Four small Polities for Yrth.

[combatmedic]

Those are all good ideas about oceanic travel hazards, guys.

Caithlos looks very cool. The bicycles are a great touch! That's the sort of low impact tecnology I could see slipping through the cracks on Yrth. I imagine these bikes are handmade- yes?

Caithlos= Caithness + Megalos, right? I'd probably give this country a different name, but that's no biggie.

[DoctorRomulus]

Originally Posted by combatmedic

Caithlos= Caithness + Megalos, right? I'd probably give this country a different name, but that's no biggie.

Loscaith? :P

[Hans Rancke-Madsen]

Originally Posted by DoctorRomulus

Loscaith? :P

Meganess?


Hans

[Mysterious Dark Lord v3.2]

Originally Posted by combatmedic

Caithlos looks very cool.

Much thanks.

The bicycles are a great touch! That's the sort of low impact tecnology I could see slipping through the cracks on Yrth. I imagine these bikes are handmade- yes?

I imagine so - TL 3 isn't big on robotic production lines for some reason.

The name was pulled out of a hat, with the proviso of an "-os" ending (I like the sound of natives called "-osi"). If you use it, feel free to modify.

As for the "Why hasn't anyone circumnavigated Yrth yet?" discussion, I think that's obvious. They sailed off the edge of the world and were eaten by the giant elephants.

[Mgellis]

I confess I am not too keen on the idea that no one has ANY idea what is on the other side of Yrth. After a thousand years of humans, including people of Norse descent? After five hundred years of people showing up from Europe when folks know there are "New Worlds" that might be out there?

I could see fifty years passing and no one finding anything, assuming that something was out there to find. But five hundred years?

The problem is not that it couldn't happen. This is Yrth. Anything could happen. But it's not good storytelling. It stretches credibility too far.

So...what's out there? Here's my idea...

The oceans of Yrth are mostly empty. The reason no one has found anything in all these centuries is simply that there is not much out there. Except for storms. And tremendous sea monsters. And perhaps strange undersea folk. Probably some small islands where a ship could get food and water, but probably uninhabited...except for the hitherto unknown island-dwelling monsters.

But the oceans are also a shiftrealm. The rumors of other continents, but continents that cannot be reliably rediscovered by later explorers, are not false, but those continents aren't really on Yrth. They're...somewhere else, somewhere that can only be reached by the right people at the right time. And once you're there, sometimes you can't get back...

(The advantage of doing this is basically having your cake and eating it, too. You can give more lands to Yrth without doing violence to the setting, unbalancing things, throwing off the "meta-history," etc. because while one can adventure in these places, they will never be able to affect Ytarria, or vice versa, in any significant way. And you could also use this as a way to get people back to Earth, etc...you might not be able to get back to Earth from Yrth, but perhaps you can do it from one of those other dimensions. Now all you have to do is get to one of them.)

Mark

[Captain-Captain]

Originally Posted by combatmedic

Hostile merfolk with really big augers?

Nah, it's the work of the deadly sawtoothed termitahnas... who are so tough they don't need to be in fresh water!

[combatmedic]

Originally Posted by Captain-Captain

Nah, it's the work of the deadly sawtoothed termitahnas... who are so tough they don't need to be in fresh water!

ahaha! Old school D&D has water-termites- BIG water termites.

[LoneWolf23k]

Originally Posted by Mgellis

I confess I am not too keen on the idea that no one has ANY idea what is on the other side of Yrth. After a thousand years of humans, including people of Norse descent? After five hundred years of people showing up from Europe when folks know there are "New Worlds" that might be out there?

I could see fifty years passing and no one finding anything, assuming that something was out there to find. But five hundred years?

The problem is not that it couldn't happen. This is Yrth. Anything could happen. But it's not good storytelling. It stretches credibility too far.

So...what's out there? Here's my idea...
[snip]

Interesting, and I could understand using the "Shiftrealm" explanation for a few Islands, but not for everything. There should be a few stable landmasses out in the oceans of Yrth. I think there are a lot of alternate explanations as to why little exploration has been done into the deeper oceans: Sea Monsters, Mana Shift Zones, the Maelstrom (and possibly others like it)...

[Dalillama]

Originally Posted by LoneWolf23k

Interesting, and I could understand using the "Shiftrealm" explanation for a few Islands, but not for everything. There should be a few stable landmasses out in the oceans of Yrth. I think there are a lot of alternate explanations as to why little exploration has been done into the deeper oceans: Sea Monsters, Mana Shift Zones, the Maelstrom (and possibly others like it)...

Perhaps there's a type of coral that has evolved to suppress mana in its area, due to the presence of hazardous-to-coral mana dependent sea monsters (Maybe island turtles, which eat coral larvae (or whatever immature coral are called)). So you have low-mana areas where they come near the surface, and very low/no mana areas where it forms atolls, and in the near by area. If you combine that with something that eats ships, deep ocean travel would be an unpleasant prospect to say the least.

[Captain-Captain]

Originally Posted by LoneWolf23k

Interesting, and I could understand using the "Shiftrealm" explanation for a few Islands, but not for everything. There should be a few stable landmasses out in the oceans of Yrth. I think there are a lot of alternate explanations as to why little exploration has been done into the deeper oceans: Sea Monsters, Mana Shift Zones, the Maelstrom (and possibly others like it)...

I take centuries of getting that 'nothing found/didn't return' result as evidence something out there IS stopping explorers who sail into the sunset. Unfortunately since IW is there we have to rule out that the ships sailed off of the edge... ;)