World Building Help - Finding the Lost Continent

[Crazy Hedgehog]

I'm looking for some help with expanding my game world. I was wanting to introduce a "Forgotten Continent" into the setting, I suppose similar to Taladas in the Dragonlance Setting. Almost as technologically advanced as the realms the PCs come from originally, but the respective cultures have been cut off for thousands and thousands of years. Indeed, so long that even the elves have thought the continent long destroyed in a cataclysm and have forgotten about it. My main problem is, how do I introduce this continent and relay a sense of ancient and forgotten wonder, when in my head I can think of so many ways the two continents could have kept in contact all this time. Spells in the PHB allow communication and teleportation, or walking from one to the other via plane-hopping. Also water and air creatures could travel from one to the other. And, while I've established that this other continent is so far across the ocean that only the most advanced sailing ships can reach it, some nations have recently developed airships of various types. I was just wanting to pick some other people's imaginations to explain how it's remained undiscovered all this time, so that when the PCs do travel there it will really seem new and special. Thanks in advance for any help you can offer!

Crazy Hedgehog

 

[philreed]

Just take the cheap way out: A god did it.

A powerful deity has shielded the continent for tens of thousands of years. Maybe he had an arrangement with other gods that he would keep his nose out of their business if they would leave him and his continent alone -- one continent isn't much to ask.

But what if word leaked out that the deity was building some horrible weapon of mass planar destruction? Something that could potentially affect everything and everyone in existence? A force of gods then entered the continent and killed the mad deity. Poof! Shield is gone and the continent can now interact with everyone else.

Of course, living in isolation for so long means the inhabitants of the continent will react very differently to almost everything.

 

[TheAuldGrump]

Or the other cheap way, nobody alive knew that the continent still existed. If you think something is gone you don't do much checking after a while.

Perhaps for a while it did not, but was tucked, Ravenloft style, into a pocket dimension for a time. Heck, perhaps it was part of Ravenloft for a time... Which gives the fun possibility that for a while bad things happened to those people who did check on the missing continent for a while, like disappearing into the Mists themselves...

The Auld Grump, considering how long it took for Australia to be discovered there is always the possibility that they never found it to begin with...

 

[Quasqueton]

Instead of "forgotten", how about "never known of".

Quasqueton

 

[Hand of Evil]

You have to make it hard to get to, say a burning ocean or reefs of death or a guard/beast(s) like dragons. The players can find an old map showing the lost continent, they can find the footsteps of someone gone before them and returned, raiders from the other side can start to show themselves, they find someone that lives there (this could be something like a Warforged).

 

[Crazy Hedgehog]

Wow, great ideas. The reason why it's "forgotten" as opposed to never heard of, is because it was originally settled by people from the "Known World" ages ago. There used to be a mighty civilization, but it got wiped out in a cataclysm, Atlantis-style. A lot of land was swept away as well, which is why this other continent is so difficult to reach now. During that empire, technology reached say about the level of the Roman Empire; afterwards, most peoples (well, humans and halflings at least) basically had to start over from scratch, degenerating back to stone age scavengers before rediscovering civilization. The inspiration for all this was "Underworld" by Graham Hancock. By looking at strange formations and ruins all over the world, he posits that there was a great prehistorical civilization that managed to conquer the oceans, but was wiped out at the end of the last ice age when the oceans rose, because they lived along the coasts of places now underwater. He reckons that explains why things like Stonehenge and other great stoneage ruins appear seemingly out of nowhere in the historical record. I wanted to use this idea in my world to give the PCs a sense that the world was bigger and older than they ever imagined. But thanks again for the ideas!

 

[Ceresco]

I use "Underworld" as a premise for my homebrew too. Only I use the maps of the Earth pre-deluge. Do you have an imminent flood? I've developed the setting to be played in three different eras; before each of the three great floods. As fpr why the continent has become lost to time... how about the entire continent has moved! Like Hancock posits happened to antarctica. There is a shift in the earths crust at that particualr tectonic plate and the whole thing shifts under the south pole and is covered with snow and ice.

ps. It's great to hear some one else is using Hancock's ideas for gaming!

 

[Gotterdammerung]

If you want to really generate ideas about why this continent is "lost" you should go way back and identify why it was the target of the great cataclysm you mentioned.

Is the cataclysm natural? Maybe the resulting earthquakes, volcanoes, and seismic shifts released the most terrible monsters the world has ever seen, plunging the "known world" into a hellish dark age. By the time civilization recovered, much knowledge was lost. The cataclysm left the region "magic-weak" where teleporting beings are dropped into the sea or on a random desert island, never to be seen again. And the powers that answer divinations know that this land needs to remain lost because it seals away an ancient evil which even they fear.

Was the cataclysm a divine punishment? Perhaps there is something there that angered/scared/upset the god(s) in such a way that required complete annhililation to remedy. What was that great transgression? Do the people on that continent seek to bring the truth to the known world? Perhaps the gods are imprisoning them on that continent for an ancient sin.

Was the cataclysm brought about by mankind? Perhaps the ancient wizards were so mighty that their power threatened the world itself. Maybe in the last great war, magic of such power was unleashed that it obliterated an entire continent. The wizards, realizing that magic such as this would be the end of all things, called for a truce and "disarmament." They sealed it all away deep in the earth, on the very continent they had ravaged. What they did not realize was that they were secretly followed...



What was the cause of the cataclysm in your campaign? I'm interested as to why the continent was separated from the known world.


-eric

 

[fusangite]

In original Runequest, there is the idea of the Closing of the Seas where the gods punished the Jrusteli civilization for their hubris by making it impossible to travel more than about 20 miles from the coast.

In a game I ran there was a similar phenomenon called The Veil that shrouded the islands in mist that had magical properties that sent people off course or into the depths.

In Tolkien's world, there was the idea that the gods changed the nature of the seas after the fall of Numenor so that no one could come to within sight of their land except by their consent.

In the Book of Mormon, there is the idea that nobody can cross the Atlantic without the foreordained consent of God.

Basically, you need two things:
(a) a big cool-sounding magic thing that has kept people from crossing, scrying across, teleporting, etc. across the ocean
(b) a reason why this thing isn't working anymore or a reason that the characters have fulfilled some special criteria nobody else has for being allowed to cross

Here's a thought from a game mechanical point of view: the Prime Material Plane was torn in two long ago, with the tear running right down that ocean with everything on the other side actually being another plane. Recently, the plane has begun knitting back together.

Good luck!

 

[Crazy Hedgehog]

ps. It's great to hear some one else is using Hancock's ideas for gaming!

Yeah, I thought that book was pretty interesting, that and "1421" by Gavin Menzies about the idea of the Chinese sailing around the world. Joining a history book club was one of my best investments ever. Really, I think I get all my best fantasy ideas from history books. Thanks everyone for your ideas, it gives me a lot to think about. I had decided that the cataclysm was due to magic gone wrong on the original continent, where the PCs were. It very nearly ripped the world apart, causing the seas to rush in and changed the shape of the continents. Hadn't thought further than that though, at least I hadn't decided what kind of magic would cause that kind of catastrophe. One thing I had been considering is that on the forgotten continent (still no name for it yet) there had been another cataclysm, or well something that's caused a large part of the center of the continent to become warped. I guess a bit like the Mournland in Eberron; I thought it would be an excuse to use some Dragon magazine articles I have and something that all the cultures of the continent revolve around. From these ideas, maybe I'll go with some magical storm idea, that's prevented physical and magical travel back and forth all this time. Then again, I like the idea of the other half of the planet being on another plane and slowly stitching back together again. Maybe the cataclysm did destroy everything!

Oh, and Ceresco, my world map is also based on ancient earth, but I think I took mine from an old atlas, with a picture of Pangaea just starting to break up into separate continents. I think my end result looks similar to the maps in the Basic D&D books of Mystara.