Joined: Oct 2008 Gender: Male Posts: 679 Location: Lille, France Karma: 45
Lost Land of Mêm « Thread Started on Aug 29, 2009, 1:30pm »
Mêm is a land of grass hills, battled by warm winds coming from the southern jungles. It’s a wilderness, with a scarce human and orcish settlement. The wild hills and grasslands are the realms of many animal species: baboons, black bears, giant beetles, wild boars (and warthogs), bulls, wild camels, wild cattle, wild dogs, elephants, flightless birds, herd animals, hyenas, jackals, mammoths, mastodons, giant rats, rhinoceros (including its wooly cousin, in the colder north), common stags and wolves are common, as well as numerous dinosaurs species like anatosaurus, iguanodon, monoclonius, pentacerops, plateosaurus, stegosaurus (in the south, near the jungles), styracosaurus and triceratops.
The chalky subsoil has been dig from millions of years by the rivers. Their large valleys have turned to swamp and marshes. Sudden changes in the river flow created islands and lakes. Theses swamps are a dangerous place, due to the abundance of crocodiles, giant toads and giant water spiders. But the main troubles are dinosaurs like apatasaurus, camaraurus, diplodocus and lambeosaurus. Some islands and rives are covered by small woods and forests, where bombardiers and boring giant beetles and strangle weed are another danger.
All these rivers converge to a dead inner sea, curiously called the Sea of Horses. Giant sea horses, sharks, sting rays and whales are common undersea fauna, as well as dinosaurs like dinichtys, and plesiosaurus. Pteranodons living in the surrounding cliffs and islands predates from fishes. This makes boating hazardous on the inner sea.
These valleys are surrounded by cliffs, pierced everywhere by caves in this karstic landscape. Due to the massive presence of dinosaurs, even if most of them are plant-eaters and other giant creatures, most thinking species settle rather in the subterranean caves than live above ground. Clans of dwarves, orcs and troglodytes, as well as band of ogres and hill giants, fight endlessly for the control of these subterranean networks of caves. Forests of giant mushrooms, including shriekers, provide food for underground inhabitants.
As their physiology doesn’t fit to underground life, human live in cities surrounded by a small farmland, fighting hard to protect them from dinosaurs and other animals, among them the feared giant stag beetle. Out of the cities, only heavily armed merchant caravans, using draft horses and mules – as well as bands of bandits and brigands – travels in the wilderness from city to city.
In these cities, people worship death and devils, as way to protect themselves from these surnatural beings. Temples are rumoured to be protected by fearsome things as lemures and larvaes.
***
All the creatures cited here are quoted as being “common” in the AD&D Monster Manual. All common creatures have been used, and no other frequency category. Lanscapes and features have been set up according to the ecology of these creature. So this is the most common world in the early Ad&d…
Joined: Jul 2007 Gender: Male Posts: 410 Location: Urbana, IL Karma: 26
Re: Lost Land of Mêm « Reply #2 on Aug 29, 2009, 3:54pm »
Exellent experiment, snorri! Is there an error in this line: "most thinking species settle rather in the subterranean caves than in the underground"? I think you mean "than live above ground".
Exellent experiment, snorri! Is there an error in this line: "most thinking species settle rather in the subterranean caves than in the underground"? I think you mean "than live above ground".
I must protest bitterly that my aircraft still has not been painted red.
Joined: Mar 2009 Gender: Male Posts: 1,596 Location: Schenectady Karma: 73
Re: Lost Land of Mêm « Reply #5 on Aug 31, 2009, 7:32pm »
Huh. That's really interesting. I doubt if Gygax meant all "common" creatures to exists in one world all at the same time, but who knows. In any case what a great land for adventures!
Marv / Finarvyn DCC playtester (2011) C&C playtester (2003) I'm partly responsible for the S&W WhiteBox Builder of the TrollBridge Master of Mutants; MA since 1976 OD&D Player since 1975
"Don't ask me what you need to hit. Just roll the die and I will let you know!" - Dave Arneson
Joined: Mar 2008 Gender: Male Posts: 571 Location: NYC Karma: 34
Re: Lost Land of Mêm « Reply #9 on Feb 24, 2011, 9:52pm »
Spoiler warning for players in the White Sandbox campaign!
I'm using the Land of Mem as an afterlife in which some dead PCs have become trapped. The fact that there are both lemures and larvas here - but no devils, or demons more potent than Type II - suggests to me that this is a plane where the souls of the dead might be siphoned off.
The way I've approached it is to look at the intelligent species. The merchants are the most so, followed by dwarves, then bandits and brigands, then collectives of boring beetles (!), and then orcs, lastly with hill giants, trogdolytes, larvae, and baboons all occupying the "low" intelligence category.
So what I think is that the merchants are running the show. They've taken advantage of, maybe even created, the breach that lets this demi-plane accrue the most basic kinds of d**ned souls. These herds of lemures and larva, some of which hatch into Type I or II demons, are one of the merchants' stock in trade; they sell this commodity to planar travelers, some of whom will use them as sacrifices in rituals requiring human souls, others of whom are seeking to exact further revenge on an enemy who had previously escaped their wrath through death & d**nation.
The other commodity in which the merchants trade is gems. I decided that the Land of Mem (as an American I don't know how to make my keyboard do accents) is metal-poor, in part because back home the PCs are dealing with the logistics of literally tons of gold so I want a change, in part because I like that Dark Sun trope. So as befits a jungle empire of dinosaurs and caves, I figure the wealth comes in the form of lots of geodes and crystal caverns mined by the dwarves. (My son and I visited the gems exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History this week...) I thought about having the dwarves be the morlock-like slaves of the merchants, but my players are likely to expect this so I decided to make them the slavers instead. Note that the merchants are also hierarchical; only 10% are actually merchants, the rest hired mercenaries.
Since two of the top intelligences are robbers of one kind or another (neutral or chaotic evil), it suits me to have the dominant power structure be more or less unsympathetic; they're neutrals and think of themselves as reasonable, civilized folk, but they make their livelihood through activities offensive to modern sensibilities. The bandits, also neutral, are principled independents, trying to make a living for themselves by raiding the wealth of the merchants and dwarves without trafficking in slaves, lemure, or larvae. The brigands are the opposite: many are sponsored by powerful devils, demons, or ritualists who employ them to carry off human bodies and souls. Since the brigands are unlikely to be able to offer better prices, perhaps their competitive advantage over the merchants is that they will accept payment in certain kinds of imports, like ego weapons, which are forbidden by the guilds of merchants and dwarves.
That leaves us with beetles and orcs. I think the beetles are perhaps the indigenous intelligent species, Tekumel-style; the ruins in the jungle belong to their strange collective hive-minds, which are largely fragmented now that humanoids have arrived. The orcs will serve as enemies and slaves of the dwarves, partially mirroring the relationship of merchants to bandits/brigands but in a more chaotic way, such that individual reaction rolls will be enough to tell me where any particular orc band falls.
One thing I'm excited about here is wilderness hex-crawling. My idea is that the planar gate through which the PCs enter this afterlife takes the form of a big stone ring, so that schlepping this forward across the landscape represents progress in the same way that mapping and clearing a dungeon does - progress which can accumulate session to session even if the PCs involved in each adventure differ, as is likely at New York Red Box's open table.
Another thing is the predominance of encounters with animals giant and otherwise. NYRB founder James was saying that although these are prominent in all classic D&D editions, in his experience they're rarely encountered - when you do run into bats, the DM tends to make them hellfire doombats or some other avoidance of the 'boring' ordinary animal. I want to make lots of the encounters ordinary in a lost-world kind of way, but the problem is that lots of the highest-HD monsters (dinosaurs, whales, etc.) are not aggressive in themselves. Some encounters with non-threatening herd animals are fine, especially if I'm draconian about supplies and encumbrance enough to make the players welcome opportunities to go hunting, but I want to pair some animal encounters with another encounter in which throwing a fireball might stampede the herd. What I think I'll do is make a second set of rolls to see what intelligent creatures an encounter might be associated with, and how closely it's associated: 1 - intelligent creatures are using these animals as mounts or herding them 2 - " depend on these animals for their livelihood somehow and will be upset if they're tampered with 3 - " are enemies of these animals and will celebrate their slayers 4 - " are using these animals as cover to hide the traces of their passage 5 - " are in the act of hunting these animals 6 - " hold these animals sacred
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