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Hey there you sexy finders of paths;
Wanted to share my campaign setting 'The City of Salt in Wounds' an evil, economic metropolis powered & fed by 200 years of perpetual butchery of the Tarrasque. If you're not familiar, you can start reading the basics here.
http://www.saltinwoundssetting.com/2015/04/salt-in-wounds-overview-origin.h tml
I've been writing about the city for over a year, and I'm shifting gears a bit in the coming months to produce more crunch (5e and Pathfinder) so hopefully you'll find some stuff you can use. Anyway, hope you enjoy!
PS As I explain in the 'what is salt in wounds' page the idea for a settlement butchering a bound Tarrasque was originally suggested by Thomas T. on the rpg.net forum.
Dotting. I remember seeing the original idea you mentioned a long time ago and loving it.
So... It's kinda like the Hydra BBQ from Order of the Stick?
^^
Joking aside... It sounds like a great concept. :)
Nifty, I've had a few DMs do something like this, so interested to see how it pans out.
Dotting. <3 the idea
Thanks guys! And yes Lemmy it's exactly like that :)
Hey, didn't you post this in the adventure idea thread?
Dotting. Very cool.
So I'm necro'ing this thread because I just recently discovered the Salt in Wounds setting & I've got some interest in incorporating it into my version of the Inner Sea of Golarion & would like some help brainstorming ideas.
So first thing, putting Salt in Wounds in Golarion means that the Tarrasque is awake, which it hasn't been in five thousand-ish years. Two ways to go about working this in; either the initial defeat of the Tarrasque after it's spawning is the event that lead to the foundation of Salt in Wounds, stretching the city's internal timeline out by thousands of years while leaving most of the rest of the history of Golarion unchanged, or keep SiW's timeline as is with it's foundation being 277 years ago, necessitating the Tarrasque woke up at some point in the relatively recent past.
I'm pretty much set with the latter option of having the Tarrasque waking up a few hundred years ago - specifically, for it to have awoken in the World's Edge mountains & proceed to rampage through Galt, the River Kingdoms, Numeria & Sarkosis, & up into what would become Brevoy & Mendev, as these are all regions that could have been wrecked hundreds of years ago & it wouldn't have a huge impact on what they look like in modern times.
From there I'm thinking it either moves into the Realm of the Mammoth Lords before being ambushed & SiW founded in the Tusk Mountains, or it going there, turning south into Belkzen & being ambushed in the eastern edge of the Kodars. I'm leaning towards the Kodars as that feels more "orcs & stone giants a natives" to me where as the Tusk mountains are more frost giants, but the bigger issue is "do I want it to have been right next to the world wound for a hundred years" or "do I want it to be right next to where New Thassilon ends up?"
I do think I might change the length of time it was awake before being bound from 117 years to something more like 30, give or take, as that time period of rampaging seems more plausible given the area I want covered & it not going all the way south into Taldor or Cheliax proper, sticking mainly to the north & the east of Lake Encarthen. Tearing up those two might have an unwanted butterfly effect - though I could be convinced otherwise - and having it not attack them for too long risks bringing up the "someone else's problem" mentality & makes raising the army more difficult.
But in any case I prefer the option of a recent awakening because of the one big difference with the Tarrasque in Golarion; it's not just a big, angry monster. It's Rovagug's spawn & herald.
The cult of Rovagug isn't an enemy that can be scared away with the MAD doctrine. Threatening to release the tarrasque wouldn't deter them. So either SiW needs to be more militarized to hold them off from trying, or it needs to not have been around long enough for it to become *that* pressing of a threat.
Which, nearly three hundred years is still a long time, but I do have a thought of balancing that out; a schisim among Rovagug's followers. Split being between "free the beast now & let it destroy everything" and "free the beast later, after it's mutated & corrupted everything around it as this is clearly Rovagug's will & blessing, so when the beast is freed it will be at the head of an army made in it's image". So you have some of Rovagug's followers, probably in secret, working to protect SiWs while others either rally to attack it or work with the Circle of Release(which probably makes them uncomfortable as hell).
Speaking of Rovagug that brings us to religion in SiWs. I'm torn between doubling down on Salt in Wounds' evil by making it a hotbed of evil demigods vs the notion that it's an evil city despite it's three main religions been one good deity & two mainly neutral if amoral philosophies. Still, neither Church of Monad or Writ of Coin Everlasting really speak to me, so on this one I'm leaning towards making a change & putting some more evil in the city.
Having said that, I do like the idea of most of Salt in Wounds' major religions being fairly fringe things outside the city that have taken off because of it's unique circumstance. So while Zon-Kuthon, Urgathoa, & Lamashtu seem fairly perfect fits, & certainly are worshiped to some extent, I want to put more focus on more minor fiendish divinities.
I'm debating between either replacing Macinfex with the asura rana Chugarra, Guru of Butchers, or putting him as a chief competing religion as two minor gods of butchers, one being good & the other being evil to split the difference.
With the Church of Monad, I'm thinking of largely replacing that with or have it be a front religion for the demon lord Haagenti as a demon lord of alchemy. Also want to give the Infernal Duke Pirias some influence in this area as a god of illicit drugs. And maybe a bit of Blackfingers Norgorber, as a disproportionately minor inclusion.
Renesec I'm thinking of replacing outright with the velstrac demagogue Raetorgash. I want to make a note that essentially all the demagogues have cults in or immediately around Salt in Wounds as a city built & based on torture can't help but attract their influence, with Raetorgash being particularly prominent due to her focus on evolution & mutation. There's also a, ah, spoiler character in Salt in Wounds that I'd want to tie in to the velstracs more strongly.
I'd probably just replace Septum Soletirmus wholesale with Abadar & then have this particular branch of Abadar's church be infiltrated, suplanted, & replaced with a cult to Mammon.
Other notable mentions would be Cyth-V'sug & Gogunta(or maybe Vois to create even more conflict) having significant influence in the Heartsblood Marsh & Kabriri obviously having a fair bit of influence over the ghoul population. There are several others, basically every time I go through Inner Sea Gods or the Book of the Damned & see one mentioning pollution or gluttony or carrion or oppression or corruption I think "that has a place here". Between the daemon harbingers, infernal dukes, & malebranche there are at least two dozen that fit right at home in Salt in Wounds. Droskar would also be a major presence, though I also like the idea of the humans of SiW adoptin Lanishra, orc god of slavery, as a bit of an intentional insult to the orc tribe they enslaved in the Granite Shard war.
Alright that's enough rambling around what minor deities I'd like to use Salt in Wounds to put a bit more shine on,
Another big element I want to tweak a bit is the Thirteen Meridian Houses & the 13 original Binder-Lords. This is the area where I've put the least amount of thought so far & am most open to suggestion. My main thought is to take the 13 original lords & make them more distinctly of Golarion, and at least for those houses where inheritance is bloodline based instead of merit based, have their houses be more reflective of Golarion as well, enclaves of the outside world preserved as noble tradition, being above the assimilation that the lower classes of the city.
I had the idea that each one would be from a different country and the pan-nation army they raised to fight the tarrasque would basically have been, each one of them raising an army from their homeland & they all combined forces, but the problem is that the Inner Sea has too many damn countries for that to work to my satisfaction, even discounting those that wouldn't have technically existed at this time. So now I have to narrow that down a bit.
Aside from all that it's just a matter of, how would having Salt in Wounds in the Inner Sea effect everything else. If I were to use official numbers it would be the second largest city in the Inner Sea region behind only Absalom. That's bound to have some effect. Never mind just the fact that the tarrasque being awake & in a known location is in and of itself a major change.
Here's a likely curse for oracles native to that city.
Food Memory.
Normally, when such a person eats any part of anything, they become connected to it. Eating beef will make them moo for a little while, but intelligent creatures are a long term problem. Something like a unicorn can become magic jarred in their body and try to possess them, whenever it wants to.
3rd level: Augury
5th level: An oracle only can use it to speak with dead as if the bonus spell.
9th level: Commune.