final two cities

Alright here we are down to Ebon-Gray and Black.  Black is completely surrounded by Ebon-gray, which is a rather unusual setup for Adama.  The politics between these two cities reflect their physical setup.  The culture of Black is rather like that of ancient Athens.  Ebon-gray is their Sparta.    They have very similar cultures, but focus causes tension.  They just happen to have a slightly more artistic and scholarly bent than Sparta.

The main reason Black manages to stay independent is that they are the only real land in the whole area. Plus they are very rich, and not shabby soldiers themselves.  Black is a plateau of black shiny rock with grass on top.  No buildings are on the plain.  The whole thing is reserved for gazing  cattle.  The city itself is built into the interior of the plateau with the richer areas being the outside, air facing bits.  Its odd in that way that the farther into the city you get the poorer it gets.  unlike the other cavern and caves of Adama, these are entirley manmade, and usually less than expertly.  They are smelly, stale and gross.  No real method for waste removal or sanitation.  Lights are rare.  Its a very dank dangerous subculture in the center of the plateau.

On the outside it is a beautiful city.  Shining carved black rock, with classic motifs and Ionic columns.  The monied are really the only citizens that are counted.  The youths put in there time in school, then in the military, and by 30 retire back home to marry and help mom and dad with the cattle business while settleing down to whatever research or craft they have chosen and the business of produceing the next generation.  The generations are rather regimented, broken into 5 year blocks.  Because women(they go through the same school, military schedule the men do)  wait so long to have children they have fewer chances.  They tend to be healthier and survive better than their younger counterparts, but it is not unusual to only have one child naturally.  A form of 'adoption' is common, but is basically buying children from the poor.  They are not treated as second class children or citizens either.  It is also not seen as any sort of stigma against it.  It is not uncommon to see a family unit where the child is clearly not related to the parents genetically.

There is a whole market for theses 'adoptions' to take place.  And rather than it being shady, it is very well regulated, so as to 'protect' the children.  It does actually manage to make sure slavery isn't a real issue.  Families who want to adopt must be citizens of Black.  They must be at least a married couple. (Group marriages and same-sex marriages are not the norm, but they are not exotic and have the same rights as any 'traditional' marriage)  The adoption must be registered and the child registered in the records as a new citizen.

Unlike our world, children are more often adopted, rather than infants.  Parents like to chose children that demonstrate some sort of inclination toward an interest of there own, possibly to find someone to inherit the family business if a biological child does not seem interested.  Or just trying to find a talented engaging child.  Competition to be that child is fierce.  The monetary reward for your biological parents, plus the privileged new life is a hefty goal.   Often an adopted child will hire some or all (depending on how many there are) of his biological family as servants when they reach adulthood.  But before that, they don't get contact with them.  Once adopted the new family is the only family.

Ebon-gray has a similar problem with their women of birthing age. This is made worse by their slightly more war-like disposition.  Few want to retire from active duty and incidents that result in sterility are much more common. Unlike Black , there is no pool of poor to draw from for adoption.  They resent black for closely cultivating there little starving section to pick gems from.  They also resent the lack of access to it.  There had been an instance of testing allowing families from Ebon-gray adopt from the pool(100 to be exact), but they didn't adhere to the strict tracking that was required.  Further investigation found that in some cases the children were being put to work as slaves, or were not even in residence.  Some 20 children were never accounted for and were believed to have been trafficked out of the area and and sold.  That put an end to that experiment.  Black needs the pool to have hope for better things.  It is what keeps them tractable and controllable.  If rumors had got back in that bad things were happening to the adopted ones, the whole balance could have come crashing down around the government of Black.  This is the main source of conflict between the two cities.

Ebon-Gray is a moat-like lake all around Black, throughly freckled with small dark gray rocky islands.  These are where the buildings are.  Some are as small as a single family home  others as large as New York City block.  The largest  can be walked across in less than 15 minutes at a leisurely pace.  Few islands are further apart than 50 yards.  It is almost like having a very through canal system rather than a bunch of islands on a lake.

ugh, this will have to be cont. later guys.

----a

Another area, but no work on map done

So I have the ideas for Tiger-eye all filled out to the same extent as Green, now I need to roll out characters.  I haven't done any characters yet because of the system we want to use.  It's one that my business partner and I are coming up with and we need to finish it up before I can roll NPCs.

So Tiger-eye, as previously stated is a similar landscape to Sapphire, with shallow waters and a hilly sandy landscape. Unlike Sapphire the waters are slow, almost lazy and quite warm.  During the winter the area has a perpetual fog over it from the warm water steaming into the air.  Volcanic activity deep underground warms the sand and water, but poses little threat to the surface other than creating a very comfortable place for a nap.  The area is uninhabitable due to the complete absence of any naturally occurring life.  No plants, no animals, nothing.  The water is crystal clear and clean but no fish or algae grow in it.  The sand supports no plant life.  Without a food source there are no larger animals.  Colonization has proven to be too expensive due to the need to import even dirt to grow food.  There is no danger to a person getting out of their boat from currents or deep water and it is not poisonous. The deepest the water gets is about 10 feet.  You can always see to the bottom.

There are a few temporary 'settlements,' but these are few and as impermanent as the shifting landscape.  Some of these groups are 'miners' who gather the pretty, naturally occurring crystals from the ground.  Others are archeologists ( from a university in Black) who study the strange ruins that sometimes are revealed by the shifting sands.  Sometimes these groups disappear and are never heard from again, although that is not the norm.

The crystals are a mystery.  They are not from the ground, can't be found anywhere else (in the world) and are a strange non-color.  They are very common in jewelry and all but the poorest of the poor have at least some sort of bauble inside of the mountain range.  The are the main export out of the Territory but that has to do with Opal.  More are constantly surfacing from the sands.  Rumor has it that the crystals are actually shed dragon scales, but who would believe that old wives' tale?

The ruins are made of stone and have strange characteristics.  The streets have large channels dug though them, with bridges regularly crossing them.  The strange part is the entrances below water level.  Almost every building has a completely submerged entrance leading to these channels in the same fashion that a surface door has an entrance to the street.  Complete with windows and remnants of furniture, almost every building has a level that was completely submerged at all times.  In some of the larger buildings (what appear to be public buildings or wealthy private ones) there are even pump systems that appear to  allow some special areas of the surface level to be filled with water, and some sub surface areas to be drained of it.  Most of the pump systems are made up of elaborate Archimedes' Screws.


I'm going to roll up a set of characters for one miner's camp and one archeologists' camp.  Then I will plot several of each on the map and where ever the players chose to go, if they cross one of points, any to of the miner camps will have the one set of NPCs and same for the archeologists.  Easier than rolling out three or four of each and having all those people to keep straight in my head.  That would be difficult.


That's that for this week.  Hopefully I will actually get something by next week.  Once a week is not to much to push for is it?


---a