More setting notes: here are 10 things everyone knows about Waynesburg:
1) Waynesburg is the largest city north of the Kingdom.
2) There was 10 years of warfare and strife in the city, which left it devastated, but that was almost 15 years ago.
3) There are multiple sets of walls.
4) You can become fabulously wealthy there.
5) The Northflood river is navigable from the sea to Waynesburg and beyond.
6) There are elves, dwarves, halflings, gnomes and half-orcs living here, as well as a host of different human ethnicities - but not everyone gets along.
7) Fire spells will get you killed.
8) It has 3 or 4 different neighborhoods/wards/areas, which can be very different from each other.
9) Geronimo and Eugene are from Waynesburg, and still may hold power here.
10) The cemetery will get you killed, especially at night.
These are things almost anyone in or near the city will know. (Whether they are all true or not remains something of an open question.) There is, of course, plenty of other information, but it is more dependent onhow much you know about Waynesburg, or on who you talk to.
Showing posts with label locations. Show all posts
Showing posts with label locations. Show all posts
Sunday, September 2, 2018
Tuesday, August 21, 2018
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.
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.
Monday, February 12, 2018
Bayport Neighborhoods
[Well - good intentions or not, I have fallen behind - but not fatally! Let's get back at it, shall we?]
Bayport: let's pickup more or less where we left last time. This time, a quick (I hope) tour of Bayport's neighborhoods.
Imagine ourselves coming in from the west, into harbor. What do you see? in the distance,north and south, you see hills, but between, you see mostly flatland, with the city itself in the middle. The city as such is bounded on the north and south by canals and fortresses, but these run through fairly low land - maybe artificial hills for the forts. On the north side, however, there is a hill rising fairly sharply a couple hundred yards from the northern canal and a few hundred yards inland. The hill is fairly high in itself, but stands out prominently in the surrounding flat. It runs a good mile or so north-south - about half the total width of the city. The rest of the city is mostly built on lowlands, a lot of it reclaimed from the sea. (And surrounded by dikes and canals, to protect it from the sea and rivers.) All of it - the hill and lowlands - is covered with houses,most fairly old, ut a lot of newer, usually shabbier houses, especially in the south. Right now, let's take a quick tour of the major areas of the town.
1. The Old Waterfront:
The area by the sea, in the north, is the old Waterfront This is the first area to be reclaimed from the sea, a couple hundred years ago. It's bordered by the Magnus Canal in the north and east (where it breaks the waterfront from the higher ground beyond) and the Grand Canal in the south. This is the old port, and still a thriving seaport. The edge of the land is what you would expect - docks, warehouses, boathouses, workshops. Around it are the places catering to the sea trade - more warehouses and workshops and storage, plus inns and taverns and bars and restaurants, some shabby, but some quite posh - and much more besides. It is a mixed bag: large guild houses, ship owners’ houses, trade houses, commodity exchanges, banks, expensive hotels; innumerable dives, bars and flophouses, houses of ill repute, gambling joints, packed tenements. Ship owners mix with laborers and beggars, thieves and merchants. It has always been like this - in these boom times, it is three times as full. The neighborhood is built around one or two broad streets, designed for transportation - Water Street especially, running north-south, and Main and Pine streets, running east-west. These are wide enough for wagons and traffic - they are connected by a warren of alleys and side streets. The large houses are usually on the large streets - the back streets and alleys are slums indeed. Most of the buildings are a mix of stone, brick, mud bases and timber tops - all materials are easily obtained in this area. Buildings are crammed in tights, tops over-leaning the streets, and in recent years many new structures have been erected on top of the old, a kind of vertical shanty town. It is, of course, a fire trap, but there is a lot of water close at hand - and windmills and other pumping devices scattered around that can save the city from the worst dangers of fire. (And of flood, which is equally terrifying here.) This land is all reclaimed, some of it landfill - it is shielded from the sea by dikes, which are very effective - but nothing is perfect. Heavy seas can top the dikes and put it all under water. There are underground structures here - tunnels, cellars - usually framed and bricked in, lined with stone - but all susceptible to flooding. There are many dangers here. That obviously includes the people - there is a lot of money in the waterfront district but it is cheek by jowl next to the thieves and beggars and clip joints, and the old, big money is sometimes as dishonest and ruthless as any pickpocket. This is the most dangerous part of town, the closest thing it has to a traditional thieves quarter - even if a lot of the thieves are in the employ of "honest" trading firms.
2. The Old Downtown:
This is is on the east side of Magnus Canal, along the base of the hill. This the oldest part of town, where the early villages were built (they were waterfront before the canals were built and land drained), and where the first pieces of a town were built. This is a typical medieval town - narrow streets, houses built close to one another, stone and brick below, wood tops, jettied floors and so on. This is all above sea level, and is quite stable, physically. It is dominated by three main north-west streets: Canal street runs at the edge of the canal, a wide street, built for traffic, with room for wagons, and lined with warehouses and shops, more like the waterfront than the rest of the downtown area. East of this, the hill rises steeply, 20-30 feet, some of it quite sheer (though there are houses clinging to the edge). Broad street runs along the top of this ledge - this is the business center fo the hwole town, lined with shops and good hotels and banks and large trading houses and so on. The hill continues beyond Broad street, through an area that holds many of the towns large institutions - cathedrals, the university, and so on. Center street, near the top of the hill, is the demarcation for the downtown - it is more residential than the places lower down, but still features many inns and taverns, shops and stores and so on. This neighborhood generally is more prosperous and respectable than the waterfront, but it is, still a commercial district, and Bayport is a seaport - and a boom town - so it shares much of the atmosphere of the waterfront, albeit more respectably,and with better guards. It is easy for almost anyone to move through this part of town - thieves, adventurers and the like - there is ample employment for such characters here, there are many sketchy forces in the area - the thieves' guild is active, and as everywhere, the line between honest and dishonest commerce is blurry and often ignored. Still: this is the center of the city, the respectable center of the city. It is well protected by the town guards, at least well patrolled. There is a lot of pressure to expand the new population into this area - indeed, many of the old houses near the canal (row houses, town houses and the like) have been turned into tenements - but there is also resistance. Above Broad street there are places that have been opened to the newcomers - but also places where the old families have refused - and fight back against anyone who tries to turn an old house into a tenement. This creates a lot of tension. This creates a fair amount of violence at times.
Physically, this district is built on the side of the hill, steep in some places, less so in others. It is,though, an area dominated by large a number of large buildings - guild houses, churches, large private residences, the university, and so on. The regular buildings are also probably larger than in the waterfront - though the same style: stone/brick for a floor, then (usually) wooden upper floors, often jettied over the street. This part of town also features fairly significant few underground structures - a well made sewer and drainage system; tunnels, pipes, cellars and so on, not all of them well documented. There are large crypts under the city; during some of the past wars, refuges were dug under the city, some secretly, some less so - some have been sealed up; some are still connected to th sewers or the known underground. It is complicated.
3. The Old Hills:
This is the area at the top of the ridge, east of Center street. High Street and Ridge street are the main streets up here - High running more or less on the crest, and Ridge running on the edge of the steep drop to the east. This is a very old part of town, the first expansion of the ancient village, originally a place for small farms and estates. It shows its past - larger houses, many of them all stone, separate, sometimes even walled in, with small yards and fields and orchards. These old houses aren't entirely free of the doubling population of the city - many of them have been subdivided into tenements and rooming houses and hotels and taverns - but not as many as below Center street. There are also a number of old estates that are owned by rich merchants or companies, who have turned their outbuildings into factories or shops, or barracks for their workers and soldiers - this cause s a fair amount of distress among the old timers. Still - this is fairly safe, maintains as much of the illusion of the old ways as they can, the idea of a genteel neighborhood outside a bustling port city. But this is maintained at great cost, and not very well - and often by having private mercenaries patrolling the place, harassing anyone who doesn’t seem to belong. There is also the simple fact that even the rich people living on this hill owe their wealth to the trade of the city - they are part of the less reputable places, like it or not. Given that the richest people in town these days are not always the most ethical - there can be plenty of excitement up here.
5. The New waterfront:
Now we move south again, south of the Grand Canal, and split in half by the Harbor Canal. The canals and extensive dikes in this area were completed in the early 1500s, and the land south of the canal basically constructed fro scratch. This area is laid out on clean grids and dominated by row houses, some of the stone/wood construction used in the older parts of town, but others made all of wood. Once this was respectable and quiet - but it has filled up since the boom started, and is now a fairly rough part of town. The area is dominated by the port on the west, and by the Marina, in the middle, opening off the north side of the Harbor canal - a large anchorage, generally used for smaller craft, but itself a very busy waterfront. South of the Harbor canal is another large area, a shipyard, where most of the city's ship building occurs. The shipyard, in particular, gives the area around it a more stable, working class atmosphere - it is less transient than the old waterfront, or the new waterfront by the sea. The area between the canals, then, tends to be more dangerous, with plenty of vice to go around.
6. The Outer lowlands:
This refers to the areas south of the Grand Canal, and inland from the Marina, as well as everything inside the Fort Canals that ring the city. This area is very mixed - much of it was just drained marshland before the boom, though these areas have been developed since - though usually small,flimsy wooden structures, built as fast as possible. Indeed, much of this area could be called a slum - at least a shantytown. There are, however, other kinds of structures in this area - before the boom, there were farms and factories out here - obnoxious ones like tanneries and breweries, as well as mills of various sorts. There are large groups of windmills out here - used to pump out the drained land, used to power mills and so on. As people moved into the area,it created tension, competition for the land - a number of windmills have been taken over by people looking for housing, sometimes legally, sometimes squatters. This creates tension - and the city itself is nervous about who is here, as the canals and dikes and windmills are essential tot he survival of the city itself. (Especially these low lying areas.)
There are similar areas north of the hill - though these tend to be built on land that was in fact land before the drainage process started. This is an even more important area for wind mills - many of which line the northwestern highland, where they get the full benefit of the sea breezes. In this part of town, the mills are often connected to the underground - sewers and drainage tunnels - and can be the entry point for dangerous creatures coming into the city. This kind of intrusion is a source of great anxiety, and creates plenty of employment for adventurers willing to track down monsters in the sewers.
We can end there. Coming up - Demographics! some important locations and landmarks! and hopefully, a map!
Bayport: let's pickup more or less where we left last time. This time, a quick (I hope) tour of Bayport's neighborhoods.
Imagine ourselves coming in from the west, into harbor. What do you see? in the distance,north and south, you see hills, but between, you see mostly flatland, with the city itself in the middle. The city as such is bounded on the north and south by canals and fortresses, but these run through fairly low land - maybe artificial hills for the forts. On the north side, however, there is a hill rising fairly sharply a couple hundred yards from the northern canal and a few hundred yards inland. The hill is fairly high in itself, but stands out prominently in the surrounding flat. It runs a good mile or so north-south - about half the total width of the city. The rest of the city is mostly built on lowlands, a lot of it reclaimed from the sea. (And surrounded by dikes and canals, to protect it from the sea and rivers.) All of it - the hill and lowlands - is covered with houses,most fairly old, ut a lot of newer, usually shabbier houses, especially in the south. Right now, let's take a quick tour of the major areas of the town.
1. The Old Waterfront:
The area by the sea, in the north, is the old Waterfront This is the first area to be reclaimed from the sea, a couple hundred years ago. It's bordered by the Magnus Canal in the north and east (where it breaks the waterfront from the higher ground beyond) and the Grand Canal in the south. This is the old port, and still a thriving seaport. The edge of the land is what you would expect - docks, warehouses, boathouses, workshops. Around it are the places catering to the sea trade - more warehouses and workshops and storage, plus inns and taverns and bars and restaurants, some shabby, but some quite posh - and much more besides. It is a mixed bag: large guild houses, ship owners’ houses, trade houses, commodity exchanges, banks, expensive hotels; innumerable dives, bars and flophouses, houses of ill repute, gambling joints, packed tenements. Ship owners mix with laborers and beggars, thieves and merchants. It has always been like this - in these boom times, it is three times as full. The neighborhood is built around one or two broad streets, designed for transportation - Water Street especially, running north-south, and Main and Pine streets, running east-west. These are wide enough for wagons and traffic - they are connected by a warren of alleys and side streets. The large houses are usually on the large streets - the back streets and alleys are slums indeed. Most of the buildings are a mix of stone, brick, mud bases and timber tops - all materials are easily obtained in this area. Buildings are crammed in tights, tops over-leaning the streets, and in recent years many new structures have been erected on top of the old, a kind of vertical shanty town. It is, of course, a fire trap, but there is a lot of water close at hand - and windmills and other pumping devices scattered around that can save the city from the worst dangers of fire. (And of flood, which is equally terrifying here.) This land is all reclaimed, some of it landfill - it is shielded from the sea by dikes, which are very effective - but nothing is perfect. Heavy seas can top the dikes and put it all under water. There are underground structures here - tunnels, cellars - usually framed and bricked in, lined with stone - but all susceptible to flooding. There are many dangers here. That obviously includes the people - there is a lot of money in the waterfront district but it is cheek by jowl next to the thieves and beggars and clip joints, and the old, big money is sometimes as dishonest and ruthless as any pickpocket. This is the most dangerous part of town, the closest thing it has to a traditional thieves quarter - even if a lot of the thieves are in the employ of "honest" trading firms.
2. The Old Downtown:
This is is on the east side of Magnus Canal, along the base of the hill. This the oldest part of town, where the early villages were built (they were waterfront before the canals were built and land drained), and where the first pieces of a town were built. This is a typical medieval town - narrow streets, houses built close to one another, stone and brick below, wood tops, jettied floors and so on. This is all above sea level, and is quite stable, physically. It is dominated by three main north-west streets: Canal street runs at the edge of the canal, a wide street, built for traffic, with room for wagons, and lined with warehouses and shops, more like the waterfront than the rest of the downtown area. East of this, the hill rises steeply, 20-30 feet, some of it quite sheer (though there are houses clinging to the edge). Broad street runs along the top of this ledge - this is the business center fo the hwole town, lined with shops and good hotels and banks and large trading houses and so on. The hill continues beyond Broad street, through an area that holds many of the towns large institutions - cathedrals, the university, and so on. Center street, near the top of the hill, is the demarcation for the downtown - it is more residential than the places lower down, but still features many inns and taverns, shops and stores and so on. This neighborhood generally is more prosperous and respectable than the waterfront, but it is, still a commercial district, and Bayport is a seaport - and a boom town - so it shares much of the atmosphere of the waterfront, albeit more respectably,and with better guards. It is easy for almost anyone to move through this part of town - thieves, adventurers and the like - there is ample employment for such characters here, there are many sketchy forces in the area - the thieves' guild is active, and as everywhere, the line between honest and dishonest commerce is blurry and often ignored. Still: this is the center of the city, the respectable center of the city. It is well protected by the town guards, at least well patrolled. There is a lot of pressure to expand the new population into this area - indeed, many of the old houses near the canal (row houses, town houses and the like) have been turned into tenements - but there is also resistance. Above Broad street there are places that have been opened to the newcomers - but also places where the old families have refused - and fight back against anyone who tries to turn an old house into a tenement. This creates a lot of tension. This creates a fair amount of violence at times.
Physically, this district is built on the side of the hill, steep in some places, less so in others. It is,though, an area dominated by large a number of large buildings - guild houses, churches, large private residences, the university, and so on. The regular buildings are also probably larger than in the waterfront - though the same style: stone/brick for a floor, then (usually) wooden upper floors, often jettied over the street. This part of town also features fairly significant few underground structures - a well made sewer and drainage system; tunnels, pipes, cellars and so on, not all of them well documented. There are large crypts under the city; during some of the past wars, refuges were dug under the city, some secretly, some less so - some have been sealed up; some are still connected to th sewers or the known underground. It is complicated.
3. The Old Hills:
This is the area at the top of the ridge, east of Center street. High Street and Ridge street are the main streets up here - High running more or less on the crest, and Ridge running on the edge of the steep drop to the east. This is a very old part of town, the first expansion of the ancient village, originally a place for small farms and estates. It shows its past - larger houses, many of them all stone, separate, sometimes even walled in, with small yards and fields and orchards. These old houses aren't entirely free of the doubling population of the city - many of them have been subdivided into tenements and rooming houses and hotels and taverns - but not as many as below Center street. There are also a number of old estates that are owned by rich merchants or companies, who have turned their outbuildings into factories or shops, or barracks for their workers and soldiers - this cause s a fair amount of distress among the old timers. Still - this is fairly safe, maintains as much of the illusion of the old ways as they can, the idea of a genteel neighborhood outside a bustling port city. But this is maintained at great cost, and not very well - and often by having private mercenaries patrolling the place, harassing anyone who doesn’t seem to belong. There is also the simple fact that even the rich people living on this hill owe their wealth to the trade of the city - they are part of the less reputable places, like it or not. Given that the richest people in town these days are not always the most ethical - there can be plenty of excitement up here.
5. The New waterfront:
Now we move south again, south of the Grand Canal, and split in half by the Harbor Canal. The canals and extensive dikes in this area were completed in the early 1500s, and the land south of the canal basically constructed fro scratch. This area is laid out on clean grids and dominated by row houses, some of the stone/wood construction used in the older parts of town, but others made all of wood. Once this was respectable and quiet - but it has filled up since the boom started, and is now a fairly rough part of town. The area is dominated by the port on the west, and by the Marina, in the middle, opening off the north side of the Harbor canal - a large anchorage, generally used for smaller craft, but itself a very busy waterfront. South of the Harbor canal is another large area, a shipyard, where most of the city's ship building occurs. The shipyard, in particular, gives the area around it a more stable, working class atmosphere - it is less transient than the old waterfront, or the new waterfront by the sea. The area between the canals, then, tends to be more dangerous, with plenty of vice to go around.
6. The Outer lowlands:
This refers to the areas south of the Grand Canal, and inland from the Marina, as well as everything inside the Fort Canals that ring the city. This area is very mixed - much of it was just drained marshland before the boom, though these areas have been developed since - though usually small,flimsy wooden structures, built as fast as possible. Indeed, much of this area could be called a slum - at least a shantytown. There are, however, other kinds of structures in this area - before the boom, there were farms and factories out here - obnoxious ones like tanneries and breweries, as well as mills of various sorts. There are large groups of windmills out here - used to pump out the drained land, used to power mills and so on. As people moved into the area,it created tension, competition for the land - a number of windmills have been taken over by people looking for housing, sometimes legally, sometimes squatters. This creates tension - and the city itself is nervous about who is here, as the canals and dikes and windmills are essential tot he survival of the city itself. (Especially these low lying areas.)
There are similar areas north of the hill - though these tend to be built on land that was in fact land before the drainage process started. This is an even more important area for wind mills - many of which line the northwestern highland, where they get the full benefit of the sea breezes. In this part of town, the mills are often connected to the underground - sewers and drainage tunnels - and can be the entry point for dangerous creatures coming into the city. This kind of intrusion is a source of great anxiety, and creates plenty of employment for adventurers willing to track down monsters in the sewers.
We can end there. Coming up - Demographics! some important locations and landmarks! and hopefully, a map!
Sunday, January 28, 2018
Bayport Geography
The city of Bayport is a seaport, located between the mouths of two rivers, the Willow and the Barnet. The Willow flows down from hills in the north, the Barnet from the south - the area between the hills is a large low floodplain. The Willow river drops abruptly from the hills, which are higher and harder in the north. The break with the plains is sharp, marked by cliffs and waterfalls, and the highlands are rough and wild, heavily wooded and dangerous. The southern side of the plain rises more gradually to the hills, which are marked by a line of chalk downs. These too rise steeply, especially where they abut the ocean - straight cliffs rise from much of the southern coast. Inland, they are less dramatic, with the alluvial plains rising to meet the higher land.
The flood plain is just that - low and wet, fertile and green, criss-crossed by many small rivers. This is particularly marked to the south, where the web of waterways converge near the Barnet river. The plains stretch for many miles east of the city (and the bay that gives it its name), slowly rising to the east, though largely a mix of ridges (sometimes rocky), and lowlands,some quite marshy, for a long distance inland. It is good land, though, a mixture of forest and farmland, interspersed with lakes and rivers and streams. 30-40 miles inland, the plains merge into the range of hills north and east of the bay, forming a saddle between higher ground north and south.
People have lived here since time immemorial. There was a ridge near the mouth of the Barnet river, and that is where people settled, on this higher ground, above the river mouth, tide flats,and small anchorages. A handful of other small settlements appeared in the area, mostly further inland where there was some dry ground, but none of them grew beyond small farming hamlets for a very long time. But people did move into this area - migrants from further east, occasional adventurers, looking for land to claim for their own. Slowly the farming villages grew, and as they did, they interacted with one another, and goods began moving up and down the rivers,and that is what made Bayport important. Local trade developed; then trade with towns and settlements on the Bay and Sea - Bayport was at the mouth of the rivers,and Bayport was the best harbor on the open water. Time passed; outside influences formed the area - southern invasions, Viking raids, orc raids from the hills, the development of countries, like Lenay; Bayport became a significant town and seaport.
It led to major changes in the land. The land near Bayport was mostly wetland - but as the town grew, farmers began to drain the wetlands, building dikes and canals, and reclaiming the land for farming. In time, this reached the town, as well. By the end of the 1300s, there were significant drainage systems in the hinterlands; the town began working on similar same projects. They built dikes around the tidal flats and along the edge of the Barnet river, they dredged the anchorages, they started filling in the old flats, to create stable land for building. They built a series of canals to drain and protect the dry land. They dug underground tunnels and canals to drain the higher ground, preventing erosion, and moving both fresh and dirty water in and out of the city. They built windmills to operate pumps to move water in and out of the town. By the time they were done, they had turned the last couple miles of the Barnet river into completely man-made canals, they had created large areas of landfill, mostly in the south, where the town could expand, they built large ports, they built a massive shipyard, and they surrounded the city with canals in the place of walls, for defense. Much of this as built to support the first major international sea-going boom in the late 15th century; it laid the ground work for the explosion of traffic in the early 17th.
By the mid 1500s, the city had taken on its current (1610s) form. To the west is Horseshoe bay - chalk cliffs to the south, granite hills to the north, and beach, marsh and farmland - and the city - between. The city is bounded north and south by large canals and fortresses. Between, the western edge is almost all port - docks and slips for ships on the water; a strong dike protecting the city (which is very low on the waterfront), with warehouses and all the usual waterfront buildings on land. The old part of town rises on a hill, half a mile or so inland, separated from the waterfront district by the Magnus Canal. The ridge rises quickly, a steep bluff a few yards inland from the canal, the hill rising less abruptly beyond that. A series of streets run lengthwise (north/south) on this hill, and others go up the hill east/west - most of these start at the top of the bluff, though; on;y a couple come down to the canal. North of the ridge,the land drops gradually to the northern canals - a lot of this land is open, used for pastures, with lines of windmills built in exposed areas. South of the hill, there is another large canal, the Grand Canal. South of the Grand Canal, almost all the town is built on landfill, with many canals interspersed throughout the city. Finally,south of the city, beyond the southern canal, the land starts to rise - to farmland southeast of the town, and to steep chalk cliffs southwest, along the shore.
The flood plain is just that - low and wet, fertile and green, criss-crossed by many small rivers. This is particularly marked to the south, where the web of waterways converge near the Barnet river. The plains stretch for many miles east of the city (and the bay that gives it its name), slowly rising to the east, though largely a mix of ridges (sometimes rocky), and lowlands,some quite marshy, for a long distance inland. It is good land, though, a mixture of forest and farmland, interspersed with lakes and rivers and streams. 30-40 miles inland, the plains merge into the range of hills north and east of the bay, forming a saddle between higher ground north and south.
People have lived here since time immemorial. There was a ridge near the mouth of the Barnet river, and that is where people settled, on this higher ground, above the river mouth, tide flats,and small anchorages. A handful of other small settlements appeared in the area, mostly further inland where there was some dry ground, but none of them grew beyond small farming hamlets for a very long time. But people did move into this area - migrants from further east, occasional adventurers, looking for land to claim for their own. Slowly the farming villages grew, and as they did, they interacted with one another, and goods began moving up and down the rivers,and that is what made Bayport important. Local trade developed; then trade with towns and settlements on the Bay and Sea - Bayport was at the mouth of the rivers,and Bayport was the best harbor on the open water. Time passed; outside influences formed the area - southern invasions, Viking raids, orc raids from the hills, the development of countries, like Lenay; Bayport became a significant town and seaport.
It led to major changes in the land. The land near Bayport was mostly wetland - but as the town grew, farmers began to drain the wetlands, building dikes and canals, and reclaiming the land for farming. In time, this reached the town, as well. By the end of the 1300s, there were significant drainage systems in the hinterlands; the town began working on similar same projects. They built dikes around the tidal flats and along the edge of the Barnet river, they dredged the anchorages, they started filling in the old flats, to create stable land for building. They built a series of canals to drain and protect the dry land. They dug underground tunnels and canals to drain the higher ground, preventing erosion, and moving both fresh and dirty water in and out of the city. They built windmills to operate pumps to move water in and out of the town. By the time they were done, they had turned the last couple miles of the Barnet river into completely man-made canals, they had created large areas of landfill, mostly in the south, where the town could expand, they built large ports, they built a massive shipyard, and they surrounded the city with canals in the place of walls, for defense. Much of this as built to support the first major international sea-going boom in the late 15th century; it laid the ground work for the explosion of traffic in the early 17th.
By the mid 1500s, the city had taken on its current (1610s) form. To the west is Horseshoe bay - chalk cliffs to the south, granite hills to the north, and beach, marsh and farmland - and the city - between. The city is bounded north and south by large canals and fortresses. Between, the western edge is almost all port - docks and slips for ships on the water; a strong dike protecting the city (which is very low on the waterfront), with warehouses and all the usual waterfront buildings on land. The old part of town rises on a hill, half a mile or so inland, separated from the waterfront district by the Magnus Canal. The ridge rises quickly, a steep bluff a few yards inland from the canal, the hill rising less abruptly beyond that. A series of streets run lengthwise (north/south) on this hill, and others go up the hill east/west - most of these start at the top of the bluff, though; on;y a couple come down to the canal. North of the ridge,the land drops gradually to the northern canals - a lot of this land is open, used for pastures, with lines of windmills built in exposed areas. South of the hill, there is another large canal, the Grand Canal. South of the Grand Canal, almost all the town is built on landfill, with many canals interspersed throughout the city. Finally,south of the city, beyond the southern canal, the land starts to rise - to farmland southeast of the town, and to steep chalk cliffs southwest, along the shore.
Friday, December 9, 2011
Setting and Situation
This is what I have been thinking:
First - I like the setting I posted about back in January - Bayport (with all the trimmings - the ocean, the deep water port, the cliffs around the bay, caves, villages and hideouts, made for piracy - etc.), plus a Kingdom (more inland, hills, valleys, lakes, rivers and so on.) Both surrounded by wilderness, lawlessness and so on - both built in old places, so plenty of ruins and dungeons and old stuff to deal with.
For immediate story purposes, and for the setting of the things we've been playing - I've been thinking about this. It's oriented more toward the kingdom than Bayport. I think it goes something like this: there is a King, but the King himself has gone on a Richard the Lionheart type jaunt, to fight infidels or something, and gotten himself taken prisoner, with a huge ransom demand. He left his younger brother in charge (like old Richard), and just like Prince John, the brother is an incompetent would be usurper. He may he levying the kind of taxes to pay a king's ransom, but he's in no hurry to pay it. This has caused the predictable resistance - the barons and other potentates are angling for power - the peasants and townspeople are resisting, which leads to the Prince outlawing them, which leads to formerly honest men running amok in the woods. All this is causing the predictable breakdown of security law and order, and making the whole place dangerous indeed.
But that has been escalating recently, because our friends the Githyanki have set up some kind of a lair somewhere that they are using as a base for raiding in the area. And that has further broken down the security and law and order of the area - especially since the Githyanki aren't thinking of any of this as conquered territory - they aren't making any effort to keep others out. So the place is overrun with monsters of all kinds. I imagine that the edges of this kingdom would always be hazardous - a frontier - but the Githyanki's presence has changed the monster population from the old days of Orcs and hobgoblins and gnomes and such to Trolls and Giants and Yuan-ti and the like. At the same time - because Bayport and maybe the kingdom as well are significant trading points, there is an endless depth of wealth to be plundered, so the monsters keep coming - probably not looking for conquest - more looking for victims and plunder.
And - along with all this - comes the inevitable parade of adventurers. NPC parties looking for plunder of their own - as well as adventure, fame, jobs, maybe, in their case, political power. THis is on top of a culture that's already fairly edgy - even in good times, there is a lot going on - pirates, outlaws, raiding parties, exploration of old ruins, etc. All this stuff is just a bit more volatile now than it was a couple years ago (so to speak.)
As for playing it - I kind of imagine a few types of locations: 1) you would have fairly stable central places - Bayport, the big towns in this kingdom, where you likely wouldn't find monsters, but you could find quite a few NPC type villains (as well as monsters that can pass as NPCs - vampires, undead, etc.) - and probably the Githyanki and their ilk, though sneakily. 2) You would have towns, villages, roads that are close enough to civilization that monsters might be rare, though not unknown - society still functions, but it's been undermined... 3) areas that are almost completely overrun by monsters - including towns, castles, monasteries, mines, etc. that might have been abandoned, or might be operating under constant threat, etc. - as well as plain howling wilderness, dungeons, etc. This might not be all that far from the other places - might be underground....
What I think this can do it provide a framework for adventures, especially the kinds of somewhat improvised adventures we've been doing, though it would be easy enough to work in more structured things as well. I hope it's loose enough to allow more or less any kind of adventure to be worked up from it, while setting up a frame that can connect anything we come up with. Hopefully, we can come up with a number of different kinds of situations - and use this kind of an outline to connect them, to rationalize them. I think if we want to develop the role playing elements and story elements, I think it helps to have a kind of background to work off. Something like this - an absent king, a semi-legitimate usurper, a bunch of other power centers (other nobles, the church, the towns, outside adventurers, plus the monsters themselves), and the external threat of the monsters - seems to me to create a situation you can run almost infinite variation out of.
First - I like the setting I posted about back in January - Bayport (with all the trimmings - the ocean, the deep water port, the cliffs around the bay, caves, villages and hideouts, made for piracy - etc.), plus a Kingdom (more inland, hills, valleys, lakes, rivers and so on.) Both surrounded by wilderness, lawlessness and so on - both built in old places, so plenty of ruins and dungeons and old stuff to deal with.
For immediate story purposes, and for the setting of the things we've been playing - I've been thinking about this. It's oriented more toward the kingdom than Bayport. I think it goes something like this: there is a King, but the King himself has gone on a Richard the Lionheart type jaunt, to fight infidels or something, and gotten himself taken prisoner, with a huge ransom demand. He left his younger brother in charge (like old Richard), and just like Prince John, the brother is an incompetent would be usurper. He may he levying the kind of taxes to pay a king's ransom, but he's in no hurry to pay it. This has caused the predictable resistance - the barons and other potentates are angling for power - the peasants and townspeople are resisting, which leads to the Prince outlawing them, which leads to formerly honest men running amok in the woods. All this is causing the predictable breakdown of security law and order, and making the whole place dangerous indeed.
But that has been escalating recently, because our friends the Githyanki have set up some kind of a lair somewhere that they are using as a base for raiding in the area. And that has further broken down the security and law and order of the area - especially since the Githyanki aren't thinking of any of this as conquered territory - they aren't making any effort to keep others out. So the place is overrun with monsters of all kinds. I imagine that the edges of this kingdom would always be hazardous - a frontier - but the Githyanki's presence has changed the monster population from the old days of Orcs and hobgoblins and gnomes and such to Trolls and Giants and Yuan-ti and the like. At the same time - because Bayport and maybe the kingdom as well are significant trading points, there is an endless depth of wealth to be plundered, so the monsters keep coming - probably not looking for conquest - more looking for victims and plunder.
And - along with all this - comes the inevitable parade of adventurers. NPC parties looking for plunder of their own - as well as adventure, fame, jobs, maybe, in their case, political power. THis is on top of a culture that's already fairly edgy - even in good times, there is a lot going on - pirates, outlaws, raiding parties, exploration of old ruins, etc. All this stuff is just a bit more volatile now than it was a couple years ago (so to speak.)
As for playing it - I kind of imagine a few types of locations: 1) you would have fairly stable central places - Bayport, the big towns in this kingdom, where you likely wouldn't find monsters, but you could find quite a few NPC type villains (as well as monsters that can pass as NPCs - vampires, undead, etc.) - and probably the Githyanki and their ilk, though sneakily. 2) You would have towns, villages, roads that are close enough to civilization that monsters might be rare, though not unknown - society still functions, but it's been undermined... 3) areas that are almost completely overrun by monsters - including towns, castles, monasteries, mines, etc. that might have been abandoned, or might be operating under constant threat, etc. - as well as plain howling wilderness, dungeons, etc. This might not be all that far from the other places - might be underground....
What I think this can do it provide a framework for adventures, especially the kinds of somewhat improvised adventures we've been doing, though it would be easy enough to work in more structured things as well. I hope it's loose enough to allow more or less any kind of adventure to be worked up from it, while setting up a frame that can connect anything we come up with. Hopefully, we can come up with a number of different kinds of situations - and use this kind of an outline to connect them, to rationalize them. I think if we want to develop the role playing elements and story elements, I think it helps to have a kind of background to work off. Something like this - an absent king, a semi-legitimate usurper, a bunch of other power centers (other nobles, the church, the towns, outside adventurers, plus the monsters themselves), and the external threat of the monsters - seems to me to create a situation you can run almost infinite variation out of.
Wednesday, January 12, 2011
Setting Idea
I am thinking about settings. I think having a more defined setting helps crete continuity in games - we have been playing encounters, mostly, with some attention to connecting them, but without binding them into a larger scheme. I don't know how much luck we are likely to have, with our particular gaming habits, of putting these encounters together into any kind of narrative - but I think a more coherent setting might have some of the same effect.
We had some of this in the old days - the towns, Hillsburg, Waynesburg, Farmington - had fairly distinct characteristics that we could use... though they were all pretty loosely defined. They were also all rather made up on the spot - which left me with a couple details I regretted. When we started playing, I stuck Waynesburg and Hillsburg - which were always going to be the main centers of our games - in the middle of the woods, up a big river - nowhere near the ocean. That didn't matter much at first - but over time, it trapped us - it became an inland game - when we wanted to do something on water, the characters had to march off across 3 kingdoms and 7 mountain ranges to see the sea. A rather strange state of affairs, for us kids growing up on the coast, and certainly for me, with my Hardy Boys and Treasure Island obsessions.
So: there are a couple things I would like to do with locations. I want to create a setting that can be used to generate a number of story lines, conflicts and the like; and I want to make up a setting that is more comprehensive and compact than the old ideas about Waynesburg and such. Smaller, more manageable, but also more detailed. (Though part of the problem there is just that several decades of thinking about D&D and its worlds without much playing gave me lots of chances to embellish Waynesburg to the point of being too big to play...) I have been thinking about a place, with the following characteristics:
1) a city
2) on the ocean - or possibly a very big lake (the truth is - this could work with Waynesburg and Hillsburg as well as anything...)
3) on a plain, that is surrounded by hills, mountains and so on - the coast itself should be mountainous, with cliffs and caves and inlets and fjords - places providing lots of exotic settings, as well as shelter for villains of all stripes.
4) which is organized, politically, into some kind of entity - maybe independent, maybe a province of a larger place, maybe something in the middle...
5) All of which is next to another entity - ideally, a kingdom, but a very small, insignificant kingdom -
6) Separated from the first city by natural boundaries - mountains, a big waterfall might be ideal - and surrounded by similar mountains etc.
7) though the kingdom itself is essentially a valley - with a full range of geography in a small space - rivers, lakes, farmland, swamps and marshes, hills, forests, and on the edges, mountains, or maybe high cliffs to the ocean, something like that.
8) this place should be organized around 1 or 2 towns - plus a scattering of villages, strongholds, manors, abbeys and such...
9) and all of it should have been overrun often enough in the past that you end up with layers of history, ruins and so on...
Basically - the first town is a transparent rip off of Bayport - its geography, it's endless supply of crooks, it's deep water sea port, etc... The valley/kingdom is something like the little duchies and kingdoms you'd see in, oh - Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, or all those Christmas specials, or maybe the Castle of Cagliostro. Though the real point, I think, would be to create a place that would suit the basic Robin Hood type plot - a town - surrounded by villages and farms - interspersed with semi-wilderness that people can move in and out of easily...
Now - thinking about it - this is pretty close to how we used Waynesburg and Hillsburg back in the day (though with a different notion of geography and politics). A large city with strong ties to the outside world; a smaller town/stronghold, surrounded by farms and woodlands and so on - the two having a cooperative, but slightly distant relationship... The main change is explicitly putting them closer to the ocean - and, I suppose, I think of both of them as being a bit smaller scale than I imagine Waynesburg. I think, within this framework, it should be possible to generate a host of incidents, basing them more on the possibilities of the setting than on the necessity of coming up with overarching story lines....
We had some of this in the old days - the towns, Hillsburg, Waynesburg, Farmington - had fairly distinct characteristics that we could use... though they were all pretty loosely defined. They were also all rather made up on the spot - which left me with a couple details I regretted. When we started playing, I stuck Waynesburg and Hillsburg - which were always going to be the main centers of our games - in the middle of the woods, up a big river - nowhere near the ocean. That didn't matter much at first - but over time, it trapped us - it became an inland game - when we wanted to do something on water, the characters had to march off across 3 kingdoms and 7 mountain ranges to see the sea. A rather strange state of affairs, for us kids growing up on the coast, and certainly for me, with my Hardy Boys and Treasure Island obsessions.
So: there are a couple things I would like to do with locations. I want to create a setting that can be used to generate a number of story lines, conflicts and the like; and I want to make up a setting that is more comprehensive and compact than the old ideas about Waynesburg and such. Smaller, more manageable, but also more detailed. (Though part of the problem there is just that several decades of thinking about D&D and its worlds without much playing gave me lots of chances to embellish Waynesburg to the point of being too big to play...) I have been thinking about a place, with the following characteristics:
1) a city
2) on the ocean - or possibly a very big lake (the truth is - this could work with Waynesburg and Hillsburg as well as anything...)
3) on a plain, that is surrounded by hills, mountains and so on - the coast itself should be mountainous, with cliffs and caves and inlets and fjords - places providing lots of exotic settings, as well as shelter for villains of all stripes.
4) which is organized, politically, into some kind of entity - maybe independent, maybe a province of a larger place, maybe something in the middle...
5) All of which is next to another entity - ideally, a kingdom, but a very small, insignificant kingdom -
6) Separated from the first city by natural boundaries - mountains, a big waterfall might be ideal - and surrounded by similar mountains etc.
7) though the kingdom itself is essentially a valley - with a full range of geography in a small space - rivers, lakes, farmland, swamps and marshes, hills, forests, and on the edges, mountains, or maybe high cliffs to the ocean, something like that.
8) this place should be organized around 1 or 2 towns - plus a scattering of villages, strongholds, manors, abbeys and such...
9) and all of it should have been overrun often enough in the past that you end up with layers of history, ruins and so on...
Basically - the first town is a transparent rip off of Bayport - its geography, it's endless supply of crooks, it's deep water sea port, etc... The valley/kingdom is something like the little duchies and kingdoms you'd see in, oh - Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, or all those Christmas specials, or maybe the Castle of Cagliostro. Though the real point, I think, would be to create a place that would suit the basic Robin Hood type plot - a town - surrounded by villages and farms - interspersed with semi-wilderness that people can move in and out of easily...
Now - thinking about it - this is pretty close to how we used Waynesburg and Hillsburg back in the day (though with a different notion of geography and politics). A large city with strong ties to the outside world; a smaller town/stronghold, surrounded by farms and woodlands and so on - the two having a cooperative, but slightly distant relationship... The main change is explicitly putting them closer to the ocean - and, I suppose, I think of both of them as being a bit smaller scale than I imagine Waynesburg. I think, within this framework, it should be possible to generate a host of incidents, basing them more on the possibilities of the setting than on the necessity of coming up with overarching story lines....
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