Eressëa, A D&D 3.5/Pathfinder Settin (WIP, help wanted!)

[DarkSetzer]

Ok, so a while back my friends and I started working on a campaign setting for D&D 3.5. I haven't touched it in a looooong time, but I've decided to re-visit it and make an attempt at finishing it up and/or revamping it for pathfinder.

However, I can't do this alone. I would love any feedback, and am more than willing to turn this into a community project. The more input the better! So if you are interested in helping out with the setting, or have ideas to expand on/edit something that we've already written up, then by all means do so!

Here is a link to the wikidot which contains all the information we had compiled so far: http://eressea.wikidot.com/start

The main idea behind the setting was to create a magic-rich world, one where spirit beings roamed freely and Pact Magic could play a large role (I was, and still am, a huge fan of that portion of Tome of Magic).

[Inglenook]

It looks nice so far.

Although I must tell you that some people might not be able to speak about the main landmass with a straight face. When I see the word Elvira, all I can think of is this:

Spoiler

[DarkSetzer]

...And thus, I will have to re-name it. To be fair, I wasn't the one who named it in the first place.

[Zireael]

I second the idea of renaming this Elvira to something else.

[Schylerwalker]

I like the idea of dwarves being muck-dwelling hunters.

[Xuc Xac]

First impressions: Accent marks and diacriticals have meaning. Outside of heavy metal album covers and bad Fantasy/SF names, they aren't used just for show. Why did you spell it "Eressëa"? What does the "ë" mean? In English, those two dots are called a dieresis and they are placed on the second of two consecutive vowels to indicate that the vowels are pronounced separately. For example, "naïve" to show that it's a two syllable word and not a homonym of "knave". If that's what you meant to indicate, why not just spell it "Eressia"? In other languages, that mark has other meanings (usually altering the sound or length of the vowel). The same thing goes for apostrophes.

The history has too many zeroes. 16,000 years is an extremely long time. All of real world history could happen 3 to 4 times and still fit into that span of time. You know what people were doing in our world 16,000 years ago? The big revolutionary idea at that time was "Hey! If we tie the sharp rock to the end of a stick, we can kill things 2 arm-lengths away. Our lethal radius has doubled from 3 feet to 6 feet!"

I'd suggest you look at the "World-building turnoffs" thread and try to avoid those things.

[Inglenook]

I figured the dieresis was to ensure the E and A were pronounced separately and to mark accentuation, maybe. So I imagined the name as a whole being pronounced "air-reh-SAY-uh".

But yeah, if you're wanting it to be pronounced "air-REH-see-uh", I'd go with the spelling Xuc Xac suggested, just because needless diacritics are silly.

[Zap Dynamic]

Wasn't it supposed to be a Tolkien reference? Somewhere in the appendices they mention that the symbol over the "e" means that it should be pronounced as in English "say."

Of course, if it's not a reference then I don't have a clue. I would say that--if nothing else--the fact that there's a conversation about how to pronounce the name of the setting could be a liability if you're planning on encouraging other people to use this. If it will only ever be played at your table then it doesn't really matter, because your players will hear the word more often than they read it. Online it's just the opposite, so it's best to have something with minimal guess work.

[vither999]

My individual issues in the spoiler: it's longish.

Spoiler

Originally Posted by Xuc Xac

First impressions: Accent marks and diacriticals have meaning.

Seconded. Please fix this.

Originally Posted by Xuc Xac

I'd suggest you look at the "World-building turnoffs" thread and try to avoid those things.

Yeah, you can definitely take that 14,000 you threw in and reduce that to 200 or so.

That being said, time to point out some major realism problems I have, because hypocrisy makes the world go round! From your website:

The planet's binary moon stays primarily north of the equator, pulling the planet north of its original orbit. Thus, no point north of 10 degrees S will receive direct sunlight. The northernmost 15 degrees receives no more than a few weeks twilight during the summer. It is plunged into complete darkness for all but 20 days a year.

This makes... no physical sense. If you're going to give it a meaning in the physical world (you're not obligated to; you've already stated that it's largely for divine reasons) you can just say that the axis of spin is much like earth's and that the axial precession occurs once a year (so the north pole always points away from the sun), instead of earth's modest 26,000 year cycle. However, that'd mean it'd be much harder to navigate by the stars (they'd always be moving around with respect to the poles).

Vorea is the largest overall landmass in the world. It's most noticeable features include the Uisché Sea, a fresh water lake that is nearly 2000mi in width (running from North East to South West) Vorea also has the Twin Ranges, which run North-South on either side of the Uisché Sea and intersect in the south, effectively separating the East and West sides of the continent. The land between the two mountains is outstandingly fertile and supplies approximately 70% of the food to Vorea.

Alright, I think I need a map to understand what you're trying to say here perfectly, but other than that, I'd say a 2000mi wide fresh-water lake (you're talking about something about as wide as 4 texases, or half of Canada) would count more as a fresh-water sea or ocean. In either case, it'd definitely divide the two halves of this landmass enough that they'd count as two landmasses with two landbridges. And I won't even get into the problem of how the hell a fresh-water body that size could exist. Assuming an average depth of around 500m (continental shelf), and that it's about half as long as it is wide, then this lake would contain 336,000 km^3 of water, which is roughly 7 times the total fresh water on Earth. And we're not including the polar icecap that would develop underneath the perpetually twilight areas.

Not to mention, man, what a weird effect that would have on climate. Fresh water tides, incredibly powerful storms generated from this massive ocean in the middle of the landmass, torrential rain all around it due to water being trapped between the mountains, bleh.

Maybe it'd be better to adopt a Great Lakes style system (many large lakes instead of one super lake) where you have some reference as to what the climate would behave like.

tl;dr:

Take your pick: is this a realistic world where the laws of nature roughly exist as they do in reality, or is this a fantastic world where the laws of nature have largely been surplanted by incredible magical/divine power, leaving any perspectives we have from reality hopelessly short-sighted?

If it's the first, please, please discard any attempt at physically explaining how the moons pull the planet out of orbit (impossible, btw), certain sections of the world exist in perpetual twilight, or the salinity of large bodies of water. Emphasize instead how a deity changed it from it's natural behavior: don't tell the players how this deity did it (they're divine). Climate doesn't match up? Oh, that's because blank deity felt that it should be changed because of a jilted lover/hungry village/devout follower's request. Give a fantastical reasoning for a fantastical phenomenon; you're already in a high-magic campaign, so might as well state that the world is so warped by that much magic that no physical explanations exist.

If it's the second, take a step back, look at the continents on earth, and pick one. This is now your main landmass. Build from that, and avoid something like a perpetual night-zone or perpetual day-zone. Definitely go read and re-read what Xuc Xac suggested: there'll be about 3 pages of argument on alignment, but they definitely identify crucial areas where your game world can be made more realistic. Also, check out XKCD's what if on climate, which has a lot of good methodology.