Revisiting Points of Light as a Setting Ideal

My crew jumped into 4th Edition hard when it came out.  While the best thing that came out of our 4E experience was a greater appreciation for Classic D&D (BX), 1E AD&D, and the OSR movement, the non-mechanical aspects of 4E were actually well-executed, particularly the world-building.  My favorite conceit from the 4E time period was the metaphor "points of light" as a descriptor for the default type of campaign setting the designers envisioned.

4E introduced a new world (eventually called Nerath) and a default starting area called the Nentir Vale.  The premise of a points of light setting is that the world is fallen; civilized people now live in small, isolated settlements (the points of light) scattered across a dark and dangerous world.  The areas between the points of light involve dangerous stretches of wilderness, marauded by humanoids, bandits, and monsters.  Scattered ruins of prior civilizations and failed attempts to quell the wilds dot the landscape.  It's a far cry from the heavily civilized settings like Forgotten Realms or Eberron.

In fact, "points of light" as a setting metaphor has more in common with Middle Earth.  Tolkien's world is sparsely populated, there are very few settlements on the map, and journeys consist of leaving a sheltered area like the Shire or Rivendell and covering huge expanses of wilderness to reach the next settlement.

The other aspect of points of light that resonates with me is it's embrace of "the American West" as a paradigm for society and mobility.  Small groups of heroes traveling vast landscapes, dishing out frontier justice and following a loose code of honor, is part of 19th century gunslinger folklore or the ideals of the knight-errant from Medieval romances.  D&D embraces social mobility through heroic action (and recovering vast sums of gold) which aligns with the ideals of the Western and American mythology, unlike a historical game or European feudal simulator.

With that in mind, here are a pair of area maps for the setting I've been working on, The Midlands.  I still have to name mountain ranges and some natural features, but they're pretty far along.  (You can see the development of the underlying world and larger area maps from last week's posts). The Midlands consists of 7 or so small "kingdoms" dotted up and down a large valley between two sets of highlands.  To the North, the Scandians and Greats have invaded, carving out their own frontier settlements at places like Slaghold, or Jernrike.  Each hex on the map is 24 miles, so there are many days of travel between major settlements, going for that sparsely populated "Middle Earth" feel.  Original Greyhawk was similarly presented, with sparse settlements depicted with giant hexes (30 miles per hex).

The Midlands, no hexes

The Midlands, 24 miles per hex

Now that all of the broader foundations are in place (the world, the continent, the region maps) I'm going to zoom in to the area of Bernia and Harrowdale and build out a smaller scale hex map (maybe 6 or 8 miles per hex) ready for use as a sandbox.  Will be back soon.

Quick Map Update - A Globe for Erda

I figured there would be a straightforward way to apply naturalistic looking textures to a fractal world (including applying a cloud overlay with some wispy "NASA style" clouds).  The versions from the previous post (Maps Galore) prioritize bright colors to support shaping the land and altitudes.

Here is an update of the globe with a bit of this "naturalistic" treatment:

Overall I'm happy with the results for a first foray into fractal mapping and this style of building the physical world.  Next up is creating a large area map for the Midlands area, and then a smaller area hex map for adventuring purposes.

Maps Galore - Fractals and World Maps

Most holidays I poke fun at my wife for making hosting guests harder than it needs to be.  She'll demand to do things "the right way", which usually means cooking gigantic dishes from scratch.  Not quite growing your own wheat in the backyard for a season and milling it to make your own homemade flour, but it's usually close to that; we've grown our own pumpkins in the garden for pumpkin pies.  There were many years of trying to make pumpernickel rolls from scratch.  We discovered a nearby Amish market last year and holiday cooking has never been better.  The Amish are spectacular bakers.

So it is with some chagrin I must to confess how I became distracted when I sat down to make a map for Erda.  Somehow "sketching an area map for my new campaign" devolved into "Gee, I should learn various fractal mapping softwares and create a full fractal world, with climate, wind patterns, ocean currents, and naturalistic erosion".  So that's where I've been hiding out a couple of weeks.

I've owned a piece of fractal mapping software for a while, "Fractal Terrains" (FT3) that's part of the Campaign Cartographer suite (CC3).  I hadn't used Campaign Cartographer in a few years, so I needed to dust it off and re-acclimate - it's a powerful CAD-style drawing platform, but the learning curve is real.  My mapping journey took me into fractal world building, leveraging a free fractal tool called "Wilbur" to apply naturalistic erosion and generating rivers on a fractal world, and ultimately importing maps back into CC3 for finishing.  (There are tutorials out there, and the various online cartographer groups with the pros are filled with helpful folks, so it's not like I could've done this without the wisdom of actual experts).

Onward to the maps.  First up, here's the actual fractal world itself after development in Fractal Terrains, erosion in Wilbur, and then brought back into Fractal Terrains to add rivers:

Erda in Fractal Terrains

Here's the same map but switched from an equidistant rectangular projection to a globe, shifted to view the main continent that's acting as my equivalent to fantasy Europe.  (I love the globe view, I should do a version with "earth-like" coloring and some wispy clouds).

Erda Globe View

Below is the same map after some treatment in Campaign Cartographer.  This is very much a working version, as I still need to name the continents and oceans, make sure the rivers carry over, add arrows for currents and prevailing winds, that kind of stuff.  The jpg export isn't a good resolution.  Anyway, I'll be working on the CC3 version during the week to add those elements (names, currents, winds).

Work in progress - the Fractal Map in Campaign Cartographer

Here is a zoom on the starting continent in the northwest corner (created in Fractal Terrains).

Northwest Erda

...And below is an actual "fantasy version" of this section that I could use as a world map to start writing about the game world.  I'd have to check scale, but the continent is fairly massive - probably 50 miles to the hex like the original World of Greyhawk.  This would be akin to a parchment world map the players could have as a starting handout about their "Known World".  As I add notes about the places, I'll circle back to the map and put in major cities.  The starting area will be a zoomed in version of the area called the Midlands, at a reasonable hex scale (6 or 8 miles per hex or thereabouts).

Erda - The Known World

The Midlands are a chaotic collection of small holds and warring kingdoms, something like Dark Ages Britain at or before the time of Alfred the Great - Mercia, Wessex, Anglia, Northumbria - the area map will have all those types of small kingdoms mapped out.  There have been Northmen invasions, and areas carved out from the coast reminiscent of the Danelaw from real-world history.  Seems like a cool area and time period to give the D&D treatment, add lots of fantasy and magic, with plenty of strife and threats of invasion.  The megadungeon, Harrowdale, is on the western moors of the Midlands.  Beyond the western hills is the Gloaming, a region of misty highlands and kings of the old folk.  The Gloaming is Celtic / Irish / Gaelic in flavor - a place of druids and faiths that predate the church.

Heading east is the sprawling empire of Caronia.  I've had it titled this way in one of my notebooks since last year - but I may need to rename it depending on what happens with this scary carona virus!  As it stands now, Caronia is a sprawling homage to Charlemagne and the Holy Roman Empire.  The Great March is a military zone manned by border nobles of Caronia and mercenaries of The Folk, the barbarians and woodmen of the southeastern vales (including Grossval).

The southern coast of the continent is home to the principalities of Aurum and the theocracy of Topaz, inheritors to civilization after old Valorum fell in the magical apocalypse that reconnected the magic worlds and allowed fresh invasions from Jotunheim and Niflheim, creating the current dark age.  Beyond Valorum (and off the map to the south) the lands turn dry and desert and we find the ruins of antiquity.

Above the whale road are Scandia and Greatland, the two nordic realms of the setting.  Invasions of giants and dragons from the west have made the northern cultures tough and fatalistic in the face of ever colder winters and darker nights.  A culture of "vikings" has developed, with sea-faring reavers attacking softer targets from Aurum all the way along the whale road to Caronia.  North of the Calden Sea is Thule, where I'll place the Black City when I work on a 5E update to that one.  So far my kids have been pushing me to build out Harrowdale rather than revisiting the Black City first, but we'll see what the rest of the player group says.

Anyway, this what I've been doing instead of writing blog posts for a week or two.  I've been on a map-bender!

A Cosmology for Erda

After months of running published campaign adventures, the call to create has become too urgent - now is the time to start building a campaign setting and adventures.  When last I got together with my neighborhood group, we had 'The Talk'.  The frank "should we be playing an OSR game or 5E game" talk.  One player was firmly in the OSR camp, one was on the fence, and three were firmly on Team Fifth Edition.  So we're sticking with The Fifth, but we agreed to bring old school gaming elements into it.  Now that's settled, I'm embarking on building a real campaign.

I've got a framework I'm following to build out the sandbox and adventuring region, I'll post about it in the next week or so.  My goal is to make a basic "bog standard" Dark Ages type setting, which has to be high magic to align with the values of the Fifth, and lots of recognizable tropes - Saxons, Vikings, fallen empires, a powerful and omnipresent Church.  The game is less about any unique elements in the setting than it is a few colorful megadungeons.  Which reminds me - the setting is Dark Ages and Vikings so I can ultimately put a version of the Black City there.  Another megadungeon idea that's malingered on my blog for several years was called Harrowhome (now titled Harrowdale) - a haunted ruin out on the moors, cluttered with the detritus of ages past.

My idea for Harrowdale has always involved an artifact from space that plummets to the earth like a meteor, blazing through the atmosphere, burrowing deep into the ground, leaving behind a deep molten shaft.  The thing is a MacGuffin of sorts, a shard of Chaos or seed of primordial evil, a thing that breached our universe from the anti-verse, the egg sack of a nascent Great Old One or future Cthulhu.  A rough beast waiting to be born.  The shaft is discovered by neolithic humans and cave peoples, and rediscovered by the succeeding civilizations that sweep across the land.  There are always death cults, prophets of doom, deranged sorcerers, and similar mad men that discover the ancient shaft on the moors, descend below Harrowdale, and leave their mark on the expanding dungeons.  Meanwhile, the Black Cyst continues to sink into the earth, emanating its dreams of madness and destruction, and growing.  It's been growing in size for more than five millenia.

Church of the Ancient Astronaut

The cosmology of Erda, the world I'm using for Harrowdale and the Black City, is essentially "weird fantasy".  I love 1960's Jack Kirby comics with the Celestials and Eternals, Erich Von Daniken's "ancient astronauts", and HP Lovecraft's Great Old Ones as immortal monsters that plunge from star to star leaving behind ruin and madness.  In recent years I've greatly enjoyed the Thor movies with their science fantasy interpretation of the Nine Realms and Midgard.  Don't they provide a great reference for a D&D cosmology?

Planar Gates don't take you to other dimensions, they open connection points (wormholes) to other planets, folding space and time.  Faerie is a planet that barely spins beneath a green sun; the Unseelie live on the dark side of their planet, haunting icy castles on a hemisphere of eternal night and eternal winter.  Hell is probably a gas giant or some similar massive body, its terrible gravity increasing as a visitor delves deeper into Hell until they reach the 9th circle, a frozen core where movement itself becomes almost impossible due to Hell's unbearable weight.

My equivalent to Rome, an empire I'm tentatively calling Valorum, fell a half millennium ago during an astral conjunction of the planar gates, when the portals to the realms of monsters opened spontaneously and giants of Jotunheim and dragons of Nifleheim freely entered the world of men, wreaking havoc and destruction.  Maybe that's how Elves and Dwarves got into the world, as interlopers.  For the Norse peoples this was Fimbulwinter, the start of Ragnarok and the end times.  For civilization, it was the end of Valorum and the beginning of the Dark Ages.

There are "gods" on some of the other planets that resemble figures of myth and mythology, but they're just powerful monsters.  The angels themselves are a race of space-faring aliens that battle at a breach between our universe and the great beyond (a realm of insanity known as the Tatters).  They act a bit like space cops and fraternal shepherds to the mortal races, although their duties at "the breach" have kept them away from earth for thousands of years.  An early visitation from space established primitive forms of monotheism centered around the Maker, or the Prime, after Aquinas' Prime Mover.

It's an approach to cosmology that well reflects my pop culture interests without doing any lasting harm to D&D's default assumptions.  It's going to be great fun to develop.


*The image is from an actual church in Salamanca, not the fictional planet of Erda