Quote from: Spike;231707WHile it is certainly cool to name landmarks like rivers 'birth and death' or some other opposed pair, there would need to be some sort of cultural reason for them to adopt such names naturally.

Consider the role of flooding. Does 'Death' flood frequently and violently? Does Birth flood like the Nile, regularly and evenly, depositing rich soil for farming?

How far from the rivers is Kaddish? Most large cities would be close to the water due to the resources available, not limited to fish and rich farmlands, but including trade routes and so forth.

Kaddish is about half-way between them, about thirty kilometres from each (a little over a day's walk when the kingdom had roads). The area between them is a flat plain cut with rivers and lakes, and the city itself (if I can get my map scanned in) is near to a small lake and several tributaries that feed the city's canals and irrigate the surrounding land.

I'm tempted to come up with some reason that the B and D are so-named, but I think it would just end up sounding lame. They do dump their dead into the Death River, so that at least accounts for its name.

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;231657I'll try to get some scanned ASAP.

I appreciate it.

How are you collating all these lovely tidbits, Pseudo? Do you have a document you update or do you use snippets in Google Notepad or something similar?

Nice work on persistently generating content at such a high standard, it's very impressive!

New City: The south and western sections of Kaddish. The foundations were built after the end of the last war with the Hill Elves, but it was only after the revolution drove the peasantry into the city that the New City became important. The orthocrats have built up the various districts to display their prestige and status, and to erase the memory of the old regime. It is composed of between twelve and fifteen districts.

Landmarks / Districts:

Snakes - Home to the awe-inspiring temples to the Red and Blue Snake Cult, carved stone snakes that stretch hundreds of feet in the air, kept upright by powerful enchantments carved into the stone, and with great obsidian eyes. The Temples of the Red and Blue Snake Cult are led by the high priest Cassius, widely believed to be the most avaricious man in Kaddish. The dragonborn veterans he commands (both as head of their cult of choice, and as leader of the College of the Scaled Martyrs) periodically form into raiding bands that roam the city's other districts stealing whatever they please. This inevitably provokes riots, which in turn require his veterans to be called out to put down, providing the opportunity for more looting. Everyone in Kaddish without scales wants him dead. He is lavish with his followers (Since he can ask for anything he pleases of them), and has enough money to buy his rivals off when necessary.

The Square of Justice - The nominal meeting ground for the elected assembly that theoretically governs Kaddish. It is a broad, flat square meant to hold thousands that mainly sees use as a cattle and slave market, and occasionally as a mustering ground for one faction or another. Every year, the heads of the Collegia gather for a ceremonial parade around the square which culminates in the lottery. The poor, desperate, foolish, rash, and extremely lucky enter. All criminals who are not killed are automatically entered by the Collegium that caught them (Clemency becomes more common as the festival approaches to provide a suitable number of entries).

The selection system is complicated, but "prizes" range from fabulous wealth, magical gifts or the ability to ask any Collegium head for a single favour which he is honour-bound to grant to death by a variety of fascinating tortures, mere drudge work, and the right of a Collegium head to ask a single favour of the entrant which they are honour-bound to grant. Everyone gets something, whether good or ill. Rigging the contest is as time-honoured as the tradition itself.

The assembly has not met in the square since the second year after the revolution, and elections have not been held in over a century.

Greyward - Greyward is the factory of Kaddish. Almost a fifth of the city's population is crammed into the mere eight km^2 it occupies. Tenements crowd together, holding one another upright through the resistance of their mutual collapses. Almost every free space is filled with a shack or lean-to. Workshops, smithies, warehouses and lumber mills crowd the banks of the North Canal, presenting an impassable wall of industry. Most of the city's halfling population lives here, working in tiny airless rooms too small for humans, sharpening spear heads, sanding barrel staves, weaving cloth and attending to hundreds of other products. The great fires that give the ward its name turn raw wood into charcoal for the blast furnaces, and light the entire ward at night. The district extends downwards as well as upward, and many buildings collapse as their foundations are mined out for new living quarters or work space. Slave labour, including press-ganged citizens from other districts, is common.

Greyward is ruled by alliance of several guilds, its native Collegium (the College of the Righteous) and Marcion of Greyward, high priest of the Black Vermin Gods, who has enthusiastically taken over responsibility for keeping the peace. Lone dragonborn are killed on sight and their heads are posted at a spot on the North Canal that can be seen from the Snakes district as a warning to the rest. Marcion and Cassius are slowly moving towards open warfare with another.

King's Head - The old execution grounds of the kings of High Kaddish, and the mythic origin point of the revolution. When the last king was killed, his head was placed upon a spike at the centre of what is now King's Head. The head and spike are long gone, stolen in the dead of night. Occasionally, rumours circulate that the head, now undead and sometimes still impaled on the spike, wanders the canals at night, eating the soul of anyone it encounters. The masters of the great Kaddish gambling halls offer even odds on such a possibility.

King's Head is contested by three different collegia (the College of the Wondrous Murder, the White Square College, and the West Canal College). Barricades have been thrown up over every bridge, alleyway and road. Only the central festival route to the former exhibition place of the king's head remains open, guarded by fanatical temple guards from the city's cults.

Every year the grand procession of the festival commemorating the revolution ends here, having wandered through each one of the city's districts distributing bread and beer to the citizens to buy their loyalty for another year. The former king is burnt in effigy along with any convenient criminals or slaves, and drunken citizens line the streets. The collegia take full advantage of this drunken stupor to rob and enslave anyone they can.

[More to come]

Quote from: Rob Lang;232570How are you collating all these lovely tidbits, Pseudo? Do you have a document you update or do you use snippets in Google Notepad or something similar?

Nice work on persistently generating content at such a high standard, it's very impressive!

Thanks! It's a labour of love.

As for collating it all, er... I have this thread. <:)

I know where most things are in this thread, so I'll eventually patch it together in Word, save it as an .rtf file and see if I can seduce this hot girl I know who specialises in layout and formatting and whatnot and then see what she can do with an .rtf. In the mean time, just about anything can read an .rtf and the only formatting I'll really be using are font sizes, bolding and maybe italics if I'm feeling fancy.

Interlude:

What a First-Time Visitor to Kaddish Would Notice:

It's massive. Kaddish is incomparable in scope to the rest of the Dawnlands. It is three times larger than Dwer Tor, itself perhaps fifty times larger than any other settlement in the Dawnlands. It is almost 15km across and 12km wide, and takes half a day or more to cross on foot (a few hours by canal-barge). It has a population of 750,000, about a third of the entire population of the Dawnlands, living within city limits or on surrounding farms.

It is crowded. The nomads stand out of arms reach of one another when they talk. The Dwer stand just within (dwarven) arms reach. The Kaddish crowd around one another, shouting, gesturing, packed by the thousands into open spaces. Because of their polygamous families and correspondingly high birth rate, there are thousands of children roaming the city in wild gangs. They live in crowded tenements, piled on top of one another in hollowed out heaps of rubble and hunched over in the halfling-sized factories of the Greyward. The entire city smells like dung fires whose fuel is dredged from the canals that serve as open-air sewers.

It is grandly patchwork. Buildings are concrete (a Kaddish invention) poured over wood frames that can't quite bear the weight. The grand temple of the Red and Blue Snake Cult towers hundreds of feet into air while shacks bunch around its outer garden wall. Even the cheapest lean-to is painted with intricate designs and every wall has some grand scene from Kaddish history on it in faded paint scored with fresh graffiti. Every building is coated with ivy to burn, grapes to eat or other useful vines.

It is supremely weird in its customs. Human sacrifice is not common throughout the Dawnlands - except in Kaddish. Enslaving your fellows is not done - except in Kaddish. The nomads have no organised cults, the state handles religious matters in Dwer Tor, and yet the cult allegiance is one of the guiding stars of Kaddish life. There is no one in charge to negotiate peace with, no one to blame for what its army does or reign it in, no one who speaks for the Kaddish as a whole. Entire districts of the city seem to be at war with one another. Clan, collegia and cult allegiances are impenetrable to the outsider.

It is new, incredibly new. Magic with a distinctive Kaddish flair and unique rituals. Alien monstrosities - the products of the soulforges - that have never been seen outside the city. Secret technologies like steel, concrete and paper that are not found elsewhere in the Dawnlands. The Kaddish are constantly building, rebuilding, demolishing and redemolishing every stone in the city. Stores, banks, and temples are unique institutions of Kaddish.

There is simply nothing else like it. It is an alien, dangerous place for the first-time visitor, and many never make it back out again.

More Districts of the New City:

Grave - The Grave District is where the bodies of plague victims are burnt, denied the more traditional disposal of submersion or inhumation. It has a peculiar style to its plazas due to this purpose, with each one being a sort of reverse ziggurat into the ground with wide tiers on which bodies can be stacked and burnt by the hundreds of if necessary. Wide bridges span the mouths of these pits and all traffic past them. Vampire cultists frequently engage on another atop the bridges, the losers plunging to fiery deaths. In winter, large fires are built at the very bottom of the pits even when there are no dead and the district locals crowd into them to conduct their business.  

The district is also the centre of the vampire cults in Kaddish. The first vampires were created over a thousand years ago in Kaddish by the soulforgers, and though tolerated by the Kaddish, they remain few in number. Many have left the city and rumours return of vampiric warlords and undead domains in the mountains. Those that remain are generally mighty warriors and wizards, and use their personal power to assemble followers. Life is cheap, and blood easy to get, and most vampires are less fixated on drinking blood than apotheosis to the ranks of the vampiric heroes, ascended demigods who feed off numinal energies of their faithful followers.

Pit - The Pit District is built around a series of sinkholes which serve as garbage dumps, theatres, and gladiatorial rings. It is the home of culture in Kaddish and more peaceful than other, more central, districts. It is the home of the Burnt in Kaddish, with more drow and tieflings than anywhere else. The Collegium of the Pit District (the College of the Bolstered Spirit) is wealthy from owning some of the finest and most popular brothels in the city, and it spends this money freely on warriors, whores, bread and games to keep the district under control.

The Pit District was originally sacred ground (Local legend has it that the Wolves of the Earth are responsible for the sinkholes), and it is a popular place for parleys between opposing factions. Spies, adventurers, mercenaries, actors, demagogues, poets and other scum crowd the taverns. Gossiping, information trading and demagoguery are ways of life.

Guardhouse - The Guardhouse District is the southern section of the New City that runs along the wall of the Inner City down to the south river that feeds the city's southern canals. It operates as the southern harbour of Kaddish, and along with Greyward, it is one of the manufacturing and trade centres of the city. Rows and rows of concrete warehouses protect precious goods from the frequent riots and raiders that sweep down to collect them. The hills across the river, safely protected from the rest of Kaddish, are idyllic and many orthocrats have villas there to enjoy themselves with debauchery, or to flee to during a riot. They are using sparingly because they are a popular place for assassinations.

The remaining 5-8 districts of the New City are left to DMs to develop as they require for their games.

The Outer City: There are three districts of Kaddish that are outside, or slightly separated from the rest of the city. The citizens of these places still part of the urban life of the city, with the furthest district a mere 5km. away from the city.

Kaddish is surrounded by a web of small farming villages and slave plantations that produce most of its agriculture. Plantations tend to be closer to the city, while farming villages can be found along waterways between the city and the Birth and Death Rivers. The specific layout is left for individual DMs to design as they require.

Reservoir - The Reservoir District is the closest of the three outer districts. It is separated from the rest of the city by approximately 2km. to lay on the shores of the Gold Lake, the artificial lake that Kaddish's canals drain into. Reservoir serves as the foreigners' quarters for Kaddish, as many refuse to set foot in the city proper. It is a more traditional town, with taverns, brothels, markets, and workshops spaced out rather than piled atop one another. The population is miniscule in comparison to Kaddish, perhaps 3000 persons.

The roving gangs that dominate so much of life in Kaddish are rarely found here, and Reservoir possesses a building most proper urbanites find inexplicable: A courthouse. The written code of laws used in it is preserved from the kingdom of High Kaddish, and a small school educates advocates and magistrates, many of whom use their knowledge to quickly become orthocrats back in the city.

For all its exceptions though, Reservoir is culturally Kaddish. Polygamous families, temples to incomprehensible gods, concrete-over-wood buildings, and scrip money are all present. There is even a collegium, the College of Correct Attitude, though they eschew the armed banditry of their urban colleagues and instead levy a tax to pay their men.

Muster - The Muster District is a fortified town and keep to the south-west of Kaddish, about 4km. away. It is occupied and maintained by the Kaddish army. Muster is linked by the south river to Kaddish, and shipments from Guardhouse of weapons and food are common.

The Kaddish army is peculiar in that it is the army of a government that does not exist. It is relatively small (for Kaddish that is; it is the largest army in the Dawnlands), perhaps 20,000 citizens, putting it under the size of the personal forces of some orthocrats. Its main function is not the protection of Kaddish, but rather the projection of Kaddish power beyond the walls of the city. It is constantly fighting with its neighbours including the more troublesome Kadiz nomads, the hobgoblin bastions, revolutionary halfling movements in the hinterlands, murderous vampire cults, strange monsters, mountain men tribe confederations, roaming tribes of savage demihumans, the Hill Elves, and Dwer Tor.

It is organised by collegia, with each having to provide a certain number of equipped men and supplies, in exchange for which the veterans get to keep any loot or slaves they take (The collegia then takes at least an amount equivalent to the veteran's equipment from his bounty). Collegia typically rotate young men in their district through at least one campaign to provide enough veterans to replace those killed in intraurban conflict, and to control their district's population. Each collegia has an abstract, coloured design that its members wear to distinguish them from their foes when necessary.

Exile - The Exile District is 5km. to the north-east of Kaddish, on the far side of the Dawn Lake which forms the eastern boundary of Kaddish. It is a town (in the Kaddish style) of exiles, escaped slaves, smugglers, bandits and other criminals, perhaps 2000 persons. No roads lead into it, but it has traffic across the water with the city proper. It serves as the way-port for stone and other metal quarried in the foothills by various economic colonies of Kaddish to reach the city. Exile is also one of the few places where artifacts of the Dawnmen can be found, as tomb-robbing, adventuring and freebooting occupy most of the residents not involved in shipping.

A note:

Kaddish is an adventure location, not a point of light. Reservoir and Exile exist for DMs who require points of light nearby to the city.

Roll Your Own District Charts:

A DM may wish to quickly generate a district for his PCs. The following charts may be used to do so. The DM may roll on any or all of them as required until a sufficient level of detail is achieved.

First details:

Number of people in the district =  1d20 +5 x 1000
Physical size of district = 2d6 kilometres^2
Number of factions =  1d6 (roll on faction table)
Number of canals = 1d6-2
Number of entrances and exits from district = 2d6

1) Layout of District 1d6

1 - Built atop ruins and rubble
2 - Fortified into walled enclaves
3 - Facing into a large open space (i.e. bazaar, forum, gladiator ring)
4 - Extremely narrow streets, alleyways and passages
5 - Choke-points all traffic must pass through
6 - Extends underground through basements, pits, tunnels

2) Disturbances 1d6

1 - Protest or riot
2 - Gang war
3 - Sorcerous beast devouring residents
4 - Religious demonstration or festival
5 - Rough justice being dealt out
6 - Display of magical potency

3) Activity of District 1d6

1 - Manufacturing goods
2 - Preparing livestock and agricultural products
3 - Small shop trading
4 - Civic maintenance of infrastructure
5 - Teaching and training
6 - Slaving and other crime

4) Prominent Factions 1d6

1 - Vampire cult
2 - Collegium
3 - Merchant family
4 - Charismatic demagogue
5 - Devil worshippers
6 - Former adventurer

5) Goods and Services 1d6

1 - No commerce in district (Roll on disturbances table)
2 - No expert artisans (i.e. smiths)
3 - No large (1000 gp+) purchases possible without visit to orthocrat
4 - PC-relevant expert services (Magic-users for hire, healers, sages, etc.) available
5 - Items from Dwer Tor available (i.e. scale and plate armour, complicated metal items, glass items)
6 - Magical items available for sale

Anything else you guys think a DM might want to know if he's quickly generating a district? I'm soliciting any advice you'd care to give.

Things to Kill:

Murder Gnome Assassins

The most willing assassin is one who feeds on death, and many murder gnomes find their places amongst the vampire cults of the Grave District, where they are trained to execute the enemies of their undead masters. Many an orthocrat has been buried by gnomes secretly related to his killer.

Murder Gnome Assassin
Small Elite Lurker 6
Lowlight Vision
Str: 16 (+6) Dex: 19 (+7) Con: 13 (+4) Int: 18 (+7) Wis: (+4) Cha: 18 (+7)

HP: 110 Bloodied: 55

AC: 21 Fort: 18 Ref: 22 Wil: 21
Action Points: 1 Saving Throws: +2 MV: 5

Basic Attack: Gnomish Rending Knife +11 vs. AC 2d8+4

Powers:

Gnome Powers (Reactive Stealth, Fade Away, as per MM)

Disarm (Immediate Interrupt; At Will)
When attacked by a foe wielding a melee weapon: +9 vs. Ref.
Effect: Foe drops weapon and ceases attack

Feed (Encounter; Minor Action; Recharges when first bloodied)
When an enemy becomes bloodied, the gnome regains 27 HP

Acrobatics +12 Stealth +14

Tactics: The murder gnome remains hidden until it can target casters or ranged attackers easily, relying on Disarm to incapacitate melee opponents who attack it. It uses its Fade Away power to maneuver into position to use Feed on a weak opponent. It will spend its action point at this point to get an extra attack against this opponent if necessary to activate Feed.

Murder Gnomes? Bitchen! I'm totally jealous.

Quote from: Aos;234336Murder Gnomes? Bitchen! I'm totally jealous.

My gnomes are necromantic vermin, mate. http://www.therpgsite.com/showpost.php?p=222588&postcount=137

It's those creepy-as-shit totally-black eyes. Once I saw those eyes in the MM's picture, I had to make them weird and awful enough to live up to them.

Feel free to use the idea if you want, of course. Does Metal Earth need soul-sucking tiny men to kill its troublemakers?

It very well may. They would certainly fit right in, that's for sure.

I've read this on and off as it was going, but I started from the top again tonight. I've gotten as far as post 70. This is really great stuff. I especially like the origin of the goblins and the Wolf and Bull worship.
You're setting is much more grown up than mine, that's for sure.