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.



LEFT TO RIGHT AND THEN DOWN

VORLA: A mercenary country. More an artist's colony than a true nation, Vorla is a meagre collection of cities carved into the vacant and frigid northern taiga. Founded by a guild of bards and wizards, it contains the world's greatest colleges of magic, barding, and art. It is most famous, however, for its willingness to sell its own labor. Merchant-mages teleport farmed goods to high bidders across the world, the standing army consists of Vorlans who haven't yet been rented by another country, and sometimes whole buildings are built without doors - the only entrance might be a stable portal in a nobleman's study ten thousand miles away.

In sci-fi settings, you often see a civilization of scientists or businessmen who got tired of society's rules and founded their own deregulated libertarian nightmare on the frontier. That's Vorla. Think fantasy Rapture, but with bards.

ONDOLIS: A collapsing empire. Ondolis the biggest political entity in the known world. It has been fortunate in both trade and warfare for hundreds of years, but now, after pursuing an expensive war against Souvland and an overly-ambitious colonial period in the east, it has finally stretched itself too thin. The current Lictor (think shogun) is trying to balance consolidating her forces back home and maintaining control over the ESS - the income from which is said to be single-handedly keeping the empire afloat.

Ondolis sits at the intersection of Rome, Imperial Russia, and Napoleon-era France. Their soldiers are mainly musketeers and pikemen and they have absurdly elaborate systems of medals and formalwear. They're mostly high elves, so they're smug fucks about it all too.

THE EMERALD SEA STATE: A god's open grave. The Emerald Sea was once a true ocean, or so the elves say. Now it is an impossibly vast forest in the shape of a sea: what begins as a flat layer of shrubs and small grass becomes full trees, growing taller as the Sea grows deeper, until finally you can no longer see any light except for what is shed by glowing mushrooms and the bioluminescence of massive aberrant wildlife. It is the sovereign forest, a ragged hole in the fabric of The Material Plane. People mostly live on top of it, gliding across the treetops on magical flat-bottomed boats called canopy sloops and living in villages carved into the trees or built on top of their football-field-sized branches. The Emerald Sea State was only formally settled about a hundred years ago by colonists from Ondolis, and now, with some prodding from Kreidiiva, the people living there are beginning to push for independence from their mother country. This would spell disaster for Ondolis. It's a big weird place, and it'll probably be the subject of several posts. It's where my current campaign takes place. A secret: The ESS was once an ocean, it's true. The god of forests (its name was lost to time, but cultists call it Jack i'th' Green, when they call it anything at all) was the only god slain during the Planeswar, and it was into this ocean that his body fell. His corpse, emitting a kind of divine radiation, is slowly remaking this world into the elemental plane of forests. Somebody should probably do something about that.

I like the idea of not-ocean oceans, and I like druids as villains, and I like this Tumblr post, so. 

SILOSIL: A struggling confederation. The wood elves, who once controlled every forest on the continent, have been badly broken and pushed back into a tiny corner of the map by Ondolis settlers. The six remaining tribes, desperate to ensure that they not be displaced again, joined together into a loose confederacy led by the Sil'Osi, the healthiest and most modernized tribe. The others are the Sil'Ank (traditionalists, druids and nature-worshippers), the Sil'Dast (once warlike, now cowed into a scholarly role by the Planeswar), the Sil'Ama (magic worshippers, where cultural pressure to become a wizard is so intense that many poor studies become warlocks), the Sil'Un (alchemy specialists who live in the roots of trees), and the Sil'Gar (fishermen from the icy north). They'll get their own post. Silosil as a country is still too weak to exert any real political power on the world stage, but it is, at least, surviving. Silosans have begun to carve a significant home for themselves in the ESS, and could represent a useful ally for any larger power attempting to control it. 

The wider context stuff came from The Iroquois Confederacy, the individual tribes just came from me spitballing. Traditionally cloistered and highly specialized tribes being forced to come together and adapt to the wider world's definition of "country" in order to survive is an interesting concept, to me - I think of Silosil as a very tense place, and elves aren't used to being tense.

CHIL'NATHA: Fire in the hills. Chil'Natha is a country of steep, terraced hillsides inhabited by dwarves. They produce a lot of rice and are famous for digging beautiful elaborate homes into clay instead of stone (they've got a kind of hobbit-hole aesthetic, but on a massive scale - very little building is aboveground). They were controlled by three clans (the Stonefaces, the Redhammers, and the Barrowbreakers), until a joint plan to re-route a major river resulted in snowballing dam-breakage and massive flooding in the lowlands. The Stonefaces blamed the Redhammers and vice versa, and the resulting civil war tore the country apart. It's still going on, nearly 75 years later, and the cities are winding mazes of collapsed tunnels and burning hillsides. There are some peasants farming the new wetlands who aren't too affected, but all the major population centers are still warzones.

You know in Fallout 3 when you go back to Vault 101 and it's just total anarchy? It's like that, but here and here and here. Mostly I love terraced hills and I think they'd be way cool to fight on.

QEI: A mobile nation. Ondolis has had some pretty major fuckups in its long history, and the racial pogrom that resulted in all the gnomes and halflings being driven into the southern swamps was one of the big ones. It was a long time ago now, but the little people haven't forgotten what brought them to Qei. They got lucky, though - those once-unexplored swamps were actually a graveyard full of pre-Planeswar technology, and the greatest of their finds were four massive walking platforms (think of those mobile space shuttle launch platforms, but on giant spider legs and topped with tiny houses). Because of their small size, the gnomes and halflings were able to turn them into full cities. The walking cities of Qei now move almost constantly, picking up tithes of crops and fish from smaller, immobile villages throughout the area. These cities are hotbeds of technological development, but larger races find living in the walkers to be extremely difficult - the streets and buildings just weren't made for them.

I once saw a little D&D supplement about a necromancer who made his home in the abdomen of huge reanimated spider and walked around in it, and that really stuck with me, so I decided to make a whole nation out of the idea. Want to reinforce the physical differences between the gnomish bard and the half-orc paladin? Play a few sessions in Qei's cramped confines. 

KREIDIIVA: A mercantile superpower. Matthew Colville says that any fantasy world needs a Mediterranean-analogue, and this is mine. Because Kreidiiva controls the middle passage, almost all international trade passes through their waters. Kreidiiva is an economic powerhouse, and rapidly becoming a superpower despite its small size. It is also a highly disciplined socialist state that abhors magic-users - once the site of a surviving pre-war bunker, Kreidiiv culture blames magic and the gods for the devastation wreaked upon the world, and vows that it will never happen again. There's a whole Inquisition of sanctioned magic-users set up to find and kill (but usually secretly exile) magic users within their borders. They're devout humanists (well, humanoidists) in the philosophical sense, and are shooting to take control of the ESS because of all the magic it represents (but there's a lot of money to be had there, too...). Any poly-sci major could tell you that Kreidiiva and Ondolis are going to come into conflict, probably over the ESS, within the next fifty years. Things are getting tense - Kreidiiva is confident, ambitious, and upwardly mobile.

Kreidiiva is lifted in large part from the very excellent Godsfall, though Kadar is more explicitly villainous than Kreidiiva should be. I was generating a lot of maps when I started making this world, and it was that little island in the middle of everything else that made me pick this one to work with. 

DOKCHAGG: Dwarves of the desert. Dark-skinned Dokchagg dwarves live primarily in the natural caves of Souvland's sandstone foothills, but the capitol sits deep under the mountains. Dokchagg dwarves are quiet isolationists with a great respect for nature - a lot of desert druids are Dokchagg dwarves. Dokchagg dwarves are most famous for operating the world's largest salt mine. Whole cities exist right behind the front lines of mining operations, and move as the front moves to support the miners. Only when the veins are exhausted completely will the tunnel be considered for permanent habitation.

They're traditional Tolkein dwarves by way of Fremen from Dune. I don't really know too much about them, to be honest, both of the southern nations are so far away from my current campaign that I haven't put a whole lot of time into them.

SOUVLAND: Keeping the faith, despite it all. Souvland is a country of dark-skinned humans, best known for the fact that they still worship the absent gods by way of the Illithids. It's a big country that was just entering a colonial period and moving north into less-deserty country when they came up against Ondolis and got kicked to shit at the edges. Ondolis is gone now, but recovery is slow and painful. The whole culture revolves around the lost gods, and their bards are as learned in history and storytelling as any scholar elsewhere in the world - they have to be, lest the tales of the old days die out. 

Souvland right now is this big blurry combination of Egypt and post-British Raj India that I'm not happy with. It's so goddamn big, too, it'll probably be spilt up into two or more countries in due time.

LACONSAI: Picking up the pieces. The large tropical-desert of Laconsai was for many generations the unquestioned domain of the drow (or Sai), who viewed the varied and resource-rich island as their eternal reward for surviving the Planeswar. They closed their borders and were content to live as the unassailable princes of the land - until their slaves rose up against them. The resulting civil war, famous for the widespread use of gunpowder and the eight-shot pistol that helped the Lacon conquer the human tribes in the first place, left the country without leadership or infrastructure. With supply lines severed, the towns in the desert were left to govern themselves individually. Many withered and died, but others have survived as trade hubs and resource points.
Laconsai is me trying to find a reason to have a wild west setting in a fantasy world, and I'm pretty happy with it. It's Fistful of Dollars plus Mad Max plus something something drow plus a little bit of King Kong? There's a lot of shit going on in Laconsai. I'll be doing a detailed post soon, because there's a lot I glossed over - like The Outlaw, and the spider cults, and the megafauna on the far side of the island.