Canvas

I wanted a large world! One where I could try any sort of culture/government/society and see how it affected its neighbors and its larger trading neighborhood (yes I have studied economics). But I wanted to be able to experiment and yet have many other “regions” far enough away that they would be unaffected by my experiment, so that I could try other experiments. In short I needed a world with a large surface area but with a natural explanation for having pockets of kingdoms that are culturally isolated from each other.

At this point I want to take a side diversion to a novel I read many years ago (probably in the early 80’s). I don’t remember its name or the author, but it was science fiction and set on a world very different from earth. The whole known world for the native inhabitants was a great river valley winding down from the crustal surface of the planet to the bottom of a large impact crater. The surface of the world was covered in ice, too cold for a gaseous atmosphere. However the deeper down the river valley the deeper into the crust the warmer it got, the thicker the atmosphere and the more habitable the land became.

I decided to make Argand in a similar manner. Imagine a planet many times the diameter of earth. The surface too cold for an atmosphere, but pepper it with craters and massive river valleys winding to the crater floors. Overt time the craters would fill with water and become the seas and oceans of the world. I could group craters together to create open areas of habitable land. Alternatively I could have isolated craters with only a thin rim of habitability between the impossibly high mountains of the crater walls and the sea of water that has collected in the bottom.

Almost perfect for what I wanted in a world. However to have a super large earth means having higher gravity, but I wanted a roughly earth normal gravity, so I had to make the planet hollow, or at least a lot more porous than earth. This presents a bit of a problem for physics because in the real world rocks, even strong igneous rocks cannot resist gravity and the extreme pressure deep in the earth, they collapse and fill in any cavities in “geological” short time frames. So I imagined that rock is generally stronger on Argand than on Earth, coupled with innate planetary magic’s linked to its geothermal cycles that keep the large caverns and porous nature of the planet intact.

I have a strong feeling that Argand would not stand up to the scrutiny of a physicist or a geologist. However the ideas had enough “internal logic” to hang together for me. So Argand was born in a hail of meteors and the slow trickle of water over eons of time.

Scope:

I wanted the ability to fit into one world Magic of every type, combat, intrigue, plots and politics complex enough to be real. I wanted to have the scope to play campaigns where magic was an escalator of power leading to heights that meant the characters growth would not be limited in by any lack of power, knowledge or complexity. I also wanted the freedom to play a campaign where magic might be scarce, valuable and treasured. The real difference, or so I reasoned, between these two extremes was... social status. Among the wealthy and nobility, training could be paid for, “every name in the Kingdom of any note has as wizard or two in the family don’t you know”. On the other hand for the poor and the rural the options are more limited, and magic would seem costly out of reach and “for the fancy city folk, not us common folk”.

To give magic and politics the scope I wanted I created a system of magic colleges that train most of the wizards in the game. They are the mega-corporations of Argand, bigger than any one nation, economic powerhouses that kings and emperors want to keep on side. They would be corporate enterprises that are household names, ubiquitous at the same time as being scary because of their wealth and power. I imagined wizards trained in by a specific college may hate and/or distrust wizards from other colleges on sight. To support “mega-corporate” magic I designed a world with high population densities, cities in the millions are common. Cities which can only be supported by proper sanitation, magi-tech assisted farming techniques, trade colleges and education that is available to all but the very poorest citizens.

To stitch all of this together I invented “Industrial Magic”. Why not have skyscrapers built by magic with engineering and architectural knowledge. Imagine roads constructed in bulk by large scale use of mud to stone, bridges, city walls and stone/concrete walls, pavements, towers, domes and fanciful buildings. Throw in permanent walls of force for perfect unbreakable windows, magical reinforcing of materials to allow construction of things not possible in the real world. Levitation, floating castles, libraries, tele-portals, magical message services, illusory theatre shows, magical medical clinics and so on. A million uses for magic that a college could charge for, make a profit and improve the quality of life of the citizens. So magic would be ubiquitous, business oriented and it could provide the necessary conditions to support mega-cities, high population density and the modern urban specialisation of job functions. In short, imagine modern society but where everything technical is supplied by magic not technology.

I imagine that technology and magic are not perfect substitutes however. Some things that technology is good at magic cannot provide, while some things that are difficult with technology could be commonplace with magic. In the former category I imagined digital electronics and computing. All the modern wonders that have been designed by or realised with computers would be missing from a magi-tech world. However, panacea healing, levitation and teleportation might be things that magic can provide relatively easily that technology does not.

So if you can imagine a world where mega-corporations sell everything, where corporate greed and money corrupts good intentions. Where nobles strive to be wizards and wizards become a mix of technocrats, businessmen and politicians. Where for a fee you can go along to your local magi-medical centre and be healed of cancer. Then take a teleport from the local magi-port to a far off kingdom. But where trains, trams and cars don’t exist and where computers and all modern electronics is missing, then you can imagine Argand.

The Why

Welcome to Kota’s Cavern.

I recently started GM’ing a Dungeons and Dragons session semi-periodically, “when we can get together”, some of us work full time and some go to uni, some of us are married, some dating and some single, finding a schedule we can all meet on is challenging. Sometimes it is weekly, sometimes only once in a month, but it seems to be an ongoing activity so I thought I would write about it.
 In this blog I want to try and share my enthusiasm for the genre and the process of role-playing, and also share the resources I have found and developed for my own world and campaign. I like creating my own fantasy maps so I want to share those as well. I am not an artist, but I have created some interesting and intricate maps using a variety of styles over the years.

We are using AD&D 2nd edition rules for two reasons. Firstly they are what I mostly used in the 80’s and early 90’s, so while I am rusty, I am at least familiar with them. Secondly, one of the players did a little digging around the internet and found some comments that 2nd edition is the best rules for “role playing” as opposed to miniatures and fantasy battle combat. So 2nd edition it is.

I already have a world ready-made that I have used for many campaigns in the past. It has over twelve thousand years of history, a multitude of realms, varied climate regions and some unique features that I always hope will make it interesting to players. I have several of the countries (kingdoms and empires) fairly well developed for play, however one of the players is fascinated with Lizardmen and wants to play one. The country that is best suited to having Lizardmen players and NPC’s is not one that I have spent a lot of time developing. However it is right next to one of the most developed kingdoms I have. I do have a fairly good idea of the kind of culture and politics I want in it, and I have lots of information about its neighbours. So I decided to use it for the campaign.

About the time that the players mentioned they would like to get involved in a campaign with me as GM, I gave them my “Notice of Rule Changes”. I play with a lot of house rules that I feel add some depth, flexibility and realism to the game. I had previously (in the early 90’s) developed a document briefly explaining the house rules to give to players. I dusted it off and gave a copy to my potential players. Rather than be put off by the changes they seemed interested in the new rules, so I took that as a good sign and started preparing for a new campaign.

Allow me to introduce my world: Argand.

If there are any mathematicians or electrical engineers, out there you may recognise the name as being particularly apt for a fantasy world.

When I designed my world (back in the 80’s) I wanted several things from a fantasy world. A big scope, a large canvas and a deep history! I will explain these in later posts.

So long for now.