The Deserts

Let me comment a bit on the Desert campaign I am running. It is a fairly shameless bit of orientalism: deserts, middle eastern and North African settings and weapons and so on - I don't know how to get around that, but since all of D&D is a pastiche of old books, I'm not sure there's any reason to try. Try not to insult anyone, on purpose or by accident, and keep the old books close at hand, I guess...

That said: what is this place? It's a very large desert, basically the big empty place in the dead center of the map on this page. It's kind of an upside down North Africa: an ocean bounding it (to the south, here), with a strip of relatively fertile land by the sea, mountains behind that, and then a great vast waste, bounded in the north by more highlands, that separate the desert from the more temperate lands to the north and west. There is civilization all around the desert - and quite a lot of traffic through it, caravans, nomadic herdsmen moving from oasis to oasis, well traveled trade routes and so on. There are resources in the desert - salt and other minerals - so a fairly thriving economy, though one that seems to disappear into the vastness of the wastes. The desert is a typical desert, not an undifferentiated sea of sand (though some areas are): ridges and hills, mountains, depressions, plateaus, and so on; there is water, but it can be hard to find. It is all hot and dry, and moving through it requires planning - there are a lot of ways to die.

We have just started playing, the PCs are in the foothills of one of the mountain ranges, looking for lost tombs, with a drow archeologist who has taken them on as his protectors. As I mentioned before, I expect to keep the "plot" of the campaign fairly loose - probably arranged around tomb raiding (Mummies!), but able to go anywhere. A series of shorter missions, really - find a tomb here; explore a ruined castle there; visit a town or city somewhere else; cross the desert, thwart a villain, etc. I hope that means they will end up traveling all around the desert - one of the features is that you are likely to move around a lot, if you are adventuring in the desert, moving back and forth between the wastes and towns, north and south, east and west, etc. I hope.

The desert is surrounded by mountains and civilization. So - some of the places of interest: in the north, the desert is bounded by mountains and a river - the Little Dragon mountains and river, something called Dragon Lake - and Greyhawk, imported directly from the old books, placed here. This is a fairly prosperous area, though it is far enough south to be fairly hot and dry. The city is old and large, and has the feel of a city on the edge of two cultures - like in the Balkans, or southern Russia, Turkey and Greece. It is a major trade center, being tied to the desert caravan routes and to rivers flowing west, the Makeesa, which flows to the Greatflood, which flows to the sea.

To the west of the desert are mountains - the Fire Mountains prominently - a high, forbidding range. On their northern edge are the Sapphire Hills, which are the center of a large dwarven kingdom, and a human country called Ritmark. In the eastern foothills of the Fire Mountains (the western edge of the desert) is the city of Phoenix - ancient and mysterious, with strong links to the mountains and the desert. And on the south-west edge of the desert is a vast high plateau called the Dead Lands: this is a completely barren, desiccated, unlivable place, though it might be the stronghold of the Githyanki, on the material plane.

South of the desert are the Altas mountains, and south of that the Southern Ocean. These mountains rise fairly high in places, and stretch across most of the southern coast of the continent, west to east. The strip between the mountains and the sea has a very pleasant, Mediterranean style climate - this is where most people live. There are several cities along the coast. The largest of these are Al Aben and Arcabar, major ports, surrounded by farmland and other resources, sustaining significant city states. Al Aben is further west, larger, more open, more of a trading center, both across the sea, and into the desert - indeed, it is a major terminus for the desert trade. Arcabar is to the east, smaller, more sheltered, especially on the land side, and somewhat more hostile. It is a notorious haven for pirates, who have deals with the legitimate government, and can be a dangerous entity at times. Around them, are numerous other towns, small counties and principalities, more or less independent and prosperous.

At the eastern end of the Southern Ocean, a vast river flows in from the north-east. This ends in a major delta, which has been civilized for millenia. The premier city here is Xandria,a sprawling port city, an ancient power. Up the river are a number of other cities, some very ancient, some very large. All of this area,not surprisingly, has an Egyptian cast to it. And south-east of this is a large Peninsular or Isthmus which itself is nothing but desert and coastal settlements. But that is not where this campaign is going. And on the east of all of this are the Dragon Mountain - a vast range, running north south, and dividing all this area from lands to the east.

All of these southern cities have been there for 1000s on 1000s of years - this is where civilization began. (Human, at least.) They have risen and fallen through the years - there have been great empires - the Black Empire, which originated in fact in Phoenix, and spread back to the east, run by religious fanatics using monstrous armies and magic to conquer all. They eventually collapsed, and were followed by centuries of smaller empires and kingdoms that eventually fought themselves into fragments. All that happened 2 or 3 thousand years ago. Another wave of conquest came from the cities south of the deserts about 500 years before the present - conquering the southern lands, then crossing the desert and invading the north and west,sparking a century or two of warfare that went back and forth across both the deserts and the north, leaving its own traces. The last hundred years or have been relatively quiet -
trade has replaced warfare as the primary means of interaction between the desert cities and the rest of the world, and the various kingdoms and city states of the region have developed individually. There is, in fact, a lot of trade between these places and the north and west - though this is the kind of trade that is, itself, often as much a form of war as not.

That is the setting, ver roughly. It is ancient; it has been conquered and reconquered dozens of times over 5000 plus years; it is very active, in that there are constant connections between these places and other parts of the world - though the distances and the emptiness of the space between helps mask that. The southern cities are rich and powerful; they are, for the most part, open to trade, so they welcome outsiders; and there is all that empty land to move around in - which provides opportunities for evil. Plenty of places for monsters and villains to hide.