Outsea: Neat idea, awful backstory

[sunbeam]

I recently got the chance to read about Outsea in the River Kingdoms.

I like the idea, but this has to be the stupidest backstory I've ever heard.

What makes it even dumber is that the mermen DECIDED to follow them, instead of laughing their gills off.

Apparently geography (and strategy) isn't exactly a strong point with the undersea races.

You can read about it here:

Outsea

What makes it even more freaky is that the original plan was to attack Korvosa.

And after they make their truce of convenience I'd think most of them would have tried to find someway back to the sea instead of staying in that location.

Naturally they all wind up in the River Kingdoms.

Another thing that gets me, is I've read somewhere fresh water is bad for Sahuagin. But is it the same for mermen?

They could have done a lot better on the backstory. Even "A wizard did it," would make a lot more sense.

[Scott Carter]

I disagree. I thought it was interesting and very different, classic China Meiville. To each his own.

[Set]

The dozen or so writers each tackling their own little domain made the book feel erratic to me. Outsea, along with the place with the 'silkgoyles,' would be my least favorites, as both are highly tied into new creatures to function. I'm fonder of new twists on old familiar faces (blink dog nations, for instance) than a new creature type being the new hawtness of a new territory.

I like the idea of places being 'out of place,' like savage jungle lands in the middle of the antarctic, or lands trapped in eternal night or eternal winter, so, in theory, the location of a salty inner sea far from the ocean, and inhabited by mysteriously non-local sea life, could be neat, but Outsea didn't really click for me, as it was tied up with the ceratopsia or whatever, and some sort of magic I didn't grok, none of which was statted up in that book.

If it was just a salty inner sea, that one or more aquatic races had colonized via a magical portal to the actual ocean (with different races coming through at different times, as the warring races held control of the territory where the portal resides at different times, and the inhabitants of Outsea getting sick of this back and forth and fresh waves of violence, and just sealing up the portal, since *they* had learned to live together in this new frontier, and didn't need fresh waves of intolerant members from their homelands messing up their fragile peace), it would be a heck of a lot less 'wait, what?'

I think the base idea is certainly usable, and novel, of a group of oceanic creatures living in a series of salty lakes and channels in the middle of a continent, just skip the bits about warring people chasing each other up freshwater rivers over many months (and the ecological devastation that would ensue, downriver, as a result of their fresh-to-salt magics killing every single thing that lived in those rivers as they traveled, leaving death and rotting fish in their wake).

[doctor_wu]

Yeah I sort of want an equivlent to Mono lake or Owens lake in Golarion.