Heliomar

So that other setting. The blurb I gave the players, of whom there were nine at the start - which was among about five different possibilities - went like this:

The pointers I had from the players which led to this were: “Shattered empires, treasure hunters and airships” (which were from a list of potential seed bits I had listed off more or less off the cuff), some flavour of "The Mummy" (1999) and Egyptian mythology, and “cosmic stuff” (in the Planescape direction). Things people didn’t want to see much of were “servants of a dead god” (trauma from a previous campaign), the dislike of the high seas, underground, having to kill animals, spiders, and “gross details”. And I imposed DM fiat by including undead, fiends, and background economics, because those are some of the things I like best in fantasy.

There’s already an interesting tension out of the gate there, between the Egyptian stuff and not having the servants of a dead god around, particularly since the flavour of The Mummy means there’s definitely a gap in time between the original culture and the people looking at it. The Mummy also has a doubling of historical periods; it’s set in the 1920s, and deals with events of 1290BCE. And it’s a remake of a 1932 film, in case that wasn’t complex enough. Upshot: while the gods of Heliomar may be ancient, they’re not dead.

Separately from all of the above, I wanted to run a more sandbox-y game, in which the player characters make their own decisions and do their own things. I’ve found before that despite what you might expect, sandboxes work best when there’s a large group of players; small numbers seem to tend more toward a strong narrative. This is purely my own experience, I hasten to add. But I think the big group will lead to some players deciding on things they want to do, and bringing the rest along for the ride.

The very first thing I had to decide is whether the place that the group is going, the place of exploration, is already populated or not. Obviously, everywhere that was ever colonised in this world already had native populations who were suppressed and oppressed. There is a lot of interest to be had in dealing with that in games, and also in looking at depictions of those cultures in fantasy without colonisers (for current stuff on that, see Coyote & Crow and The Wagadu Chronicles). But that isn’t something I feel equipped or indeed entitled to deal with; while Ireland was colonised by England, it’s a very different experience to the Americas, Africa, India and Australia.

On the other hand, saying that this place is empty when the Empire gets to it raises different questions: what happened to the people there? And once I can make a question of that, I’m a lot happier with it. I know - or have an idea of - what happened myself. It’s not clear whether that will come up in play, which is one of the great joys and sorrows of the homebrew setting: is anyone going to be interested in this aspect? If they are, you get to develop the thing and wrap story around it; if not, it sits out there as some kind of metaphorical architectural folly.

Obviously, there is an echo of Australia going on; the boatloads of exiled convicts being dropped off on at one of the outposts of empire point that way. And the European empires of the 19th and 20th century had a lot of interaction with the concepts of ancient empires, leading to them looting and pillaging the remnants of Rome and Greece and Egypt with abandon. So we have a lot of thinking-about-empire here, and in these days where the idiots promoting Brexit are rah-rah-ing about the glories of the British Empire, I’m happy to give the idea a good kicking.

So the Empire of Ayuur is a decadent, decaying empire. Its last hurrah, really, was the first set of expeditions to the continent of Heliomar, when that became possible, and when it declared it was annexing that continent. I’m really thinking of India more than Australia here; the hubris of declaring that a place halfway around the world, an area of land vastly larger than the imperial homeland, is for some reason subject to its rule. To be fair, I’m also thinking of Elon Musk, not content with being a billionaire on Earth, and working on taking over Mars - that’s imperialism as well.

Why was Heliomar inaccessible, though? I have declared that it’s actually relatively close to the Empire - two weeks of sailing, weather permitting - but was surrounded by huge walls of storm for thousands of years, which only died down about two hundred years ago. There are a few things I’m playing with here; first and foremost among them the images from the Great Plains of North America and from the Russian steppe of walls of cloud with lightning under them; the edges of thunderstorm cells. I’m also poking at an event in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars books, where soon after the first hundred colonists arrive on Mars, they’re confined to their habitats by a multi-year dust storm. And that leads on to thinking about the Great Red Spot on Jupiter; a storm that’s been going on for at least 200 years, and maybe longer than 400. This gets me thinking about the figures of Jupiter/Zeus and Mars/Ares, and the use of lightning as a weapon in Classical sources, all of which is good material to play around with, and ties easily enough back into the ideas of empire.

It was around here, I think, that I decided to make the Empire of Ayuur a Classical empire. So, broadly, it’s the Roman Empire in its breadth and administration, but with a more Hellenic look and feel. The existence of the D&D rulebook Mythic Odysseys of Theros makes this an easy decision; Theros is Ancient Greece as interpreted first through Magic: The Gathering and then through the D&D ruleset. And since I intend to have exactly zero of the campaign actually happen there, it can be a vague and cloudy background that allows me to use Greek names for NPCs, and borrow some stuff from that rulebook when I want to.

Heliomar itself, then, has a vaguely Egyptian background, way back. It’s been empty of intelligent life for thousands of years, and then there’s two hundred years of the Empire going “it’s ours, we’ll colonise it by throwing people we don’t much want that way”. And there are other cultures elsewhere in the world who presumably also have an interest in this newly-available continent. In reality, since the Empire has given very little in the way of resources to its “control” of Heliomar, there are a few towns and settlements on the western coast that are “Imperial”, and then the rest is rather wilder. The whole continent is full of ruins from the time before; pyramids and palaces and tombs and temples, statues of animal-headed deities and some even stranger, and a written language in hieroglyphs which is - broadly - understood in writing, but which nobody has ever heard in speech. There are two aspects of D&D “reality” feeding into this; the first is that there’s an easily accessible power in the game rules wherein certain warlocks can read any written language. It feels churlish to declare that that’s not available when I can play with it instead. The second is that when you have species who live for thousands of years, and the possibility of summoning up demons and celestials whose memory is even longer, you have to have longer timescales. So the storm walls have stood for at least ten thousand years, and the written language is known, but not the spoken.

That covers the “shattered empires”, “The Mummy” and “Egyptian mythology” bits, more or less. We have the treasure hunters, the airships, and the cosmic stuff to go. But to be fair, “treasure hunters” describes the British, Spanish, and other European imperial attitudes to everywhere, Egypt included, so I’m borrowing that wholesale: the Empire of Ayuur’s major real interest in Heliomar is in the magical and mystical loot brought back. And for that, you need treasure hunters. So a huge, huge part of Heliomar’s economy (there’s my background economy stuff) is around retrieving stuff from the ruins, and either using it to get even more stuff out, or shipping it back to the Empire. Or, now that we’re two hundred years into this effort, studying it locally, because there are only so many hints of remnant power that can pass by before some of the colonists or exiles become interested in it for its own sake. This gives loads of reasons for the player characters to go, or be sent, to poke around in ruins.

Airships present an interesting quandary, though. Exploration and mapping will go a lot faster if people can fly over the land in vessels, and I don’t want that to happen. I want the situation where, two hundred years into things, there are still good-sized parts of the continent unknown to the Empire. Whether they’re known to some of the people who now live there - some of whom will be five to seven generations in - is a different matter, but very few of them will think of themselves as being Imperial in any way. So to touch on the airships, I am saying that some of ruins in Heliomar are of great flying cities that crashed to the ground ten-thousand-years-or-more-ago. There’s one near the east coast, and there are reputed to be two more elsewhere. And if there are great flying cities, there will also be smaller flying towns, villages, and ships. And maybe, maybe someone might find one that could be got back in the air.

That leaves the cosmic stuff. And while I have some thoughts about that, they’re not yet fully formed, and I’m enjoying thinking them too much to let them settle onto paper or screens yet. It’s also important, I think, to keep some stuff for later, so that I, as the person creating the world and running the game, don’t get bored. So the cosmic elements will continue to brew, and I’ll just note that the player characters in the last session managed to release some kind of celestial from imprisonment, where, presumably, it had been for ten-thousand-years-or-more. That may be step one on the route to cosmic stuff.

Drew.