byzantine
city where characters could squander their gold, evil could wander dark and
crooked alleys, and there was one bastion of civilization, for good or
bad. I wanted my own Lankhmar, Greyhawk
or Sanctuary. The City-State of Anzagort
was my answer to this. It sounded old,
fantastic, and somewhat lawless. It had
every temple, a marketplace where strange things could be bought, and an
underworld organization the players could grow to hate, or at least mistrust.
Outside of Anzagort, I
scribbled down a few towns and hamlets, but they would be lesser settlements.
I wanted the big Law vs Chaos
conflict common to Moorcock’s novels, and I wanted to meet some of the conceits
of the DCC rules – elves weren’t the shining ethereal beings of light, scrounging
for a chain shirt would be an achievement, and magic is unreliable and patrons
fickle – so I wrecked the world. The
Pathfinder campaign backdrop of Golarion did this and the writers talked about building
a world that can you have a landscape littered with dungeons and treasure. Their solution was to take a world, depopulate
it and leave a ruins of a former civilization.
So instead of everyone preparing for the great battle of Law vs. Chaos,
it’s happened, and everyone is living in the shattered landscape
aftermath. Aquerria was the name of a
shining kingdom of order and civilation, but it’s gone, just an echo, a
memory. Chaos was defeated, but not
obliterated, and the world and sky bear scars of the great battle. I wanted the gods to not be ineffable beings,
but fallable and flawed supremely powerful creatures like the King of Swords or
Donblas of Law. I wanted patrons to be strange and mysterious, so I named a few
in my introductory page that I printed for my players, new to the DCC game –
Shaleer of the Thousand Eyes is a god of Law, but doesn’t sounds pristine and
someone worshipped by throngs wearing white linen.
I had other ideas as well – I
wanted knowledge to be rare, so literacy was less common in the current world,
to make magic less understood. I wanted
a world of disjointed settlements, so independent cities, or if there was a
kingdom, it would be a small clutch of towns and the ‘king’ would be a petty
ruler.
I tried to rough out where elves, dwarves, and halflings lived in the world, and what they did in it. No cute shire-like villages for my halflings, no ethereal elven towers of ivory. It was definitely a world of mankind, with the non-human races living on the edges, not dominant cultures at all.
Lastly, I wanted strange sounding
names for places, people and things. I
wanted Gygaxian, Vancian, Lieberish names.
I wanted monsters that sounded creepy and unknown. I wanted that feeling we had when we first
played D&D, so I stayed away from orcs and goblins, so blackvoles instead
of wolves, boggards and grues instead of orcs and trolls, and so on.
On my map, I put in a few landmarks or
places of note, but they were just names – I hadn’t decided what the people of Peln
or Ilvernary were like, or who lived in the Green Tower. I’d figure that out later.
I love world building as a
GM/DM/Judge .. it’s one of my favourite things.
With DCC, I fought my impulses and did the absolute bare minimum. These few paragraphs were enough to evoke a
feeling, an atmosphere. As my players
explored the world, I started making up details on the fly, taking notes, and
expanding my ‘gazeteer’ but this was the origin of my campaign world of
Aquerria …
Next article will be my
Gazetteer thus far, and a far more polished map…
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