The Campaign Builder's Guild

@ Xathan: yes, yes, and yes. I´ve been thinking the same thing myself and have some ideas of non-terrestrial things that I have yet to post in their entirety.

These include: malaric jungle islands inhabited by harpy-folk, the proverbial primordial forest which is slowly, but with great cost to humans, being harvested, sea leviathans, magical diseases and ailments, black-glass desert, surviving spawn of deities, and "dragons".

A rough, shoot from the hips idea for a Venician-Hong Kong type port city.

Cardoon: The malaric, duckweed choked canals. The sweaty, smokey Quistown, adorned with electric lights of blue, red, and yellow, almond-eyed fey dripping through the narrow alleys and stalls. The resplendant, faded glory of St. Horace square, walled in by buzzing cafes serving coffee, gin, and Po-Mo sodas with street-wizards performing small prestiginations of fire and sparks. The soggy ghetto of Blacktide, the location of one of the few remaining enclaves of the Gillmen - the Maramari - where dank wine-bars host the best bands south of Portosh and hide the best pick-pockets south of nowhere. From the greed-fueled docks to the red-light hotels of Carnation Street, Cardoon is a city of a thousand faces, forged by a thousand different hands through a thousand different years.

First raised in the early Spear Years by Ugo the Boastful on the marshy mouth of the Mander River, it was built island by island by hand, building the city sea-floor up with dirt, stone, and bones. It quickly came into its own, and, resting on the cusp between the Northlands and the Occident, thrived as a port-of-call for merchants, pirates, smugglers, and slavers. This liquid society also gave all manner of avante guard artists, poets, musicians, and arcanists a relatively safe place to call home. Cardoonish poets are world-reknowned and its gin valued in any bar worth its salt - in fact, the gin was specially designed to mix perfectly with quinine tonic, which, it is said, helps fight of the malaria that plagues the city in the hot, steamy summers.

Later in the nascent years of the Steam Age, the Great Quis Fleet arrived from across the Babbling Sea armed with firearms yet unseen in the Northlands, and claimed the city for nearly 200 years before the Burning Men Revolution dethrowned them and threw them back into the sea.

In the most recent years, Cardoon has managed to both absord the new - electric lights are common throughout the whole city, telegraph stations are plenty, silent-cinemas flourish, the harbor is choked with all manner of modern vessels - it has managed to retain a romantic aniquity - there are no railways within the city, automobiles are prohibited due to their weight, and flighty modern fashion and culture has yet to overtake centuries-old Cardoonish fiddle bands and the omnipresent black overcoat, colorful Quis-inspired scarves, and knee-length britches.

before I ramble on more, any thoughts? too much new, not enough magic? vice-versa?

Gorgeous writing!  Gillmen/Malamari sound pretty interesting  - are these like Deep Ones, or are they humans who modified themselves somehow...?

so, in order to get a more modern feel in the setting, I thought it best to have a very strong, monotheistic religion be present in most of the Northlands (the at-the-moment name for the immediate area of the setting.) but instead of going pure monotheistic route, I thought I would try to blend poly- and monotheism for funsies.

So Ive thought of having the religion focus around an omnipotent, complemetly alien and uncomprehensible GOD. in fact, it is a key tennant in the faith that this GOD is completely, absolutely incomprehensible, and to even try is heresy. However, there will be a wide pantheon of Saints, who at certain times in history, were granted a glimpse into a miniscule aspect of GODS plan, only to be immediately killed in some fantastic, magical fashion: immolation, petrification, etc. So these martyr-saints would act as intermediaries between GOD and mortals. Each saint would, obviously, have some specific portfolio or ideas that pertain to what was revealed to them by GOD. There would be more than 100 of these saints, but only about a dozen would be widely known, others more local or more focused in their patronage. There could even be other, False Saints which the church would persecute.

Some ideas of saints so far...

St. Jasper the Particulated - Patron saint of mathematics and science. Died from exploding apart at the molecular level.

St. Horace of Portosh: Patron saint of Celebacy and Fortitude. Died from lack of sex (I kid...). Died from petrification.

St. Lysa of Yellow Cloth: Patron saint(ess?) of the poor and ill. Died from a simultaneous infliction of 1,000 maladies.

thoooooooughts?