As there is very little published for 15th level characters in the River Kingdoms area of Golarion and since one of our characters wanted to "push east" to create a holding on the Castrovin Sea I decided to run with that plot line. The map for this area is based on the maps I made last summer.
When designing that map, I just extended the local topography down, allowing mountain chains to trail off and taking what few cues I had from existing sources. That was the easy part. The hard part was coming up with a history and explanation for why this area was never settled. In my opinion, the closeness of a navigable trade route to Casmaron should make that area very popular. So, something must have happened.
In the end, I decided that this once was a settled area. A thousand years before, on the eve of the first, great Kelesh - Taldor conflict, the Taldanes settled this area as their newest prefecture, Eastsea. The goal was to put a permanent Taldane settlement on the Castrovin Sea. But something terrible, terrible happened. Something so awful that sailors and Iobarians avoid this place completely and memory of it has almost been completely wiped from all of Avistan...
So, without further adieu, here is Eastsea as it appeared on the eve of its destruction (as researched by one of the party).
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| The Prefecture of Eastsea - as a PC handout. |
But WHAT happened?
ReplyDeleteI still say there's just way too much land where you say there's land. And that there should probably be more mountains. Ah well, Paizo's fault for basically not even bothering with the area - the size discrepencies with the published materials was already covered, you this is basically as good as anything you'd get.
Still following this by the way.
Hey CommandoDude!
ReplyDeleteSorry I haven't been publishing. Two things got in the way. One - I ran the party through the module I created to go with the map, so I was spending my free time on that rather than this blog. Two - we decided that this summer would be a good time to move house. So, I've been working on that.
The executive summary of what happened is that one of the evil gods of Golarion (Ghlaunder) put into play a plot to seriously damage all of Avistan and beyond. Ghlaunder did not create the devices for the plot - she just used items that had been abandoned there millenia before. The immediate plot was foiled by the prefecture of Eastsea, but at the cost of the prefecture and its inhabitants. Since then, its been a place shunned by the living. Nothing lives in the prefecture, save for some stunted brown grass. The whole land is blighted, deathly quiet and avoided. The Centaurs speak of a winter that refused to end, of the disappearance of any of their kind that ventured far enough south. The same goes for the people of Vladmirr, who tell of black smoke that rose from those lands almost a thousand years before, in the summer before the great war between Taldor and Qadira. They also speak of occasional adventurers who tried to sneak into those lands to plunder its secrets. Those that returned suffered from a wasting sickness and a hunger for mortal flesh...