#RPGaDay2025 - Day 5 - Ancient

Day 5 of #RPGaDay , and it's another one to make me grateful that I always start early, because this one stumped me almost as much as #4, "Ancient."

I can honestly say that with the exception of my Adventures in Gulluvia campaign, everything I've run has taken place on my own homebrewed world, and even Gulluvia gets a retroactive asterisk to it.  

The world evolved once the players moved from the Temple of Elemental Evil and travelled directly to... Shadowdale?  The high school campaign was a collection of modules I bought, Dungeon Magazine scenarios, and random stuff I made up.  

As the years progressed and the campaign expanded, I went from localized maps, to randomly generated wilderness maps using charts in the 1st Edition DMG, to finally converting everything to an actually Earth-based game, highly influenced by the Epic of Aerth for Dangerous Journeys.

After 35 years, I'm essentially caught up with some interpretation of the actual plays from the many campaigns, and I've been slowly focused on the Georic Gazetteer, my country-by-country excerpts in the voice a biased travelogue. 

Using the Epic of Aerth's format, and hopefully a more personalized tone, some of my nations were easy to set up, some I need to make more than a name, and others I keep pushing back, procrastinating, because of the desire to make them as detailed and perfect as they deserve. 

One thing that plagues a lot of the peripheral nations is ancient history.  Why is the culture like it is, how was it affected by not one, but two European-influenced empires, and what has changed with the collapse of each empire, back to the current status quo?  

The Kingdom of Crosedes, most notably the Barony of Dechie, has significant importance in many of the campaigns I ran.  

It took me four years from my last Actual Play posted, to create that gazetteer entry.   I tried to tie in a lot of loose ends and narratives in the actual plays, but it was RPG Blog Carnival that started me connecting the ancient times to the modern.

The carnival is simply a community working on a single topic for the month, then everyone sharing their work.  Some of the work provided is quite impressive.  

I've only ever done one month: The fun-sounding, "What will your PCs find if they just start digging"  

There fore I attempted to explain the foundation ruins that remained under the Temple of Alasku, a location I've used at least three times in over 30 years, and 200 years of campaign time. 

Spoilers:  It's not a village like most thought, it was an above ground temple, done in a particular infamous style. 

I didn't even go into full detail such as "Where did the Dragon-Men Elementalists go?"  "Who conquered the dungeon first?" "When did the lizard men take over the the area?  Did they help with eradicating the Dragon-Men?  Are they abandoned Dragon-Men offspring, generations later?  

It's important to ask these questions and set-up and a logical background, or a semi-logical progression of events, even if your players never see it. 

When I wrote this up a week early, the August topic for the RPG Blog Carnival was to be determined.    I am tempted to return to it in November for "Why my party so weird?"