Defending the Thief, My Old School, and Crypto-Rolemaster

I understand and completely sympathize with the desire to emulate the old school playstyle. But I have to say that certain persons who share this prediliction are pushing the School-O-Meter back a little too far. Case in point is James Maliszewski’s disdain for the Thief class, which seems to me to be based mostly on the fact that it didn’t appear in the original D&D brown/white box rules, instead being added in one of the supplements.

First of all, I need to say that James’ blog is a great place to go for ideas and insight on old-school play, regardless of where exactly one wants to set the bar. But I don’t feel that older automatically equates to purer, or better in any meaningful sense. In fact, I think that the original D&D rules are a big mess, filled with contradictions and presented in a manner that makes the rules almost unintelligible to a modern audience. This is why I much prefer using something like Castles & Crusades to emulate that kind of playstyle, or, failing that, why I’d rather use D&D 3.5, despite that ruleset not neccessarily being a particularly good match.

A big part of this is, of course, my own personal value for ‘Old School.’ I started with the Moldvay boxed Basic Set but moved swiftly into AD&D, which was, from my experience, a common approach back in 1981-82. The Thief class was a prominent feature in both, and I have an additional fondness for it because one of my own first and formative experienced with D&D was with the solo module Blizzard Pass, in which one plays a Thief. I therefore have a big soft spot for the class.

But that’s beside the point – which is that for me ‘Old School’ means the days of Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan and Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth and Descent Into the Depths of the Earth. By 1981 or so AD&D had become the default platform for play, and only a comparatively few players stuck with the older rudimentary form of the game. It helped that AD&D first edition stayed relatively stable from a rules standpoint for as long as it did, the only significant rules addenda being the relatively mild (by modern standards,) ones in Unearthed Arcana, Oriental Adventures and the two Survival Guides. Even those mostly introduced changes in the form of new classes, magic items and spells, with fundamental mechanical changes being fairly light except in the new emphasis on Non-Weapon Proficencies, the implementation of which I considered halfassed even at the time.

There’s another variable at play in my case, however, which is that a great deal of my formative experience didn’t come from D&D, but from Rolemaster, which I owned in the 80s but which I didn’t play until the early 90s – but when I did play, I played it extensively and exclusively, for a number of years. Therefore, any attempt at emulating my old-school ideal means incorporating some of the aspects and/or flavor of Rolemaster.

The current default version of that game, the Rolemaster Standard System, is somewhat bloated in a similar way that D&D 3.0/3.5 was inflated from its previous editions; the rules are detailed enough to feel confining rather than liberating. And while a version of the older system is now available, RMSS addressed some of the issues I had with those rules, and the so-called Rolemaster Classic represents a step too far back, much like James’ dislike for the Thief class strikes me as a step too far in the direction of intentional archaism for archaism’s sake in the case of D&D. That step eliminates a lot of clutter that I don’t like, but it also eliminates some features that I do like and would prefer to retain.

Of course I could houserule together an amalgam of RMSS and the older rules, but I hate doing stuff like that – I would rather build from scratch, or at least from a well-understood and freely publishable base (i. e. and Open Source system,) since I could then share it freely, or even publish it. I’ve gone through the mental excercise more than once of taking the basics of d20 and shaping them into something Rolemaster-esque while clearing away a lot of D&D chaff. In principle this is easy to do, at least by the standards of RPG design.

One tenet I’d start with would be that there are classes and levels, but that the former would not completely block you from picking up any particular in-game ability. I think that both elements could easily be exciused from the d20 rules, and I’m disappointed that some efforts (notably Traveller d20,) chose not to do so. But for something like this, I’d keep them. The Rolemaster approach is to base everything on the skill system, and that’s what I’d do here. Spells, combat bonuses and the like would all be based on skill ranks.

Combat would be a blend of D&D and Rolemaster; it’d work basically like D&D 3.x, but there’d be no feats and you’d be able to elect to put some of your combat bonus into defense. Armor and protection would work just liike it does in D&D 3.x. And of course, you’d have to develop critical tables, although I’d leave out the attack tables and just have an array of damage types, with a single percentile critical damage table covering all of them, with maybe another one for exotic damage types such as those dealt out by magic.

I’d want to keep the Rolemaster convention of making rolls generally open-ended; I always found that this added a dynamism to combat that was lacking in games like D&D, whose battles appeared to have more tactical options enumerated in the rules but which never felt as alive to me. Magic is trickier, but I’d keep the general level of spell utility about what it is in D&D, but adding the Realms and pure/hybrid distinction of Rolemaster.

So there, mostly fully imagined but not actually designed, is a sort of Crypto-Rolemaster built on the bones of D&D. It’s something I’ve love to play some day. As for designing it… well, I’ll let you know when I make some progress, but don’t turn blue waiting for it.

 

Thoughts on The Kingdoms of Seoland

It occurs to me that the Kingdoms of Seoland would make a fine setting for D&D.

Now, that’s so self-evident that it sounds kind of dumb, given that it’s supposed to be an ‘old-school’ setting and all. But what I mean by it is that I’m not interested in D&D – at all. If I wanted an old-school game I have a number of alternatives but would likely settle on Castles & Crusades, which while very like D&D, is not D&D per se. I am not interested in playing or running D&D out of the box, or in making the kind of sweeping changes to it that would be needed to make me happy with it.

But there is one kind of D&D that I would consider playing – Birthright. Not Birthright exactly, either; that was a wonderful setting but the D&D rules of the time (AD&D 2nd Edition, a system I passionately hated,) were very inadequate for the style of game that it was shooting for, and it ended up being a weird synthesis of styles where the PCs were kings, rulers and archpriests that would go dungeon-crawling together. But try we did, back in the day, and we had a wonderful time with it, despite the many issues. I’d be happy to play that type of strategic-level game again, if I had a better rules foundation for doing it.

D&D 3.5 had just such a system available, in Fields of Blood from Eden Studios. It gives you mechanics for ruling and building fantasy kingdoms, and the interactions between them, diplomatic and otherwise. Around the time of its release, there were several D20 products from various publishers that tried to do similar things, but FoB is the best of the bunch, in my opinion.

But there’s one problem with it. It’s a pretty detailed set of systems, all tightly interlinked, for military operations, diplomacy and regional development. The scale is set up such that one 12-mile (I think I’m remembering that number correctly) is a single ‘province’, which you as the ruler can then go ahead and develop, pillage or whatever. Movement rates of troops are tied to the 12-mile province. A small kingdom might have two or three provinces, while a big one might have five to eight. Massive and vastly powerful states have 12-15. Each province adds significantly to the bookkeeping involved in running a state; nations of a few provinces are no problem, but actually running big empires at the table is likely to eat whole sessions, especially if the players actually talk about what they’re doing.

The problem should now be apparent, if you’re thinking about the numbers here. Medieval Wales, by this yardstick, is a vast and powerful empire. Late Medieval France, not the largest country in Europe at the time, is made up of thousands of FoB provinces, making it unplayable under those rules. It thus becomes very difficult to plug FoB into any existing setting, virtually all of which presuppose the existence of states which are of reasonable (or at least vaguely believable,) size by historical standards but totally unmanagable under the FoB rules. Nor does FoB supply a setting to use.

There are a couple of ways around this; setting up a single large kingdom wherein the players take the roles of Barons of the realm, ruling over smallish areas, rather than as the rulers of the realm. But FoB provides few mechanics for the interactions of internal political factions, which is what such a game would naturally center around. Nor can you just change the size of the provinces, because the movement systems are tied into them very tightly, and you’d have to retool the rules substantially to make it work. Rules design is not something I want to put effort into when envisioning potential D&D campaigns. This leaves me back at the starting point of not wanting to do anything with D&D proper.

But it happens that the map I am using for the Kingdoms of Seoland is one I’ve had around for a while. And it happens to be of a scale appropriate to a ‘world’ (which you should read as ‘campaign area’,) of 12 miles to the hex. It occurred to me just yesterday that this could be made to work with Fields of Blood, and that my overall picture of the place, of a decent-sized island containing several small kingdoms, as well as areas dominated by barbarians and humanoids, would complement it as well. A world designed with FoB in mind alleviates the scaling problem entirely.

This doesn’t really change the development of the Kingdoms at all, and running a game using Fields of Blood remains a hypothetical option. The notion of getting up to speed on the D&D (3.5, probably) rules holds no particular appeal. But there’s also nothing that says you can’t do old-school gaming under D&D 3.5. The strategic-play thing is definitely not old-school, but you could set up a campaign in phases, with a series of dungeon crawls in the early levels concurrent with building the PCs reputations as heroes, or at least competent folks who get things done. Such a campaign could then (around levels 5-6, I’m guessing,) move into a mission-oriented phase, where the PCs are working for some important personage or other, before moving into a final, political phase where the PCs are movers and shakers themselves. Run the way I’d prefer, this would let me dig into what is, after all, a fairly complicated rules system pretty gradually.

 

Megadungeons and Ytherra

One of the banner elements of old-school play is the ‘megadungeon’. Essentially, this is a dungeon massive enough that by itself it could serve as the setting for an entire campaign. It’s a common feature in old-school settings like Greyhawk, and even the Forgotten Realms, where Undermountain fills the post admirably. The outstanding Grognardia blog has me thinking on this subject a little bit.

I’m working on an old-school setting alongside Ytherra, called the Kingdoms of Seoland. This will be very thinly developed, as befits that kind of setting, essentially complete in a map and maybe 4 pages of gazetteer-style information and a list of suggested character names. And lots of dungeon sites. Verisimilitude is not a major priority, although I’m not a believer in the idea that it’s not important at all.

Now, Seoland has the traditional mix of old-school races that you’d expect. So along with the myriad Orc lairs and Undead-riddled ruined temples, there’s an abandoned Dwarven fortess called the Sparburg, inhabited first by the Dwarves, then by the Orcs, and currently by the Eleven, the chief lieutenants of some Lovecraftian Horror or other.

I don’t have a system for this yet (although I’m leaning toward using Castles & Crusades rather than ALAT or developing something specifically for it,) or a concrete plan to actually run it. It’s on the list of ’some day’ projects that I hope to get to.

Now, it occurs to me that a megadungeon serves a purpose even if it’s not going to be a primary arena of play – or even if the players will never set foot in the place – as an admirable source of legends and rumors. This got me to thinking about megadunegons on Ytherra, which is not at all an old-school setting, but which is very strong (I think) in color and history. So I ran down a short list of existing (i. e. with something written about them already,) sites that could serve in some kind of corresponding role.

The Antháve is a Dravánu fortress hewn into a massive chunk of glacially-deposited rock in the general vicinity of Dravá. It hasn’t yet been placed on the new map, although I have a fair idea where it’s going to be. It holds the Imperial Armories, is always manned by a full legion, and is honeycombed with tunnels housing weapons mundane and mighty. The fortress has never fallen, and in the War of the Circle of Ghámeron it was the last redoubt of the legendary Emperor Ánsesh I, when Dravá itself fell to a coalition of enemy nations.

Morú Váreneth is a major holy site of the faith of Deshéng, the Goddess of Death. There’s a major temple on the site, which is the destination of pilgrims from across the Imperium, and beyond. There’s also a labyrinthine series of underground levels, themselves among the most closely-held secrets of the Deshéngu, and at the bottom of these lies their deepest secret, one which would shake the foundations of both faith and Imperium were it revealed. Deep beneath the earth lives the Parliament in Gray.

There exists the remnant of an ancient installation atop Mount Gútha, in Arál Draván. The mountain is a climb formidable enough that only one man has reached the summit, and that tale has passed into legend. Such folktales speak of the place as a City of the Gods, now abandoned, but the learned priests of both Deshéng and Zerém know it to be a relic of a prehuman civilization. Who knows what may be found there?

The city of Thal, in the Selurean Kingdoms, was inhabited even in deep antiquity – possibly before the arrival of humanity on Ytherra. It was a stronghold of the Sorcerer-Kings called the Coercers, and was razed upon their demise, but it’s highly probable that extensive old warrens lie beneath the modern city, which is an independent state ruled by the Captains of Thal, a council of merchant princes. Sewer workers in Thal have an unusually high mortality rate…

Then there’s the so-called Tower of Jet in the Southern Ocean. It’s rather far off the beaten track from the explored world, but tales of it made their way as far north as Mánthezar and a famed Dravánu loremaster once tried to plumb its secrets. It was never built as an inhabitable structure, but rather as a locus of magical power by beings whose presence on Ytherra predates even the old races. The legends tell of unimaginable horrors that dwell within, monstrous things beyond mortal comprehension. And even the Gods – even the Five – won’t go near the place.

Most of these weren’t intended for dungeon-delving per se, but all could be employed in that capacity with only a light repurposing, if that. I don’t know that I would use them for that, but… Thal was intended as an adventuring hub in the first place; it’s a major trade port, a rival in that regard even to Dravá, and more open to foreigners from a hundred lands than any Dravánu city. The Selureans consider it more a city of outlanders than of their own culture, and there’s a modicum of truth in that. Although the catacombs beneath it weren’t envisioned as a ‘megadunegon’ exactly, they were intended as the primary venue for dungeon-crawling on Ytherra, if such a thing should be desired. So while I hadn’t though about the place that way, that’s really what it is.

 

Magic on Ytherra

There are two broad classifications of magic present on Ytherra, both of which utilize the ambient power of the essence, that force which pervades the world, and which is called Ilésh Asú in Draványa and Ihénza in Old Manthezárin. So-called “Low Magic” uses the power present in objects and symbols, or energy that can be easily coaxed from such. Practices such as alchemy and herbalism, the use of runes and augury are examples of Low Magic. “High Magic” is the direct manipulation of the essence.

This latter was chiefly a Manthezárin development, although its methodology has been widely adopted, even in Arál Draván, where practitioners utilize essentially identical methods, although there are many superficial differences. Early in the history of Arál Draván a distinct magical tradition developed, chiefly due to Dravánu feelings of cultural superiority, culminating in the development of a “dialect” of Archaic Draványa called Nashanáya, a complex artificial language invented with High Magical practice specifically in mind, as a counterpoint to the predominant use of Manthezárin by spellweavers across Suratha.

Today, these two traditions continue to co-exist. In Arál Draván, the so-called Asangáru Tradition is overwhelmingly dominant, and it holds a great deal of sway in Angháza, which lies within the Dravánu cultural sphere. Even there, however, it contends with the Manthezárin Tradition, which is dominant everywhere else. This is true even in Selurean lands, in which a third tradition is being developed in the Gray College. This approach is fundamentally different from the older methods, regarding the essence as a single unified force rather than six different varieties of energy. Some preliminary breakthroughs have already been made.

The essence is comprised of six different types of energy, each of which corresponds to one of the six Empyreal Realms. These “flavors” of power are called Correspondences; each affects different parts or components of the physical and immaterial worlds. In all of its forms, the essence can be manipulated; indirectly as by the process of alchemy, or directly by application of both the intellect and the will, a practice requiring long study and careful instruction, and also a particular gift or talent. Those so gifted, when they are identified at an early age, can be trained to mastery of this ability.

The Asangáru hold that each individual gift is attuned to one of the types of power, more or less exclusively, with talent in the others regarded as rudimentary or residual. Practitioners of that tradition thus focus training in one of the six Asangáru paths, each a subgroup within the Asangáru Concord and each corresponding to an Empyreal Realm and its associated Correspondence, and trained solely in that path, with a few legendary spellweavers mastering multiple paths. In the Manthezárin Tradition, while it is realized that most individuals are more gifted in one Correspondence than in the others, value is seen in mastering as wide an array of magics as one is capable of. Magi of the Manthezáin tradition tend thus to be less specialized than their Asangáru counterparts.

A comparatively young tradition has arisen in the Selurean Kingdoms, born only two centuries ago with the establishment of the Gray College near Enthierre. Adherents to this philosophy hold that magical energies exist in only one form, which while seen as differing by Magi of older traditions, are fundamentally the same. This approach has led to some breakthroughs long considered impossible by Asangáru and Manthezárin Magi, combinations of the power of the multiple realms rather than effects utilizing only one. The Selurean Tradition is still young, and its Magi have not yet approached the levels of power seen in Magi of the elder traditions; many of its techniques, while revolutionary to the student of the schools of magical thought, are of a lesser magnitude than long-perfected techniques. The manipulation of the weather is an exceptional case; this was thought impossible for centuries except in very limited scenarios, but Selurean Magi have managed to create spectacular and potent effects in the last three decades. The Gray College guards these arts carefully, but it is not clear that such feats are even possible in the older Traditions.

Too, in the Selurean Tradition the talent for High Magical practice is not seen as an absolute; any sentient being is in principle capable of the practice of High Magic according to this doctrine, at least on a rudimentary level, and presuming that the individual has sufficient gifts of determination, willpower and intellect, such that they are capable of grasping the essentials of the techniques involved.

There is another source of esoteric power which some choose to pursue; the aid of powerful entities of various origins. The Gods are the most obvious of these, and their powers are often invoked, not only by priests but by common people. As a rule, divine blessings are subtle, unlike the savage power wielded by Magi, but it can be effective nonetheless. The Gods and their servants are a part of Ytherra, even dwelling as they do in the Empyreal Realms; other entities, many of them malign or alien in nature, can be contacted in the Well of Worlds, a cluster of adjacent dimensions separated from Ytherra by stronger barriers than divides it from the Empyreal Realms.

The structure of the Well of Worlds is largely conjectural, but it seems to be arranged in a series of tiers or layers; some layers are comparatively easy to contact, but the beings dwelling therein are of roughly the same order as mankind (or perhaps of the old races,) and concern themselves chiefly with their own inscrutable agendas. Entities from the more distant layers are progressively more powerful, more concerned with Ytherrean events, and more dangerous. Such beings are collectively called Azakárin, demons, and the practice of contacting and dealing with them is called diabolism. Not all of those from the nearer layers of the Well of Worlds are inimical in principle, but they have outlooks and ethical codes different enough from mankind’s to make them treacherous to exhort aid from.

Entities from the Deeper Void are inimical indeed, and greatly desirous of influence on Ytherra, for reasons which are not fully understood by mortal practitioners. Bargaining with such entities is extraordinarily hazardous, as they consider mortals to be lesser beings on the order of gnats, and do not hesitate to subvert or even devour such arrogant mortals who anger them, and seem not to have any semblance of an ethical or honor code as such are thought of by Ytherreans. Such practices are proscribed almost everywhere on Ytherra, though exceptions exist.

 

The State of Ytherra, January 2009

This development journal is alive as well, even if I haven’t posted to it as often as I’d like.

The Ytherra website is paid up for another year, through February 2010. It still contains only some basic introductory material, which is unfortunate. But there’s a plan.

On my dedicated Ytherra memory stick Ytherra is in a disjointed state. Currently in revision 5.4, I have a small number of core documents and a huge number of files filled with older material from different iterations of the setting, many of which differ in subtle or obvious ways. All this stuff needs to be gone through, at which point I will confine the older files to an archive. Progress is being made in this department. Some of the writing is in what I now consider the ’semi-final draft’ stage, some is in early draft, and a lot of it should frankly be considered ‘notes’; chronologies of wars and lists of rulers and legions, and brief descriptions of a lot of little things.

As noted recently, Ytherra is being completely rempapped, and some significant changes have been made to the geography and the placement of certain cultures (i. e. almost all of them except Arál Draván and its satellite states.) Progress is being made in this department as well – I am currently moving points of interest (mostly large and medium-sized cities) from older versions of the Arál Draván map to the new one. Geography outside of Arál Draván, its satellites, and (weirdly) Ar-Knešt is fairly underdeveloped, so some of the stuff I’m doing right now is actually new.

Probably 80% of the older material deals with things in the Dravánu cultural sphere. The rest is scattered all over the place, but there are deeper pockets in Ar-Knešt, in the Selurean Kingdoms, and in Täka, where a lot of stuff is written about their religious traditions. This last is going to need substantial revision, since the ‘true’ cosmology of Ytherra is much better-developed now. Some of that work was done with the Täka model in mind, however, so it needs to be tweaked rather than completely reshaped.

A note on transcription: acute accents (as in Thacháya) always indicate syllable stress, and umlauts (as in Täka) always indicate long vowels. Some older Dravánu material leaves the acute accents out to reflect the standard stress rule in Draványa; moving forward I will include them universally except in Selurean words and very short words, in which I will use them according to my own aesthetic choices, or not.

As always, the primary obstacle to posting material on the official site is my opinion of its readiness. However, I have a plan in mind. First up will be the Histories page, which will be fully hyperlinked to a new Index. This will be followed by a new introduction which will include a detailed cosmology along with astrographic details. This will probably go up in segments as I write them, but all of the details are already worked out, and the final version will occupy only a single page. Beyond this, I have an outline, but I won’t go into details quite yet.

If all this happens as planned (and it’s probably gonna take quite a while,) there will be a printed sourcebook published, through some as-yet-undetermined channel. By my back-of-the-envelope guess, this may happen in 2010, but there’s a lot that has to happen in the meantime; as much editing as writing, and I’ll need art as well.

 

A New Map

The map ’shuffle’ is pretty much completed. I’ve thrown a map together that shows the relative locations of all the cultures, and have begun a) rebuilding the timeline based on the revised Arashálinu Enáthaga, and b) rebuilding the Master Index, entirely from scratch. This new version of the latter will be more of a glossary than the old one, and less of a core source for information.

The core developed area are thus spread out of the shores of the Luesh Alen. The Hesurea area on the right side of the map is intended as a place left open for user development, noting only that several distinct cultures are present there, and that some trade makes its way through the Pass of Iráo into Angháza, and thence into the lands around the Inner Sea.

I’ll be posting entires from the new Master Index over the next couple of days.

 

Ytherra 5.4 Map Redesign Progress

The latest map redesign effort continues. The existing cultures fell more or less into place around the Luesh Alen, with a few rounds of tweaking that took place over the weekend.

There are many ramifications of the redesign; Arál Draván grows in importance, regaining some of its orginally-conceived prominence, and becoming more culturally stagnant in the process. Ar-Kneŝt grows as well, from a relative backwater to a pretty important trade hub on the Sea of Doorways, while Täka is pushed to the side, still important but occupying a much smaller geographic area. The Haddanái city-states grow in number and find a mountain range between them and the Qad desert and the Felkaydn tribes, through which there are a number of major passes and several minor ones. This will cause their intertwined histories to require a rewrite. The Teilanu Imperium becomes a coastal rather than island empire, based in the Red Coast, and much greater threat to regional stability – the Dravánu navy is strong, but the Emperors have never been desirous of extending their military power over sea

Use of Draványa as a trade tongue and lingua franca becomes more reasonable, although Manthezárin remains the language of magi. The Zeresi Calendar becomes prominent enough to become the standard measure of time, at least as far as the ’sourcebook’ is concerned. This eliminates the need to make some rather tedious calculations to get dates in the (lunar) Selurean calendar, which can now be relegated to a footnote.

The historical centers of the setting become the three ‘Old Empires’: Arál Draván, Imperial Mánthezar and the Selurean Kingdom, now able to interact within the geography. Arál Draván survives where the other two have fallen, Mánthezar beneath the waves and the Selurean nation to civil war, plague and ongoing conflict, both internal and under threat from the Teilanu Imperium.

Also interestingly, Mánthezar is the only one of the three to have touched the outer ocean. This implies that some remnants remain on shores other than Suratha’s – the Manthezárin were the ablest seafarers the world has seen, equalled only in the last few centuries, perhaps, by the Vaarlenga. There’s room here from some great legends, I think.

I have said, from time to time, that I’ve been developing Ytherra for almost 20 years. This is true in a literal sense, but from my current perspective it seems like the real work began about 14 years ago, with the rise in my mind of the Imperium of Arál Draván. Only shreds of development older than that remain in the work, although the name itself (Ytherra) is one of those, and I’ve kind of had to struggle to rationalize it within the setting’s etymology – eventually settling on the Selureans as the vehicle to deliver it, building that people into the Sundered Kingdoms and a much more complex ethnological history.

Mapping and gepgraphy have never been a strong point of Ytherra, which is why I’ve managed not once but several time to wholly start fresh on the mapping of the place, moving cultures and nations around as seems appropriate. It’s the history which interest me the most, and Ytherra has a great deal of that.

Which is a part of the current problem. I have (I’ve found) something like 25 MB of text spread out across hundreds of files, some of which are different versions of the same information. I’m having to paw through all that to collate a single set of seven or eight master documents that contain as close to everything as I can manage, neatly arranged and corrected for consistency. It’s a hellishly complex task.

 

Ytherra 5.4

I’m going through another retooling of Ytherra material; many of the developed cultures are spread out across the globe, and I want to eliminate that. This is Ytherra version 5.4.

The current (and hopefully final save for minor tweaks) world design has one supercontinent (Great Suratha,) three large continents (Anelthea, Kelarh and Ruhlvarin) and some lesser large landmasses, along with innumerable islands. Some adjustments were made to the map months ago; thus the differences between this version and the old one used in the page graphics. Three developed (to one extent or another) cultures exist on Anelthea, and three exist on Kelarh; I’m moving all of these to Great Suratha pending the geography working out. The most important move is that of the Selureans, of course, and I want them in a place where they will have contact with Arál Draván.

This has a number of implications. The Sea of Doorways becomes the Selurean name for the Luesh Alen, the great Surathan inland sea. The Teilanu Imperium is pushed to the boundaries of the explored world, since it’s not moving from its current home on Nemáy, but this can work since it’s a weird sorcerous culture anyway. And the remains of old Mánthezar is now a continental shelf rather than an island chain, with the Vaarlenga coming from the islands that were once the remnant of that shattered land.

The places all of the developed cultures in or near the eastern lobe of Great Suratha, mostly around the Luesh Alen. These cultures are far more varied now than they were in a previous incarnation of Ytherra, yet little of that material has been abandoned outright. Ytherra is thus truncated, in a way, but this leaves more terra incognita, a desirable feature anyway, and the essential features are in much closer promimity, allowing for greater interaction and more interesting relationships and conflicts.

In particular, Arál Draván has always suffered from a dearth of external threats. While this is an essential feature of that state in the context of Ytherra’s history, it’s also a bit boring. This adjustment makes it easier to create such threats within the contemporary political situation, and makes it much more plausible for Dravanu PCs to be tooling around in the Selurean Kingdoms or the deserts of the Haddani, for example, since they are no longer on distant continents separated by thousands of miles of ocean.

The attached map shows the relevant area of Great Suratha, with regional names but no political boundaries. I will still be doing some global-level development, but this is the meaningful part of Ytherra from this point. On the map, Arál Draván occupies the peninsula on the central part of the western coast of the great inland sea – the Luesh Alen. Moving northward along that coast, the more-or-less level plain in the demense of the Kónd, who are still prinicpally nomadic, but have established a powerful state ojn the eastern end of their range as a counterweight to Dravánin power. Still further north are the old remnant-states of fallen Mánthezar.

The Selurean and Avarean nations are situated on the outer eastern coast, clustered around that peninsula that reaches farthest east – still threatened by the swelling power of the Teilanu, based on the westernmost isles of Nemáy. Opposite Arál Draván, on the eastern shore, are the Angházu nations – firmly within the Dravánu cultural sphere but independent of Imperial authority. South of that is a flat area bracketed by two mountain ranges – the vast desert called the Qaddan, and home of the Silver Principalities of the Haddani.

 

Post-Holiday Update

Work on ALAT stalled utterly and somewhat unexpectedly when I spent most of my free time during the holiday break working on Traveller stuff.

Despite that, I’m itching to get back to work on it, and I have some interesting ideas regarding a new game world for it, taking a much more old-school approach than Ytherra does. There will essentially be a map of a single largish region, a city map, and a few dungeons, along with some Greyhawk Folio-level background. I have some additional ideas banging around in my head for putting this up on the web, but nothing definite quite yet.

Progress on Ytherra was made, extending the Arashálinu Enáthaga into the Third Dynasty. This document is the dynastic record of Arál Draván; I have had all the ‘core data’ – names, titles, dates and major events for close to 1800 years of history – ironed out for quite a while, but the individual ruler writeups stalled some time back. I also made some minor mapping progress.

And, over the break, I renewed domain registration and web hosting for ytherra.com. Hopefully the site willl actually get something done with it this year.

 

Status Report

I’d been meaning to look into solutions for creating PDF files for some time now, the prices of Adobe Acrobat, let alone the much more attractive Adobe Creative Suite being prohibitive for the tiny startup project that I’m envisioning. I may have found my solution is something called PDFCreator, a free product that’s essentially a virtual printer – you print to it and out pops a shiny PDF. I experimented with this last night and while I’m not yet sure how it’ll handle font imbedding, it looks very promsing.

Work proceeds apace. As a temporary solution to the major logistic hurdle of assembling ALAT (the writing) I’m putting together the rules in the tried-and-true case system, and making some decent progress at that. The current character creation system is a point-based, fully deterministic metasystem with which I intend to build two different specific character creation systems for the final game; one in the old-school style for ALAT, and another very different one for use with Ytherra.

And speaking of the writing, it’s occurred to me while looking over my drafts that my writing style for game rules leans heavily toward the Gygaxian. This is not exactly a problem, but it is an issue that may bite me when it come to keeping the text as tight as possible.

Right now I am working on a rather massive outline for three ‘books’ which may or may not end up being distinct volumes, depending on their final size. The first is the players’ volume, which will contain character creation and the ‘core rules’; the second is a book on magic, while the third is a bestiary that I intend to approach in a slightly non-traditional way. I’m also doing the rules draft for the players’ book while I work on the outline. I’m hoping to start posting rules segments by the end of the year, probably both here and elsewhere so as to get actual feedback.

Oh, and I gt actual Ytherra mapping work done last night, too.