[-] chaogomu@ttrpg.network 1 points 4 days ago

As a thought for clarifying things. The shifting caves are via earthquakes, cave ins, and tunnels that collapse into others.

This is much less likely to happen to caravan routes, mostly for narrative reasons.

Infinite ever shifting caves are incredibly useful to the story, being constantly lost is not. Not unless that is the story, and it should be the players who decide that.

If only through a botched roll.

[-] chaogomu@ttrpg.network 1 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

Maps work by showing which turns to take, and importantly the distance between the turns, with guides on where the scouts should step. Think of it as a list of vectors and distances.

Paths may not be stable, but if you follow a guide (either a map or markings/spore trails) you should come out of the rock face roughly where you'd expect to.

Take a wrong turn, or walk around the wrong side of a cavern, and you lose the trail. Even with a map, there's a chance of losing the trail, at which point you either have to backtrack, or start exploring randomly. This should be a result of the Scout's tracking and or navigational skills.

Basically, this is so that players have a degree of agency in their cave diving. It's their rolls that see them safe, not GM rolls. (GM rolls are for encounters in the caves, things that might also be traveling those infinite paths)

[-] chaogomu@ttrpg.network 1 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

Leaving markings is part of what stabilizes the route, footprints and otherwise. You could magically remove such traces and no one would be able to follow the path.

This also implies, correctly that you could use stealth, careful foot placement, or otherwise to avoid leaving a trail at all. You'd still leave body heat in the air as you pass, but with magic, you could even clear that away. At which point, someone would likely need to be within visual distance to follow, otherwise at the first branching, they'd have at best a 50% of following you.

Edit; Thinking about well traveled caravan routes, they would be very difficult to disrupt. Any caravan that regularly runs that route would have it mapped, Which requires some creative mapping, but can be done. Which leads to people finding maps to all sorts of goodies in the caves.

3

While the caves are non-Euclidean and infinite, any given path once traversed, is stable for 1d6 days, with modifiers based on the number of people traveling said path, and any markings they leave.

This means that if something nasty crawls out of a monster nest deep in the caves, there's a good chance that its friends can follow. Conversely, an adventuring party can delve the deeps, follow the spore trails, and clear out the danger before more makes its way to the surface.

This stability, coupled with the fact that any cave diver is likely to return to their home canyon (if they survive the depths) means that a secondary form of adventure is available. Trailblazing new trade routes.

The normal method is to simply enter a cave, take the first turn available, and then make your way back to the surface, then use the sun and stars to see how where you are North to South. Then repeat until you have a useful trade route.

Most useful trade routes have 3d6 stops above ground. Finding a faster, more direct route, can lead to riches.

[-] chaogomu@ttrpg.network 1 points 6 days ago

As a note here, the winds next to a cliff are treacherous at best. Up drafts, downdrafts, and extreme lateral forces.

This generally limits travel by airship to a single terrace at a time, but clever and skilled pilots can overcome these issues, provided their airship is suitably reinforced.

5

The simple answer to the question of weather is, that it's whatever the story requires.

The long answer is that water vapor rises from the center of the Low Sea, but it only reliably fills the lower terraces.

This means that the Low Sea and Green Hell are both inundated with water, but the Emerald Hills and upward are not.

For the Emerald Hills, the Arid Steppe, and the Frozen Wastes, the prevailing winds alternate between day and night. Daytime winds blow from the Low Sea outward, while nighttime winds blow from the Frozen Wastes inward.

Summer and winter have the effect of lengthening the day/night cycle, and thus the giving more variation to the temperatures.

Another factor is the North/South winds, the Northern and Southern latitudes can see wet air traveling to the poles, and then back toward the equator, but much colder and following the upper terraces. This can lead to some intense winter storms.

And also some intense summer storms as well.

The only area spared is the equator, which gets monsoons in the spring and fall. Pouring rain, but little in the way of severe weather systems.

The Frozen Wastes are less frozen at the equator, and the Green Hell actually extends into the Emerald Hills.

[-] chaogomu@ttrpg.network 2 points 1 week ago

I have heard tale of a legendary battle where there was enough dakka, but I don't believe it.

2

The City of Whitefall takes its name from the WhiteFall river, whose headwaters are found in the Frozen Wastes, 1-W-41N-5.

A somewhat unique magic infuses the lands around the Whitefall, allowing a hardy species of cottonwood tree to grow along the river's flood plane.

The average fully grown Whitefall Cottonwood tree produces close to 250kg of cotton each Autumn. This sets off a yearly race to harvest the white gold before it can begin to decompose.

The spinning and weaving factories of the City use the flow of the Whitefall river to produce finished cloth, most of which is transported down the cliff face to the lower city (1-W-40N-3), where it is then loaded into caravans to be sold across the world.

The City boasts a pair of great elevators, each having dozens of platforms in near constant movement. The near constant is accomplished with a cleaver use of clockwork. This allows the passenger elevator to have a one-minute stop at each platform, and the freight elevator a ten-minute stop.

The elevators run day and night, with the infrastructure responsible for their operation taking up several kilometers of the cliff both at the top and base.

There are also maintenance stairways bolted to the cliff face, making the 4km climb.


The city of Whitefall is ruled by a coalition of merchant houses, Their true names have been lost to time, and are now just named for their colors. Members of each house and their employees all wear tunics and capes dyed in the color of their house.

The Main players are the Families Black, Red, and Green. These houses exist in a perpetual state of competition, which can at times turn violent, even as the heads of the houses themselves are friendly with each other.

There are several lesser houses, and the unofficial house of the poor workers, the White.

The current lord of the Upper City is a man named Erik Black.

Erik is a deadly duelist, and one of the most competent administrators to ever rule the city. He also has infamously bad luck at any game of chance. He has been tested repeatedly for supernatural influences, including by three separate gods, and yet the bad luck persists with no known source.

Erik Black is often found at his favorite Tavern, a gambling den run by House Green. If you meet him in a game of chance, you may be slightly disappointed to learn that he only bets pocket change. The exception is when he wagers the title of city lord, this is the one time of bet that Erik Black has never lost, despite the number of times he's attempted it.


The Houses' main responsibilities are as such.

House Black mostly provides security, policing, and caravan guards.

House Green, based primarily in the Lower City (with several Upper City establishments) handles foodstuffs. They have farms, groceries, and taverns.

House Red maintains the machinery that is the lifeblood of Whitefall. They built the Great Elevators, and own most of the spinning and weaving factories of the Upper City.

Notable lesser houses.

House Blue tends to handle messenger and scribe services, and they maintain a large library in the Lower City.

House Saffron tends to the gods.

The unofficial "Houses" are the Whtie, which is most of the everyday workers, who are expected to keep their clothing a pristine white, and the final unofficial House, the Gray.

The Gray are those too poor to regularly wash their clothes, which then pick up filth and muck which then "dyes" their once pristine clothing various shades of gray.

The Gray are the poor, the beggars and the sometimes thieves, with constant rumors of a more organized structure hidden within the sorry masses. This is generally false, the Thieves' guild operates in the White.

2

To make things easier for mapmakers and content creators, and as a tool for players to know the world. Any post talking about a specific location should have a number code formatted as follows;

First is the Canyon Number. This is an arbitrary number from 1 to 40, but theoretically could go higher if people are interested.

Then a dash, for readability, then either E or W for the East and West slopes, again a dash, then the rough Latatude, and finally after another dash, the Terrace, either the common name, or the terrace number (Low Sea, and Shore are 1, the Green Hell 2, Emerald Hills 3, Arid Steppe 4, Frozen Wastes 5, and anything cave related uses the closest entrance, but includes a C at the end of the code.

Thus, the City of WhiteFall would be 1-W-40N-4

Or 40 degrees north on the Arid Terrace of the western slope of Canyon 1.

This will give a roughly 100km x 100km area for the location being talked about, which is plenty of space for a small kingdom.

Caves accessible from WhiteFall's area of influence would be written as 1-W-40N-4C


However, the City of WhiteFall is special in that it actually has a pair of great elevators, powered by the Whitefall river, and thus WhiteFall has a Lower City, located at 1-W-40N-3, with the corresponding caves 1-W-40N-3C.

[-] chaogomu@ttrpg.network 1 points 1 week ago

Fun fact, the horizon on Earth is easily calculated as the square root of your height in meters, multiplied by 13.

Standing at the water's edge of the Low Shore, you'll never see the Horizon, it's covered by clouds and rain... But it would be a hair less than 5km for the average sized adult human.

Standing on the edge of the Green Hell terrace and looking out, The Horizon is 161km out, which is not far enough to see the opposite shore line, but the Horizon is again blocked by clouds and rain, particularly the cloud wall at 100km out.

Standing on the edge of the Emerald Hills Terrace, the horizon is roughly 280km out, once again in the Low Sea.

From the Arid Steppe it's 360km out, once again in that same region of the Low Sea.

From the Frozen Wastes, the Horizon is roughly 430km out, which puts it in the Low Sea.

And Finally, if you could stand on the Airless Wastes, the Horizon would be just over 500km out, nearly at the center of the Low Sea, but still just barely blocked by the Cloud Wall, just like every Terrace below.

[-] chaogomu@ttrpg.network 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

That's why I'm putting it together.

I'll have more posts on the History, and Religions, and then move on to the various Sentient Races. Then I'll start doing Kingdom Maps.

For a spoiler of each;

the History goes back to the earliest settlers coming out of the walls, no races are known to be native to the Canyonlands.

The gods of the Canyonlands are all Ascended Mortals. These gods often rule a territory or maybe even just a single city, within their domain, they are extremely powerful, but are no more knowledgeable about the world or its past than anyone else. There are powerful deities, known up and down the canyon, and none of them know more about the world than the average scholar.

As to Sentient Races, aside from Humans, and every flavor of Elf, Dwarf, Orc, etc., there are also Crab People who are in a constant war against the things that lurk below.

There are tiny communities of every race you want in your world, but humans outnumber everyone else several times over.

[-] chaogomu@ttrpg.network 2 points 1 week ago

As a note here, 1000km is the distance between New York City and Indianapolis, or Paris and Vienna.

This means that the world holds as many as 40 Canyons. Some of these Canyons will be at different tech levels, and have slightly different magic density. The Structure, however, is identical between all Canyons.

Travel between different Canyons is normally impossible. The top of each Canyon is an airless, and magicless void. While caves into the walls are non-Euclidean. There are some notable Trade routes carved into the walls, tunnels that reliably connect different cities, but most of the tunnels will loop back into the same Canyon, albeit in a random location relative to the start.

It's said that the caves have an infinite depth, and yet somewhere, somehow, they connect to anywhere. The trick is in finding the route.

Oddly, most of those who wander into a cave, come back out again in their Home Canyon, even if they somehow stumbled into another, The next time they enter the caves, they'll likely end up home, or at least somewhere in their home Canyon. Children born within the walls have the even greater ability to reliably find their home within the caves, with no more than a week of randomly wandering the caves.


This is purely a storytelling mechanic to allow a GM to let players play in different sandboxes, while still bringing them home at the end of the day.

6

The Canyon stretches north to south 20,000km, with a width of 1000km and a depth of 20km.

The Canyon exists on an Earth sized spherical world, but leaving the Canyon is quite impossible, as explained later.

At the center, is a 200km wide 2km deep sea that stretches the length of the Canyon from the frozen south to the frozen north. The Low Sea has a shore line that averages 1km wide before meeting a 2km cliff face. The Low Cliff. As the very center of the Low Sea is the cloud wall. An upwelling of warm fog that turns to clouds, that then move east or west as weather systems and storms.

There are sections of the Low Cliff that have sloughed into the sea, creating the Low Shore, and slopes up to the First Terrace, the Green Hell.

The Low Shore is dotted with cities, but since these cities almost never see the sun through the thick clouds and constant rain, they are not a popular place to live for most sentient races.

The Green Hell stretches 100km on either side of the Low Sea and is generally heavily forested. With Tropical Rainforests, Swamps, and deep dark woodlands further north and south. The weather is usually raining or snowing, depending on latitude. Strange magics cause the plants and beasts of this level to grow much larger than normal. The sun rarely peaks through the cloud cover.

A 4km tall cliff separates the First Terrace from the Second.

The Second Terrace, or the Emerald Hills, is mostly rolling hills and grasslands, with some light forests. It receives less rain than the First Terrace, but enough for crops and temperate forests to flourish. This is the level where most sentient species live.

Looking out from the Emerald Hills over the edge of the cliff, all you see is a rolling sea of clouds.

Moving outward and upward again is the Arid Steppe. This grass and scrubland is almost free of trees, and boasts year round sun.

100km inland and another 4km upward is the beginning of the Frozen wastes. Oddly, there are ancient evergreen forests dotted about.

And the final layer, if it can be called a layer at all, is the Airless Void. Nothing lives here, nothing can live here.


Forgive the rough map, it's just there to give a sense of structure.

chaogomu

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