The Implementation of the Fixed World

The last couple of weeks I have been thinking more about the implementation of my setting idea, the Fixed World.

What I envisage is a tighter version of Yoon-Suin. Each section of the map, of which there are 20 or so, contains a regional 24-mile hex map, an overview, the necessary d30 encounter tables by terrain type (which also functions as a bestiary), and then a sample 6-mile campaign hex map with random tables necessary to fill it. The aim is to be relatively succinct (a target of 6 pages per section).

Flavour-wise, the Fixed World (what I am provisionally calling Orbis Immobilis: the Fixed World) is a tribute to Mystara, the Known World - a kind of jumbling together of standard D&D tropes, but given new twists.

Above is a rough and ready sample of a 24-mile regional hex map for "Mane Hiemalis", the region of the world in which it is always spring and always winter. Here is the overview section:

Mane Hiemalis

Eventually the vast ice shelves of the frozen sea give way to open waters mixed with pack ice as the sun begins to dawn upon it. This frigid ocean of black water washes its ice floes up northwards onto rocky, desolate beaches under a red-gold sky. This is Mane Hiemalis, the land where it is always dawn and always winter.

Mane Hiemalis is rugged and ruffled - shelf after shelf of hills rising up from the coast, each higher than the last, until they are finally mountains and on the other side of them the plateau of Mane Vernus. Between those hills, sliced into them by rivers of glacial meltwater, are a myriad of deep, high-sided valleys where mist gathers and dark pine forests flourish in the dim light. On the hill tops above the tree line there is only rock, frost, lichen and tundra - and the unending cry of the wind.

Mane Hiemalis's terrain can be divided into four distinct belts: the sea and coast; the hills; the valleys; and the mountains.

The Sea and Coast

The seas of Mane Hiemalis may not be entirely frozen but they are frigid and cold. In the depths are Kuo-Toa, who thrive in the miserable darkness below. They are divided into many rivalrous warring theocracies, all with their own interpretation of their God's demands; holy war is a fact of life on the sea bed, and when it rages half-eaten and rotting corpses of the fish-men wash up on the beach like flotsam in their hundreds. At those times the bounty for scavengers is immense, and vast flocks of gulls sweep the coast like storm clouds to dissipate when the war is at an end.

On the cold bleak coast human communities eke out a living from the whales, walruses and seals with which they share their beach homes. They owe fealty to nobody and are so scattered, distant and distrustful of each other that they could generally never have the wherewithal to group themselves into something more organized than a loose affiliation of tribes. They dress themselves in skins and blubber and war occasionally with the horseshoe-crab people who inhabit the shallow littoral zones: petty inconsequential squabbles played out in repetitive brutality while the world beyond goes about its business.

The Hills

The bare hills of Mane Hiemalis begin to rise not far beyond its beaches and soon they are tall and looming - ridge after ridge extending northwards, their foothills shrouded in mist and shadow, their humped peaks pale with permanent frost. They support little animal or plant life, exposed as they are to the wind, fog and cold, but different nomadic groups range across them, occasionally raiding down into the valleys below for food and plunder.

There are three types of such nomads. The first are the troll-kings, petty potentates who traipse the high ground with motley collections of followers - subordinate trolls, human outlaws and slavers, captive ettins or other giants, vagrant duergar, and so forth. The baggage trains for these roving marauders can straggle out for miles behind their vanguard; typically the troll-king is somewhere in the middle, being carried on a howdah, chariot, or other grandiloquent vehicle. They as frequently fight each other as they do raid more settled lands below.

The second are the heath elves, ancient, proud and cruel, who inhabit the most isolated and distant hilltops of all. They live in high, narrow towers gently curved like fingers, which they call waypoints; different families move between them, spending a week or month here, a week or month there, before traveling on. In the ancient past the heath elves lived a settled existence in their towers, but now their numbers are greatly reduced and there are too few of them to populate all of the waypoints at a time. Hence their relentless wanderings.

The third are the bariaurs, half-goats, who herd their flocks across the desolate, craggy landscape, picking their way over cliff faces and scree on dainty hooves, traversing places which no other travelers can reach. Their goat herds can number in their thousands, spread across dozens of miles; each individual, tough and rangy, is able to survive on its own on the grass and mosses it can pick from the thin soil of the hilltops. The bariaurs themselves live off goat milk and meat - the only permanent cultural artefacts they create are huge geoglyphs etched into hillsides, visible when the dawn sun cuts through the mist, to mark their territory and summon the power of their gods.

The Valleys

Between the hills, where streams and rivers cut their way down into valleys, are the main centers of civilized life in Mane Hiemalis. Here, where the dawn light shines through, are thick pine forests where the trees stand like ghosts in the mist and rain. Amid it all are the strongholds of the were-raven lords - stone towers or motte-and-bailey castles, each ruled by independent nobles marked for rule by their lycanthrophic bloodlines. They hold sway over human serfs who carry out forestry and mining in their lands under oaths of fealty in return for what protection can be offered against the dangers abroad. The were-raven familes are ancient, powerful, and refined: they rule with what they insist is benevolence over the benighted villeins beneath them, though what "benevolence" means is open to broad interpretation.

In the deepest, darkest, most northerly forests where the light barely penetrates, and the mist lies permanently like a blanket, are other polities. An ettercap queendom in a great palace of silk threads, where giant spiders are bred for war. A treant king who rules over a race of forest dwarfs - brown-skinned, sharp-eyed variants of their mountain brethren who find the dark of the forest to their liking and construct great citadels there under the loamy earth. Three green dragons, all brothers, who live on an island in the centre of a forgotten lake; in its caverns great treasures are stored, guarded by golems the dragons have constructed from dead trees, stone, earth, and even the very mist and dawn light which surround them.

The Mountains

In the north of Mane Hiemalis is a high range of snow-peaked mountains which form the barrier between the cold damp south and the verdant wet plateau of Mane Vernus. They are bitter, glacial, and near impenetrable except for a mere handful of dangerous passes through which the merest trickles of trade and diplomacy can run.

These passes are guarded. One is the realm of a family of Formorian giants, deformed white-skinned behemoths who live in caverns of ice with throngs of troglodyte slaves. They tax any trade which goes by and grow ever bigger, ever fatter, and ever more wealthy. Another is watched over by an amethyst dragon, who sleeps under a glacier with one eye on the pass; travelers of interest are interrogated to sate her curiosity, while those who bore her are toyed with and eaten. Her glacier is burrowed-through with tunnels built eons ago by a race of ice elves long since disappeared. Their cathedrals and halls, filled with blue luminescence, lie otherwise empty and haunted save for those where the dragon stores her hoard. A third pass was built by a dwarven hero, Eskwetthum-bey, thousands of years prior: he rules it still as a lich, preserved in undeath by powerful magic and his own sheer will. It consists of a vast tunnel lancing through the heart of the highest peak, inside which Eskwetthum-bey's inbred descendants still live. Their inbreeding accentuates their aptitude for magic and they are sorcerers and warlocks all - though they are frequently also blind, enfeebled or deformed.

(The hex map was created using Cecil Howe's excellent Hex Kit.)