20 Questions again.

A little over a year ago Jeff Rients asked these twenty questions on his blog here, I was thinking we might want to use this as a basis and start answering the twenty questions about each country in Garnia World. Obviously, when you are dealing with countries a question like "Where is the nearest tavern?" isn't relevant, but we might want to include a matrix of political attitudes between countries, kind of like the old Racial Preferences table from the 1st edition PH.  Assume that all of the questions apply to the campaign at present.

• What is the deal with my cleric's religion?
• Where can we go to buy standard equipment?
• Where can we go to get platemail custom fitted for this monster I just befriended?
• Who is the mightiest wizard in the land?
• Who is the greatest warrior in the land?
• Who is the richest person in the land?
• Where can we go to get some magical healing?
• Where can we go to get cures for the following conditions: poison, disease, curse, level drain, lycanthropy, polymorph, alignment change, death, undeath?
• Is there a magic guild my MU belongs to or that I can join in order to get more spells?
• Where can I find an alchemist, sage or other expert NPC?
• Where can I hire mercenaries?
• Is there any place on the map where swords are illegal, magic is outlawed or any other notable hassles from Johnny Law?
• Which way to the nearest tavern?
• What monsters are terrorizing the countryside sufficiently that if I kill them I will become famous?
• Are there any wars brewing I could go fight?
• How about gladiatorial arenas complete with hard-won glory and fabulous cash prizes?
• Are there any secret societies with sinister agendas I could join and/or fight?
• What is there to eat around here?
• Any legendary lost treasures I could be looking for?
• Where is the nearest dragon or other monster with Type H treasure?

Garnia- Celts, Romans and Earth's Magic Supply

I was reading through some of the earlier stuff that I was writing about the initial Celtic migration specifically and how I came up with a reasonable estimate that they would have a population of roughly 37 million, all the steppe-taiga-tundra could easily contain, within 100 years, if they had a conservative 120,000 original settlers. That happened and the tribes set to fighting amongst themselves a bit and looking for new lands to settle. The Sidhe empire to the south was promising territory, but they were epic sorcerers, even compared to the raw power of the Druids.

It was the Sidhe warriors that got itchy about Human incursions into their "forbidden zones" that started the war that brought their empire down. The tribes of the eastern steppes were attacked and culled like an over population of deer, or killed by these troops with the mercy they'd have shown a band of Goblins, their villages were burned and their people were slaughtered, this was around 150 AD. By 170 AD or 230 years after the migration, (What are we going to use as an abbreviation for the Garnian calender dates?) Gwaryn is declared High-King of all the tribes of man and leads an invasion force into the Sidhe empire. The Celts own potent magic, use of both chariots and cavalry, as well as iron weapons and their great numbers*. The Sidhe empire was swept before their tide of destruction, but it was vast enough that it took time to do, the campaign lasted for more than twenty years, and in the end, the southern 1/3rd of their empire was not as totally devastated as the northern 2/3rds. The campaign took on a less genocidal tone over time too, it was discovered that the Sidhe became weak and could not do magic if you put an iron collar on them, so many were enslaved.

Now the Romans, if the Celts were brought to Garnia by the forces of Darkness because they loved to fight, took heads as trophies, and practiced human sacrifice. I suppose when the Celts started turning all namby-pamby good on the Sidhe plane, because it emanates Good, they must have figured the people who scared the hell out of the Celts were a good bet for creating a more Evil empire in their place. They oppressed their women more, they kept slaves on a grand scale and had regular mass human sacrifice as entertainment for the masses. Plus they were militarily unstoppable, at least by the Celt and everyone else they'd met in the Mediterranean region. With the Sidhe out of the way, only the Dwarves really had to go, and they were already under serious pressure, so they took advantage and brought en masse the entire population that would have died and replaced them with simulacra, provided them with an intelligent and strong slave race that already spoke and read Latin and Greek, the Apes, put them in a place that was exactly like their home, down to the olive trees and vineyards, with pre-prepared housing and other needs taken from Earth. It was a huge undertaking, probably draining the power of several major Evil players for decades, perhaps centuries. I do need to figure out rough population estimates for this entire group of people that was supposed to have died, so I can expand their population over time and build their empire, they won't be taking Goblin Aegyptus overnight.

Now we still have to figure out when Earth's Mana battery dries up, how many times can the Dwarves or the Elves use gates to and from Earth, I assume it uses Earth's energy to open the portal and send them through from the Earth side to Garnia, and Garnia's energy to open to Earth. Garnia has energy to spare, it regenerates, Earth doesn't. So maybe the Mongols, or the Aztecs are good examples of cultures on Earth that Evil says"Finally, somebody we can really work with" and drags their asses through, but I am thinking the Byzantine Greeks might have been a rescue, or a spell someone figured out from some dusty old tome. The Iroquois could go either way honestly. The pre-Muslim Arabs and the Hindus? The Kung San? The Han Chinese, the Japanese? The Romany, Kushites and Basques? Obviously the Neanderthals were a Sidhe rescue program. The Saxons got here via forces of Evil because they were invading Britain, and actively at war with the Celts; it seemed like a no-brainer to the bad guys, it just didn't work out as planned.

This also makes a big difference because the Celts control and understand how to use a Sidhe portal to Earth, and they taught their compatriot Druids on earth how to use them too; this is essential for the multiple crossings plan. So I need some input on when the last Celts can freely leave Earth for Garnia, what makes sense? Ancient times? Pre-Christian times? Medieval Celts? Renaissance/Elizabethan Period? Early modern, runaway Jacobites could be fun, eh? 19th Century and the Potato Famine (1845-1852 in Ireland killed roughly 1million people and caused a further roughly 1 million to emigrate, about 25% of the population; the same famine struck the Scottish Highlands and Islands between 1846-1857, it's called the Highland Potato Famine there, and, while the death toll was lower, 1.7 million people were forced to emigrate** and many others suffered from severe malnutrition due to the meager rations the British government allowed them (24 oz grain/man/day 12/woman/day 8/child/day). This mass death and/or migration destroyed what was left of Gaelic culture, the English speaking areas of these countries were unaffected or taken care of by the government.

Yes, I understand that both Scotland and Ireland have Gaelic speaking regions, but there are damned few monoglot Gaelic speakers in the world anymore. Same goes for Wales, which has a thriving Welsh language, they successfully tied their national tongue to their quest to be recognized as a separate people from the English, but they all still speak English too. Manx is dead, although they're trying to revive it. Breton is on it's way out, the French have been trying to kill it with all the vigor that the English have been trying to kill their Celtic languages for just about as long, centuries. The last Cornish speaker died in the 1700's if I recall correctly. The sad fact of the matter is I think there are more people speaking Klingon fluently that there are any form of Gaelic.

*Roughly 10% of all Celts were warrior aristocrats, perhaps a further third had at least some training at arms and were fit for battle at any given time, the initial invasion force would have had 3.7 million professional full-time warriors and another 11.1 million lower born spearmen/slinger types. Plus the Druid-Priests, Wizards and Bards, maybe 1/2 a million or more of them.

**Including, in all likelihood, my great-great grandparents.  

More Inspirational Pictures

These are the warriors that would have been brought to Garnia, I don't see them adapting their traditional methods of warfare or their culture too much, so these pictures show pretty much the kind of armies that would have poured into the Sidhe empire off of the northern steppes when the war between Elf and Man started, and they probably wouldn't have looked too much different a couple generations later when it was all over. I suspect the modern Garnians and their related subcultures have changed significantly in the intervening centuries to greater or lesser degrees, but this is their starting point.

In any pictures with Romans, just pretend they're Elves; same with the severed heads.

Blog Name Change

I figured we're at a point where development is pretty much a done deal, we're just fleshing out details. I have a rough idea of a 100,000+ year old Sidhe Empire, that collapsed, for the most part, roughly 1800 years ago. I know when, where and how pretty much all of the different Human groups got here. I know how the Dwarves got here and where they came from and why they can't go home. I know the stresses the Sidhe and the Dwarves were under before the Humans were thrown into the mix, all part of the multi-planar war and I have worked out a rough timeline for that as it affects this particular world. Plus we mapped the whole world out. Now I just feel like I should hand out assignments to people so they can flesh out the parts of the world they are most interested in!

Typical Celtic Buildings

When we had our sit down the other day we didn't really talk too much about the civilization level of the "Barbarian" Celts that lived to the north of Garnia, except for the one brief mention that they had one "Real" city; the word I couldn't remember was Oppidum. Since most of the Celts in the original crossing were Gauls and Britons, they were familiar with building techniques and probably used them to their advantage even out on the semi-barren steppe where the found themselves. Their one city, the city holy to the barbarians and learned men from Garnia to Frodia to Tirnakaur is in this steppe, it is the place where all the people of Math were led to, and Druids, Priests and Bards still hold their traditional roles here. I always pictured it as an Oppida built on a hill next to the one "mother river" that flows to the north; from there they could protect their people and expand against the ill equipped hordes of poorly led and not terribly intelligent humanoids that already lived on the the steppe, and they would also come into contact with things from earth that hadn't been seen in tens of thousands of years, Neanderthals, Mastodons and Woolly Rhinoceroses to start with.

I did a Google image search today for some inspirational examples of real world Celtic structures and it was not easy coming up with anything solid. When you search for Celtic structures of any sort, from Oppida to Crannogs they inevitably lead to many images of ruins, which is probably unhelpful in the inspiration department, or conjectural drawings of what artists and/or archaeologists think they looked like, or models from miniature companies, or the proud owners of said models showing them off, or back and forth to each other type of Celtic building, and, of course the conjectural reconstructions of said buildings, sometimes entire villages.

So, without anymore explanations as to where I plundered this bounty of Celtic building Awesomeness, I'll just start posting  the pictures.

 This is a Broch and out buildings.

Both of these were the work of a guy on the Warlord Games forums.

This is an artists rendering of an Oppida.

An artists rendering of a Crannog.

An actual reconstructed Crannog.

The cut-away of the inside of a typical Celtic round house.

A reconstruction of a typical Celtic round house.

An artists rendering of a Celtic village near Glastonbury. 

A Celtic Hill Fort in the west of Ireland, there was an actual picture, but I thought this was prettier.

OK, we actually did stuff yesterday

I picked up Dalton and we headed over to Darryl's house, which is pretty cool when you have three people on your design team that can get together and brainstorm over things and I drew out a much better -to scale- world map. We discussed a bunch of timeline issues, including the thorny question of why are there Dinosaurs in Garnia? Chronomancy by those ecology loving Elves, or rather their more magically powerful ancestors, the Sidhe. It was a failed experiment because the forces of Darkness launched an invasion into their experimental Chronomantic area, Goblins mainly, driving the Sidhe Chronomancers either away or killing them, are those secrets lost? Were they stolen by the forces of Evil? Or were they simply destroyed? All I know is that there is a pretty cool "Lost World" area to go adventuring, and it had some weird ancient ruins too, as well as all the Tyrannosaurus Rexii and Veliciraptors, wild Goblins, and Lizards Men, both primitive and advanced, and all manner of other jungle and swamp dwelling goodness.

I also found this pretty cool looking miniature on another blog and thought I'd share him here, he's exactly the sort of Celtic bad-ass that overthrew the Sidhe Empire.

Not a lot of activity here.

When I set this blog up as separate from my "main" blog, it was intended to foster all kinds of intellectual fermentation on the topic of world building. When we started off we were on fire, then we just kind of stopped. I have to say it has made me wonder if the project is worth doing or if, just maybe, we should scrap the idea that we came up with in 7th grade, and refined slowly, but surely over the course of our adult lives; and just start something new? I don't know, I am tired and I have been sick, and I have a dozen other gaming projects on my plate too.

This blog stares at me every time I post to my other blog and accuses me for not finishing up some bit that I can't make my mind up about, like when was the Necromancer war? How long was the war against the Sidhe Empire? How long did the first Garnian kingdom hold together before Frodia split off? Did Frodia split off before or after Tirnakaur? I think before, because Tirnakaur represents an older Garnian Royal line, but then how long were they united before their succession crisis split them into eastern and western factions? How long did the Sidhe empire rule before the coming of man? We know it was at least 50,000 years, because they acted as preservers for species that died out on earth and, presumably, other worlds. When did the forces of Darkness invade for the first time? When did the first Elves fall and become "Dark Sidhe"? How long were the Dwarves in contact with the Sidhe empire and what did they trade? We know the racial enmity between Dwarves and Elves is caused by the fact that the Elves sealed the gates back to the Dwarven home world, when did this happen? I know why.

Multi-planar war between the forces of Good and the forces of Evil; Men, Elves and Dwarves caught in the middle of it. Halflings too if anyone can give me a good enough reason, hell, I'll even bring back the Gnomes, so the entire 1st edition AD&D Players Handbook will be useful again. Just give me a good reason that doesn't say "They're in the book, so I should be allowed to play one.", I was never a Gnome fan, I used to be a Halfling fan, because I loved the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings, but that's a reason to NOT have them here.

Just Some Pictures

Here's a series of Celtic pictures I found on the web today to keep everyone's interest until I have more time. This A-Z blogging challenge is taking more time out of my day than I expected, and I am concentrating it on Norse themes for now.

I figure this is more or less what the original Garnians looked like.

These would be leaders.

More of the original style Garnians.

Some Garnian style art.

A Garnian warrior with a trophy!

Goblins Slightly Modified

I started my Norse campaign on Sunday and the first non-humans that the Viking adventurers encountered were some Goblins. Since they had absolutely no frame of reference for monsters I kind of ad-libbed a bit of the description of them, basing them partly on the 1st edition AD&D Monster Manual, and partly on what I was feeling at the moment. I described them as "a pair of short orange skinned, yellow-eyed humanoids", remembering something I read once about Bugbears using catnip as a narcotic, and given the fact that they have infravision, I added later that they had cat-slit pupils to their eyes. The best part though was the kittenish "mew" of pain I gave the first one as the party attacked them from ambush and speared it to death. They felt bad for the poor wee, cute Goblin; not that it stopped them from slaying the other one and looting their corpses.

Anyway, henceforth it is established that all Goblinoids on Garnia world have a vaguely catlike, although not furry except for the Bugbears, appearance. The pointy ears doesn't hurt for that effect either.

Not Getting Ignored

I have another "lost" map to post here, once I dig out my scanner from underneath the mountain of gaming stuff I have buried it under. Darryl found it in his stuff and sent it back with me last Saturday for me to post here. I call it a "lost" map, because it is clearly based on the original Garnia maps from when we were in 7th grade, it has the same outlines and all of the old countries, including a couple that I had forgotten existed; but it also clearly post dates that time period significantly. Darryl had mentioned to me that he had run a Garnia campaign when he lived in Utah, maybe it dates from that period? I don't know. I do find it interesting in that it has a couple of original countries on it, and the names of cities are changed or they have been moved. When he and I talked about it his best guess was that the map he worked from had the original countries outlines, but that the cities were illegible.

In other Garnia related news, I am working somewhat frantically to complete for this coming Sunday, the Viking island of Dvergrholm, which is going to contain that Dwarven gate to Garnia from Viking age Earth that I alluded to earlier this month. I tend to jump when I want to playtest something, so I am both designing the setting and converting stuff from various games as I go to make a more Nordic themed B/X D&D game.

Cryptic?

Sorry if the last post here was cryptic, I am kind of making it up as I go along and kind of building on the old 3e/Neverwinter Nights Norseworld campaign setting that I ported into Garnia World after the fact. I had an idea for an origin story for them, kind of like the campaign I ran in the 1990s for 2nd edition AD&D with the Celts campaign sourcebook material that became the backstory for all of Garnia. Only here I am starting a "new" Norse colony on an island in the north Atlantic ocean, maybe between the Faeroes and Iceland? Anyway, this island has a Norse colony on it, and they find some ancient ruins too, and a tower with a dungeon and lots of weird reatures and riches and stuff. Now this is the type of thing that will get pushed into the realm of "romantic" or "legendary" saga material by later scholars, if anything is ever found referencing it, but ultimately I am thinking that the island itself, along with the tower/dungeon complex is a gateway to Garnia world. This sounds to me more like a Dwarf built gate than an Elf built one right? But I actually got the idea from the old PC game "Master of Magic", where they had the towers that, once you defeated the occupants, would transport you from the primary world of Arcanus to the other world Myrra; or vice versa if you started off as a Myrran.

So my thought here is that there is an island with a tower/dungeon complex that must be "defeated" in order to gain control of it so the Norsemen can come from Earth to Garnia. Since it brings the entire island, they'll have their families, homes, livestock, ships and everything when they get there, so population and immediate survival concerns won't really be an issue.

The plus side is, I get to start playing something Garnia related, even if it may be a long time before it gets us to Garnia, right away. I can't really see a down side, except, maybe, that I am not using the core Garnia Celtic area, but I don't want to screw with the development process going on here and elsewhere with regard to them. Oh, that and I will be ditching my current B/X game to do this.

Any thoughts?

Playtest?

I am thinking about running some playtest games in a non-core area of the game world so I can work some ideas out. I was thinking the Norse area because it's not ever been properly mapped even and doesn't have regular contact with the core area of Garnia, but it'll let me experiment a little with some of the Sidhe and the Unseelie Court, and the multi-planar war stuff on a local scale without breaking anything overall.

Hrolf Black-Ear never died. Tough bastard. Andvari always knew more than he was letting on.

So, Dragons, eh?

I have been kind of apprehensive about writing this now, the promise of this piece was made over a month ago; so, I assume, there has been some anticipation and that means it had better be good. The fact of the matter is I never intended to wait this long to write this, I was just distracted by other stuff, then sick for a couple of weeks, then kind of distracted by other mini-projects, and a little worried about making this actually be worth the wait. Then I remembered this is the Garnia Development Blog, a blog I set up so Darryl and I and anyone else who wanted to could spit-ball half-baked ideas back and forth to see what stuck, what developed out of the process.

I have some pretty definite ideas about dragons and their use in D&D and other fantasy games, frankly I think they are over used and have become somewhat mundane end bosses for too many adventures. I actually blame D&D for this. The codification of Dragons with the color and metallic categories made them seem too normal, regular. Dragons in literature, pre-D&D, and in ancient and medieval myth and legend were so much more bad ass. They were singular and powerful. In Norse mythology they mention two of the beasts, Nidhogg, the corpse-render, that tears at the corpses on Nastrond in Niflheim and he also gnaws at one of the roots of the world tree; then there is Jormungand, the Midgard Serpent, who is a child of Loki and who will ultimately die killing Thor at Ragnarok. In Beowulf the unnamed, but suitably bad-ass, Dragon kills Beowulf before being slain by Wiglaf. In the Saga of the Volsungs, or Nibelungenlied if you prefer the German version, Sigurd slays Fafnir, the singular and bad-ass Dragon. When we get to the honorable Professor Tolkien's "The Hobbit", the entire quest is based around ultimately slaying the Dragon Smaug.

In each instance, the Dragon is THE Dragon not A Dragon, and I think that's an important difference. In Garnia I want each and every Dragon that ever appears to be something special and memorable, they should be singular and unique like Demon Princes or Arch-Devils. My thinking on this may have been colored by my early play experiences. When I was a kid, my DM Tim had the Grenadier Ancient Red Dragon miniature from their "Gold Box" official AD&D line, and it only got broke out for special occasions, the end of a major quest, the deepest level of some mad Arch-Mage's mega-dungeon or some such major end game. We might see that miniature get used once or twice a year. He always had it with him, but it rarely came out, and sometimes when it did it was a statue or an illusion or something. When it wasn't, the first few times, we learned our lesson that we weren't quite up to snuff yet, and ran away as fast as we could. Later on we stood our ground a little longer and suffered for it, Dragons are tough as nails and we still weren't ready. After a while we were tougher, and planned better and we started hunting it and had some inconclusive fights. We wanted to be Dragon-Slayers. Bad. That damned Ancient Red Dragon became one of the focal points of our multi-year campaign. It was THE Dragon, not A Dragon.

Now, I have made some errors in Judgment regarding Dragons in the past myself. One of the first adventures I made for the same group of players that was in Tim's campaign included not one, but two Dragons, and neither of them was Red, there was a White Dragon and a Green Dragon. I wanted to set myself apart stylistically from Tim I guess and use a greater range of AD&D monsters than he ever did. I also made extensive use of Kobolds and Goblins instead of Orcs, just because they were his signature, go-to humanoids, again, because he owned the official AD&D boxed set from Grenadier.

So what corrected these missteps? In a word- Dragonlance. The overwhelming popularity of Dragonlance caught me totally off guard, I was reading Dragon Magazine at the time they were preparing the project, so I guess I knew it was coming, but I didn't read the books or get the modules and play them, so the Dragonlance mania that took the D&D community by storm caught me by surprise. Dragonlance took Dragons and made them commonplace adversaries, and for characters that were too low level to fight Dragons, invented Draconians for them to fight. As a multi-level marketing scheme for TSR, I can't fault the idea; it was new and somewhat innovative to tie books to the modules. I have other issues with the setting and characters in the books, because I did read the short stories as they were published in Dragon Magazine and I did eventually get around to reading the first Dragonlance trilogy, but they are beyond the scope of this post. I never did play in or DM the modules, but I am slightly familiar with their content. Making Dragons an everyday occurrence is a problem though, and I recognized it as such, so I started taking a step back.

Now, I understand the game is called Dungeons & Dragons, but does that really mean we have to have Dragons everywhere? I had, in fact, already moved away from a dungeon-based model of gaming and was more of a wilderness exploration, smaller dungeon/location with some politics and war type of a DM. I am, even now, re-learning the basic points of running a more mega-dungeon based game, trying to bring back a little of the older school of gaming to my kids and the rest of my gaming buddies. But having Dragons everywhere eliminates some of the majesty of the Dragon. One of the things that I liked, then didn't like, about 3e was the adventure path series of modules starting with "The Sunless Citadel" and the fact that it featured a wee Dragon for newbie adventurers to slay, on the first level of the dungeon. It was the same problem that I had when I started DMing for my buddies in Tim's D&D group, they wanted to use more of the monsters, particularly the iconic Dragon, but they did it in such a way that it was a huge misstep. I didn't DM that entire adventure path, I switched to playing after a while, then I quit playing it a while after that, but I seem to remember Dragons showing up quite a bit along the way.

How does this relate to Dragons in Garnia? I want to have rare, awesome, unique Dragons that can be the focal point of campaigns. The D&D chromatic/metallic axis of Evil and Good Dragons with their set Hit Dice and Breath Weapons and Sizes and Age Categories doesn't really quite do that for me. I want every single Dragon in Garnia to be THE Dragon. They'll all look different, wings, no wings. They'll all have different Hit Dice or Hit Points assigned and different abilities, Fire-Breathing, Poison-Breath, Poisonous Bite, or something else. Maybe they'll be immense creatures, maybe they'll be rather smaller than you'd have expected. Maybe they'll have names, like Nidhogg, or maybe they'll be known as the Great Dragon of the Averyraen, or maybe they'll be some nameless beast that comes to ravage the land like in Beowulf. The only thing that is going to be certain is that they are going to be ancient and deadly.

So I guess what I am saying is, naturalism be damned when it comes to Dragons, the age of Dragons is passed, over with; there aren't any breeding pairs, you won't find any eggs and you aren't going to be able to subdue the Dragon and sell it or use it as a mount. The Dragon doesn't necessarily have to be Evil, although the rest of this post certainly seems to be pointing that way, and I am mostly basing the campaign world on European myth and legend, which tends to paint Dragons in a certain less than Good aligned light, there is the possibility of a particular Dragon being Good aligned or Neutrally aligned, certainly there have been human cultures that saw them as such. I am merely positing that they should be unique, special creatures.

Now, how does this relate to lesser Draconic creatures like Wyverns or Dragonnes? I didn't really give this much thought, but I would say that we can either decide to exclude them from the world, keep them as is, or change them too. I am for keeping them as is and either assuming that they are devolved Dragons, not fully evolved Dragons, or that the similarity in appearance is merely coincidental; I don't want to throw out the whole AD&D Monster Manual. I also have a section of the world with Dinosaurs, a real lost world kind of a place, the place that looks like a giant version of the Congo basin, only ringed in by mountains, on the alt-Africa continent way south of the alt-Mediterranean where the Romans live; I haven't explained them to myself yet, so they are a mystery to the setting. Maybe all these Draconic species evolved from them, and they were saved from extinction on earth? But by who then? That is a long time ago, I had not considered an Elven civilization that was 65 million plus years old, and I don't think they are time travelers either. Any thoughts?

To be fair, the only reason they existed originally was because I thought "Wouldn't it be cool to have an adventure where the PCs went and captured Dinosaurs for use in Gladiatorial games in the arena?", and I ran with the idea when I was building that part of the world. That part of the world is also chock full of savage tribes of humanoids, it's where the Goblins that overran and destroyed the Egyptian empire came from, full of Lizard Men and is the only place I have ever placed either Bullywugs or Lizard Kings in Garnia.

Neglected?

I have been sick for a while, but I have also been waiting for some new maps from Darryl before I went ahead and posted too much more here. I have the Dragon post for Garnia that I haven't actually gotten around to writing yet still kicking around in my head. I also have, somewhere in all my stored D&D stuff here, a bunch of old, old 7th grade Garnia stuff that, while I may mine some of it for ideas, is frankly cringe-worthy when I look at it. There's a reason I keep it in storage after all, but I am planning on scanning those original pages of what amount to a "Garnia World Gazetteer". They have pages and pages of history written by myself and Darryl, coats of arms for the various noble houses of Garnia, the original Garnian pantheon- spoiler alert- Garn and Frodal are prominent deities, and much, much more. I just have to find where I put it, I know I have seen it since I moved back here, but I don't remember where I packed it away. Anyway, it's fun to look at from a purely historical perspective, to see where we came from and how the campaign world developed, what ideas we kept and what we discarded and how things evolved over the decades; or it's a fun look at a campaign world designed by two precocious naive thirteen year olds just starting out, trying to make something as cool as "Greyhawk" or "The Known World".

Anyway, I didn't want people to think I'd abandoned the project entirely, I have actually been kicking around another, smaller section of the world to detail as a part of another project I have been working on in an on again off again, as I can, when I can kind of a way. OK, it's the Japanese Samurai Island empire of Tenchuko for my Oriental Adventures project. They are located "off map" to the east of Ming Liang (AKA The Bright Empire).

I also have another, more detailed timeline I am working on, but it's still mostly in my head too. I hope to have another post ready for you guys on Sunday.

A Bit of an Update

Yes, I know it's been almost two weeks since this blog has gotten any love. Darryl and I have been working some behind the scenes, which is ironically what this blog was designed for, to get some more work done. He has some new maps, I am still not entirely satisfied with them, but they are way better than mine. He is still planning the globe and has a template for drawing real round world maps onto flat pieces of paper. I am still looking into learning how to use simple drawing programs for map making purposes, just so I can send him a better representation of what I actually am looking for.

On my end I am working on how Dragons fit into Garnia and the great multi-planar Good vs. Evil war. I have discussed it some with Darryl, I just haven't gotten around to writing it up yet; I have been fortunate to have a busy gaming schedule. The major thing going on there is that I am busy abandoning thirty plus years of TSR/WotC-isms that have accreted onto Dragon lore (and lore surrounding a bunch of other things too, like Dwarves and Elves).

I am also working with Darryl, slowly, on building a better timeline. The problem with the timeline is that certain things need developing before they can really be "dated", and that takes some time too. The Necromancer has been vexing for instance, his development, the war against him and his ultimate defeat, he is a villain of almost Sauron-like proportions for this world, he shaped an age; and like a reverse, evil cognate of King Arthur, it is prophesied that he will rise again. His adherents rule over a land in his name to this day, on the southern end of the Tirnakaur peninsula. Darryl also has asked that we work on a timeline that includes a number of events prior to the coming of man to this world, so that too is taking time to work through, and that's still mostly in my head. I have a lot of stuff on paper that was written when I was in 7th grade too, by both myself and Darryl, I'd like to see how much of it I can keep as an homage to Garnia's past.

Then there is the still unanswered Halfling question, do we keep them or eliminate them from the world? Although when I phrase it like that I feel like I must sound like a Nazi. Seriously though, Gnomes are already gone and the only reasons that Halflings are here are that I named the campaign world after my Halfling character Garn, Halflings were an AD&D (and Basic D&D) player character race, and I owned the official AD&D Halflings boxed set from Grenadier. Historically, I have had, over three decades of play in Garnia, two player character Halflings. One was my next door neighbor Scott who played a Halfling Thief named Thorik when I was in junior high and high school, he was a serious long term character. The second is my oldest daughter's Halfling Thief Ruby Cloverleaf, who is technically still alive, but the campaign went on hiatus and then I decided to reboot. I guess Scott's character Thorik is technically still alive too, but I would certainly label him "retired" since he hasn't played him since the 1980s and Scott doesn't live within 500 miles of me now.