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So I'm taking a stab at putting together a map of the city of Mivon as part of my plan to set up a successor AP to Kingmaker using Giantslayer. Before I start drafting, I need to get an idea of what is known about the city. The wiki page is a good start, of course and that's where I started. But it isn't always inclusive.
So far I have the following tidbits about the city itself:
- Lots of fishing (so, lots of docks)
- eels.
- Swordlords have a specific dueling place called the Sevier in the central square of Mivon.
- the city has stone walls around it and an inner set of walls that are more formidable.
- the inner walls protect the rich and elite in the city.. the outer ring (especially to the south) are docks and slums.
- there is a league of merchants building near the central square.
- the high council building (aka Council Hall) used to be the palace and is located near the central square.
- there is a market square adjacent to the central square.
- Mivon city is located in a swampy, low valley. Most swordlord families have villas and estates on the low-lying hills just outside of the city.
For completeness' sake I've uncovered this about Mivon (the nation) as well...
- most Mivonese towns have wooden palisades.
- there are several stone keeps on the west side of the river. Stone appears to be a lesser problem than in Brevoy, but it's still prioritized towards Pitax.
- there's an exiled group of elves living in the NE of Mivon in the forests.
- raising sheep is a major resource in the southeastern (hilly parts) of Mivon.
I'll take any additions. Bonus points if you can cite where you got the info from!
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We extrapolated the following for our KM campaign.
Using the KM map we placed Mivon 5 hexes SW of Candlemere and 1 hex W (N being the top of a hex for this reference). We also added another river confluence 1 hex S of the where the Little Sellen flows off the KM map, this river runs straight E up to the Tors, and SW to Mivon. This helps clear up the location of Jovvox so it's not on the edge of the KM map. This area is plagued with bandits from the old country.
Located at the confluence (Y shaped) of the Little Sellen and the East Sellen Rivers, on the N flood plain that rises slightly to some scattered light hills. Most of the area is marshy.
Everything NNW of the city starts out marshy and goes straight to massively wooded swampy as it reaches the Hooktongue Slough.
WNW starts drying out the more W you get, and that is where their border with Pitax is.
SW & SE are normal hill country also drying out the more you get away from the city. The SE hills grow considerably to the E, and there is plenty of stone here to be quarried.
NNE is drier hills and increasing wooded as you get further into the Narlmarch Woods, which are fey infested old growth.
ENE continues the SE hill country.
Jovvox is a few miles N of Mivon, but almost directly 66 miles E of it.
The 9 House holdings are split into 3 groups by the rivers, with one to the N, and 4 each in the SW & SE.
There are no bridges in the country over any of the Sellen Rivers, ferries are used instead, smaller rivers and streams normally have stone foot bridges for crossing.
Most small villages have stone walls or mostly stone, very few use wooden palisades completely. Every Mivoni settlement has its own version of the Sevier.
Use the Random Encounter charts from KM for the southern Narlmarches, Tors, Slough, and Spinefields.
For atmosphere, the 9 houses are very swashbuckling musketeer-like in Venice, with house gondolas all over providing access to the city.
This is the basic stuff we extrapolated from GttRK and TISWG years ago, just to give it some flavor.
For atmosphere, the 9 houses are very swashbuckling musketeer-like in Venice, with house gondolas all over providing access to the city.
That's interesting... In the "People of the River" map, its hinted that Mivon may be flooded like Venice. I haven't come across anything that corroborates it, though. Have you?
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Just the reference to the city's outer walls sinking, the lower quarter's muddy streets, and the general marshiness of the area.
I don't think it is like Venice where it is full of canals, it could easily have many canals if you want. That is just the image we came up with then - dueling musketeers with saber-like swords (French or Italian), with distinct visual differencing (colors), located on the edge of a swamp and forest, and bounded by rivers. Seemed like mounts would be down-played in favor of watercraft.
The lower quarter could frequently flood. Using flat-bottomed boats and gondolas is an interesting twist to your foppish musketeers trying to stay out of the mud. With many of them actually living outside but around the city, you will need some kind of aquatic transportation system. Give each of the 9 houses colors, divide up the 20 minor houses with subsets of colors, add independents and you have a dynamic society of dueling factions with a near island as the arena.
We also ignored the artwork in the GttRK for Mivon, we could not figure out what those plate-armored and glaive-armed figures were supposed to represent (apologies to whomever the artist is).
Since then I believe we've adopted the Beastmaster's sword, to represent what an ADS actually looks like.
Our Aldori PC died pretty early and no one else has bothered with one since, whether Rostlandic Aldori, Moreland Aldori, or Mivoni Aldori. We also include a Duelist's Park in each settlement and drafted some basic dueling rules for the Kingdom. We also added a Swordlord position to the Kingdom Council, determined the northern boundary of Mivon, created arms for it, and prepared some basic trade stuff, but that's about it.
You could check with the authors to see if there is any other tidbits of information, but officially your pretty limited. I believe the designers intend that so you can flavor it to suit your taste.
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As an update, in Adventure Path #48 there is an entry on Wilendithas, a hag lich, that resides in the southern Narlmarches in Mivon. It says she may have recently been responsible for destroying a noble house of Mivon; however, it does not name which noble house.
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All the discussion about Mivon got me thinking... wouldn't it be particularly interesting to start a Kingmaker campaign that originated in Mivon rather than in Restov? The Stolen Lands aren't considered 'stolen' at all by the nobles of the River Kingdoms, and Mivon would likely see the territory as rightfully theirs, and the brewing civil war in Brevoy could be just the sort of distraction needed for them to finally press that claim and settle the lands before anyone could stop them.
Alternatively, the GttRK suggests that the Mivonese nobility are already building keeps to guard against Pitax, and the players' kingdom could start out as a small grant of land at the northern edge of Mivon and funds to raise a keep to guard the area against further bandit/monster incursions. This would then allow the party to decide how to deal with the desire to expand further: to just ignore Brevoy's claims, to offer support to Restov in exchange for relinquishing any claim to the land, or perhaps even allying with Regent Surtova. (And hey, they're PCs, I'm sure they could come up with options I'd never even think of.)
Regardless, since none of the Houses of Mivon formally swear fealty to anyone, independence wouldn't be an issue, and mostly you would just need to swap encounters from book 2 down to book 1, re-balance the CR of encounters, and/or encourage players to avoid the Narlmarches initially and stick to the hills of the Kamelands.
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I should think that the threat of war with Brevoy is the main thing keeping Mivon from expanding north, since Brevoy claims that land even though they've done nothing in decades to actually enforce the claim. If not for the civil unrest in Brevoy, such a move would probably be treated as an act of war and you'd have armies marching down through the Greenbelt to lay siege to Mivon.
The lack of loyalty issue could actually be turned around into an opportunity. The houses of Mivon could simply offer to recognize the party as founders of a new major house, complete with the right to compete for a position in the Mivonese government. Whether the party accepts or declines, the nobility of Mivon win, either by being gravely insulted so they have just cause for war against these upstarts, or by making them a pseudo vassal state.
Is it really any much worse of a system than strange women lying in ponds distributing swords?
With an empire that spanned a quarter of the globe and gave us the Beatles?
With an empire that spanned a quarter of the globe and gave us the Beatles?
But that only happened because we were the best sword fighters by a long way! DOh, and we didn't play close to home and made sure that we had a much bigger Army and many more gunboats, than anyone we did play with :)
Mivon still has to truly decide that they are the best swordsmen - and when they do, they will be able to conquer anything that is half a world away from them.
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Their governmental structure is based on who is the best at swordfighting. So they aren’t exactly geniuses.
Dudemeister is absolutely correct. When I was setting up Mivon for a major story arc for a royal visit from my PCs, I ran across this issue. I decided that since the kingdom hadn't collapsed from incompentence, there must be some sort of understood rules to swordlord rule by blade prowess. Basically in my world it goes like this:
- if you are a great swordsman, you find yourself an advisor to handle all your administrative affairs and live like the rockstar that you are, arrogant, confident, and cocky.
- if you are a great policymaker or merchant, you back the strongest swordlord in your House.
- if you suck at both of these areas, you make yourself indispensable in some other way, ie- information gathering, lead a gang of secret enforcers, be a great smuggler, or lastly a productive artisan.
If you are already a noble member of one of the houses, you have an automatic place in one of these roles. However if not, here is how I handled it:
- unaligned great swordsman - you become a champion for hire. If someone need to travel, fight a war against Pitax, or simply has to face a more talented swordsman, he hires you as his champion. Much like the Ronin, these swordlords often gain greater renown than House Swordlords given they have more opportunity to shine in confrontations. This model was sort of implied with how the mayor keeps his position. I just codified it as part of the "rules of law".
- unaligned merchant or administrator. These are hot commodities and often vied for like free agents in professional sports. Treachery and intrigue are a big part of this internal layer of House politics, in particular if there is rivalry between Houseborn and unaligned for the same positions.
Spies, thugs, artisans that are unaligned usually either stay neutral or hire out on a mercenary basis, much like Mivon's greatest export, hired swordlord troops.
I also codified the rules for mercenary troops, their conduct, and terms of surrender/ransoming back to their House.
As an aside to this, I play Mivon as a sort of Venice in renaissance Italy, with a very dark, seedy underbelly hidden under a veneer of sophistication, culture and artistry. Often times the veneer is extremely thin, lol...
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I should think that the threat of war with Brevoy is the main thing keeping Mivon from expanding north, since Brevoy claims that land even though they've done nothing in decades to actually enforce the claim. If not for the civil unrest in Brevoy, such a move would probably be treated as an act of war and you'd have armies marching down through the Greenbelt to lay siege to Mivon.
The lack of loyalty issue could actually be turned around into an opportunity. The houses of Mivon could simply offer to recognize the party as founders of a new major house, complete with the right to compete for a position in the Mivonese government. Whether the party accepts or declines, the nobility of Mivon win, either by being gravely insulted so they have just cause for war against these upstarts, or by making them a pseudo vassal state.
This same issue was raised by my players sort of out of game, and I explained the lack of expansion as a preference for fighting a war with Pitax with all its opportunity for glory in battle as being preferential to carving out a section of wilderness. Plus the mayor doesn't want expanding houses to have free reign to grow beyond what he already has plans for.
This of course didn't stop Mivon IMC from annexing a bunch of hexes in the southern portion of the players land grant once they had cleared them. To complicate things even more, the mayor issued these as rewards to several different houses, which makes negotiating their return or physically annexing them back more difficult.
The PCs got distracted with other events in Brevoy up north, and lost about 6 cleared hexes to the south to a perfectly timed Mivon expansion when their armies were committed to the north. You have what you hold is the law of the land for the River Kingdoms :)
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This same issue was raised by my players sort of out of game, and I explained the lack of expansion as a preference for fighting a war with Pitax with all its opportunity for glory in battle as being preferential to carving out a section of wilderness. Plus the mayor doesn't want expanding houses to have free reign to grow beyond what he already has plans for.
This of course didn't stop Mivon IMC from annexing a bunch of hexes in the southern portion of the players land grant once they had cleared them. To complicate things even more, the mayor issued these as rewards to several different houses, which makes negotiating their return or physically annexing them back more difficult.
The PCs got distracted with other events in Brevoy up north, and lost about 6 cleared hexes to the south to a perfectly timed Mivon expansion when their armies were committed to the north. You have what you hold is the law of the land for the River Kingdoms :)
That's an excellent way to play things, and I think I would do the same thing in reverse if I were running a campaign based out of Mivon, with the Swordlords of Restov snatching up lands in the northern Greenbelt, then handing those lands over to refugees fleeing from the civil war. Or, alternatively, just tossing in a bunch of minor lords similar to Maegar Varn and Hannis Drelev. Let them opportunistically seize on the moment, and the players have all sorts of options available to them. They could recognize those fiefdoms as minor kingdoms and open diplomatic talks, they could demand or negotiate fealty, go to war, or come up with any number of plans that I could never hope to anticipate.