RangerWickett
Legend
I'm working on a setting that's heavily inspired by Bronze Age Mesopotamia. I have plenty of ideas for action and adventure out in the wilds, but I want to have some interesting political dynamics going on in the two main cities that the heroes can get involved in.
Honestly, I expect this thread to mostly be me talking to myself, as a sort of exercise to force me to come up with details. But I would love input and suggestions.
The Region
Ostalin
Eshkital
Foreign Politics
D&D-isms
So who are the people in the power families in Ostalin, and what are they up to? How might their schemes interfere with each other? What non-family organizations do I need to include to get involved in these machinations? I can create new minor gods, or get the four big temples involved in things. I can have tribal war leaders wanting protection from monsters or raiders, or small cities perhaps fighting over control of an important canal and the taxes from its villages. Some noble might have their family treasures stolen. A powerful merchant might be slandered by a family that wants to get into his business. A great work of art might be presented, and the artist might be imperiled or their family threatened. Someone might be trying to build a new temple for a minor god, but have to broker deals with other folks who have control over various artisans, or even over the docks on the river that would bring in quarried stone.
I'm planning to have a villain try to assassinate some folks at a sort of proto-Olympic Games event, which (ideally) will kill the king's male heir, but leave his daughter alive, leading to various groups vying to marry her, all while folks hunt the assassins and their allies.
But who are the people who are going to do the vying? Ages, personalities, specific goals, weaknesses, reasons the heroes would want to help them, or hinder them?
Honestly, I expect this thread to mostly be me talking to myself, as a sort of exercise to force me to come up with details. But I would love input and suggestions.
The Region
- Two cities (Ostalin and Eshkital) lie 100 miles apart, on two rivers that run roughly parallel in an arid region. The rivers flood every spring, which supports the civilization's agriculture.
- Each city is fairly small by modern standards, maybe 70K for Ostalin, and 30K for Eshkital.
- If you travel a week to the west, the two rivers flow into a marsh, and then after another fifty miles or so you reach the sea.
- Up and down the rivers, maybe a dozen smaller cities exist, like 10K people each. Cities are roughly 40 miles/2 days apart, though towns of 1K are common in between.
- Once you move away from the two rivers, stuff gets fairly dry and inhospitable, where the largest settlements are just 100 people, but dozens of these tiny villages might all think of themselves as part of the same 'tribe.'
- Borders are a loose, ambiguous thing, but if you travel maybe 2 weeks north, east, or south, you'll hit another 'nation.'
Ostalin
- Ostalin is the seat of the royal family, currently led by King Nitath-Dun, to whom the leaders of smaller cities (including Eshkital) pledge loyalty, as do leaders of various small tribes.
- Ostalin has a big ziggurat upon which stand the temples of four prominent gods: the Gods of Contracts, of Protection, of Craft, and of Secrets.
- There are many minor gods, but none have much political power here except the God of Warriors (see below).
- Some laws in the city's highly organized legal code are enforced magically.
- There should be several prominent families who vie for favor of the king and of the four temples.
- One way the families contend publicly is by sponsoring artists to make music, sculptures, even entire buildings.
- They also try to get their children accepted as priests.
- Naturally they also contend covertly by interfering with each other's business, sometimes even escalating to using violence or assassins.
- One attempt to use a magical law to protect the walls of the city had a weird loophole that created the Implication, a demiplane that a group of thieves who revere the God of Secrets are able to use to slip between different parts of the city.
- Wizards are tolerated as members of the Enclave, allowed to study arcane magic as long as they adhere to certain laws to ensure they're not competing with them in performing miracles. (This is sort of an in-universe justification for why wizards don't get cure spells or crop growth spells.)
- Monsters are rare near the cities, but still lurk in the desert and around scattered oases. Servants of the temples (basically paladins) are tasked with dealing with these threats. Paladins can serve many different gods, but a famous family of paladins, led by a man named Sinjur, do a lot of training and organizing.
- The families do not have children who are paladins, because it is tradition that only children with no siblings can be paladins, and no powerful family would risk only having one kid. (Sinjur's family does a weird thing of staggering generations; it's complicated.)
- There is no standing army in the nation, but the king could call upon his loyalists to put down rebellions or to fight off foreign threats.
Eshkital
- The governor of Eshkital is appointed by the king of Ostalin.
- Eshkital's temples two most prominent gods are those of Rivers, and of Medicine.
- Various local families vie for favor of the governor and the temples, similar to Ostalin, but at a smaller scale.
- Where Ostalin's powerful families focus on power in their city, the powerful families of Eshkital make efforts to get support from the rest of the nation. Much how Ostalin supports paladins to fight monsters, Eshkital supports rangers who protect travelers and deliver news among small villages and towns.
- Eshkital has nearby woodlands and a deeper river, and locals are good at building water wheels to power forges and mills, so it produces a lot of wealth.
- Ostalin taxes a lot of that wealth.
- Radicals, free thinkers, reformists, and artists flock to here. Forty years ago, Ostalin put down a rebellion when Eshkital killed its governor and refused to pay taxes.
- The city turns a blind eye to sorcerers and druids, who use magic heavily regulated by the temples of Ostalin.
- A major religious relic (think Noah's Ark) is beached on an island in the river near Eshkital. When the city is threatened, magical beasts emerge from it to fight off invaders.
Foreign Politics
- To the north are mountains that feed the two main rivers, and beyond them is Qazvin, less a nation and more a land bridge (with seas on either side) with a shared culture. The people there have barely any metallurgy. Their culture is fatalist, rejecting the worship of gods but instead favoring famous heroes and natural spirits. Their land is mountainous and rough, so Ostalin never managed to conquer it, and today it's mostly a buffer with Kequalak to the farther north.
- Kequalak is inspired by Slavic folklore and Christian demonology. The region was contacted by Ostalin by sea a century ago, then conquered.
- It was remote enough that four decades ago, when Ostalin was busy with the rebellion in Eshkital, the priests and nobles running the Kequalak 'colony' decided to operate independently.
- It's way poorer than Ostalin, but has access to much of the same magic, plus demon summoning, which is illegal in Ostalin.
- One of the power families in Ostalin has brought a group of Kek demonologists to the city to try to showcase their power and get the law revoked, appealing to the king's fear of looking weak.
- To the east are the Pleian Basins, a bunch of small river valleys stretching for hundreds of miles (based on Persia) with tons of small villages but no unifying hierarchy these days. A couple centuries ago they were a growing threat, but Ostalin invaded, sacked their capital, and stole a statue of their Sun God. The region has never reunified, but they maintain a great resentment toward Ostalin.
- One of the power families of Ostalin have contacts with rich gold mines in the region, a source of wealth that their rival families like to disrupt.
- The region is recently being beset by roaming undead, and different tribes are blaming each other for angering their gods. One tribe reached out to Sinjur to send his paladins to help, but he's wary of acting without getting the king's permission to intervene in another nation.
- To the south is Chathus, a nation famous for its chariots and necromancy, ruled by a line of demigods. Over the centuries, Ostalin and Chathus have clashed often enough that they always see each other as rivals. About two decades ago, though, the nations ended a small war by declaring a patch of land between them as a 'neutral zone,' where no one from either nation could settle, farm, graze, hunt, or mine.
- In the intervening years, tribes who worship the God of Beasts moved into that area. They believe their god demands they not use written language, which makes them hostile to the God of Contracts. Right now they're just a small thorn in the side of both countries, raiding villages on the border of the 'neutral zone.'
- Warlords near the border who are pledged to King Nitath-Dun claim the Chathans are supporting the tribes and using them as proxy warriors. They want to invade and slaughter the tribes, though this might provoke a war. They'd be okay with that.
- One of the power families in Ostalin thinks this could be an opportunity for Ostalin and Chathus to forge an alliance by working together to defeat a common enemy.
- The temple of the God of Medicine in Eshkital actually has friendly relations with some of the beast tribes, and is trying to persuade one of the power families in Ostalin to support starting trade with the tribes.
D&D-isms
- Imagine that few people are any higher than 5th level, and even the most powerful individuals cap out at 10th.
- The Enclave wizards do control a few teleportation circles in hidden locations, but none are in any of the major cities.
- The ziggurat temples theoretically can raise the dead, but the supply of diamonds is incredibly low because the region simply doesn't have the right types of mines, and so politically the rich and powerful aren't going to raise anyone from the dead unless the fate of the nation depends on it.
So who are the people in the power families in Ostalin, and what are they up to? How might their schemes interfere with each other? What non-family organizations do I need to include to get involved in these machinations? I can create new minor gods, or get the four big temples involved in things. I can have tribal war leaders wanting protection from monsters or raiders, or small cities perhaps fighting over control of an important canal and the taxes from its villages. Some noble might have their family treasures stolen. A powerful merchant might be slandered by a family that wants to get into his business. A great work of art might be presented, and the artist might be imperiled or their family threatened. Someone might be trying to build a new temple for a minor god, but have to broker deals with other folks who have control over various artisans, or even over the docks on the river that would bring in quarried stone.
I'm planning to have a villain try to assassinate some folks at a sort of proto-Olympic Games event, which (ideally) will kill the king's male heir, but leave his daughter alive, leading to various groups vying to marry her, all while folks hunt the assassins and their allies.
But who are the people who are going to do the vying? Ages, personalities, specific goals, weaknesses, reasons the heroes would want to help them, or hinder them?
