Emirikol and Building a Setting from the Seeds

Last week I listed the 9 issues of Dungeon I had on my shelf, plus stuff I pulled from the WotC website, for the 35 adventures I had to seed the setting. There is a lot of space for complaint about Dungeon Adventures content in how ill designed it is for picking up the adventures for use at the table. That’s been a big design goal of the OSR, and I see the point, but it’s not what I’m using it for right now. Instead, I’m working in advance to steal the extensive backstories and weave them together with minimal work.

 For example, in a fit of high octane lazy I decided that Emirikol is called 'The Chaotic' because it's 5 or 6 smaller townships that grew together to take advantage of the port. This means 5 or 6 different architectural styles encased in 5 or 6 different walled areas, with one big wall around the outside. Now I don’t have to change the names of the non-generic towns in the adventure notes - all of these 'cities' are just parts of the big, main city. This means

·       No city is mentioned in Nightshade but it’s clear the culture has wealthy noble families using interpersonal relationships to undercut each other, and cursed Wizard willing to be hired to make potions in this. Wizards are superficially aloof but still involved. In Asflag’s Unintentional Emporium we have four wizards’ towers in Serin. populated by the slightly mad Asflag, Ednoc the Short, Mirim Galeweather, & Tullinen Grimm. So Asflag (or some version of it because I want to avoid random syllable collection names) is Nightshades first name, and since Grimm is presented as someone who will charm the PCs to get them on his side, he’s the one who cursed Nightshade. Serin becomes one of the quarters of Emirikol, likely the most tradesman-y district. Wealthy conspiring against each other continues in For a Lady’s Honor where there’s blackmail for sexual favors, so we now know a decent amount about the wealthy in the chaotic city. Finally, the Legerdemain theater is supposed to be in a prosperous part of a big city and include a wizard villain, a perfect fit for here.

·       The Serpents Tooth takes place in the port quarter of Scornbul, “where even the muggers travel in pairs” and that captures the feel of the city well but doesn’t have a map of the areas as everything is focused on one inn. A Lady’s Honor relies on a delightfully non-descript thieves guild. House of Cards has two rival thieves’ guilds – the Night Masks and the Shore Patrol – in Westgate, but the guild in Lady’s Honor is now the Shore Patrol. I like the name Scornbul more than Westgate, so there you go. Westgate is a small community inside Scornbul, leading to whatever is west. (Swamps. It’s swamps.) The action in Mad God’s Key starts in a nearly lawless part of a city and moves to some docks before dealing with a small thieves guild (the Green Dagger Gang, who pays tribute to the Shore Patrol to stay semi-autonomous) and then to the mountains. Much of that action will take place in Scornbul.

·       Povero is a quarter full of merchant families for Matchmakers and the victims having sizable manor houses; big enough for landscaped lakes and small herds of goat to keep the grass down. (I am seriously considering having this whole adventure be smallfolk).  This is the south end of the city, and may or may not be outside the walls while still being considered part of Emirkol. Ultimately I decided this name wasn’t evocative enough so I changed it to Orchid. It is the flower of Emirikol (growing from the midden that is Scornbul)

·       Ferrantino from The Lost Library is a quarter made of marble and dedicated to learning, with the library and its loremasters dominating the area. It’s the only part of the city completely extant from the Chaos invasion, as much of the wood and stone structures were destroyed. There are tunnels underneath the library leading to somewhere with chaos beasts use to inadvertently break into the Library basements. The deeply strange Last of the Iron House in theory revolves around the city of Mirago, but at no point are the PCs there: the adventure is all in seaside caves a distance from the city. That makes it easy to have these be caves under Ferrnatino, linking the adventures and moving the villains plans into the city. The inaccessible wizards tower form Ministry of Winds should be here as well, continuing the wizards tower themes from Serin. Given this design it has to lie on the city’s east side, closest to the mountains.

·       Further south of Povero are smallfolk farms that are the breadbasket of the city. This territory is Girdley Crossing, from Pearlman’s Curiosity, and maybe Grimm or one of the other wizards is the “villain”? Huddle Farm is also there, and one aristocrat PC will have that as a tenant farm. In any event, Gridley Crossing is now the place the PCs will have to protect even if it is embarrassing. Encounter in the Wildwood takes place on a forest trail; given we have the four quadrants already spoken for in terrain, I think ‘The Wildwood’ is a modest forest inside the territory of Gridley Crossing that houses a small chaos crypt (The Fountain of Health?) that is the source of the leprechaun, the nilbog, and the various critters of the Wildwood. Since Troll Bridge takes place among Gnome communities the bridge has to be here.

Now to lay out parts of the map that aren’t the city proper:

·       Some distance to the east in Tortles of the Purple Sage part 2 there’s an inland trading post and passages to three communities unrecovered from the chaos invasion. This may change the time since the recovery, or that these communities were too tainted for some reason, or as evidence of the republic’s lack of focus that these haven’t been recovered.

·       The abandoned town of Ravensglass in Light of Lost Souls, whose river had silted over completely, with its lighthouse, lies to the east as well, as it follows the theme of abandoned locations that could be recovered by the Republic taking steps to do so.

·       There’s the coastal town of Ranaan from In Defense of the Law, which we’re going to say is east from the city, on the far side of the mountain range. The mountain range should be protecting this place from the heavy weather that effects Emirikol, but at some point it won’t due to chaos. Ranann has ‘prospered’ due to the collapse of Ravensglass, but it depended on goods from the lost cities of the Purple Sage.  

·       There has to be a mountain range because lots of adventures take place in such places, including Mountain Sanctuary, At the Spottle Parlor, Hermes Bridge, Changling, The Alchemist’s Eyrie, and House of Harpies. That mountain range ends in the Sparrock peninsula, where the Wounded Worm takes place.

·       By the Wayside takes place in a swamp and has long been a favorite of mine for atmosphere and its clever use of a hag, one of my favorite monsters. So, the west of the city is swampland.  A Wreck Ashore also takes place in a swamp, so that’s easy.

·       There’s a whole state of Interlaken ruled by religious theocrats in Granite Mountain Prison. I like the idea of a Lawful Evil community inside the Republic, which is focused on Law over Chaos but not always Good over Evil. Thematically this needs to be south, between the PCs and the capital.