Etrania Strategic Map
Sept 22, 2018 22:18:55 GMT -5
Crimhthan The Great and Hexenritter Verlag like this
Post by dragondaddy on Sept 22, 2018 22:18:55 GMT -5
This is the history of Etrania, prounounce eeetrain-eh-ah, my third homebrewed D&D game world which was started in 1985. In 1984 divorce proceedings began, and my wife at the time after she had left me, had returned to Colorado from where we had both been living at White Sands Missile Range, and took my entire gaming collection, which was in storage, and sold it for cash. This included about $10,000 worth of games at the time... and both my original as well as my second D&D campaign worlds, as well as my original Traveller campaign setting. Back when we first started playing there were no published campaign worlds except for the Judges Guild Wilderlands, and GM's created their own fantasy adenture settings by trial and error.
By 1985 TSR had Mystara, and Greyhawk as they had finally figured out they could make money from new D&D players by selling them campaign settings in addition to adventure modules. For us veteran GM's we simply didn't care as we had been building our own game worlds for so long, all we needed were the core books. In my case, that was the white 74' bookset which had went out of print back in 1980 with the release of the AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide. AD&D was so popular, used copies of the 74' white book set were available in most friendly local game shops back in 1985 for just ten dollars, and even sometimes less. That started to change in 1987, when they first began to get scarce.
After my divorce, in the Autumn of 1985, the army reassigned me to eighth army HQ in Yongsan, Korea, and I started hanging out with a gaming group there playing Champions, Traveller, and D&D, nights and weekends in the rec room of our barracks at Yongsan. We had about 20-25 regular gamers and two to three campaigns going on simultaneously, So I rebuilt my campaign world and this is the result...
The major kingdom was the fuedal Kingdom of Ammara. Etrania is where I usually began games for new players, at Dragon's Gate Castle, and the nearby village. Other Kingdoms included Chelar, The Kingdom of Five Circles, Asara, Celania, The Grand Duchy, The Great Desert, and the Scorpion Islands.
Etrania Strategic Map
Originally drawn in 1985 for Dungeons & Dragons. This map shows the kingdoms, kingdom details, as well as mountains, and strongholds. The Rolemaster RPG was a heavy influence, and I used the Rolemaster background details generator to provide details about the various kingdoms. Krynn was the name of a castle here, and that was the name one of my players gave that castle. He had been playing in the newly released Dragonlance setting. Thrandar later became a famous character in World of Warcraft online, but decades before Blizzard poached that name, it was the name of an island castle here. Drantos was a kingdom in Jerry Pournelle's Janiassary series of science fantasy novels. Here it is the name of a stronghold.
