Nentir Vale

I'm giving some serious consideration to not really making a solid map of DH5 after all.  What?! How?! Why?!

Well, the reason is perfectly encapsulated in Ray Winninger's First Rule of Dungeoncraft.  Let me quote:

Before we go too far, though, it's time to introduce you to the First Rule of Dungeoncraft: Never force yourself to create more than you must. 

Write this rule on the inside cover of your Dungeon Master Guide. Failure to obey the First Rule has been the downfall of too many campaigns. You shouldn't feel compelled to create more information or detail than you'll need to conduct the next couple of game sessions. When some DMs sit down to create a new campaign, they are strongly tempted to draw dozens of maps, create hundreds of NPCs, and write histories of the campaign world stretching back thousands of years. While having this sort of information at your disposal can't hurt, it probably won't help—not for a long time yet. Spending lots of time on extraneous details now only slows you down, perhaps to the point where you lose interest in the game before it starts. For now, the goal is to figure out exactly what information you'll need to conduct your first few game sessions. You can fill in the holes later, as it becomes necessary. This approach not only gets you up and playing as quickly as possible but also keeps your options open and allows you to tailor the campaign around the input of the players and the outcome of their adventures. In this spirit, you should aim to start your campaign as soon as you can, while doing as little preliminary design as possible.

So, yeah—I'm not going to run anytime soon, and I like world-building for it's own sake.  But a corollary to the First Rule is that it's not that all that detail won't help for a long time yet; it's that it's arguable if it ever really helps at all!  Later on in column #10, Winninger suggests a local map with a radius of about 60 miles.  I suggest doubling that, but I also suggest that that's all that you ever really need for multiple campaigns of adventure; especially if you are good at wringing the maximum potential out of your potential adventures and don't just breeze over them in your haste to move on to the next one.

As it happens, double that is about, give or take a little, the size of Nentir Vale, the localized setting default for 4e.  Now, this works really well for something that's frontier or Dark Age like in its assumptions.  4e is.  Dark•Heritage is (more frontier than dark age, whereas 4e is the reverse, but the two are overall mostly very similar).  If you're more into Imperial politics and whatnot, then maybe you do need a bigger canvas.  Julius Caesar started his career in Asia Minor, went to Rome, became governor for a time of Hispania, traveled extensively in Greece and Egypt, fought the Gauls and the Britons and the Germans, and fought a civil war against Pompey in Illyria.  He got around a much larger geography than the Nentir Vale, which is only about half the size of the Carpathian basin, which was just a tiny part of Caesar's adventures.

But personally, yeah—I like the frontier type campaign, so I'm thinking something that size of Nentir Vale (or the Bighorn Basin, to put it in a real world perspective).  So, all I really need to do is create a more detailed setting that's about the size of the Bighorn Basin or Nentir Vale, and just refer in somewhat handwavy fashion to what else exists in the world and where.  A sketchy map of the whole area isn't even required, although it might be nice, but more than that is totally unnecessary.

Now, some of you may well be suggesting that while I'm obviously name-dropping 4e and Nentir Vale, this was hardly a new idea to 4e.  You note that the Grand Duchy of Karameikos detailed (very lightly) in the old Moldvay-Cook B/X series Expert book was a very comparable example to Nentir Vale both in scope and scale, and certainly it predates it by decades.  Some of you may even note that I've already included my own version of such in Timischburg myself.  So why do I need a new one?  Or rather, naturally I don't, but why might I want one, instead of just spending a bit more time fleshing that one out?

The answer to that lies mostly in the question of tone.  Timischburg was originally invented specifically to be my own answer to Ustalav (from the Pathfinder Golarion setting) for my CULT OF UNDEATH project, and it was supposed to present a kind of Gothic/Transylvanian horror vibe.  While that was 100% appropriate for the CULT OF UNDEATH project, I question whether or not that's really the right approach to what I hope is more generally useful and can support perhaps a broader range of tones with ease.  Also; I need a place that's a frontier region, not one that's haunted by the ancient and the corrupt.  Not that there won't be the ancient and corrupt in the frontier region too, but it'll take a different form, and will generally be more alien.  Also; frontier regions tend to be more diverse, which is part of why there's so much potential for conflict (diversity + proximity = war).  But Timischburg had only limited opportunities for certain types of player characters (or fictional protagonists) to find anything that they could relate to.  Which was partially by design, but also partially... not really what I want for something more general.

So, I want to create another comparable area that is more one that has been washed over by wave after wave of now vanished political entities.  Lingering peoples from those past empires still... well, they linger, here and there.  New colonists, from the Six Colonist nations in particular, have started to establish their new homesteads and towns and maybe even a city or two, but the dominant theme should be one very different than that of Timischburg; it should be rival different settlements of various peoples each occupying the same general area, and with both alliances but also friction, and with loads of dangerous wilderness in between the various settlements.  This dangerous nature of the region means that natural rivalries are sometimes going to be repressed as civilized people regardless of background have to be willing, at least at times, to work together to survive.  This gets back to the more defined points of light type of paradigm.

Timischburg would exist here too, though—it would maybe be a neighboring block, and at least a small border of this newer portion (I'm thinking it'll be the Hill Country, as earlier described) will border Timischburg, although probably separated by pretty difficult boundaries, like the Knifetop Mountains and the surrounding Haunted Forest and Thursewood.  By their names, you can imagine that there isn't a lot of good traveling through those regions.  This probably also means that I'll have to both flip and rotate the Timischburg map to make it work, but that's OK.

Other than that I'll have to draw it again.  Sigh.

UPDATE: Requoting some elements of my discussion about Timischburg.  Maybe it works pretty well after all. What I think I'll end up doing is creating the Hill Country, attaching it directly to Timischburg, and just have two linked areas, for double the fun.  That's more work, but as I said up front; it's actually mostly work that I enjoy anyway.

Ghouls haunt the graveyards at night.  Byakhees flit around the towers of reclusive rural lords with vile reputations.  Dark Young lurk in the depths of the Haunted Forest, and werewolves have famously made the Bitterwood dangerous to pass through.  Succubi siphon the life from urban socialites who fool with powers over their heads that they don't understand or respect.  The Eltdown Fens crawl with shambling, moss-covered skeletons that rest uneasily in their watery graves.  The coastline features mysterious areas that are rumored to be ancient ports destroyed by Ketos.  Liches keep lonely towers in the wilderness, surrounded by their rotting servitors.  Nightgaunts haunt the peaks of the Knifetop Mountains.  Dark rumors of shoggoths lurking in the sewers of Grozavest and Preszov continue to linger.  The Thursewood is crawling with thurses (duh.)  The hilly ridge that gradually rises to the Mountains of Mittermarkt are topped with lonely, old barrows where wights lurk in the night. 

Etc. and so forth.  Everyone likes to talk about how during the Middle Ages people rarely traveled more than a few miles from where they were born.  With a place like Timischburg, it is painfully obvious why that's actually a great idea.