Sean Merwin

You know, killing in the name of peace. Yes, precisely, precisely. So it's got this history, it's got this dual sort of mercantile but religious component to it. And there is obviously a tension. There's the leader, and the leader is always trying to balance the power of the faith versus the power of the merchant clans, and gets into trouble if they ever lean one way or the other too far.

And only for a very brief, short amount of time. But the big thing that you had to, the trope that was Bissell was follow the laws, especially the religious laws, or you end up losing time units in the salt mines. And so you had to follow the rules and not do this and not do that. And it's fun once.

or twice, but when it's a constant refrain that you can't, especially if it's something that your character would normally do or want to do, having to to an entire character, especially with this regional thing where you can't just go and play in another region. You could play core adventures, but you're always coming back to this region.

And yeah, I noticed the same thing with conflicts and intrigues. It was this political stuff that didn't easily translate to adventures. And then there's the typical and there's bandit activity in the Bramblewood or there's monsters coming out of the barrier. And it's like, OK, but it's like that everywhere.

What how do we adventure if I this region to make the politics not an NPC, but to make it right, an important PC in this campaign that we're playing.

Zaif wasn't a region?

At least I'm not seeing it here on the list at the back. Okay. Because I set a core adventure or part of a core adventure in Zaif.

One of the interesting parts, and we really haven't talked about it, was since there was this group world building aspect to it, If you were doing it right, you were reaching out as a creator, you were reaching out to other regions to say, hey, I'm doing my regional adventure, but I want to skirt into your region. Could we work together and you tell me what would be here and we can have fun?

Or a core adventure that was in a region that was represented by a triad. It was polite for the core writer to reach out and say, I'm writing this adventure. It's going here. Could you work with me? And we'll tie it into one of your stories.

then we will boogie on to the next region as I turn the page, which are the Lendore Islands. Do you want to start with this one?

end up here um what else would you add sean in its history so so first of all this is both this combines this idea of a theocracy with the idea of elven uh its species feeling superior and yeah so you start with that and then a sewell wizard named lendore i don't know if that's how you're pronounced but that's how i do uh brought he and his followers to one of these islands.

And there was tension, but the elves finally said, fine, you stay where you are, we'll stay where we are. And there was a peace that actually turned into an alliance when a threat threatened more than one island. So it seemed like everything was fine. Lindore finally passed away, and there were omens, and there were prophecies, and all sorts of things happened.

But finally, the elves must have decided that, well, we want that island, too. Enough is enough. Because they came, and they took the island over violently. Although it was a bloodless...

War but somehow still right it was Well many many people because of the prophecy knew this was coming So they were able to either escape via ships or escape via a portal But the ones who were left when the elves got there, they didn't kill the the humans They just said okay you leave and if you stay You're going to serve us. And not in a, oh, we'll pay you a fair wage sort of way.

To the point where the human servants of the elves were not allowed to talk unless they were directly addressed by an elf.

And you like island nations? Well, we've got another one for you coming right up. The Lordship of the Isles. This is an independent monarchy, but it's not really independent because it answers directly to the Scarlet Brotherhood. So this was once ruled by an Aridi prince. And there were also, now this is, I should say, these isles are south of the Lindore Islands.

So you're still in the same area, you're still dealing with the same sorts of issues in terms of naval power, trade, piracy, etc. So these islands were held by Aradie. the Great Kingdom, et cetera, et cetera. But as most colonial powers, you can only hold on to things far away from the seat of power, especially if they're islands and involve the Navy for so long.

Lots of pirates were causing problem to the point where the Great Kingdom actually got its entire naval fleet together and crushed the pirates. But you can't keep a good pirate down. So some escaped or a bad one. So some escaped, some held out. And then when the Navy went away, the pirates came back to taking possession of some smaller islands.

And so these islands, the possession of them and the rulership of them changed hands several times. Then the Scarlet Brotherhood got involved and took control of the islands through the prince, Prince Framlar.

inger scotty yeah and that's where the situation is currently the scarlet brotherhood controls everything uh but the sub rulers the the rulers of the smaller islands who are you know subjects of the prince sort of know the deal. They know that the Prince is in the pocket of the Scarlet Brotherhood.