Wednesday, March 1, 2017

Not dead, just on a break

The Frozen Kingdom will continue in a couple months when work gets less stressful.
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Thursday, November 24, 2016

The Frozen Kingdom, Chapter 9

Chapter 9 of The Frozen Kingdom is now available for preview.

This chapter picks up right after the end of chapter 8. Two rival gangs, The Smiths and The Guardians are preparing to battle in the Guardians' underground brewery-fortress. The party have allied with one side or the other to gain access, but the fight itself is not their concern.

Within Barreltown is rumoured to be the third of Valasir's libraries and another crucial piece to uncovering what happened to freeze Tannock in ice and what the would-be queen Zerith Amastatica is really after.

After the RP-heavy eighth chapter, this chapter swings the focus back to combat, dungeoneering, and puzzle-solving.

The Bestiary has also been updated for chapters 8 and 9.

Download

Chapter 9 - Barreltown: Google Doc | PDF
The Frozen Kingdom Bestiary: Google Doc | PDF

Level 4-5 characters. Estimated playing time: 2 hours.

The Frozen Kingdom Chapters

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Monday, October 24, 2016

The Frozen Kingdom, Chapter 8



Chapter 8 of The Frozen Kingdom is now available for preview.
In this module the party continue their quest by traveling south into Koldar and the City of Ardan Castle. There they must deal with the locals to discover if Välásir's third library is even in the city, and where to go to find it. There's a great deal of potential side-tracking in the city, places to see, and characters to interact with.

This is the longest chapter in The Frozen Kingdom so far, and probably the longest of the entire 13-ish chapters in the whole story. The length is attributable to the large number of potential side-tracks for parties to go on as they scour the city looking for clues as to where the next library is located. Players on the direct path could be done in under an hour, whereas players who explore more or find a lot of dead-end paths will take several hours. Those dead-ends all have their own challenges and rewards, though, so I like to think of them as "optional encounters" rather than true dead-ends. DMs running this module will have to read their players and decide how big a trip to make of their time in The City of Ardan Castle.

Note: At time of publishing (Oct 24th), the bestiary has not been updated yet with blocks for NPCs from this chapter.

Download

Chapter 8 - Ardan Castle: Google Doc | PDF
The Frozen Kingdom Bestiary: Google Doc | PDF

Level 4 characters. Estimated playing time: 1-4 hours.

The Frozen Kingdom Chapters

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Thursday, August 18, 2016

The Frozen Kingdom, Chapter 7


Chapter 7 of The Frozen Kingdom is now available for preview.

This picks up right where Chapter 6 left off, with the party heading upwards into the ruined city of Skyperch in search of where Valasir may have hidden the rest of the spell that froze the kingdom.

Download

Chapter 7 - The Ruins of Skyperch: Google Doc | PDF
The Frozen Kingdom Bestiary: Google Doc | PDF

Remember that the party gained a level at the end of chapter 6 but that new level should not take effect until they have taken a long rest.


Level 3-4 characters. Estimated playing time: 2 hours.

The Frozen Kingdom Chapters

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Thursday, July 14, 2016

The Frozen Kingdom, Chapter 6

Chapter 6 of The Frozen Kingdom is now available for preview.

Thus we enter the "Road Trip" part of the story.

The party must now travel to the dwarven town of Kor's Geode in search of another of Välásir’s libraries. Getting there is the easy part. Once there they must somehow convince the city's tyrranical leader to grant them access to the ruined city atop his mountain where the library is believed to be.

This also introduces the first of a series of sidequests concerning Merle Raddelle if the party chose to keep her alive and bring her along. Merle's story largely runs in parallel with the main plot as she comes to understand her powers and the world at large with the party's help. As the story progresses we will see more of these.

Download

Chapter 6 - Kor's Geode: Google Doc | PDF
The Frozen Kingdom Bestiary: Google Doc | PDF

This module has highly variable playtime depending on what the players choose to do in Kor's Geode. If they miss or ignore the sidequest and jump straight to a successful strategy for getting to Skyperch the chapter could be done in an hour. If they do the sidequest and choose to sneak/murder their way to a solution then it could take much longer.

Level 3 characters. Estimated playing time: 1-4 hours.

The Frozen Kingdom Chapters

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Thursday, June 16, 2016

On Constructed Languages

Just as Tolkien gave us our modern definitions of Elves and Dwarves, he also gave us on of the best examples of fantasy constructed languages. Since the beginnings of tabletop roleplaying there has been a long tradition of GMs and world builders making up languages. I'm writing this article about my experience with the process of formally designing and building a language. I'm going to try and avoid using technical terms as much as possible.

Background

Years ago I embarked on the traditional language-construction quest to build a Drakoni language as an outshoot of my work on Drakoni culture. More recently I put some examples of romanized Drakoni words in articles on this blog.

Below is an example of formal edict written in Drakoni and Elvish (in Teredahar, Elvish is the primary language of trade, thus English is used for all Elvish writing) modeled off of the Rosetta stone.
 
The same message written in Elvish and Formal (boxy) v2 Draconic. Click for romanization.


I have used Drakoni for a few years in my normal Pathfinder group's stories. The Frozen Kingdom only has a few examples of the Drakoni language so I could have just stuck with the same version I have been using (version 2, technically). However, recently someone with a formal background in speech and linguistics joined my circle of friends. She has agreed to help rework Drakoni as a properly-modeled, internally-consistent, and usable language.

Physically Speaking

The first step was just working out what sounds a Drakoni can actually make. For Mac's concept art I described the Drakoni as having crocodile-like features. Typically dragons are drawn with shorter, more iguana-like features. Various other fractional-dragon races are portrayed with wildly differing facial structures and different kinds of tongues that impact what kinds of sounds they can make. We had to settle on the shape and position of teeth, lips, and tongue and how flexible they are. In the end we decided that:
  • A Drakoni's tongue is in-between a crocodile and an iguana. It's broad, flat, and unforked but long and flexible enough that all Drakoni can touch their noses with their tongues. They can make a wide range of tongue and throat-based sounds.
  • Their teeth are triangular, spaced out, and stand in two rows such that some sit outside of the lips when closed. This makes sounds that use the lips over the teeth like "f" and "v" impossible to cleanly make and requires using a stiffened upper lip instead of the top teeth to make sounds resembling "th". As a result, these sounds are rare and sound "lisp-y" when made.
  • Their lips aren't able to make an "O" shape. 

Evolution

Just as lifeforms change and evolve over time, so to does language. I'm assuming you know English if you're reading this (Hello, users of Google Translate) so I'm sure you know that languages pick up features over time mostly from other languages. For Drakoni, it was previously established that it evolved from an older Draconic language (no surprise there) so we started with what that older language was like.

Dragons aren't the most sociable creatures so it was probably very simplistic. Lots of hissing and growls and forceful words. This gave us an evolutionary starting point for the language of their smaller, more sociable offshoot race. Drakoni have ancestry from lizardfolk who are commonly depicted as being social, living in tribes, and doing trade. Drakoni doing similar would have evolved their language include more diverse sounds and convey more information. The swear words probably stayed close to the original Draconic, though.

Selecting Sounds

The next part is a bit arduous. I had to go through the 80-ish words that exist in v2 of the language and try to sound them out based on the newly-detailed understanding of Drakoni anatomy. This often involved sticking fingers in my mouth or holding my lips in different places to try and tease out what sounds you can make with those teeth and lips. I used the International Phoenetic Alphabet and Wikipedia's interactive sound tables to take a first pass at classifying the noises and then my linguist friend helped clean the data up.

Having clear IPA classifications meant we could now agree on how a particular string of sounds would add up to a word and how to speak words written in Drakoni. Not every language uses all of the sounds possible for its speakers to make, so we looked at anatomy again and decided that any sounds that might be possible but difficult to make are only found in loanwords taken from other languages. For example, we decided native Drakoni speech has an "n" but no "m" sound. "Magik" for instance in Drakoni is a loanword from Elvish.

At the end of this process we had 5 vowels and 28 consonant sounds. Three of the consonant sounds are made in ways that are less natural for Drakoni to make, so those are foreign sounds added to the Drakoni language over time. Knowing which sounds are common in the language and which are not is important when it comes to creating the language's vocabulary and written components.



In Part 2

Now that we know how Drakoni speak, the next step is to turn it into an actual language. In the next part I'll cover how the grammar, syntax, and writing system for Drakoni v3 were created.

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Wednesday, June 15, 2016

The Frozen Kingdom, Chapter 3 Updated

Chapter 3 of The Frozen Kingdom has been updated following playtesting.

Download
Chapter 3 - The Girl from the Glacier: Google Doc | PDF
The Frozen Kingdom Bestiary: Google Doc | PDF

Changes to this chapter were relatively light and focused on clarifying some of the exposition and balance changes to the two skill challenges presented in this episode. Most notably players with middling investigation skills are more likely to get information that is potentially incorrect rather than no information at all during the search of the city skill challenge.

The Frozen Kingdom Chapters

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Thursday, June 9, 2016

The Frozen Kingdom, Chapter 5

Chapter 5 of The Frozen Kingdom is now available for preview.

I had to split the dungeon experience from Chapter 4 into two pieces to follow my length guideline. Chapter 5 continues where we left off with the search for Välásir’s hidden library.

Download 

Chapter 5 - Archives: Google Doc | PDF
The Frozen Kingdom Bestiary: Google Doc | PDF

This chapter's dungeon is slightly less puzzle-focused and features some non-combat encounters for players to work through.

Level 3 characters. Estimated playing time: 2 hours.

The Frozen Kingdom Chapters

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Thursday, May 19, 2016

The Frozen Kingdom, Chapter 4



Chapter 4 of The Frozen Kingdom is now available for preview.

That's probably it for May updates. In June I expect to have Chapter 3 updates and Chapter 5 out for preview.

Download 

Chapter 4 - Välásir: Google Doc | PDF
The Frozen Kingdom Bestiary: Google Doc | PDF

This chapter delves into a bit more of the mythology of the world and begins to set up the main adventure arc. The players must find a clue towards what Zerith Amastatica is looking for hidden deep beneath the city of Sylridian.

This chapter features a medium-sized puzzle dungeon and encounters with new and familiar enemies.

Level 3 characters. Estimated playing time: 2 hours.

The Frozen Kingdom Chapters

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Saturday, May 14, 2016

Chapter 2 Updates


Following playtesting this weekend, Chapter 2 of The Frozen Kingdom has been updated.

Download Chapter 2 - Dragon's Teeth: Google Doc | PDF
The Frozen Kingdom Bestiary: Google Doc | PDF

There were only a few changes for clarity and some minor editing this time around since this module overlaps with Chapter 1 a fair bit.

One clear piece of feedback received was that it is too similar to chapter 1 in terms of setting and encounters. Without giving too much away, most of the similarity was intentional and logical. Nevertheless if this feedback is repeated I will re-tool parts to make it a more unique experience.

Another piece of feedback was that Bottle Knight fights weren't interesting enough after the nerf. In response to that I've changed them yet again. They now have a battlefield control ability - leaving puddles of acid around after missed acid shots and AoE spray attacks. This is balanced out by the puddle only doing damage if a player walks into it or ends their turn in that space, to give creatures already hit by the AoE a chance to move and avoid extra damage. Additional testing will be required to see if this makes the encounter more "interesting" in a way that is fair but challenging.

Playing time came in just under 3 hours for a party of 5 with some inexperienced players a lot of table chatter. More focused and experienced groups could probably do it in 2. For such groups I recommend playing chapters 1 and 2 back-to-back as they together comprise most of the "introduction" part of this story.

The Frozen Kingdom Chapters

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Sunday, April 17, 2016

Frozen Kingdom Chapter 1 Updates

Following a playtest this weekend I've updated The Frozen Kingdom chapter 1.

Notable changes include:
  • Removed irrelevant section about the Sylridian Helix that doesn't have any importance until Chapter 3 and is repeated there anyways
  • Clarified wording in Taneth's quest speech
  • Added description of Bottle Knight defensive tactics
Bestiary changes include:
  • Nerfed Bottle Knight damage output
  • Changed Bottle Knight abilities because they were too similar to Ice Mephits already encountered in Ch.1
Updated documents can be downloaded here:

Chapter 1 - Mog the Missing: Google Doc | PDF
The Frozen Kingdom Bestiary: Google Doc | PDF

The Frozen Kingdom Chapters

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Tuesday, April 12, 2016

The Frozen Kingdom, Chapter 3

As promised, it's done early!
Module 3 of The Frozen Kingdom is now available for playtest.

This one is different from the first two in a few important ways: First off, it's much heavier on narrative and exposition as it expands upon events from the first two chapters. Second, it takes place entirely within Sylridian at various locations in the city. Lastly, it contains a couple skill-challenge encounters as well as traditional combat. I guess what I'm saying is, "roleplayers and skillmonkeys, this one's for you."

I said this one would be short like chapter 2 but it's actually the longest by page-count. Go figure.

#3 The Girl from the Glacier (CR 2)

Google Doc | PDF

The Bestiary has been updated with monsters from this episode:
Google Doc | PDF

The Frozen Kingdom Chapters

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Friday, April 1, 2016

The Frozen Kingdom, Chapter 2

The second module of my new campaign for 5th Edition is now complete and ready to playtest.

This one is kinda short but it contains one of the pivotal RP moments from the story. Episode 3 is also a short-ish RP focused module which I'm already off to a good start on so it will probably be done ahead of schedule.

The Frozen Kingdom Ch. 2 - Dragon's Teeth (CR 2)

 The Bestiary has been updated with monsters from this episode:

The Frozen Kingdom Chapters

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Thursday, March 17, 2016

The Frozen Kingdom, Chapter 1

The first chapter of my new adventure for 5th Edition is now complete and ready to playtest. When I played this with a test group it was about 2 hours long. My goal is for each chapter to be 2-3 hours in length.

I hope to crank these out once per month but we'll see how that goes with testing and revision work.

The Frozen Kingdom Ch. 1 - Mog the Missing (CR 1)

The Frozen Kingdom - Bestiary

The Frozen Kingdom Chapters

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Tuesday, March 8, 2016

Updated map of Teredahar






Writing new modules got me in the mood to make a new map. This is an update and colourization of the previous hand-drawn map. I've drawn colour maps of Teredahar before but this is by far the best-looking. Details are sparse in this version but it's drawn at very high resolution so I can zoom in for locality maps and add detail as necessary, keeping in mind the rule of Conservation of Detail.

The scale has dramatically changed from the previous map in order to put locations at more Earth-like latitudes for their given climate. At the new (and hopefully final) scale Teredahar is about 2/3 the area of North America. It's 2000 miles as the crow flies from Sylridian to Kivan Torrat and the continent is 3000 miles east to west at its widest. That's nearly triple what it was before but properly scaled for an Earth-sized planet. As always, this scale is purely for aesthetics.
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Monday, February 29, 2016

5th Edition updates and more modules are coming

After a year on ice I've gotten some of my writing initiative back. Hurray. 

Now that 5E is OGL I'll be updating the license text for Teredahar and adding 5E stat blocks alongside the Pathfinder stat blocks where applicable.

I've also begun work on porting one of my personal Teredahar campaigns into proper modules for 5E. This will be about 10 episodes long. I've got no release schedule yet but I'm aiming for one a month.
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Monday, March 30, 2015

Blog is on hold

I've got an active campaign on the go. I'll write more here next time I'm on break.
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Friday, March 27, 2015

Teredahar History & Mythology: The Conquest

(Rob: I'd like to point out that 2015 had two Friday the 13ths in a row. Neat.)

The Conquest was a series of wars fought between the Legion Drakoni and the Empire of Tan'Rar. In only 20 years the Drakoni armies were able to surge outwards from their island homeland and, through a combination of superior weaponry and tactics, bring the Empire to its knees. I'm going to focus on how they were able to do this and a few key events that made it possible.

After the Age of Settlers

The Age of Settlers was a great and prosperous time for Tan'Rar. The Spellweavers had successfully conjured the entire continent of Teredahar for the Empire to claim. Cities were being founded, resources discovered, and trade routes established to bring those resources back to fuel Tan'Rar's industries. This rapid expansion had a major drawback, however: defense.

Tan'Rar established a second capitol in the region called Tannock in Teredahar's north. Between the two capitols the Empire was able to effectively govern but not control Teredahar's massive territory. The Drakoni saw this weakness and used it to great advantage. When their airships first arrived in the skies of what would become Kurudar in TR 6183 they were met with only token resistance as the Elvish forces were too spread out to challenge them.

Invasion

Since their last war both the Elves and Drakoni knew the advantage of airships in battle, but whereas the Elves development focused on mounting ever-more-numerous guns and carrying increasingly large cargoes to and from the new continent, the Drakoni built lightly-armed carrier ships and invented boarding tactics taking advantage of their natural ability to fly (called "dragon drop" by the elves). Their fast, agile airships allowed them to easily capture defending Elvish ships, deploy rapidly, and keep their supply lines moving.

As the Drakoni gained territory they would enslave the local peasantry to produce food and materiel for their armies under threat of starvation. The Drakoni also used slave labour to construct several keeps, airship facilities, and engineering projects throughout their occupation of Tan'Rar. By winter of TR 6188 the Drakioni controlled all of southern and western Teredahar and were closing around Syldar and Tannock, both regions now cut off from supplies coming from Loraida.

The Legion Drakoni quickly conquered the remaining large settlements in Syldar in the spring of TR 6189, the northern capitol region of Tannock was much better defended. The Tannock Shield Mountains are high enough to be nigh-impenetrable by airship and the climate of Tannock is much colder than the cold-blooded Drakoni were used to dealing with. Instead of sweeping through Tannock as they had the rest of Teredahar, they were forced to lay siege to Elvish strongholds guarding the passes through the mountains.

Counterattack

During the invasion of Teredahar the Empire kept a sizable portion of its navy and airship fleet around Loraida to defend the homeland. Several small incursions were successfully repelled but the Legion seemed to be fully occupied with conquering Teredahar and showed little sign of desiring to invade Loraida as well.

In Spring 6189 with seemingly the full force of the Legion occupied holding territory in Teredahar, the generals commanding Loraida's forces planned a decapitation strike: They would bring as large a force as they could as quickly as they could to the Drakoni home islands, capture their cities, kill their leaders, and force them to withdraw from Teredahar.

A force of fifty ships and a dozen airships were mustered from Loraida's defenders. Under the command of General Näsir they voyaged into the uncharted waters where the Drakoni home islands were known to rest. No Elvish ship had ever traveled into this region and returned; a record that would remain unbroken for centuries more.

Notes released later by the Drakoni ruling council recount that due to Drakoni universal conscription and the widespread arming of populations throughout their home territory, the Elves were never able to hold a safe port for very long before being driven out by well-trained and -armed local militias. The Elvish fleet survived for five months harrying Drakoni coastal cities with hit-and-run tactics until the need for supplies and continuous damage to their ships forced them to attempt a retreat. By that time it was early fall and an ocean storm is believed to have destroyed what remained of the fleet.

Catastrophe

The failed counterattack drew the focus of the Legion down upon Loraida, where it fell like a hammer. Few records exist of what happened next, but it is known that in mid-autumn an immense force of Drakoni and even Dragons themselves descended upon Loraida bent on wiping Tan'Rar out as they had failed to do ages before. Survivors tell of fire falling from great black storm-clouds and sundering the great stone towers at Rakos Bridge, black-armored Drakoni death-squads dropping from airships and massacring entire villages, and great red Dragons burning acres of countryside to ash. When it was all over, Loraida was completely depopulated and the continent that once cradled  the weary Elvish race now holds nothing but ruins.

The capture of Tannock in 6191 and the utter destruction of cities on Loraida ended the Empire of Tan'Rar. The Elves would suffer under Drakoni rule for nearly 200 years before seeing freedom.

Gameplay Notes

  • Teredahar is dotted with numerous small built by Elves or Drakoni during the fight for Teredahar. 
  • Ancient battlefields and relics of the war are numerous.  
  • The entire continent of Loraida (South of Teredahar) is full of bones and ruins. The Ashram Academy has a permanent expedition there constantly bringing back interesting trinkets.

Next Week

Next week we'll have some lighter fare and talk about an unambiguously-good (something rare if you're paying attention) faction: The Wayfarer Guides.
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Friday, March 20, 2015

Cities In-Depth: Sylridian, Syldar

Sylridian is the wealthiest and most influential city in Teredahar. It is a bustling metropolis of over 85,000 people; the second most populous city after Kivan Torrat, Kurudar. It is the capitol of Syldar, the home of the Ashram Academy, and the main staging area for armies heading to fight on the shards.

Location

Sylridian sits on the North bank of the Stone River where it meets the Sea of Rime. The area is overwhelmingly flat and mostly consists of dried marshes and flood plains. A scant 60 miles North of the city the flat terrain is abruptly broken by the Tannock Shield Mountains and the Tannock Glacier beyond.

Being so close to the sea, the climate of Sylridian is much more hospitable than surrounding areas. Much of northern Syldar is cold and dry grasslands and desert verging on tundra. The area around Sylridian, however, is cold and temperate (rather like central parts of Canada). Winter in the city is long and snowy, and summers are cool and short. Spring flooding affects much of the surrounding countryside but is kept in check within the city by an extensive network of underground cisterns and waterways.

Layout

Sylridian has been sacked, flooded, expanded, invaded, and rebuilt several times and by several different cultures throughout its long history. This evolution has given the city a very disjointed layout, but some district lines are clearly identifiable:
  • Commerce and trade are focused in the city's southeast, near the main gate and the harbour and around the Old Castle. 
  • The Ashram Academy's Sylridian campus (sometimes called the "Civilian Campus") occupies several blocks in the northeast, and many of the blocks around that house its staff and students. 
  • Sylridian's capitol building, The Hall of Voices, stands in the centre of the city's eastern half. It's surrounded by various guild offices, embassies, and international banks. 
  • Several large places of worship are clustered together on a small rise called Temple Hill in the central north district. 
  • The city's former western wall divides the city into "old" and "new" halves. Many of the city's poorer inhabitants live in the new half. 
  • On the city's extreme western edge stands a modest army base.
  • Finally, outside of the city's northwestern gate is a large field used for parking airships and occasionally as a carnival ground. 
Sylridian, Syldar

Architecture

Due to the city's long history, several architectural styles tend to overlap within the city. Three main styles are common: Late imperial elvish tower-houses, modern half-timber, and monolithic burtalism.


Elvish Tower-Houses

These are easily spotted on the map where they look like collections of linked circles. Elvish tower-houses are groups of tall, thin spires linked by bridges. Often these towers are 4 or 5 stories tall and built from stone blocks and timber. Each floor of each tower is often a single room. Rooms are connected by curves stairs or bridges between towers. Usually the lowest floors are used for storage and living quarters are on the upper floors. Supposedly these abodes were designed in Tan'Rar to be built in spaces between trees so that the inhabitants could live in a modern structure while still enjoying nature. Commonly houses of this style will have 2 or 3 towers, while the largest mansions may have 7 towers or more. Living in a tower-house is a sign of status only upper-class Elves can afford.

Half-Timber

Much of the common building stock in Sylridian is of this style: a stone lower floor supporting a timber-framed upper floor with masonry filling in-between. Older buildings in this style have cobblestone for their lower floors while newer ones use fitted blocks of stone brought from other regions.

Monolithic Britalism

Many of the Ashram Academy's buildings and the government's offices (including the Hall of Voices itself) are built in this style. These buildings are often enormous edifices built of fine imported stone. Their shape is chosen to reflect their function. A fine example is the five-towered library building on the Academy campus. Each of the five towers houses a library focused on a different discipline. The building's odd shape has led students to name it "the pipe organ".


Politics

Sylridian is home to the government of Syldar but the city itself is governed by a ruling council with 20 elected members. Law and order is maintained by the City Guard, a civilian policing force. Sylridian's City Guard has more mages in its ranks than any other city's defense force.

Stat Block (Pathfinder)

Sylridian, Syldar
NG Metropolis
Corruption +3; Crime +4; Economy +7, Law +3, Lore +5, Society +8
Qualities magical, academic, well-educated, financial centre, guilds, magically attuned
Danger +10

Demographics

Government Council
Population 86,000 (52% Syldarri(Elves), 25% Humans, 8% Drakoni, 6% Plains Dwarves, 4% Kurudari(Halflings), 5% Other Races)

Notable NPCs

The Lords Magisters, rulers of Syldar
Alar Therassan, King of Syldar (male, elf (highborn), NG, Wizard 10 / Aristocrat 5, age 311)
Valasir Amastatica, Regend-in-Exile of Tan’Rar (male, elf (highborn), CG, Aristocrat 6, age 116)
Hasan Al-Fadir, Prime Minister of Guilds (male, elf (syldarri), NG, Expert 8 / Aristocrat 5, age 202)
Ashelia Valar, Headmistress of the Ashram Academy (female, elf (highborn), LN, Warmage 12 / Aristocrat 4, age 271)
Soveliss Oaken, Supreme Commander of Syldar’s Army (male, half-elf, LG, Fighter 13, age 70)
Other Notable NPCs
Owner of The Copper Roof Tavern Lia Stonepenny (female, half-elf, NG, Expert 6, age 79)
Guard Commander Akshay Al-Kord (male, elf (syldarri), LG, Fighter 9, age 57)

Marketplace

Base Value 19,200 gp; Purchase Limit 120,000 gp; Spellcasting divine 9th
Minor/Medium/Major items: any / 4d4 / 3d4

Next Time

Next week's article will be a History & Mythology article covering the Drakoni invasion of Tan’Rar’s holdings in Teredahar, a time known as The Conquest.
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Friday, March 13, 2015

Factions of Teredahar: The Wind People

The Wind People are a tribe of Human nomads who live at high elevations along The Torran Spine Mountains in central and eastern Teredahar. They're reclusive and don't seek out other groups except for a little bit of trade they do along Kurudar's northern border. They have left numerous walls, stairs, and simple bridges throughout the mountains but don't control any fixed territory except for a string of tiny mountain holdfasts they only use during winter. Like most nomadic peoples, they herd animals rather than farming. Many get around simply by walking but some families have salvaged or been gifted retired airships which they have learned to maintain and operate as a much faster means of getting around in the lower mountain passes.

Description

For this group's subrace stats, see Races of Teredahar - Humans. 

Wind People and their descendents are often shorter than average; most are less than five and a half feet tall. They have copper-coloured skin and black hair. Their eyes are often very dark brown, almost black in colour. A hard life of travel gives most wind people a lean, athletic build rather than muscular.

Wind people often shave their heads and have elaborate tattoos on their scalp, face, and elsewhere. These tattoos often incorporate geometric designs or abstract animal forms and include writing in the Wind People's own secret language. Psionic Wind People often weave power tattoos (Pathfinder SRD) into these designs to hide them from casual observers. Such tattoos require a special ink which they are skilled at making.

To better operate in the often-extremely-windy environments they live in, Wind People often wear tight, form-fitting clothes with little or no adornments that would flap or come loose in the wind. Often these clothes are made from animal hides and lined with fur for warmth.

Interaction

Travelers in Teredahar may encounter lone descendents of the Wind People among the crew of large airships, sailing vessels, or desert caravans. Wanderlust runs very strong and they are unlikely to settle down in cities or towns.

One particularly large family of Wind People operate a traveling trading post in an old Drakoni assault carrier called the "Enduring Dominion" (Drakoni: Eskavok Taldeéthun). The Dominion visits each of the major cities of Teredahar twice per year bringing loads of exotic goods for trade. For many common folk this is the only time they can see Wind People and the ships' arrival is often integrated into a local carnival or festivity.

The Wind People are the only community of psionic Humans on Teredahar. This unique way of manipulating magic is a closely-guarded secret. They do not overtly use this power or demonstrate it for anyone. They have been known to adopt and train psionically-gifted individuals (even of other races) into their culture if such an individual is exiled from his or her own culture. Joining the Wind People means fully accepting their culture, traditions, and lifestyle for life.

Next Week

Next week will be a Cities article going into some of the details of the largest, most influential, and second-most-populous city in Teredahar: Sylridian, Syldar.
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