Spotlight: Ravenia

Ravenia is the name of the region which lies along the eastern border of Ioropa, abutting Rus to the northeast and Ba'al Turath to the southeast. As such, this forbidding mountainous region forms the front line in the long, grinding war of civilizations between the Turathi and the Ioropans. Its vital strategic significance goes a long way in explaining why the Church of Bahamut, which otherwise abhors necromancy, is curiously silent on the subject of the vampire nobility of Ravenia and their tradition of undead servitude.

Since time immemorial, the lords of Ravenia have levied a grim labor tax on their serfs. Necropolises grow alongside the hamlets huddling uneasily in the shadows of the grand castles, and there the dead lie uneasily by day. As night falls, the people retreat to their homes, lock their doors, and close their blinds, as the night shift rises to do the bidding of the lords of the realm.

Although deeply conservative by nature, the masters of Ravenia have been dragged sulking and snarling into the 16th century. Advances in military power by their hated neighbors the Turathi have prompted the application of a twisted sort of science to the shambling armies of Ravenia. The result is a new and terrible creation: the abomination. These hulking constructs, formed of dead flesh reshaped and reinforced by metalwork and alchemy, are the vanguard of Ravenia's armies of the night.

The undead are not the only things that go bump in the night, however. The halflings, traveling in families and clans in their distinctive ox-drawn cart-houses, have been steadily sidling across the eastern borders of Ravenia for centuries. Claiming ancestry from far-off Arindia, they are regarded with suspicion for many reasons: their willingness to travel the roads by night, their passage through Turathi lands, their curiously tiny proportions, their strange language, their mysterious religion and sorceries, and whatever other reason the justifiably paranoid Ravenians might come up with. Nevertheless, although no one admits to it, everyone visits the halflings for one reason or another.

Confronting some questions

Age of Sail began with two concurrent thought processes. The first was a growing interest in the history of the 16th and 17th centuries, brought on in part by reading the Cartoon History of the Modern World. Whereas the European medieval era that forms a popular basis for a lot of fantasy roleplaying seemed to me to be characterized by a certain degree of fractious stagnation "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing", the age of world exploration that followed was one of massive upheaval, collisions of cultures, cosmopolitanism, and the birth of "the world" as an idea and a place. On the other hand, it was also an era of horrific, bloody genocide, wherein real people and real cultures were really oppressed, enslaved, slaughtered, and scattered to the ends of the earth. So the first question that must be confronted is "why would you turn the history of a people's destruction into a game?"

The other thread of thought concerned the fantasy races of Dungeons and Dragons and other fantastic fiction and the unfortunate implications of their assumption of cultural stereotypes and artifacts borrowed from real history. I found it all too easy to map fantasy races, which are often characterized as "good" or "evil", onto the actual cultures and ethnicities that had been the source of their artistic and descriptive motifs. So the second question that must be confronted is "why would you say that Africans are orcs?"

To the first question, I would answer this: it is better to confront the evils of history, in study and in play, than to ignore them. I do not intend to portray the exploration and conquests of the nations of Europe as a triumph of civilization over savagery; every side of this great collision is a perspective the players can assume, and although the cultural forces in motion are perhaps too immense for any one person to turn, every individual retains their freedom of moral choice. Every hero may be someone else's villain. The shifting of this era and its conflicts to a fantastic setting, more divorced from reality, rather than dehumanizing and simplifying the conflicts, may help players understand the forces driving individuals to act in the way they did, and the ways in which people are still susceptible to those forces. History is not dead, not gone forever, but with us still.

My response to the second question can be summarized thus: I do not wish to denigrate the African, but to dignify the orc. I find it profoundly creepy from time to time how, in our escapist fantasies, we create intelligent humanoid creatures which for the sake of simple enjoyment we define as irredeemably evil and then kill for fun and loot - when, at certain times in our actual history, we created labels for actual human beings which for various reasons we defined as subhuman and then killed for fun and loot. In noting this, I am not saying that all fantasy gamers are racists, that we cannot distinguish between our carefully constructed escapist fantasy and the complexities of the real world. But I am also saying that it is rare that these complexities are not elided, and fantasy gaming may be the poorer for it. So I decided to confront the issue head on.

In the interests of full disclosure, I am an American of European origin. I am aware that this means I have blind spots about issues of culture and ethnicity, although I lack the hubris to claim that I know what those blind spots are - that's what makes them blind spots. This blog is open to public comment, and I would be happy to hear from people with different perspectives regarding their feelings on this endeavor. On the one hand, this is a fantasy gaming project, and not a factual statement about real people and real history - I explicitly state and maintain that I only draw inspiration from history when it is more interesting than anything I could make up. On the other hand, I won't try to pretend that fiction doesn't have real implications and shouldn't be taken seriously. The purpose of this project is not to strip-mine painful events for entertainment or whitewash history in fiction, but to create a fun context for coming to grips in a fictional context with the forces that shaped a real era - and I want to know when I'm doing the former rather than the latter.

Town guard disposition table

So there's been some trouble, and the guards have arrived. What manner of guards are they?

1	Honest: applies the law as correctly as possible.
2	Lazy: minimizes effort on their part.
3	Corrupt: solicits bribes to let the matter drop (or not drop).
4	Bought: does whatever their bosses require.
5	Overzealous: wants to make arrests, whether warranted or not.
6	Biased: will favor locals and people they know.

Generally, this would be rolled only once per town or city district, as a culture of policing tends to be self-reinforcing within a group.

A quick and dirty map of Ioropa

The sort of thing a more educated or worldly Ioropan might draw if pressed for time. Many details omitted, of course.

Random Secret Society Table

Secret societies may be assumed to be thick on the ground, although the degree of secrecy and seriousness will of course vary.  Here is a table of secret societies - roll once and read across for a quick society, or roll 5 times for a more random selection.  If you don't like one, write your own!

Number	Prefix	Organization	Suffix	Activity	Initiation
1	Mystic	Brotherhood	of the Occult Hand	Religious sect	Dark room with hungry swine
2	Masonic	Order	of the Golden Cross	Mercantile monopoly	Burn your finest hat
3	Fraternal	Society	of the Compass	Anonymous good works	Shave head, spend night in prayer
4	Inscrutable	Knights	of the Silver Crown	Vigilantism	Stand in circle, be hit with sticks
5	Legendary	Monks	of the Moon	Heavy drinking	Intense questioning while drunk
6	Chosen	Children	of the First Men	Political influence	Find black bean in hill of white
7	Unspeakable	Wrights	of the Four Winds	Anarchism	Ritual self-cutting
8	Shadow	Princes	of the Crossroads	Weird sex	Streaking
9	Crimson	Association	of the Scales	Violent crime	Get home after ride in sack
10	Peculiar	Union	of the Black Bat	Pranks	Steal 5 items chosen randomly
11	Dignified	Lions	of the Medallion	Get away from the husband/wife	Long, ambiguously symbolic skit
12	Obscure	Keepers	of the Endless Flame	Racism	Eat a bug
13	Ancient	Defenders	of the West	Nationalism	Blood pledges
14	Elucidated	Elders	of the Nameless King	Blackmail and extortion	Written confession of crimes
15	Reformed	Circle	of the Mountain	Black magic	Animal sacrifice
16	Orthodox	Chamber	of the Left Hand	Random terror	Hand in ant nest
17	Oriental	Masters	of the Old Rites	Pseudo-alchemy	Drink unknown substance
18	Dignified	Gentry	of the Stars	Grave robbery	Sleep under knife on thread
19	New	Family	of the Black Lion	Illegal satire	Denounce local potentate
20	Enlightened	Legion	of the Ribbon	Blood sports	Punch a guardsman

So what is this anyway

I am starting a roleplaying game.  The setting is a fantasy version of our world around the year 1550, as the great nations of Ioropa set out to explore and exploit new worlds, while making and breaking alliances and always keeping one eye on the encroaching Turathi; as the dominant religion, the Church of Bahamut, faces challenges from religious schisms and splinter groups; as warfare is revolutionized by mandala weapons, which take the power to slay a knight in full armor from the elite few and place it squarely in the hand of the common man; as feudalism gives way to commerce and the ascendancy of the nation-state; as the warring kingdoms of the Dark Continent trade each other to the Ioropans and are shipped around the world; as the bloody empire of the half-orcs is assaulted for its precious orichalcum, and the treasure ships groaning with looted wealth create an age of piracy.  It is an age of world travel, adventures both grand and venal, tragedy on an unfathomable scale, conspiracy, amazing coincidence, struggle and hardship, when fortunes are easily won and easily lost and anything could happen over the next horizon.

The system is Dungeons and Dragons, 4th Edition.  Kind of.

I have been, and will be, preparing a great deal of material for this game, both setting and rules related, operating on the general principle that when truth is stranger than fiction (as it so often is) use the truth, and otherwise make up something even cooler.  This blog will be a place where I post material related to the setting and campaign, for the benefit of my players and for anyone else who might find it useful or interesting.