Oh Hi!

Okay, I've been worldbuilding again: Fantasy this time, instead of Sci Fi; Tunnels & Trolls instead of Traveller. I'm starting with the BIG map, then drilling down: starting with the biggest picture I'm prepared to contend with, knowing I'd never ever use all of it, so that when I do detail I can have it be in context.

The whole world is Ardis.

The year is 1520.

And here's the world map, circa 1482: 

I'll post a bigger one later.

The known world is BIG: almost three thousand leagues wide, a bit larger than Eurasia. For some fantasy perspective: I've just been rereading Fellowship of the Ring, and the distance from Caradhras in the Misty Mountains to Mordor is about three hundred leagues. So I'm figuring the largest practical adventuring setting is liable to be about four or five hundred leagues in breadth, about the size of Western Europe, or India - and generally speaking, only a small part of THAT will ever have to be shown in detail.

I'm leaning towards two settings, here. There's a mountain range right in the middle of the map. I haven't named them yet - for now I'll call them the Dwarf Mountains, because I know that once there was a dwarf-kingdom there, and in antiquity it was destroyed and scattered. Their tunnelings have since been taken over by goblins and other nasties. So I want to stay close to those!

Just south of the mountains are the kingdoms of Khurasan and Angapam; rough analogs to Persia and the Mogul empire. That, in Ardis, is CIVILIZATION. The most cosmopolitan cities are along the coast of the Inner Sea, in the south. The northern reaches, in the foothills of the Dwarf Mountains, are more hinterlandish, and good adventure fodder. So that's one choice.

The other region that's attractive is Vladria, to the northeast of the Dwarf Mountains. Further east are the Trollstep mountains (full of monsters, good adventuring.) To the north are berserker tribes (good adventuring.) And to the west is a great huge forbidding forest (more good adventuring.) I'm picturing Vladria being heavily forested and broken by high hills and low mountains - not good for big kingdoms, but favorable for lots of little baronies.  And THAT'S good adventuring. So I'll think about both.

There's a lot of the game, at its root, that is based on Tolkien, and it's hard to get away from that. Elves, Dwarves, Hobbits all exist in T&T and all owe much to J.R.R.. Some of that I'll keep, simply because so much of what makes these critters is dependent on what's gone before.  But I'll try to recontextualize that stuff.

I'm going to try to incorporate a certain amount of the wackiness that's part of T&T's charm, but that's liable to be down on the very micro level: the broad context doesn't need to be silly - at least, no more silly than the whole RPG thing is in the first place. 

So, welcome to Ardis.