Under Sleeping Suns: Coming Up From The South

When crafting the history and feel of Loris, the world on which Under Sleeping Suns takes place, I promised myself that I would craft it as if I was building the next Star Wars, and not the next Dungeons & Dragons. I wanted a world that gave out enough information to get the players and GM's from Point-A to Point-B, and get them excited about discovering things. I wanted a world that was rich in history and had plenty of things to discover and dig up. I wanted ancient temples buried by the sands of time, legends and myths of times long past, and - much like the real world - I didn't want a lot of people in the game, be they Player Characters or Non, to know about them.

One of the things that has always bothered me about the histories and details of ancient empires in Fantasy RPG's is the infallible depths to which they can be plumbed by the player characters. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy reading about the scrupulous and meticulous details of the many thousands of years of history in, say, The Forgotten Realms, or Middle Earth just as much as the next guy. I like knowing that "The Days Of Thunder" took place approximately thirty-five thousand years before the start of Dale Reckoning. Trust me, I think it's cool, knowing those details. But honestly, as a player and a GM, I don't need to know them. They're the realm of the game creator, something to use when generating the adventures and villains and ultimate perils for the game world. The problem here is that once it's written down in a format for players and GM's to read about, it becomes common knowledge, and once it's common knowledge, someone will bring it up in game by way of a flawless, factual recounting of events.

You can say "It's the GM's job to nip such things in the bud," and you'd be partially right, but it also falls to the game creators and the genre writers to dole out only as much information as the players and GM's could conceivably need to make the game interesting. Instead, by giving the full rundown of such things in the form of complex and intricate timelines in which we learn all the fiddly secrets of Things Gone Before, we not only lose the sense of uncovering the mystery of the ages, we also end up with the question of "how do all these people know all these details about things so long past, when in the real world, most of us can't even remember what happened 20 years ago without a reminder?" Think about it - you're playing a character in a game, and unless your GM lays down the law and says "Your character really can't know that," if you've got the skill and make the roll, typically speaking, you know at least something about the subject. Countless are the times that I've been in a game with such a rich and detailed history, and had another player - whether playing a bookish, learned Wizard or a pretty dimwitted brute of a fighter - bring up that the character they're playing has the History skill, and shouldn't the character know about (random tidbit of really obscure history) with a roll of 19 on the die? And really, such things are completely contrary to the lens of history as viewed from a real-world perspective. Let me explain.

Ever heard of Catal Huyuk? I'm betting that the majority of you haven't. The only reason I know about it is because I took seven years of History and Civilization courses in college. It's widely recognized as one of the first cities, if not the first city, in the world. It existed between 7500 to 5700 BCE, and housed over ten thousand people at its height. It was structured in a manner completely unfamiliar to the other, later, neolithic settlements: it didn't have any special housing for the religious or ruling classes (if indeed there were any), it had no streets as we know them, and citizens would frequently have to travel through their neighbors homes to get in to their own dwelling. And get this: it lasted for nearly two thousand years. The site has been getting dug up in earnest since about 1993, and the archaeologists tearing it up are pulling up more and more knowledge about it every day. And here's the thing: We still don't know everything about it. In a game setting, though, all it would take would be one really good roll, and the PC would get all the interesting data about Catal Huyuk, right down to the knowledge of where to go looking for the Sacred Dingus Of Plot Advancement. Yet, in the real world, we're sitting around scratching our heads, saying to one another "Well, crap, once we get about nine-or-so thousand years back, we really don't have a lot to work with. Time for educated guesses!" It's because of this inexorable fact:

History. Eats. The. Evidence.

Dirt accumulates. Pottery breaks. Organic trash decomposes. Buildings get ruined in earthquakes. Farmers steal stones from sacred circles and use them to make cattle pens. The world is a lived-in place and it is never static and stagnant (unless, you know, magical spells cursing the entirety of the Nation Of Plot-topia to stay at exactly fifteen minutes after sunrise on the day of the Spring Equinox).

And that gets us down to the whole point of this entry.

When I started working on Loris,  something I wanted to provide my players was that sense of a lived-in world, as I've said. I wanted to get away from the idea that the PC's could go adventuring and find an ancient temple complex with all its mysteries and secrets intact, traps waiting for the eager young tomb robber to trip them. I purposely shied away from that, because in the real world, that is not what happens. In the real world, Sayif the brash young thief is told "Do not go to the tomb of the Pharaoh, for if you do, and you take any of the gold therein, you shall be cursed! And DIE!" But Sayif goes anyway, and what does he find? He finds the corpse of another robber, who tripped a fiendishly clever device in the ancient, long-abandoned tomb. Sand and the decay of decades, centuries even, of neglect have worn down the reliefs and battered away the ancient symbols of warning that once decorated the walls of this place. Sayif gingerly picks his way past that corpse, but only after stealing the few pieces of loot the previous man had gathered. Sayif finds more corpses along the way, and more sprung traps, but stops short of trying to break into the actual tomb. After all, his pockets are full of gold already, and he's lived longer than anyone else who's tried. Sayif cuts and runs, and lives to tell a tale of bravely facing the ghosts of all those dead tomb-robbers, and how he saved the gold (and himself) from their wretched clutches.

Does doing this to the player characters remove the adventure from, well, the adventure? When they find an ancient temple with all the traps tripped by previous invaders, or all the hazards having fallen to the degradations of time, does that mean there is nothing for them to do? No, absolutely not. Consider: those rotten and snapped ropes that once held the two-tons of limestone in place - you know, the ones that will crush such foolish invaders as yourselves? Those ropes have, by rotting and snapping, served to drop those same slabs of stone into what would have otherwise been a perfectly passable corridor. The PC's must now find a way to get through that room - or find another, potentially more hazardous - way to their destination. When you accept that, unless there is a secret order of fanatical priests and workers diligently maintaining these things long after the fall of their civilization, time passes and things break, many more adventure seeds can be born than the typical "You travel to the tomb of Khut-Rasis, last of the Golden Pharaohs, and there, you find traps! And mummies!" tropes that we're so used to.

Not that I have anything against mummies.

But back to Catal Huyuk, now, and how it relates to Loris.

The world of Loris has about three and a half thousand years of "known" history. And I say "known" as to relay the idea of "Only about the last three hundred or so years are detailed in any real particularly good manner." These years are known as the Age Of The Nine, and are the time frame that matters most to the player characters - modern history begins here, with all the pressing concerns of the day that will drive the characters. The war against the Kolanthans in the south. The schism rising in the Cualish Free States to the east. The tales of a dragon rising from the ice in the north. The development of cannon and firearms. The fall from grace of magicians and their ways. The Kolanthan Inquisition. All of these things take place within a roughly three-century long span - plenty of time for kings to rise and fall, for traditions to be built or cast aside, and for incredibly bitter cultural hatreds to take hold.

What comes before the Age Of The Nine? Well, everyone who goes to church and school knows that before the Age Of The Nine was the Age Of Kings, and it's from there that the people of the Four Nations fled, running before the Rain Of Glass brought death and fire to Harak-Ur, Land Of Kings. No doubt, every school child knows, as well, that before that came The Journey, when the Good Kings, before they fell to evil, led the people out of Kever after The Sunfall. Before The Sunfall was the Kever Age, when there was but one sun in the sky, not two, and they say the Gods walked among the people, and bread rained from the sky. Man came up out of the South and into Kever, and from Kever moved East and North into Harak-Ur. From Harak-Ur, the people of the world moved West, into Angarn and Cuali and Vetris and Cymrik. This is the path of Man. Everyone knows these things, but only a scholar could tell you that there was a Library - the domain of the King Of Books - in Harak-Ur, that is rumored to still stand even to this day. It would take an even better scholar to tell you that the Library was supposed to have a complete copy of the Library Of Doan, Lord Of Light, that once stood at the heart of the Imperial City of Kever before The Sunfall wiped that glorious empire from the face of the world.

And really, that's all you'll ever get, as a player or GM, until and unless you need it. Why? Because it's not necessary for the enjoyment of the game. In that last paragraph, I've laid out several story seeds that give exactly enough information to start an epic campaign of exploration and discovery. Sure, I, as the creator, know what I want to do with all of those things. I know the full history of the game world, from the moment of its creation, to the reason behind the cyclical nature of all of these empire-destroying cataclysms, to exactly whom the Lord Of The Western Ride is sleeping with this week. But the moment I reveal all of those things - unless it's necessary to do so - the mystery is gone. There's nothing to dig up. There's no real sense of excitement to it, when the GM looks at the fully detailed list of dates and times and names, and knows that his players have probably read the same things he has, so they already know what to expect.

Instead of giving such lists, then, I have purposely kept the full history of Loris vague, indistinct, and maybe even a little contradictory. Where appropriate, details are kept and fleshed out, and made as distinct as they can be. But memory fades with time, and history is lost. Farmers dig up the sacred stones to keep their cows in. Tomb robbers carve out the gold from the stone doors of the tomb of the ancient warrior king, leaving only chiseled echos of the ancient warnings in their place. Time and weather wear away at the stone of the cliff, and break apart the ancient warning mosaic that tells of unholy things buried beneath the ground of the island just off shore. The world should be full of mystery, and that is what I intend to provide when this project is finally complete.