Introduction To The Armies of Adel
Posted: November 29, 2011 Filed under: Campaigns, Fluff/Inspiration, Other Systems, RPG, Spirits Of Eden 4 Comments »For most people in Adel, a stay in the military is a respectable, character-building experience – mostly because no large conflicts are currently ongoing. Most military groups allow a person to serve two years and then decide whether to retire from service, or make a career of it. As such, almost every village and every town has plenty of men and women who’ve picked up blades and loaded bullets for their nation once in their lives, and each nation has many more who remain, ready to give their blood for the honor of their nation and the protection of their people. Military characters are an archetype that can yield great stories within Adel, and in this article we’ll look in brief at the armies of the Five Nations, and the unique character of each army and some of its foundational ideas as institutions and emblems of their nations. These are not the only military forces in the world – the smaller powers of the eastern and western seas have their armies, some of which may even be able to stand against the forces of the continental peoples, should they ever come to blows. But the five nations are the most iconic.
Worldbuilding Diary: Layers
Posted: November 21, 2011 Filed under: Campaigns, D&D 4e, Fluff/Inspiration, Legacy D&D, Other Hobby, Other Systems, RPG, Spirits Of Eden, Worldbuilding 3 Comments »I have talked about “Layers” before, in brief, and probably in other web sites and not this one. There is a price to pay in memory when you make disparate comments about your projects on other people’s blogs. Anyway. I write The World of Adel using a three-tiered system of Layers, dividing topics of interest for different groups of people. You can read as many or as few Layers as you want to get started playing a game. This way, I reward greater interest in the setting and greater time commitment, but I do not penalize lesser interest – you can run a perfectly fine game off of Layer 1.
So let’s look at how I arrange these layers. This article will contain a lot of my opinions, which tend to wildly diverge from conventional gamer culture. I do not say these things to offend, just as my observations, and to explain why I did certain things, and why I advocate certain things. These diaries are just as much about the setting as about me – since the setting is a product of myself, and what I want to see in my gaming and hopefully in gaming as a whole.
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Military And Warfare In Adel I
Posted: July 5, 2011 Filed under: Adventures, Campaigns, Fluff/Inspiration, Other Systems, RPG, Spirits Of Eden Leave a comment »For a hundred years the whole of Adel was at war, and it is a war that they will remember 200, 300 or 500 years later. Though they have been mostly at peace, to say that Adel’s culture is not partial to war would be misleading. Adel’s culture and traditions are very warlike at their roots, and the three ancient tribes reveled in warfare. Almost all of the mythology of the Adelians in some way involves battle and honor, either defending oneself or attacking another, and the decisions involved. The great heroes and heroines of the Adelians are so because of battle – either metaphorical battle or physical combat.
Adelians have war in their blood, and have developed powerful national armies to protect their sovereignty. The only mitigation to further warfare is that the Adelians now recognize the cost of war, both in human suffering and national prosperity. There are common skirmishes against their machinating enemies, but the Adelians have no large national targets with whom they could war – except each other. And sometimes, they have come close to resuming all-out war, though the peace has tenuously held.
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Adventurous Professions: Cartographer
Posted: May 30, 2011 Filed under: Adventures, Campaigns, D&D 3.5, D&D 4e, Fantasy Professions, Fluff/Inspiration, Legacy D&D, RPG 3 Comments »A Mapmaker or more formally, a Cartographer, is a fairly innocuous profession that one would not immediately associate with swords and magic and derring-do. A Cartographer creates maps, choosing in which ways to depict an area to ease future travels, to make known political boundaries, and to plot sources of natural resources for continued exploitation. Most fantasy worlds are either mostly uncharted, only partially charted, or containing yet-uncharted places.
Even though a geographic area might be charted, there is room for improvement, and therefore room for a more detailed cartography. So even in a fantasy world where most of the known world is mapped, there are always more maps to be made – maps of dungeons, charting of natural resources, charting of the seas, more detailed maps of an area such as geologic maps, etc. A Cartographer always has something to aspire to, and always makes a good fantasy profession to take.
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