Etatia is an elective empire in the west of the Old World, north of the kingdom of Vaquero and south of the Staten.  It is a vast feudal nation that imagines itself the heir to a much older empire of the same name.

Imperial Provinces

The Empire is made up of over a hundred Imperial Provinces ranging in size from independent cities to counties, duchies, and minor kingdoms. The chief requirement is that the territory answer to no feudal lord other than the Emperor.

Imperial Circles

The Imperial Provinces are organized into half a dozen administrative Imperial Circles for the purposes of defense, gathering taxes, and organization within the Assembly. There is no internal Circle organization or hierarchy. These are, incidentally, the basis for our campaign map development.

The Assembly

The head of each principality is entitled to vote in the Assembly, the chief legislative body in the Empire. Each Imperial Circle’s provinces vote and act as a block within the Assembly. Other Assembly members include the Pontifex of each god’s priesthood and the Grand Master of the different knightly orders. These members do not belong to specific Circles; their votes are “loose” and they are highly courted to vote alongside a given Circle.

The primary duty of the Assembly is electing a new Emperor from among their number when one is required. They also pass the various laws of the Empire, and rule on matters that concern all of them.

Each Circle meets in an great hall in their own territory, each of which is in magical contact with each of the other circles. In most cases the actual members themselves do not travel to these meetings, but send a representative.

The Emperor

Election to the the position of Emperor is for life. In the past, when the position held more power, that might not be terribly long – competition could be fierce. However, over time, the Assembly has gained more and more authority, and at this point the Emperor is mostly a figurehead. The appointment still carries a great deal of prestige, and elections themselves can be fiercely competitive.

The Imperial Concilium

The supreme court in the Empire, the Concilium hears cases between provinces, and any case that it otherwise chooses to weigh in on. It is perhaps well known for the length of time it takes to reach a verdict. The 18 members of the Concilium are advisors appointed by the Emperor, and when an Emperor dies, his Concilium is in turn dissolved. It does not generally hear criminal cases, unless a procedural matter is involved, or a crime has been committed against the Empire itself.

The Imperial Army

The Empire itself has no standing army. When defense against a foe or a military campaign is called for, each principality has a certain military obligation to meet, providing a fighting force to act under Imperial command. These units typically have greater loyalty to their homeland than the Empire as a whole.

We have our broad-strokes campaign setting, some history, fuzzy notions about incorporating the quirks of FRPG systems as setting conceits, but nothing we can actually use to play with. It’s time to get down to the nitty gritty of implementation. How exactly we do this has a lot to do with the kind of game we’re planning to run, so at this point we need to step away from the theoretical and make some solid choices about the game we’re going to be playing.

Welcome to the Sandbox

This Heroic Expeditions campaign is going to be a hex-based sandbox played in 5th Edition Dungeons and Dragons, using the Hexbox supplement freely available from Taoscordian Games through DriveThruRPG. Go ahead, download it if you want, give it a quick read-through. The basic idea is that the game is structured by the players’ choices, without a heavy metaplot, and the story arises from the stories they create as they explore.

If you’re not interested in sandbox games don’t worry; most of what follows will still apply to you. The first big difference is that rather than starting with a “bottom up” or “top down” approach, we’re going to start by defining a large campaign area in playable detail, and move on to another when our players express an interest in exploring it. We’ll start on the nation-state level, giving us Avalon, Vaquero, Alem, the Staten, and Etatia to choose from.

I haven’t drawn a full map of these areas, but I picture the Staten in the north, Vaquero to the south, Etatia in the middle, Avalon as an island to the west, and Alem somewhere East. Etatia seems the most centrally located, giving us plenty of room to expand, so we can start there.

A Matter of Scale

Of course, the way a Hexbox map works is that every hex includes something interesting for the players to interact with, so the more hexes we have, the more work we have to do. We could use bigger hexes too, but that means that our map becomes more sparse, with a lower density of “interesting things” overall. In our case, though, Etatia is, for our setting, fairly well settled… there’s still a monster-haunted wilderness and dungeons a-plenty, but maybe here, in the heart of civilization, they’re not so tightly packed. We can definitely get away with a larger scale map.

If Etatia is a Holy Roman Empire analog, we can use the size of the historic HRE as a basis for deciding what we’re dealing with. At its height in 1050, the Empire covered almost 400,000 square miles. The standard Hexbox hex covers 70 square miles, so a standard map of Etatia might require 5700 hexes… or a hex map 75 hexes by 75 hexes.

Yeah. I’m not going to come up with 5700 interesting locations. For Ibu: The Emerald Canopy, we ended up with 60-70 hexes, owing to the irregular coastline and plentiful water, and we can consider starting with a project of similar scope using a 10×10 hex grid. 100 hexes.

Ibu’s midsection. Each of these hexes had to have some interesting encounter or location written up.

The question is, how sparse are we talking here? If we wanted to cover the entire Empire, we’re talking hexes of 4,000 square miles each. That gives us hexes that are 68 miles across, taking days for a party to walk through. Yeah, that’s possible, but each hex’s interesting encounter is a needle in a hay stack. We could subdivide each hex into a hundred 40 square mile hexes, but that gives us hexes that are only 6 miles across. A party will zip through a handful each day, making it even less likely that the prep work we do will be used. And besides, it feels sort of arbitrary.

Instead, we should consider starting with a hex map of some political or geographical division within Etatia. A given province, perhaps, or some other Feudal grouping. Duchies. If we go with a 24-mile across hex – the distance a party can move in a day under normal conditions – that gives us 498 square mile hexes, and 10×10 grids of 50,000 square mile coverage. Eight such regions makes up our 400,000 square mile empire, and that feels a lot more manageable.

And that is how we’ve come to the design decision that Etatia will be made up of 8 roughly equivalent regions, either geographically or politically.

We have our Adventurers, and we have Dungeons for them to cavort around it. In describing them we’ve sort of implied a context for the rest of the setting. Let’s run through that quickly.

• Adventurers are a known and specific class of generally powerful individuals known to cause problems as often as they solve them.
• Anyone can potentially become an Adventurer, but few do, owing to the effort involved in uprooting your life and the general lethality of Adventuring.
• The landscape is littered with dungeons of great danger and potential financial reward.
• Many of these dungeons are ancient ruins.
• There was an ancient advanced Elven civilization.
• Adventuring has a dramatic impact on the local economy.
• Guilds exist as a thing. So does a nobility.

So from this we can sort of imagine a quasi-feudal landscape filled with danger. Adventurers are tolerated, why? Maybe the world is just that dangerous. In fact, let’s say that it is, as FRPG tropes imply a high frequency of random encounters with fierce beasts just in the course of daily travel. Just… just monsters everywhere.

So with so many monsters (so many) how can civilization persist?

Civilization among the monsters

The default situation is one of chaos and danger. Predators exist in numbers greater than a sensible ecology could reasonably be expected to support, so let’s put a pin in figuring out why. We could just backtrack and say that encounters with dangerous monsters or fierce predators are actually relatively uncommon, but that goes against the strengths of the games we’re going to be playing. In a very abstract way, let’s say that an encounter with a dangerous beast is possible once a day, and likely once a week. These encounters don’t always result in combat, but there you go. Still way more dangerous than in the real world.

So we have this monster haunted wilderness. Add civilization. Towns, cities, villages. There’s a pacifying effect… settlements mean organized human resistance. Not that monsters never attack, but you’re safer in numbers. Safer yet if you build a wall, maintain a militia. So any communities we run into have some sort of defense against the darkness surrounding them, or else they’d be dead. This pacification doesn’t extend far… say only within a mile or so band, enough for the growing of crops, but where possible the crops are within the walls, too.

So a lot of isolates. People rarely travel, and when they do, they do so in large groups. This is not too different from pre-industrial societies where a peasant was likely to be born and die without ever leaving the sounding range of his village’s church bells.

To have gotten to this point, though, civilization had to have advanced to the point where fortifications and the like were at least possible. So maybe all the monsters weren’t always there. This brings us back to our ecological problem; the preponderance of monsters is an artificial crisis. Dates back, at most, to the bronze age. Maybe the gods stopped protecting us, or maybe wizards did it, or maybe it’s an otherworldly invasion. Pandora’s box got opened. We’ll think of something cool that makes an interesting hook.

For now, though, we have a sparsely populated landscape of isolated communities where travel is dangerous and uncommon. So there’s a greater degree of self-sufficiency, which works well with a Feudal power structure. There’s a king, sure, but for all practical purposes the local lords are on their own and operate with minimal oversight. Small villages and isolates are uncommon due to the danger; towns are more frequent, and there’s a greater frequency of cities than in the real world, though they’re far apart.

Europish

As I said in the first post in this series, we’re developing a world based on the “Old World” briefly mentioned in Ibu: The Emerald Canopy. I didn’t elaborate much in the book because it was just a generic placeholder, but here’s what we’ve got to work with.

• The Etatian Empire is loosely based on the Holy Roman Empire with an age of sail twist. There are a number of client states, each of which gets a vote for the Imperial Seat. More French and Italian than German.
• Vaquero is a mix of post-reconquista Spain and colonial Mexico. Vast open plains, a powerful navy, machismo.
• The Staten is a northern land of ice and snow, Scandinavia having just outgrown its Dark Age “viking” phase. Independent kingdoms united in an almost-democratic Confederacy.
• The Alem Caliphate is more of a near neighbor, but it’s mostly what you’d expect from the Near East. A little ancient Persia, a little Ottoman Empire, a lot less monotheism.
• The Avelonian Empire is an elven colonial power based on an island, very early British but with more of a Celtic influence and Elven snootiness. I don’t want them to be a direct analog to the British Empire, but there will certainly be parallels. The goal here, though, is to emphasize the inhuman nature of a culture of veritable immortals.

This gives us a good enough base to start with, though the geopolitical situation may in fact be a distant concern to our Adventurers. It does provide a lot of cultural “flavor” to draw from. And further afield? Is there an Africa with kingdoms like Egypt and Kush? A Russian princely state? A far East?

Yeah, probably, but let’s deal with what we’ve got here, first. We have more “Big Picture” questions to address first. Like what’s up with the gods. Like how magic works. Like where did that Common tongue everybody speaks come from. Like why are gold coins only worth ten times the value of silver. Like how did all the monks get to our European analog from wherever martial arts comes from. And is everywhere as ridiculously dangerous?

Yes. Yes it is.

A setting’s magic and cosmology are usually tightly related. Let’s deal with that.

Miracles are Everywhere

The first question we should concern ourselves with is, “how common is magic?” Let’s say, “pretty common.” Not so much that everybody’s a wizard, but maybe everybody knows one. Everybody has an idea of what magic is even if they don’t know how it works. Powerful magic is correspondingly more rare, but so is high skill in every endeavor. We don’t want it so common that magic isn’t special, but nobody gets burned as a witch for lighting a candle from across the room.

Magic helps a little with the “how do lone communities in the middle of a monster-filled wilderness survive” question, but not so much that they’re living in a post-scarcity magical economy. Everything is still more or less recognizably medieval and feudal.

Do Divine Powers Prove the Existence of Gods?

Maybe it’s the opposite. Maybe divine powers are a matter of the blessed individuals personal faith, rather than a gift from on-high. This has two implications.

1. Faith is the belief in the absence of proof, or in the face of contradictory evidence. With absolute proof of divinity, there can be no faith. With no faith, there is no magical divine power. So there must be room for doubt in order for faith to resist doubt. That means the gods are either so subtle or inactive that they don’t really make their presences known on the earthly plain.
2. Divine power is untied to rank within the church itself. This fits in nicely with our general attitude towards Adventurers as powerful outsiders, and gives priest characters a reason to be off adventuring rather than in some town giving sermons.

In fact, we can take it a step further and say that our established religions are largely orthopraxic. Modern religions tend to be orthodoxic – what matters is your belief, your faith. In an orthodoxic religion, like that of ancient Rome, your faith doesn’t matter… only your behavior. That makes our faithful priests more the outsiders; rank within the church is about your ability to play politics, and the highest ranks may be outright political appointments.

The Gods

But what about the gods? Well, they’re distant, if they’re real. We established earlier that the appearance of all the deadly monsters is relatively recent; maybe this is tied to the cause of the gods’ disappearance, or the result of their inaction. Or maybe they were never real to begin with.

Morality

Despite the ambiguous nature of divinity itself, morality is an objective force. There are spells and magical effects that target “good” and “evil.” And everybody has an alignment.

In Dungeons and Dragons and many other systems, this Alignment is a defini

te part of your character’s stats. You are good. You are evil. You are lawful. You are chaotic. In some interpretations alignment is fluid and based on your behavior and attitudes.

Not here, baby.

No, we’re going to say that Alignment influences your choices. It’s not absolute. Good characters are not incapable of harm, and Evil characters are not unable to be compassionate, but these tendencies are strong, known, and taken into account by the people who live here.

What is ‘Alignment?’

Alignment is a concept within the context of the setting, as are its variation. If we’re playing Dungeons and Dragons, that’s Lawful Good, Neutral Good, Chaotic Good, Neutral, Lawful Evil, Neutral Evil, and Chaotic Evil. These alignments aren’t choices that you’ve made, the result of devoting yourself to good or evil, but accidents of birth.

You were born that way. This is this setting’s astrology. The time of day, the position of the stars and planets, a lot of tiny astrological circumstances determines your Alignment. It’s not a definite thing. It’s not a divination. But it influences who you are, and who you will become. You’re not doomed to a life of evil for being born Chaotic Evil, but it might be a constant struggle against your nature.

So, Alignment is not what you have done, but what behaviors you tend towards. It’s not a compulsion, it’s an affinity.

• Good characters feel altruistic.
• Evil characters are selfish.
• Lawful characters prefer order, structure, and hierarchy.
• Chaotic characters find such restrictions stifling.

But in all cases, characters have free will, and can make conscious choices to resist (or play into) their instinctual drives.

Attitudes towards Alignment

Most people don’t know their alignment. The process to chart it out is complex and requires specialized training.  But it’s an accurate enough statement of character that people do judge one another. As a result, most people are close-mouthed about their alignment except around very close friends. To ask someone about their alignment is one of the rudest things possible, and “proper” people refuse to discuss such things in public. “Are you Neutral Evil” is the same kind of question as “Are you a liar?” and “Are you Good” is like “can you be trusted?”

Racial Alignment

Are all orcs evil? No. Just as with every other sentient creature, they are born under an Alignment Sign. Their culture and society may reward different behaviors and encourage different attitudes, but that just reinforces the fact that alignment is not an absolute predictor of attitude and behavior.
Same goes for every other race.Universality

Alignment is a literal moral force within the setting, but of course, not every culture views it the same way. Maybe they think about it in other terms, or ascribe different reasoning to the reason for these attitudes, like blood type or time of year.

But Alignment itself is a spiritual reality, and magic can and does reveal its truth.