Laconsai, Or, I Made A Whole Country Out of Spaghetti Westerns

See that? That's Laconsai.

Past and Present:

The three genealogies of elves, as you may have gathered, are the Lis (or high elves, of Ondolis), the Sil (or wood elves, of Silosil) and the Sai (or drow, of Laconsai). After the Planeswar, the people left on the island of Lacon were primarily humans and drow, who crawled out of a series of pre-war bunkers. The drow used their natural magical abilities to pacify and assimilate the human tribes, setting themselves up as the ruling class of a country of primarily humans - the empire of Lacon-Sai, or Laconsai later on. Once in full control of the island, the drow looked at the richness of their dominion, looked at the seas that kept them so far from the rest of the world, and decided it wasn't worth the risk. They shut their borders for hundreds of years.

The Corpse-City of Alavation

Alavation is a minimalist's nightmare, a sprawling mountain of gothic architecture that reason and purpose have long-since abandoned. It is a rat king in city form. Gothic cathedrals growing out of bigger gothic cathedrals, wrought-iron fences with eight kinds of filigree going straight up walls, thoroughfare-sized stairwells that go up into nothing, tenement houses hanging upside down from bridges passing over streets so deep that sun never hits them. Engineering ranges from senseless and surreal to utterly impossible. Buildings are bigger or smaller on the inside than the outside. People who live there swear that the inner city changes constantly, and though nobody has ever seen a building move, maps consistently fail to capture the true nature of the place. There are some places in the city that are *almost* laid out logically, but they are pockets of dense, winding streets in a sea of greater madness. 

1d10 Countries

Mainly I'm making this little series so I can link back to it later on - it's an overview of all the main countries in my homebrew world as they currently stand. I'd like this whole blog thing to mainly be a depository for more detail-oriented stuff that you can just pluck out and put in your own adventure (my worldbuilding doesn't really help yours, after all), but sometimes context is helpful. These places will probably get a more detailed solo post in time.

Anyway, here's the major political bodies of the Material Plane, along with some of the things that inspired them. Frankly, that's probably the most valuable part of this.

Or, maybe you just like worldbuilding. Me too!

The Material Plane, Courtesy of Dwarf Fortress. Sorry this motherfucker is so big. God help you if you want to see it in its original size.

All you really need to know about the world itself is that it's secretly a post-apocalyptic setting. A thousand years ago, the gods (of which there were dozens, each bound to people and countries who worshipped them) were summoned to use as superweapons in a cataclysmic chain reaction of alliances and old grudges that tore the world apart: The Planeswar. It wiped out civilization and ruined the landscape, and the gods fled in shame or to lick their wounds. But that was generations ago now - a new world has grown from the ashes of the old.

Evacuating The Underdark (Pt. 1): Ascension of The Illithid

There's no true Underdark in my world, so I gotta get all the cool shit out of there and stick it somewhere else. Here's a post about mind flayer clerics living in the desert.

See all that circled shit down there? That's Souvland. It's a seafaring desert country of mostly humans who still worship the absent gods - and critical to that worship is the illithid.

1d10 Generals

So I like generals, so here's 1d10 of the big bastards.

That is, generals in the Fire Emblem sense, where they're just any kind of Big Tuff military figure, a miniboss one step above his own faceless grunts. Each of these guys are designed to fit into any role they need to - they can be minor villains, or allies, or quest givers, or guests at the queen's ball, or even just a flavorful capstone for that cadre on the other side of the hill. And since they're *kind of* nobility, they can be the PC's entryway into the political scene - they've all got an associated quest or two if the PCs latch on to them.

By algenpfleger