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.

Silver Standard

I was going to write a long post about how I keep going back and forth on whether or not I should switch the Garnia campaign world over to the Silver standard for coinage. There are pros and cons to doing so, the biggest con being the work involved in switching prices over, but I have already done a lot of that in repricing things in gold anyway, and I had set at one point gold to silver at a different exchange rate than the 10:1 or 20:1 that it has been in different editions of D&D. Now I feel like I am just jumping on a bandwagon though, because I read they were switching all of D&D over to the silver standard in 5th edition. Any thoughts?

Intelligent Apes?

Sentient Apes as citizens of the Roman Empire? I ask because I forgot about these guys:






I thought they were some pretty cool miniatures and I like to support the company that makes them, Black Orc Games. That's just a random selection of miniatures from their Roman Ape line which was designed for their own in house miniature wargame. I started buying their stuff for my own Oriental Adventures games but they have a pretty wide selection of cool stuff. The Roman Apes actually intrigued me some time ago and I never really got around to planting them into a game anywhere, but since we're rebuilding the Garnia campaign world now AND we have decided to keep the Roman Empire I tacked on in the 1990s, I suppose we could retcon them into there without too much difficulty.

Opinions? Too weird fantasy? Awesome? Something else?

Goblinoids in Garnia

Goblinoids in Garnia are, as I envisioned the setting originally, the first of the Evil invaders of the world. I always pictured them Goblins, Hobgoblins and Bugbears as different stages of guided evolution of the original Goblin species. Whatever force of evil ultimately owns their home plane, their "God", has tinkered with their species to make the perfect race of evil servant-soldiers to conquer in his (or her, anything is possible I guess) name. I never even considered going the Tolkien route and having Goblins just be corrupted Elves, and Orcs just being a different name for Goblins; besides I really want to go with a more mythologically sound version of Elves, where I get to kind of mix the Gaelic Sidhe and the Norse Alfar into a blender; I feel it makes for a more interesting campaign setting and more interesting Elves.

I see the Goblins as the base species, fairly weak, but they are Evil and cunning, fairly well organized, if none too bright and they breed quickly. Hordes of these can be raised in say a decade or so. I assume they were originally bred to fight the Dwarves and followed them here from their world for two reasons; first they are a primarily subterranean race and get a -1 to attacks in full sunlight, and a bunch of Dwarf type bonuses regarding mining and underground construction, and second, they attack Dwarves on sight. This is all based on the 1st edition AD&D Monster Manual, but, once again, that's Garnia's roots. They also hate Gnomes, but in 1st edition AD&D Gnomes are essentially a pretty distinctive sub-species of Dwarf, so that makes sense, and I axed Gnomes from Garnia in the early 1990s when I realized that no one had ever played one.

Hobgoblins then are the next toughest Goblinoids, and are probably the crowning achievement of Goblin genetic engineering. There are only about 1/2 as many encountered, which tells me they don't breed as fast or they have higher mortality rates or something, but they are bigger (6'6" average as opposed to 4' average), stronger (1d8 damage vs. 1d6), faster (MV 9" vs 6"), tougher (1+1 HD vs. 1-1HD) and harder to hit (AC:5 vs. AC:6). They are just as well organized, maybe better, since they are specifically mentioned as living in a military hierarchy. They also will organize Goblins or Orcs to do their bidding. They don't have the sunlight penalty, but maintain the underground/mining bonuses and they have a marine genetic variant, the Koalinth. My assumption about Hobgoblins is that they were bred for fighting here on Garnia because they have an inbred hatred of Elves rather than Dwarves.

Now we move on to the Bugbear, the wacky cousin of the Goblin family tree. They look like what would happen if you took a Goblin and stretched it to nearly twice it's normal height (7'+ Average) and covered them in long fur. They are described as having a "shambling gait", but are actually rather quick (9" MV) and stealthy (50% chance of surprise). They are the biggest, strongest (2d4DMG), and toughest (3+1HD) of the Goblinoids. They can throw any weapon up to 40' (with 20' considered short range), I think they might be the only monster with that peculiar ability. They are so tough that even their women and children get to fight, as if they were Hobgoblins and Kobolds respectively. Their AC of 5 is OK, matching the Hobgoblin, their dual weaknesses are their lack of organization (due to their Chaotic Evil Alignment) and their small numbers (6-36 vs 20-200 Hobgoblins or 40-400 Goblins). My Garnia specific assumption about Bugbears is that they were an early experimentation with the "build a better Goblin project" from Evil forces R us, and they just went too far to the bigger, stronger, more aggressive end of the spectrum with their super-Goblin serum. They make good shock troops for Evil forces though, even if they can be a bit difficult to control and often run off the reservation; anything that screws over the Elves, Dwarves and Humans is a good thing for Evil incorporated, right?

Rakasta?

What do we think of the Rakasta? I was reminded of them while I was watching my kids play Skyrim, which has a race of cat people, although I never caught their name. If you all don't remember them, they were an anthropomorphic feline race introduced in the 1981 Expert Set module X1: The Isle of Dread. I actually had thought they were in the Expert book, but they weren't, I looked it up. I always had rather liked them as a species and thought it was kind of a shame they never made the jump over to AD&D. Anyway, they are pretty cool. They are nomadic cat people that ride Saber-Toothed Tigers, shall we introduce them to Garnia? I only ask because I was considering that they might be a playable race.

Apparently they got their own D&D module at some point, but they don't look as cool here as in the Isle of Dread illustration

Maps, pt II

Ok, decided to get on this map thing. printed out the maps available onto hex paper for comparison. Looked at the comments section of my last post about maps, relevant material quoted here:

I think we still need to work on scale and redraw maps. I never really envisioned Garnia for instance being much larger than, say, France or maybe Germany, but merging the old maps together makes the various nations huge. The steppes should be immense, I have no problems with that. Khazarak should be like the Himalayas and Hindu Kush mountains or more. Tirnakaur should be the size of the Iberian peninsula roughly. Frodia is slightly smaller than Garnia and Wodanslund is 1/2 the size of Frodia.

Based on the scale of the original maps, Garnia has a size of roughly 1000 miles by 700 miles (700,000 sq. mi.). France is 260,558. Germany only 137, 847. The Iberian Peninsula is roughly the size of France, 224, 507. So if Garnia is the size of France, it needs to shrink to about 36% of its current size.

On the other hand, Alaska is 663,268 sq.mi., roughly the size of Garnia on the ancient maps. My point is that leaving the countries with the scale that already exists in the old maps is not an unworldly concept. Even if the land area of Alaska is only 571,951, surely some of Garnia is water as well... Texas is #2 for US states at 268,580, about 40% of Alaska, so roughly in line with your ratio of Garnia:Frodia. (Frodia on the maps is actually about 800 by 500 or 400,000 or about 57% of Garnia). I envision Frodia with more water area than Garnia though, so land mass area (on the old maps where inland and coastal waterways not shown very well) of Frodia:Garnia could very well mimic that of Texas:Alaska.

The old map is drawn as if the rather boxy landmass now called GW is largely surrounded by water, but this is likely not true, and easily attributable to the vagaries of early cartography, perhaps coupled with relatively little long distance shipping. Assuming that the old water boundaries are, in fact, largely continuations of various land features (for instance the steppes continue to tundra to the north, with a possible polar ocean largely covered with icecap) and extension of the western landmass (which you have effected with the placement of the Romans in the far west, essentially "off-map" for the ancient maps) which would logically extend south some. Quite simply after sailing along to the south and east of the great desert a spell, our ancient cartographers extrapolated, mostly incorrectly.

I extrapolated the size of the Himalayas at about 255,000 sq.mi., so if we use the smaller sizes and use the Himalayas (although in a less spread out kind of more bunchy way) as the guidelines for Khazarak, that works. If we go bigger, then the mountains of Khazarak are either roughly 3 times bigger in area than the Himalayas, or there is some non-mountainous terrain over in there somewhere that our ancient cartographers misrepresented, or Khazarak is simply not as big as the old timers believed, and some of the western territory is in fact the Romans.

I am in favor of the original scale. This makes the "known world" roughly the size of the United States & Canada (together about 7,000,000-ish) and makes it easier to expect that in 1000-2000 years these far flung cultures mostly have not encountered each other. If we shrink it, using your still-not-perfect-but-more-to-scale map the whole thing (including the Romans) comes in about the size of Alaska - about 798,000 sq.mi.

My point is, I am going to draw it at the large scale for a new map and a globe, and I guess this was my reasoning why...

Giants in Garnia

Darryl and I have skirted around this topic a couple of times and never come to a definitive answer as to the wheres and whys of Giantish origins on Garnia world. We have also done a little wrestling with Dragonish origins too, but that can wait for another post. I spent a little time thinking about this today and came up with the idea that maybe Giants are from a plane/planet/sphere/whatever called Jotunheim; all of them, Good ones, Evil ones, smart ones, dumb ones, two-headed ones, et cetera, probably Ogres too, since they seem to be just a runty, stupid, Evil race of Giants. I decided on Jotunheim because, hey, maybe the Norse were right, eh? I mean this is pretty much Alfheim, right?

Now the thing about Giants in AD&D is, and remember Garnia was originally designed as an AD&D game world, that they are pretty much attached to some natural feature or elemental force, so I guess that means that Jotunheim must be a pretty elementally connected plane of existence. There are six types of Giant in the 1st edition AD&D Monster Manual- Cloud, Fire, Frost, Hill, Stone and Storm. Each type of Giant has some pretty amazing abilities, even the weakest, the Hill Giant, can hurl boulders up to 200' for 2-16 points of damage, and they come in groups of 1-10, larger groups (more than 4) have women and children and have a 50% chance of having Dire Wolves, Giant Lizards or Ogres as Guards for their lairs. Tougher Giants get better special abilities, immunities to, or lessened damage from certain types of attacks, better guards that are generally more suited to their elemental type, and seem to have a more magical, elemental connection.

So that's the where they came from anyway. Why are they here? At a guess I would say that the Good aligned Giants were happy to trade/communicate/cooperate with the Sidhe when the Sidhe more or less invented planar travel. That said, it doesn't have to be a magic belonging only to the Sidhe either; there's no reason why magically powerful Giants could not have invented gates too or at least used spells for planar travel. Aren't Titans just a type of Giant? They are really smart, use both Arcane and Divine magic, and Psionically* talented too. Anyway, maybe they came here for company, maybe they came to join the fight on either side once it got underway. They're here, that's the important thing; they're none too common in any variety, but they do exist.

*I dislike Psionics, but there's no reason anyone else running a campaign in Garnia couldn't use them. I never specifically disallowed them in the old days, they were just really hard to get and most people never thought to try.

Polls Closed

What did it tell us? When the voting was taking place there were 10 followers/members of this blog, 7 of us voted. On the plus side we had a whopping 70% voter turn out rate, so kudos to us for being so civic minded :) The downside was the sample size was really small, so I am repeating the poll on my other blog, because even if only 1/2 of the people following the blog answer the poll that'll be more than four times as many as we have here. I probably should have thought of that before I put up a poll here.

All that being said, the most popular choices were Norsemen and Neanderthals tied at 5 votes each. Then in second position in the poll the Byzantine Greeks, Turks & Mongols and Arabs tied at 4 votes each. The Romans, Han Chinese, Japanese and Hindu all got 3 votes. The Aztecs and Romany each got 2 votes. The Kung San, the Basques and the write in candidate Iroquois each got 1 vote. The Kushites got 0 votes.

Did the Norsemen get a boost in the polls because everybody likes Vikings or because they got a write up during the polling time? Neanderthals were pretty much a shoe-in for making it into Garnia World's reboot anyway, because they have been in every incarnation to date; it is nice to see that most people think that they were a good idea though.

All of the second place people were a little surprising to me. Arabs have been there all along, even if I did forget about them. Turks & Mongols have been canon since the late 90s, but I had to work to find them a homeland on the map. Byzantine Greeks were invented as an "off-map" place to develop at some nebulous point in the future for my Norseworld campaign before it was part of the Garnia campaign world, so they have really never been developed at all*.

The third tier were all more canonical, more recently than some of the stuff that beat them. I was also a little surprised to see the Romans do as poorly as they did. The Han Chinese were the most canonical of the third tier, being the third major ethnic group in the Garnia campaign region. The Japanese were another "off-map" group, but, to be honest, they were about to invade Ming Liang (the Bright Empire) and win the mandate of heaven. Mostly because I found it easier to run a straight Oriental adventures campaign set in Ming Liang that way, with a Samurai ruling caste and all, but still. The Hindu people were mixed into the same area with the Arabs, and ruled over by the acolytes of the Necromancer.

Honestly I wouldn't miss either the Aztecs or the Romany, but they both provide some pretty good adventure opportunities. Aztecs are a good example of an evilly aligned Human empire, yes I understand it's ethnocentric to say so, but I believe that Human sacrifice on an industrial scale is probably evil. Gypsies as a fantasy trope are well played, but they are a cliché for a reason, the cliché works.

Kung San and Basque can probably go, I guess they were just there for their value as exotic cultures and the fact that I felt bad for how bad they got hosed here on earth. Iroquois are a good candidate to add, they are a super bad-ass culture of Native American Indian warriors and I know quite a bit about them, owing to the fact that I actually live in Iroquois country and am related to them. I don't know why I didn't think to add them before, probably just because they are too close and familiar.

The poor bloody Kushites got 0 votes in the poll, was that because I admitted that I just added them as an after thought because I realized there weren't any black people in my world? Or are the Kushites really that boring? Or too obscure? I had really wanted to use the Zulu but they were way too late in history for my purposes and required adding either time travel or some other type of paradoxical issues. There are other black African cultures I could export to Garnia World I suppose, but I am not an expert on African history, particularly not sub-Saharan Africa, and I was shooting for ancient, particularly pre-Christian and/or pre-Islamic peoples, although I guess that's not the deal breaker I thought it was going to be. But I still think the more ancient the people the better.

* Other than their name, The Trebizondic States.