Wilderlands of Swords & Devilry: Viridistan

So despite my last post calling for players, I decided to put my Uz campaign on hiatus because I had that age old problem of burnout.  Now I'm feeling less burned out in time for the release of 5e, and I've mentioned a couple of times that that system fills my nostalgia-sack to bursting with precious orgone, so I thought I'd give it a whirl.  As I was going to do with the playtest version, I'll be using the Wilderlands for this, since it is at least somewhat close to 5e's default assumptions while still being palatable to me. 

Mer Shunna Temple, Most Holy Shrine (on Land) of Armadod-bog

In the dying years of Kelnore, when that glittering but death-sick empire collapsed under the weight of its own decadence and hordes of invaders, a strange people came to the shores of the Trident Gulf.  They were a green skinned people, and legend says their blood carried an ancient lineage from the Demon Kingdoms in the distant south.  In the gulf they found the god Armadod-Bog and the race of fish-men that were at that time his servitors.  Armadod-bog promised these green men that they should have a great empire if they venerated him and mortified themselves for the sin of being born land-things.

And so the Viridians met their god and their fanatical hordes of flagellants conquered many of the cities of old Kelnore, enslaved the caveman of the Elephan Lands, and butchered many northern elves.  Eventually they traded fanatics for keen archers, but this did little to stem the tide of their empire building.  Twice they forced the "Invincible" Overlord to submit, first at the infamous Bloodless Battle and again when the great and terrible relic from the Uttermost War nearly destroyed the City State.  They ruled territory as far north as Damkina, as far south as the hills north of Lenap, and as far east as the Majestic Mountains.

But those days are gone.  Like Kelnore before them, and like the First men and the Markrabs before them, their empire is dying.  His Piscine Majesty, the seemingly immortal Viridian Emperor, has retreated with his sister-wives, the infertile remnants of his once powerful race, into the Mer Shunna Temple, and rumors abound that he is losing his power.  Certainly that seems to be the case abroad - Damkina has asserted its independence, the new Invincible Overlord - Bjorn the Mighty - and his Skandik allies are reclaiming the land beyond the Majestic Mountains, and even the Elves of Elsenwood have grown bold enough to once again challenge Viridian soldiers.  There are even rumors that the Satrap of Tell Qa seeks to join Damkina in its revolt against the Lord of Land and Sea.

Even Armadod-bog seems to have turned his many, ever-open eyes away from the city.  The sect of Mycr, a peaceful god worshiped in the Desert Lands, has been growing within the city and throughout the empire.  It is said that they work magics to undo the rituals to the city's traditional gods, and that they preach such rank heresy that the gods are literally sickened by them.  During better times, his Piscine Majesty would have drowned these freakish blasphemers by the thousands.  Once his hosts even stormed their strange cave cities and sacked the temple to their "true god."  Now only a few score are killed every year, and without the Emperor's emerald hand to guide them these few executions are at best half-hearted.

Despite all this, it is doubtful that any city in the Wilderlands can rival the splendor of Viridistan even in this debased state, much less any "empire."  For this reason it has attracted a large population of Tharabian mercenaries and many adventurers.  The PCs are presumably of this second category.  One can carve a lot of wealth out of the corpse of a dead empire.

In future posts I hope to cover some subtle differences in the races and backgrounds of the PCs as well as give an overview of the different quarters of the city, its common religions, and the nearby dungeons.

My Nostalgia be Different

Last week, I did a bad thing.  I ran a game and it wasn't Traveller.   I was weak (and the home group was going to be missing its pilot), and so I repurposed an old Uz map, put in some bandits and some degenerate "elves," and put it in hex 2521 of the Elephand Lands.  In keeping with what I talked about a while ago, I used the last D&D Next playtest packet to run it, and we had a blast.

I probably wouldn't be talking about it, except that over at the Hill Cantons blog Chris did a post about a recent game he played and the nostalgia he felt in doing so.  Despite using a new system, I felt a lot of nostalgia as well, and weirdly about things that are essentially the opposite of what Chris describes.  I started with 3e and for most of my high school and college games used a weird mix of 3e and 3.5 (I had the 3e books and my players had 3.5 and I had no idea what the difference was).  The things that took me back, so to speak, were things like 4d6 drop low stats, barbarians as a class, and weird class/race combinations like dwarf ranger and tiefling cleric.

Certainly the setting and the play group had something to do with it - the people at the table were the same people I played some of my first games with back in high school, and I ran the Wilderlands for most of my undergrad college career - but there was something in the air that wasn't when I tried some of my OD&D/S&W experiments out with the same group.  They liked Uz, sure, but it didn't feel like this did.

I also found that D&D Next was able to evoke this certain special something without a terrible amount of rules complication - in fact, certain aspects of the system mirrored what I was already thinking of doing or had done with my Dark Country house rules.

Ah, but since I am Demogorgon (probably) I would not be true to myself if I was not also filled with lingering doubts and some small voice whispering "no! no! it is wrong!"  The thing that originally attracted me to OD&D and S&W was their mutability.  In 2008 when I started reading these blogs, Huge Ruined Scott - in contrast to his current "no setting information whatsoever" ethos - was first working on his Wilderlands of Darkling Sorcery and then his long lost Thool setting.  These were in uncountable ways different than what I had thought of as D&D while still feeling obviously like D&D settings, with ruins and adventurers and weird magic and stuff.  He took OD&D and banged it into something weird and idiosyncratic to Scott, and he did it with ease.

So I said I wanna do that, and did my own thing for the Hammer Horror set.  The Dark Country is, as I have often said, my baby, and running a fantasy game (or really any game) outside of it - despite my constant urge - ultimately always seems pointless.  But it has developed in ways that, while still fairly close to D&D, make it and D&D Next, or at least what my group seems to want out of D&D Next, like fitting a square peg in a round hole.

But - says my other, D&D Next liking head - the characters they made for the little test session seem easy to convert to the Dark Country.  The chaotic wizard and the dwarf ranger are acceptable untouched, and the half-orc barbarian whose adopted human father tried to burn him works just as well if he's some kind of riff off of the calibans from the 3e version of Ravenloft.  Maybe I can do this, thinks Aameul.  Ah, thinks Hethradiah, but your wife made a tiefling cleric of Braz Kazon, Battle God of Smoke.  That would be quite a bit harder...

A note on the top picture: my favorite book for 3e was Oriental Adventures, and when trying to find 3e art that made me nostalgic, I was lucky enough to find this illustration.  Not only does it make me nostalgic for 3e, but it always reminds me of a Chinese folk tale about a dragon who lived in a kingdom under the sea I heard in my rather bizarre 7th grade history class.  Any time I have a map with an ocean or lake on it, I always put some little underwater ruins there because of that exact story.  Unfortunately, I don't think any group in my games has ever had the water breathing spell.