monuments, myths, and Dim Sum

Turland. I think that's gonna be the name of the planet the new campaign is on. I think. I might have named it before, wrote it down somewhere and forgot. Hell might even have done it here and just don't feel like rereading everything. I should put a "Campaign Guide:" tag or something in front of the relevant blog titles so I know which ones to read. Huh.....

Anyway, made a little progress in my many walks today (another day of inexplicable claustrophobia inside the cubicle). Came up with a few setting ideas and shit like that. For instance, there are a few monuments that most people think of as great. There's the statue gardens in Freetown; the Celestial Palace, which is the home of the royal family and Pan Lung (dragon god) in the oriental nation; there's the Wall that said nation is building; there's the temple (as yet unnamed) in the theocracy nation. Shit like that.

I have the name of the oriental place at home, as I started serious development (classwise) there, but can't remember it. Regardless, their dragon is named Pan Lung. The rival theocratic nation is named Hawfynfr. That's pronounced Haw-ven-ar. The people just named their nation after their Dragon God. There was a dragon that watched over the Border Lands named Yarisella, but It was supposedly killed in a great battle with Pan Lung and Hawfynfr. That claim is contested by that fact that generally when one of the Dragon Gods dies, the land where it's body lies suffers a great blight. (That's the explanation for the great desert west of the mountains, as easterners believe the heathen Turu killed all of their Dragon Gods and destroyed the land.) There was no known blight in the Border Lands. Both the oriental nation and Hawfynfr say this is because Yarisella was not a true dragon and Its followers are all burning in hell. Despite that, many residents of the Border Lands still worship that particular being and only pay lip service to either Pan Lung or Hawfynfr based solely on which military/priest/whatever is in power in their village at the time.

There are a lot of myths concerning the breech phenomena. Most deal with the uneducated populace protecting itself from the beasts that slip through and avoiding stepping through a gateway themselves. There are expensive oils and perfumes you can soak in to protect yourself and tons of shit like that. What works and what doesn't is anybody's guess. One of the constants, though, is the traveler's tax. While the rate itself varies from village to village, every village has a tax of at least 1 cp to enter the walls of the town. That's because everyone believes that copper can't pass through a breech gateway and Outsiders can't carry native copper. If you can't pay the copper tax, you're banned from entry at the best. You can imagine the worst. Most travelers will sew a copper coin into their clothes somewhere as a protection against bandits taking all of their money and then being mobbed at the next village. The nice bandits still leave a traveler with at least one copper, though.

Language wise, the human tongues all descended from elvish. I want to work up a language system that takes that into consideration, so that even if a character only knows Hawfynfr they can still understand many things in "common" and can probably still survive in the house of Pan Lung. Whether that system includes skill checks or not, who knows?