The Beginning of All Things (Inactive)

Game Master Terquem

I want to get the two new players introduced but I am having some issues right now. I'll try to get it done tomorrow or y Wednesday. I'm sorry

No problem! Just let me know!

I am introducing Calamity Tabei and Apostolos Murandea to the adventure. We will assume that the two know each other, and if they would like to exchange information about each other through PM that would probably be helpful

Calex does not know them, Robert knows Calamity, but they have never spoken (she has visited Woodbridge many times, as has Apostolos, but there was never a reason for them to interact). Obviously Marwan does not know them.

Apostolos had been travelling with the rest of the MacNorra House Gymnaga, toward, Castletown, when he decided to leave the rest of the survivors with a small group of his own kind (I’ll identify them later) who set out for Woodbridge to help in the defense, the group was lost for one day in the moors between the west coast and Woodbridge, but he was able to get the group straightened out and led them to Woodbridge safely late last night.

Calamity had come to Riverside with the rest of her people, and when she heard Darlene was going with the humans to find Cicily, she convinced her parents to let her go, even though Darlene had gone on to Mingary Bend the night before.

Quick question for Calamity - Do you want to be a member of the Children of the Crescent Moon? If so I will send some details for you.

Oh absolutely! She'd participate in as many things as she could involving the Maetaur

Absolutely 100% has nothing to do with this game, but I would like an opinion on a Pathfinder solo blog project I started no long ago from people I trust.
Here's a link.
Any feedback would be welcome.

I started reading this earlier today, and then went out to celebrate my Birthday. I just got home, and if I have time I will finish. So far I like the way it is written,and I will let you know some of my other thoughts in a PM when I get a chance.

Happy birthday you old coot! Many blessings and future birthdays as well!

Hope you had a wonderful birthday T. Thanks for the offer of a critique- can't wait to see it. If anyone else wishes to offer an opinion please do- PM me if you want to keep it off the game threads. I welcome any comments you may have.

Same. With the history of my own "people" scattered in my player mind, I'm bound to mess (more than) a few things up as we kinda write and re-write over what others have written.

It'll take some time- luckily with this campaign that's all we have :P <3

Happy birthday T!

Happy birthday!

Thanks everyone. I got the new D&D coloring book, how fun is that?

A notice posted outside the Bread & Board the night before Calex leaves:

Let this be known to all inhabitants new and old within the Holding of Woodbridge:

I, Sir Calex, knight of the realm, subject of the Lady Anticus of Castletown and Holder of the Demesne of Woodbridge, do offer and appoint the yeoman Marcus Dale to act as Steward in my name, with the goal of arranging and organizing any repairs, construction and rebuilding the area may need after the recent damages inflicted upon us. This authority includes, if warranted, the creation of any new infrastructure needed to keep the village and its people safe from any future dangers, as allowed by the authority of Her Ladyship. Any aid rendered to Steward Dale to help in his efforts will be evaluated and compensated for upon my return to the Holding.

In addition, and for the greater good of the village I do also request and appoint Patricia Flaherty to act as my Sheriff. May she act to help enforce the laws, maintain the peace, work with the authorities of Castletown and give such aid & protection as she can to the people of our lands.

These appointments are voluntary and a stipend will accompany the posts to provide for their personal livelihood with an attached term of 5 years to be provided. It may be rejected by those named without prejudice, and a village quorum will be assembled upon my return to discuss alternates should those named decide not to accept.
>Affixed with Calex's seal<

I should have this character changed and be ready to play the pirate ranger Ravenna shortly bwa hahahah avast ye scurvies nothing like a pirate in the wrong setting... ninjas and pirates baby got to love em

Actually, to be a little bit more correct for the setting, Ravena will be an Alodoan/Halfling - ex-privateer, once employed by the Alodaon Empire to fight Urandoman piracy.

When the invasion of Urandoma was successful, the piracy ended, and the privateers found themselves looking for employment elsewhere, that was when Ravena took an opportunity to join the Groundsmen at Castletown...

Does that sound alright to rou, Ravena?

sounds awesome sauce!

Okay, please don't laugh

I tried to make a"parchment" style map of the journey to Otter's Lake using Campaign Cartographer 3+. That map is linked at the top of the page.

CC3+ is a precise map building tool, and I am still learning how to use it. The map is not supposed to be "too scale" as it was made by Darlene's father from his memory.

Obviously Castletown and the surrounding villages and farms there is larger than Woodbridge, but Darlene's father shows the oxbow lake and Woodbridge as being larger. The fox wood is not very large, and the Hill of the cairns is about four miles north of the fox wood

The green wood is eight miles or so north of the Hill of the Cairns, and Otter's Lake is supposed to be two days walk through the wilderness to the northeast of the Hill of the cairns

I have started working on a new version of the map of the Known World, there is not much detail on it, but at least it will show you where each country we have identified in all of the games is located. It is in the links above

Has everyone had an opportunity to see the Journey to Otter's Lake map?

Yes! I believe so! It's been a week or two since I've clicked on all the maps.

Yes, it looks good.

I feel so proud, and rewarded, that the players in this game have stuck though this slow period. Thank you all so much, it means a lot to me right now (wish me luck, a doctor visit with a new specialist is coming up on Wednesday, I am positive about what we expect to talk about and I wont say any more about it)

I see in my future, possibly, more opportunities to post, so, I hope the game picks up a little bit

Awesome! I've enjoyed it so far, despite the pace.

I'm preparing for some crucial tests as i near the end of another semester. This pace has been perfect for me :)

Love the maps and the effort that has been put in, Terquem. Thanks for running this game!

Is it safe?: 1d12 ⇒ 4

Forgive my absence! Looks like I forgot to tell this thread I was hosting a bachelor party Friday, and we kinda pregamed on Thursday.

I have returned :P

non worries, I will update Sunday

Been a busy week, should be back on Tuesday

"twenty five of the alar of the Alodoan"? So this is...?

A gold piece made by the Alodoan government, just a regular gold piece to you (they have their own gold coins, these small folk, older Urandoman gold pieces, but they are a bit larger than Alodoan gold pieces, and are less pure gold in content)

Ah. gotcha. nice detail.

I'd like to add something to the setting: I mentioned on my alias that Vurespanian culture traditionally places great importance on the distinction between the soul and the body as far as what constitutes a "person". They practiced necromancy and the reanimation of corpses as well as autopsies, study of cadavers and similar interactions with dead people because they saw them as raw materials to be used for the betterment of society after the passing of the person who inhabited them.

Given that this was a society that placed all the "personhood" as it were into the soul, and none of it into the body, slavery in any fashion would be more of a luxurious indulgence in cruelty rather than anything to build an economy around. Why feed and house slaves to pick your crops when you can just have zombies do it? Thus enslavement of living people, that is, of people that are still people because they still have their souls, is something that would personally offend anyone who is from Vurespania specifically to almost the same extant as someone from modern first-world society.

That is an excellent addition, and I will include it in the journal. Vurespania is becoming an interesting place centered within the Alodoan Empire as it is.

How would they react to intelligent undead? Are they also considered evil abominations as well?

You know, I've never really thought through that whole "intelligent" undead thing, though I use "good" intelligent undead in my games all the time (mostly for humor).

If the Paizo model is that the "soul" (no offensive meant to anyone who is sensitive to this kind of discussion)leaves the body and travels to the plane of alignment and the body then can be animated by negative energy, then are intelligent undead inhabited by a "different" soul if the original soul was good and the new intelligent undead is evil, or are all evil intelligent undead re inhabited by the original soul, simply using the deceased body to thwart the will of a deity?

Well in the case of a lich isn't the process to become one (usually) voluntary? In that case it seems like treating them as different than humans seems kind of silly. Vampires by nature tend to be rather murderous, so I think that's a strike against them regardless of philosophical questions. Same probably goes for ghouls/ghasts. Anything native to the plane of shadow would probably be treated as though it were an outsider of the same alignment.

If I remember correctly, becoming undead prevents the soul from traveling on to where it belongs. Hence Pharasma's hatred of undead. Also, intelligent undead are the same person as before, the curse of undeath causes almost all to turn evil. A good unaligned undead is almost unheard of and usually around for "story" reasons.

That is probably one of the many reasons I avoid Golarion, I like to keep as many options open as possible

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays everyone. Like most of the rest of you I'll be busy for the next week, but I will try to get things updated.

Enjoy the festivities if you can
Cheers,
David

Calamity

read over your recent post a couple of times, and wow, just wow, nicely expressed.

What we are going to have to do is create a synergy, a link in the past between the humans, the maetaur, and the tafganor. Something that goes back to a time before recorded history, when all the people of this world looked into the sky and saw patterns in the stars, and for some explanation, were able to communicate their ideas to one another.

Now, obviously, as time passed, a rift grew between the tafganor and the human/maetaur people 9which can probably be attributed to the tafganor being a "dark" race, or a race from the realms of the "underdark" the worlds below the surface world. This rift eventually lead to the war, that has been mentioned in this game, that occurred over four hundred years ago, when the maetaur and Human folk united against the tafganor and sealed their warlord in a citadel below the mountains.

But, Aniktah's mother comes from the Vayangurr islands, to the east southeast of Alodoa and Urandoma, where those tafganor were not involved in the turn toward evil that the tafganor people of this land were swept up in. her people carried (probably migrated to those islands generations ago) with the same ancestral knowledge of the stars as Calamity's ancestors shared.

There was a mention, in another game on these boards that I am running, that the tafganor originally came from the south/southwest, beyond the lands now known as the City States of Tarule. it is not inconceivable that Maetaur, and humans as well, most like all originate in a more southern climate, and have migrated to this part of the world over millennia, in sort of a combined migration, but when the tafganor/Humans/meataur reached what is the island country of Urandoma (called Orimar by the local human population)they encountered a small land with fertile soil, and plenty of fresh water, affected by a surprisingly warm climate, due to the off shore southern current, and naturally a struggle for dominance ensued. Most likely, tafganor from the continent simultaneously migrated to Vayangurr while also migrating to Urandoma, but those that settled on the Vayangurr islands along with those humans that migrated at or near the same time, developed a more "Hollywood idealization" of a Viking/Survival against rugged conditions culture and found a more peaceful cooperation there.

The Vayangurr islands are small, rugged, and not well suited to a strong agriculture, and the Maetaur did not migrate to those islands in any great numbers.

The people of Woodbridge have lived a semi-sort of isolated existence for about three generations (and this includes the people of Mingary bend, and the very newly settled, in the last generation, MacNorra House (the Gymnagaopthians). While people such as Calex and Marwan, who come from Alodoa, really know practically nothing about the local history of Urandoma at all.

No one in Woodbridge remembers ever seeing a tafganor, or a Sashi-Anhain, for many, many years, while the player characters are now learning that far to the southeast, in the high mountains of Urandoma there, it seems to be that tafganor have been living in a sort of "peaceful" coexistence with local human/gnome populations who live there. It is only recently that some powerful warlord (he may in fact be a half giant, or even a giant) has brought several small tribes of tafganor together to reclaim the dominance that the race once held in these lands (if that is even true or not, is still a mystery to the player characters).

As for Urandoma, and its history, it is often disputed who came to this land first, the humans or the Maetaur. The human folk have a strong oral tradition that supports the claim that they have been on urandoma for centuries, well before the conflict with the tafganor four hundred years ago, but the Maetaur have ancient written epic poems, preserved on parchments protected by powerful magic (said to be in the keeping of the great Maetaur Druid Elders, far away to the north)that tell of their migration to this land more than a thousand years ago. With that said, at this time in the world, there is no clear evidence who was here first.

What I see is Calamity teaching Aniktah what she knows about the constellations, and their role in the spiritual life of the Maetaur, and Aniktah, occasionally, having an insight into similar, but not exactly the same, morality tales she learned from her mother and in all this possibly no more than one or two common names for a particularly prevalent constellation.

Glad you are happy with it!

I really had to take my time with it, despite how much I wanted to rush it lol.

I love RP experiences where one player teaches another PC / NPC / name it about their own culture.

As to the rest of your post, I'll spend tonight reading on it here or there and see what I can come up with :P

I hope everyone is enjoying the Holiday time of year, and maybe getting a few days off. I have been busy, weird since I am an empty-nester, seems I am more busy during this time of year than when all my children were home.

I ended one of my games in the past week, which was the first time I actually ended a game here (instead of the game ending because of lack of interest). That game started in June of 2014.

I am playing a marathon session of Time stories today, I got the three expansions for the basic game for Christmas, yay!

I hope to be updating all my games tomorrow.

I hope everyone had a great holiday season, and looking forward to another year here on the forums. I intend to struggle through some awkward posts to try and get these games moving again. Please check in so that I know you are still around.

You haven't chased me off yet in any of your games :)

>cracks the blinds and glares out at the snow drifting around the start of 2017< Bleh. Well, at least we still have Terquem...

Still here, and enjoying the game.

I've come out of my liquor-induced holiday stupor, so I'm still here.

Here, of course! I'll post either tonight or bright and early tomorrow morning!

Like a bad penny I keep turning up!

Temps dropped to -15 end of last week causing spotty internet. Hopefully things are better this week

I know you are in Idaho so please stay safe and warm. I am in SE WA so I know what gold is but luckily not that cold here yet.