A Place For Every Adventure (Where I'm Coming From, Part 5)

A couple of things came together to result in this post. First, as I've been working on my Wyrd Kalamar notes and building up my own campaign, I've been spending a lot of time re-reading the Sourcebook and pouring over the Atlas with a particular eye for places that I'd dismissed as being not all that interesting to set a campaign in before, like Paru'Bor (too stodgy for free-wheeling adventurers, I thought). The second was that I really liked the original Blackmoor and Rob Conley's serial-numbers-filed-off Blackmarsh, and wanted to find a place that I could drop it in with some modifications to Tellene.

After some search on the map, I realized that Narr-Rytar was perfect: A city state far in the north on a huge body of water. On the Atlas, you could see where the river suddenly turned twenty or more miles westward, diverting around a low-lying area of streams and lakes that was almost certainly marsh or swamp. The city was surrounded by woodlands of rolling hills, and lay north of a vast mix of woodland and steppe (Dhrokker) which could approximate the Haak. And of course, it lay far off from a "Great Kingdom" that had shrunk from its original size.

That got me wondering just how many other "typical" or iconic settings fit into Tellene. For example, before deciding to break out the ol' KoK books (the Atlas was the winning argument, really), I contemplated digging out the old Greyhawk box. I had both the original and the From the Ashes, the latter of which had a nice 6-mile to the hex map of the area immediately surrounding the titular city, which included a pretty awesome number of biomes for the PCs to quickly wander into. In Tellene, I found Prompeldia, City of Thieves, right on the edge of the Elos Desert, but also near a forest and a northern plains area (Pekal) and within spitting distance of pretty much any race one could care to introduce.

So that brought me back to Paru'Bor. Once I got over my 21st American bias that Lawful Good = stodgy oppression = Lawful Stupid, Paru'Bor's rigid adherance to Law and Truth made a lot of sense. It was, after all, a relatively small nation surrounded by a sea of chaos: Tokis is falling to pieces even as it struggles to conquer Pekal, Pekal is a land of sorcery with a lot of fae in the blood for all that it's an allied nation, Ek'Gakel is falling apart at the seams and overrun by barbarian Dejy, Shynabyth is literally a land of godless barbarians, O'Par is untrustworthy, etc. I suddenly realized that I had a perfect candidate for the "Realm of Man" described in module B2: Keep on the Borderlands. (A module that I've always considered to present the iconic D&D setting.)

Actually, Paru'Bor is also very similar to the Forgotten Realms' Cormyr, which led me to look again at Pekal as an analogue to the Dalelands--a bit more organized, true, but still very similar in geography and outlook, at least if one assumes that the wetter eastern area has a lot of small woodlands and, well, dales dotting the landscape. Of course, Tellene is a bit grittier: Where the Dalelands just had to deal with a couple of rogue city-states, Pekal is threatened by a whole empire.

Geanevue is of course pretty much a smaller version of Waterdeep--no surprise given the hand Ed Greenwood had in its development. The northeastern Renaaria Bay and the Wild Lands likewise make a fine Sword Coast, vikings and all.

Want to run the old Slavers series of modules? Norgra-Krangel makes a good Pomarj, and the city-states of the Elos Desert a good Wild Coast.

The Giants and Drow series? Korak and the Elenion Mountains.

I asked Jolly and his crew on the Kenzerco forums whether I just reading all this into the setting, or whether this entirely intentional for the purpose of making it easier to 'port other campaign material into KoK. David Kenzer answered back just a couple of hours later,

If there are similarities, it's purely subconscious on my part -- I ran greyhawk for many years prior to working on Kalamar. The Kingdom of kalamar itself contains a lot of material from my home game, which was set in the Great Kingdom, but Adama Niepomnik, one of the original K&C Krew, wrote the first draft of that nation, so it's not a perfect analogue either (he ran FR last).

That made a lot of sense to me, as I've done it before myself, even to the point of lifting whole names and concepts into my homebrew campaign without meaning to. I certainly don't think "cribbing" in a fantasy world, whether intentionally or subconsciously is any kind of sin. Pretty much every "vanilla" setting is cribbing from Prof. Tolkien as interpreted through the eyes of D&D, after all. (Elves, Dwarves, Halflings, Orcs, even the concept of mixed parties of adventurers, etc.)

Even if certain locales were deliberately patterned after some "iconic" settings, that doesn't make KoK just a pastache of them. Tellene has a far richer sense of place, culture, and history than any other setting (with the possible exception of Harn, which I don't have any personal experience with) as well as a number of unique twists of its own.

And this is what ultimately drew me back to this setting. Remember how I said I had gamer ADD? Still do, and as I said then, given my limited time, I needed a world big enough and diverse enough to be able to satisfy my many impulses, one that at the same time is detailed enough that I don't have to spend vast amounts of time creating local area maps, names, and cultures, but still open enough to give me room to plant my own adventures and ideas. No metaplot. And I found all this in the little collection of books sitting beside my desk.

Okay, enough with fanboying on the setting. Over the next several posts, I'll look at how to take an intrinsically AD&D setting and "convert" it to fit B/X D&D. Less philosophizing and a bit more crunch.