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Exploring the Map of Evil
Tweet Topic Started: May 30 2011, 02:34 PM (190 Views)
kismetrose May 30 2011, 02:34 PM Post #1
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(Cross-posted from my Facebook group)

In our last game session, the characters had to head farther out of their home base city than they've gone in the current chapter of our campaign. They needed to venture across the lake, over the desolate countryside of Delhumide, and into the forest of Gauros to look for a dryad and a nymph, two things that are not easy to find within the borders of Thay. And it's not that they haven't left the city before, and it's not that I don't enjoy stories in their home base, but there was something about this weekend's session that felt like traveling and seeing the sights of a real place.

The city of Eltabbar has ended up feeling like a major city, I think, with more magic and services and plots per square mile than most places and a whole teeming mass of slaves taking care of all the dirty work. We've established that it's a lovely location overall, with more artistic flourishes than most would give Thayans credit for. It is also a major center for nobility, with each of the 90 noble houses having an estate to represent the family's interests somewhere within the city. But it also feels like each noble house is an island (which is not entirely unfitting, since the city has canals like Venice), and although they maneuver against each other, many house are focused inward on their own rosters of family issues.

The lake felt more lively than their previous visit, from interactions with the captain and crew to dealing with threats on the water. Delhumide felt just as barren as their last quick jaunt through it, but it also seemed lonely; most people don't wander or set up small town in the region due to all of the lingering menaces from magical battles and experimentation. When the chaos beast's transformation attack started to turn the blackguard to jelly, despite his bonus from divine grace, shit got real. Yes, they had a cleric, but only one, and they were too far away from any other known help. If too many of them were affected, someone was going to die. If the pregnant cleric was affected, she knew her child would be lost outright. (The blackguard pulled it together long enough for him and his cohort to take the thing down, with the cleric and the bard providing backup from way back.)

But the tharch of Gauros was a place that I was hoping to distinguish from the bulk of the Thay they've come to know. It's a rugged region of foothills leading to towering mountains, covered in forest and with no major towns. Compared with other tharchs it is poor, rough, a place of timber and furs and beasts. It's also a bastion of rangers and druids, but the area is so far from the borders of Thay that most others in Faerun believe there are no nature-based classes to be found there. After all, Thayans erected a network of magic to control the weather in most of their country - what respect for nature could they have?

The logging and fur-trapping town of Denzar was their first stop, and it is the first stop for most traffic into Gauros. It is a place to get supplies before heading into the forest and into the ancient lairs within the Sunrise Mountains. It is also a waystop for nobles who come to hunt escaped slaves for sport up in the foothills. The locals know this and try to milk it for all they can, and they hide their grins from the tourists. They are rougher kinds of Thayans, in some ways, built thicker and stockier from their hard work. They learned to respect the region's harsh ways long ago; uncontrolled fire is punished swiftly with torture and death, and a number of magical sites are guarded by druids. Rumors say that the god Malar visits the forest and the laws of the hunt are paramount. The people pay lip service to the Red Wizards when they have to, but they have less respect for weak-wristed finger-wagglers than many other places in Thay.

It was fun to finally explore this other side of Thay, this hidden side of a reviled country, and to imagine how the general evil of Thay is expressed in a different way. The dryad they discovered was still just a good creature guarding her massive tree, but the nymph they found was as evil, arrogant, demanding, and petulant as any Thayan noble child, wanting her own way and expecting to be catered to at every turn. She was also completely and utterly mad and more than happy to use her beauty as a weapon. So just when they might have expected fay creatures to remain good and pure, they bumped into yet another way beauty is twisted within Thay's borders.
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