Wednesday, June 2, 2010

Welcome to Carrow. The Toilets May Kill You. Enjoy Your Stay.

This will be the first of many posts with the following warning:

GAME SPOILERS: IF YOU'RE ONE OF MY PLAYERS, OR MIGHT BE, DON'T CLICK 'READ MORE'!



The City-State of Carrow - Pop. 30,000 within about 4 square miles. Those blocks aren't houses, they are blocks of houses, shops, slums, etc. Carrow is a big deal kind of a place.

This post is only going to touch on the broad need-to-knows.There are all kinds of specifics and adventure seeds that will warrant their own post.

Carrow's people are mostly corn farmers that leave the South Carrow slums and public housing each morning to work the fields outside the gates. However, there's a large middle-class of landowners, merchants, tradespeople, soldiers, traders and government workers. There are also several very, very rich families living in the Estates.

Carrow is a democracy. I don't like to spend a lot of time on politics, so here's the skinny - any tax-payer living within the walls can vote. Each of the nine districts gets a couple representatives, which is actually a piss-poor system because South Carrow has nearly half the population, but gets the same representation as the Estates (home to 6 families and their servants).

Carrow is a democracy because of a complicated revolt way way back, that's an important plot point so I'll go into it later.

Carrow's residents are 97% human, with halflings and dwarves being the most common other species (most are not permanent residents - for instance the dwarves are usually salesmen from a nearby colony, that keep a home in Carrow rather than sleep in inns all the time).

People in Carrow aren't outright hostile to elves and gnomes, but they're creeped out by them at first. They remind them too much of fairy tales about the Wood.

To the West is the Wood: The humans of Carrow fear it - only the poor make short hunting trips in. It's not uncommon for them to never return. Sometimes they return strange and different, and it's not unheard of to be convicted of being a changeling and find oneself executed or banished back into the Wood "from whence you came."

Of course, there really are changelings in the woods. But more on the Strange Court later.

Besides the Wood, Carrow depends on the Orcteat Mountains for protection from the West, as the Orcteats eventually meet to form a horseshoe shape. They are tall and impossible to travel over. But not under or through, of course.

Technology in Carrow is, like the rest of my DnD world, a weird hodgepodge of tradition swords-and-armor medievalist and steam-punk magical-mechanical fusions. Just a little bit of black-powder weaponry, but mostly prone to exploding in your hand. There are magic rifles that shoot magic missiles (for which I'll give stats when talking about the inventor), clockwork men stuck in trees for eons, etc.

Well, I think that covers it for now. Enjoy the map, and thank Zak Smith for the method I generated it by.

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