The Campaign Builder's Guild

Hmm, perhaps I'm just accustomed to the larger distance between lines in word and OneNote. I usually only make those linebreaks for significant paragraph shifts. I'll try again.

EDIT: Attempted some heavy linebreaking both in this post and the Kolyaev one. Might indeed have made the paragraph easier to swallow, but the volume of the text also seems to have increased significantly. Don't know if that's as bad as a wall o' text. Probably not. Also decided on icerenders for the Kolyaevian ships. I think I'll post a list of cities/nations at some point in the future.

Thank you. I like the new formatting. I don't think it's too heavy. If you are worried, you might try to format it like I did with IC entries for Gloria (see signature).

Btw, mock-bulls were largely inspired by pictures like this supercow image.
It is a breed of cow called Belgian Blue which has some kind of double muscling. Only mine are bigger and taste worse :p

Has the Coiled Wire made it into Tawny? Also, the name Tawny is kinda strange, it really doesn't scream industrial city, but than again, I used to have a dog called Tawny, so who knows. I could be wrong, but it seems like the Union was built quickly on new found wealth - I'm guessing the Gray Rush is like the American Gold Rush? - that being said, what if all the cities in the union weren't named, but instead numbered? City 13, City 6, etc. I think this would make some sense considering that most of the towns would have started as mines right?

Also, now that I thought about the Coil, it could be a neat juxtaposition if the Union had their own individual technology based on some kind of Broken Verge coal or fossil fuel. Nothing steam punk of course, but I think it might be a good contrast to Kolyaev's Coil. (maybe a type of "coal" that is the fossilized remains of an older, evil race, what when burned releases energy and their dark spirits that in turn find a way into the lungs of people, giving them the BV equivalent of Black Lung or cancer)

When I read about all the towns in the Saltedges, I had an image of a spider-like machine caravan pondering through narrow passes and along steed ridges.

haha, I hope I'm not taking too many liberties here, I just got on a roll with ideas. ;)

The Coiled Wire as a network is restricted to Kolyaev. Receptacles, of course guarded ferociously by Keepers, make their way into the world from time to time for a considerable fee. There might be a few heating some furnaces in Tawny.
And just picked Tawny because it sounded vaguely like a rust/gold color. English is not my first language, so not sure about the connotations the word holds :P (cool you had a dog with that name in some sort of weird metagame way)
And I'd rather not all my countries have access to easy electricity. And having a fuel power source would make the electric mummies of Kolyaev rather redundant.
Hmm, I'm not sure about how many big machines I can put in before it turns too steampunky. Of course, it might make sense once I get to tinker a bit more with my artificial souls and the technology that goes with it.
Numbering the towns sounds cool though :D
And the Gray Rush is indeed like the Gold Rush, only for a massive vein of iron.  

EDIT: and thanks for the input by the way!

haha, yeah, Tawny is a fairly common dog's name, at least where I'm from.

and if you're worried about making it too steam-punk, you could always have huge, spider-like mounts for traversing the mountains. and I'm glad you liked the town numbers, i really dug that idea.

Well, I guess it fits the color of a Golden Retriever nicely :P
What about renaming it Blacktawny? Sounds more industrial while staying true to the roots.

EDIT: I've attempted several improvements to (Black-)Tawny. I renamed it (perhaps prematurely depending on what you guys say), and added some sentences focusing on the cold and the snow. Also added some details on the Slag Father and the princes, and wrote in that part about the numbered camps while also adding a sentence to the river so it seemed less bereft of life and made the consequences of drinking it less lethal (although I can imagine alchemists making poisons out of its water :p ).
Is the Saltedges a good name for this mountain chain? Not sure if it sounds too... nice. I could always move it. But I can only use Iron [something] so many times before it gets dumb.
Oh, and entirely forgot the question about the mock-bulls because I was busy finding pictures of them! They indeed have very muscular legs capable of supporting a lot of weight, but their body bulk is also vastly bigger than it rightly should be, so the strength-weight ratio might not always be high enough for them. But they manage. Most of the time.

the little bit of ice and snow really tied the city together. It's melding together in my mind's eye as a mix of Dickens' era London and industrial Isengard. Still not down the name Tawny though, I still vote for numbered cities.

Also, this is out there, I was thinking the fact that Tawny didn't sit on the river, which struck as strange the more I thought about it. North of where I live, there was a big iron boom in the early/mid 1900s, also in the mountains.

I've been up there, and even the really really rich veins of iron were only mined by make-shift and ramshackle towns that lasted until they moved on to the next vein. The big towns, however, were always on waterways. What if Tawny was actually on the Umber? It makes more sense for a big industrial city to actually be on the water - for transportation, commerce, and industry. Just a thought (Also, the mock-bulls in the industrial city made me think of Sinclair's The Jungle, which is really creepy and fits perfectly with the city.)

Saltedges are good, except I always read it as Saltridges. You could always just make up strange words to describe them, like calling them the Gibbenmauls or somehting.

Yeah, I wanted to place it next to the city but then I couldn't really have the whole pockmarked chasm-filled thing. But essentially, it extends from the foothills to the harbor, it just takes some time to get to the outer suburbs.
And I did make all the mining towns numbered; only Blacktawny is named, and I'd rather keep it named.  
Blacktawny isn't much of a mine anymore; it just used to be a large one. Then when the iron came down from the mountains it just came through Blacktawny and it grew and became the place to refine the ore, forge it, and ship it out.
If you think it's a better idea, I could remove the chasms and just place it by the river. But then it's one quirk short.

Quote from: Cataclysmic CrowYeah, I wanted to place it next to the city but then I couldn't really have the whole pockmarked chasm-filled thing. But essentially, it extends from the foothills to the harbor, it just takes some time to get to the outer suburbs.
And I did make all the mining towns numbered; only Blacktawny is named, and I'd rather keep it named.  
Blacktawny isn't much of a mine anymore; it just used to be a large one. Then when the iron came down from the mountains it just came through Blacktawny and it grew and became the place to refine the ore, forge it, and ship it out.
If you think it's a better idea, I could remove the chasms and just place it by the river. But then it's one quirk short.

I think you'll have plenty of opportunity to use bottomless chasms and giant strip mines in all the other mining towns, I would go with river focus, especially, like you mentioned, Blacktawny was a place to refine and transport the mountain ore. Sometimes too many quirks work against a setting too - I think air-baths, mockbulls, and the pollutants are plenty.

And I think I can deal with Blacktawny if you're set on that name. Still, what about things like Blackport, Blackiron, Rustholm, Forgeport, Torque, smthng like that?

Torque is not bad actually! It just needs a pre-/suffix and then it'd be good. And I'm not set on Tawny in any way.
And I'll do some rewriting after my exam tomorrow then.

Possible names:
Graventorque
Embertorque
[name]torque
Torqueriver
Torquequay (perhaps a little overkill?)
perhaps something with cast, tarnish, blister, dull, ingot, or wrought?
Or one of those british names where you hyphenate a sentence.

EDIT: or maybe not Torque after all... It sounds a bit modernish doesn't it?
Damn those important names...

Torquemada? :D

For a more serious suggestion, you could add a suffix to Torque, perhaps replacing the final -ue: Torqton, Torquay, Torqdale, Torqford, Torqbourne, Torquester, Torqwick...

I rather like Graventorque and Torqford.
Torquett? Toiltorque?

the more I think about it, I would say just keep it at Torque. Or make up a name, like Kolyaev. Kolyaev's name was one of the reasons it was so cool. This is just personal opinion, but I'm kinda tired of the World of Warcraft/DnD naming schemes of Adjectivenoun.