So this is gonna be a series I am gonna do on my blog going over my process of getting a setting guide ready for my table. I am gonna start with a book I recently got access to, Vralkast: Monstrous Metropolis.

This is a setting book that paints a very broad strokes painting of the sea of sorrow, a giant freshwater sea deep in the underdark and the most prized metropolis inside it. It’s a very vibes forward book so I just want to show the process of me translating those vibes into concrete details.

I am gonna work my way towards the center of the setting so as such I am gonna work on defining the sea itself and the factions in it.

Part 1 General Map and Factions + Miscellany.

The main focus of this post is getting a map’s outline to later key. I am gonna be using the supplementary book Field Guide to the Sea of Sorrows.

Regions

There are five predefined regions:

  • The Glitterdrift – A set of caverns enchanted so all light turns to liquid and drips away.

  • The Gorgon’s Mane – A place with incredibly low ceilings where speleothems have merged to create a labyrinth of pillars.

  • The Salamanderine – Where rifts into the molten core of the earth itself fill the water with boiling ashy waters.

  • The Sporesea – A fungal mangrove forest that is home of the Ruin, a swarm of giant centipedes that is roughly analogous to a biblical plague of locusts.

  • Time’s Tomb – A section of eroded rock filled to the brim with ancient fossils, the ghosts of the long gone make it their home as well.

Alongside that there is a small table that provides sparks for creating additional regions, with 1d6 themes and 1d6 biome types.

I am gonna generate 6 more regions with this list because I want there to be a kind of neutral default sea region to place Vralkast, I want to make my own regions to make the setting my own, and I like things to be in multiples of 6 because it’s just a nice number to work.

My additional regions are

  1. 1.

    6,6 Fungal Ruins

  2. 2.

    2,5 Crystalline Islands

  3. 3.

    5,1 Hunted Caverns (I suspect hunted is a typo and it’s supposed to say haunted but I am gonna go by the letter and not the spirit because I think it could provide a stranger result)

  4. 4.

    5,5 Haunted Islands (I am gonna go with the by the spirit interpretation, and include spirits)

  5. 5.

    1,2 Tectonically Active Floodplains

  6. 6.

    4,5 Monolithic Islands.

Some comments, although I tend to dislike doing this, I rerolled on this table a fair deal. I think this table is too small to be used in the way I want to use it with generating more than two or three regions at a time. I got hunted as a result 4 times in a row and while the biome kept changing I felt like there was only so much I could do to make each spin at it unique.

My Regions:

Fungal Ruins → The Uncherished Empire

A highlands overlooking the Sporesea. Great fungal trees have reclaimed abandoned cities of the dark alves who first tried to expand into the sea of sorrow. All dark alves in Vralkast can trace their lineage back to this city.

Crystalline Islands → The Crags

An archipelago dominated by piezopsionic crystals. The crystals are too hard to have been broken down into soil yet so hardly anything more than a biofilm lives on the land. However the constant lulling of the waves constantly releases psionic energy into the surrounding area, making it a hotspot for wandering psionic creatures and strange phenomenon. 

Hunted Caverns → Grotto of the Spiders

Wolf sized eusocial spiders call the caverns home. People avoid it.

Haunted Islands → The Graven Shores

Vralkast did not always stand alone. Plague wiped the people from the land. Their ghosts still haunt the abandoned cities. Everyone who has spent any considerable time there in the past 100 years has fallen deathly ill.

Tectonically Active Floodplains  → The Gnarled Canyon

A giant niche in the cave walls torn open by the rift that fuels the nearby Salamanderine. Spring tides will force the water up the canyon walls and onto the flatter ground above, bringing with it soils rich volcanic minerals. Small farming villages held aloft on stilts dot the landscape.

Monolithic Islands → The Stones

More remnants of the dead empires that litter the sea. This one is truly titanic and ancient. Being here feels like having your soul sucked out through your throat. It’s unnatural. The megaliths that dominate the islands find their way into dreams. This empire lacked the courtesy to end its reign of terror once it died.

Factions

As for the factions that inhabit outside of Vralkast the book lays out 4, these are all intentionally vague and nebulous to presumably help the new an inexperienced feel as if they don’t have to consult a wiki, but there are three d4 tables for generating out specifics for the faction.

In this setting we have

  • The Vermin States – Raiders set to feast upon anything they can capture. Sorcerers driven mad by the vermin that swarm them after they made a pact with an entity known as the Dark Queen. They pilot ships made of bioarcanically amalgamated rats. In the version I rolled up these Sorcerers are all married to each other, produce bioweaponry, and crave lullabies.

  • The Toolgolgin –  A deiocracy ruled by She Who Breaths Below, a god of deep sea vents. In the version I rolled up she is represented by zealous rebels, she needs protein, and abhors haste.

  • The Undynasty – A dynastic empire ruled over by mages who command and bind the broken water elements of the sea of sorrow who long to be reunited with a true ocean. In the version I rolled up, they are human exiles, who desire cold-iron weapons, and battle each other. (One note for readers, this is the underdark, there are no human native to the underdark)

  • The Vermillion  –  A worm cult who worship the tube worms that they harvest. The believe it was a worm who carved out these caves, and in time the worm will return and feast. In the version I rolled up they are a hivemind, who work to bring about the end times, that fear intersocietal strife.

Time

This is just a small one but one I want to lay out in the first one, it’s not super important in regards to filling out hexes but I think it’s gonna be something that I think will define any game where things transition from the surface to the sea of sorrow. The surface works off of 24 hour days, the sea of sorrow works off of tidal cycles. It doesn’t tell you how long tides are so I am gonna take a page from real life and make one tide equal to 25 hours. Any surface dweller going to the sea will slowly have their sleep schedule shift, their circadian rhythm untethered from the sun.

Sentients 

Vralkast is very different than the sorts of settings I typically make. I am a humanocentric gal through and through, in this setting humans are “non-existent” (although there is a 1-in-4 chance they do exist, and that happens to be this version of the setting I am gonna run lol). With it there is a random table in the very back to help you generate a random npc that includes what sort of thing it is. I want to keep the spirit of this alive but I am gonna combine a few things because I just don’t care for that many taxonomies that a lot of fantasy roleplaying does, and in this setting where mutation seems very on the table I don’t see why I would make strong taxonomic distinctions.

In this all Yttins, Fomorians, and the Children of Gogmagog will be chaos titans. There will still be a cultural distinction between the groups, because that is an explicit thing in the setting but you couldn’t tell them apart because one has two heads and one has lots of eyes. 

Goblins, Kobolds, and Boggles, and anything in the Unda will all be the wee folk. I’ve honestly never been able to find a reason to include a real thematic difference between goblins and kobolds in my home settings besides aesthetic qualities. Throwing in gremlins, goblins, boggles, hintergnomes. Nah they are all just weird small mutants. Now this may be broken down into clan or maybe guild affiliation but I am not sure yet.

Dark Alves, Attercops, and Harpies will all be Dark Alves. There is a great tradition in fantasy roleplaying of dark elves being spider amalgams, I like to expand that out generally to animal humanoid hybrids being a practice amongst dark elves. So the spiderpeople will become alves who intentionally mutated themselves into spiders for religious/cultural reasons. The harpies will be that but with owls instead.

This may be later expanded out into making my own tables to determine the appearance of chaos titans and wee folks, but that’s a later blogpost.