Antediluvia: The City-State of Megiddo, the Iron Wall of Spears (Overview)

    Located just north of where the River of the Nameless God and the Hoshama Watercourse meet, Megiddo stands shining. Its outer walls are constructed of tan stone flecked with gold and quartz, and they sparkle dramatically in the sunlight, even at a great distance. When citizens of Megiddo arrive home, they speak of the sparkling stone with relief as being the first sign of safety upon returning from the dangerous wilderness of Antediluvia.

    The city-state of Megiddo is run by the priesthood of the Nameless God, a benevolent deity that encourages kindness and fairness. This does not stop the priesthood from becoming occasionally corrupted by politics and power, but the devout priests that hold fast to the Nameless God's teachings are almost impossible to sway from an honest path. For this reason, Megiddo is looked upon as an excellent place to live, and the city has grown exponentially, and so has the settlement of immigrant people outside the city walls that are largely responsible for farming the land and herding animals that feed the populace. More people arrive weekly to live near the city, or in it. They are always welcomed with open arms as long as they are not afraid to work.

    The leader of the priesthood, and overall ruler of Megiddo, is called the Ecclesiast. He interprets the holy writings of the Nameless God, sets down laws to be followed by the populace, and has a team of priests to see to day-to-day business with a level of detail rivaling the strictest of bureaucracies. However, he is fair and just.  If he is found to be unfair or unjust, he can be replaced with a vote of no-confidence from the priesthood.  He works miracles, as do the other trained priests, and divine magic is a somewhat commonplace, but always amazing, sight within the city. The priests of the Nameless God are some of the only users of magic in the world of Antediluvia that aren't corrupted and twisted by their use of magic, since it comes from a benevolent source of power. Most other wizards and priests of Antediluvia traffic with dark powers rather than powers of light.

    Every seven days, all activity in and around the city ceases, and a day of rest is taken. This serves both to refresh workers and to give them a day to worship the Nameless God in peace. If someone chooses to work, they may be reprimanded or asked to come to the temple to worship, but nothing more severe than that will happen. There is a bit of social pressure to attend temple, but it's always couched in positivity and not ostracism. However, other faiths are not allowed in the city, and the worship of other gods is strictly forbidden. No temples to other gods exist here, and would be destroyed if they were built. If the priesthood finds out about the worship of another god in the city, they will take up arms against the offenders, and they will be driven from the city, and hunted in the wilderness until they are destroyed. One of the tenets of the Nameless God is that no other god shall be worshipped in Megiddo, and so offense runs deep when it happens. Dark gods are especially hated, and extra attention is paid to anyone rumored to belong to the cult of a dark god.

Antediluva: The Technocracy of Taltun, City of Sages and Libraries (Overview)

    At the center of the mountain range called the Spear, within its circle of peaks, lies a lone mountain, atop which is located Taltun, a technocracy run by sages, wizards, and engineers. The only access to the city is through the Fell Pass on the northeast side of the Spear, or along the river that flows through the north side of the mountains from Lake Kharad in the land of Khemish. A long stair, carved into the mountain itself, winds around and around the peak all the way to the top, right to the gates of the city.

    The Sages of Taltun rule the city and its environs by council and this council is called the Synod. The Synod rules by majority, and there are nine members, three each from the Sages, the Wizards, and the Engineers. They vote their conscience and not to defend their respective corners of government, but in the case of a three-way tie, they will consult with an other-planar entity, chosen randomly, and communed with via magic. They accept whatever the entity says as their final vote. This happens only rarely, and only in very contentious matters.

    The city and surrounding lands themselves are quite peaceful, appearing at first, upon approaching the mountain, as an agrarian society. Only occasionally, however, will a farmer be seen in the fields. What visitors will see in the fields, rather than humans, are golems, automatons, and constructs of every imaginable type and application. All the agriculture around the base of the mountain is entirely performed by these constructs, at every stage from planting to harvest to market. Once visitors have made it to the great stair circling up the mountain, they'll notice that almost all they counter will be automatons of some sort, on errands, delivering messages, and doing all sorts of other jobs. They'll notice great floating barges moving grain, and great harvesters taking off crops in the fields down below. Even the city gates are guarded by golems, and they comprise the city guard as well.

    Inside the city, humans have their choice of leisure activity, unless they're overseeing the golems and constructs, and there are quite a few people devoted to this effort. However, the nobility and land-owning citizens are free to do what they wish since all of their work except for intellectual pursuit and pleasure have been automated in some way. The Sages are free to research the universe, the Wizards are free to create new spells and new methods of making constructs, and the Engineers are free to create new technological wonders.

    Not all the constructs and machines in the city are magical, although many are. The Engineers are masters of forgotten ancient technology, and they guard its secrets very closely. Some of the technology is rumored to have been recovered from the Necropolis of Voor or encountered on other worlds, although the Engineers insist that is simply a rumor and that they have created all of their weird wonders on their own. Chief among their inventions is the transportation system that is used within the city, called Telebeams. They work simply by stepping onto a small platform, wherever a platform is located, and speaking the destination. After a flicker of light, the person using the Telebeam disappears and then appears at their destination, assuming the Telebeam is working. If it's not working at the destination, the user goes nowhere. This technology is a very closely guarded state secret of the Engineers, and not even the Wizards or Sages know exactly how it works.

    Any imaginable sort of construct, for any purpose, is able to be found or commissioned here. There is no limit to the wonders of Taltun. Adventurers can find ample employment by the different groups in the city to locate components, materials, or information, including items and artifacts. A Sage, Wizard, or Engineer in need is an easy way to line adventurers' pockets, but it is never without danger. The knowledge these rulers seek is almost always in a dangerous or unexplored location, long forgotten by all but those hunting it, and their reasons for seeking it are not always altruistic.

Antediluvia: The City-State of Ho-Olhed, City from Beyond the Stars (Overview)

    Just south of the Urud River and north of the mountains called The Scales of Ohtar, and at the western edge of the known world in the region of Imrur, lies the city-state of Ho-Olhed. It is a wild, strange place, with alien customs and a strange religion. The people of Ho-Olhed are light-skinned and light-haired, but their bodies are entirely covered in green tattoos that they begin to receive at the age of 12. The subject content of the tattoos is highly individual, but the custom is that by the age of 20 a citizen's body must be entirely covered, even the face, eyelids, and other unmentionable sensitive parts of the body. Olhedians wear only green in various shades, and it is illegal within the city, unless a visitor, to wear any other color. Green is the sacred color of the Olhedian god, Olo-gomi. Olo-gomi is not just a god, but the living ruler of the city.

    Olo-gomi's main concern is the spiritual purity of his worshippers. He teaches that spiritual impurity is contagious, much like a disease, and any contact with impure ideas or substances or the dead can taint the soul of a person. If someone is ritually unclean, and comes into contact with someone who is purified, that purification is null and void, and the previously clean person must be cleansed again. Only a blood sacrifice will wash away spiritual taint, done in the name of Olo-gomi. These are performed in the temple at the center of Ho-Olhed where Olo-gomi lives. The type of impurity determines what sort of sacrifice must be made, from animals as small as a pigeon to a human being for the gravest of sins. When a human must be sacrificed, criminals or war captives are used, since the ritual is said to purify both the unclean person and the sacrificial person at the same time (in this way criminals atone for their sins and enemy soldiers do something good for their captors). The sacrifice itself is usually done by burning the animal or person alive on a pyre, bound if necessary to prevent escape from the flames. Visitors must take utmost care in this city lest they run afoul of the long list of sacrifice-inducing sins. Ignorance is no defense where Olo-gomi is concerned.

Antediluvia: The City-State of Nilkka Senggu, the Green Wall (Overview)

    On the southern coast of tropical Nog, on the western side of the strait called The Pillar of Karthage, lies the city-state of Nilkka Senggu. The citizenry of the city are a docile lot, quite peaceful overall, but the reasons for that will be revealed below. The citizens are made up of two former tribes of the area, the Nilkkites and the Senggites. The Nilkkites are tall, nearing seven feet in height, with uniformly white hair and dark skin. They wear traditional dress consisting of robes tied at the waist with colored leather belts, and wear stylish hats that advertise their social positions. The Senggites are smaller, no more than five feet in height, with various hair colors from black to red to brown, and have a medium skin tone. They also have traditional dress, consisting of three principal colors - blue, purple, and orange. Leggings and tunics are worn in all colors, but their boots or footwear are always orange. They have also adopted the practice of the Nilkkites of wearing certain styles of hats to advertise their status. The two tribes are now one people, and no enmity is borne between them. 

    The strangest thing about Nilkka Senggu is the ruler of the city. The ruler is called the Metaphrast, and is chosen every eight years. The Metaphrast receives his orders from the true ruler of the the city-state, a huge black obelisk called the Testate. The Testate is intelligent, telepathic, and inscribed over its entire surface in an unknown language. It is constructed from a type of stone unknown to the world of Antediluvia, black in color, but with an iridescent finish that shimmers in the light. The Testate chooses for itself a speaker, the Metaphrast, and communicates through this person. Although it can speak aloud, it speaks in what is likely the same unknown language of the inscriptions that cover its surface. The Metaphrast is telepathically and empathically linked with the Testate, and he can innately understand what the obelisk intends, needs, and wants, and can articulate these thoughts to the citizenry.

    After serving eight years, the Metaphrast will die. The obelisk, in order to maintain the link to the speaker, drains the life force of the character. Over the eight years the Metaphrast serves, he will age at a highly accelerated rate, and by the end of this time, he will appear to be ancient and frail. As soon as a new Metaphrast is chosen and the link is severed from the old speaker, he dies, the obelisk no longer sustaining his life.

    Disobedience to the laws the Testate communicates carries various sorts of punishment. Not only does the police force of the city (called Inscriptors) enforce the law, but the Testate can, because its psionic senses are indescribably strong, tell if an act of disobedience is occurring within the city. Depending on the severity of the infraction, the Testate may or may not alert the Metaphrast and the Inscriptors.

    The obelisk itself is usually located in the city square, which lies in the center of Nilkka Senggu. It floats about a yard from the ground and is able to teleport with no chance of error to any location within the city walls, whenever it pleases, in an instant. Anyone that has tried to damage or attack the Testate has found themselves confronted with crushing psionic power, and are usually driven mad by contact with the mind of the obelisk. 

Antediluvia: Alignment

    Alignment in Antediluvia will be the standard Lawful/Neutral/Chaotic of BECMI. Why? It makes sense for this world. Before the world was destroyed in a flood, humanity as a whole was wicked. Good and evil don't matter as much in this particular world (yet), but law and chaos do. The cosmos is consistently in flux between order and disorder in this world, with the forces of law trying to civilize a wild planet, and the forces of chaos pushing back and desiring no change to the status quo. They aren't philosophies of life, per se, and there's no alignment languages since they're not binding philosophies and most of the time characters aren't acknowledging the world in this way, but the alignments do dictate what side of the fence a given character stands on and what ideas they'll defend. Most of the known world is ruled by chaos in this age, of course. These are not magical forces, but forces of the divine working behind the scenes, on other planes of existence, for control over its development and course.

The Tiny Appendix N of Antediluvia & a Rambling Thought-Post

There are a few works that have left their mark on my Antediluvia game world more than anything else. A lot of them are currently a part of AD&D 1E's Appendix N already, but they come into focus more sharply for me with this game world, and I've read them all recently (or re-read them, as the case may be with some). Even though some of the below are post-apocalyptic, they also apply in a waking, birthing world like Antediluvia.

Sterling Lanier's Hiero books

Jack Vance's Dying Earth stories (these are especially important)

Classical mythology (Antediluvia was built on the bricks of my old Hellenista campaign)

Clark Ashton Smith's Zothique stories

Robert E. Howard's Conan stories

Edgar Rice Burroughs' Venus and Mars stories, as well as his lost world stories

Jewish and Muslim folklore of pre-flood Earth, as well as the Bible's accounts

Various encyclopedias and dictionaries of angels and demons

    The current working idea behind Antediluvia is "what if I took the strange cultures Jack Vance liked to outline in Dying Earth, and constructed a sort of pre-Flood Earth with them, leaning into the whole humanity was extremely wicked angle?" And the geography doesn't have to match it at all - parallel world so to speak. I also borrowed the "points of light" idea - the world is mostly unsettled, with self-governing, almost Greek-like city-states, and no nations (yet), just regions that are named. Each city-state has a very distinct and alien culture, none of the likes of which exist today. I'm staying away from the typical "proto-medieval" default of D&D, except where weapons technology is concerned. Magic is Vancian in nature (right down to forcing spells into the mind, and their erasure after being cast). Vancian magic makes a lot more sense now, in the way that D&D manifests it, now that I've re-read half of the stories. However, magic is still going to be a rather dangerous practice (even as it was in Vance's novels with some wizards - they lose their conscience, it seems, in their pursuit of power). The world has two moons, which both happen to be inhabited, unbeknownst to the populace of the world, which is where E.R.B.'s works factor in. Add, then, the heroic tone of R.E.H.'s work, and voila, a mish-mash is born. Weird advanced science could play a role as well, with certain devices perhaps mimicking spells with their operation, or existing magic items.

    I'm having fun detailing the world. It's languished as a work in progress for a decade, with no active game going on within it, since I've never thought what I had i    s something that I'd like to run. But now, however, it's coming together. The kids are almost grown, I moved to Detroit, and began to buy all the products that I can get that I missed out on in my youth. It's a good time to be a DM, and I intend to be again. All the creativity spawned other campaign ideas, like: 

Dark Appalachia (Appalachia removed from Earth in the early 1900s)

Dungeonworld (where I take published dungeons and populate an otherwise barren world with them, making them the feature and not the bug)

Hunters of the Apocalypse (a post-apocalyptic Biblical and Supernatural crossover)

Weird Science & Sandals (where I lean into a classical Bronze Age world with weird science and advanced technology)

Gonzo Fantasy and SciFi (where any fantasy idea from any book and any supplement in the rules system I select is fair game to use, even if the DM doesn't own the book)

(There may be more to come.)

    For Dark Appalachia, Hunters of the Apocalypse and Antediluvia, I'm using BECMI, mostly as-is with Antediluvia, but for Dark Appalachia and it's historical-modern setting will require a few house rules. I may use 2nd Edition for the Weird Science & Sandals campaign, and that would mean OSRIC and 1E materials are in as well, since they're quite compatible, to expand the options classes-wise or elsewhere. 

    For the Gonzo Fantasy and SciFi campaign I believe I'll use d20/3E/3.5. I have a ton of works for that system, and with so many varied settings published for that chassis, and oodles of classes, it will make a super-fun anything goes atmosphere. I'll back-convert Pathfinder stuff as well. The power levels are close enough that I don't care which version of the system it comes from, and I'll use 3.5 to adjudicate. Most of the time, it's just the skills and some methods of resolution that are different. It would be mechanically easy to drop a d20 Modern character in beside a Traveller d20 character along with a straight 3.5 sorcerer and a Pathfinder 1E fighter. The feats are mostly self-contained and affect what the character can do without affecting others, and base attack bonuses and saves are largely worked out the same way. Any incompatibilities can be worked through on the fly. The idea for this came from reading Philip Jose Farmer's Dungeon series, where over five novels with multiple writers they develop a fantasy world where people find their way to these kind of planes-like worlds called the Dungeon, and are all from vastly different cultures and worlds and technology levels. It lit me right up.

    I apologize for the rambling. But you can see my brain is on fire with ideas right now. Now, back to writing.

Antediluva: The City-State of Uzuldaroum, the City of Black and White (Overview)

    In the north of the known world, on the edge of the northern plains of Nushirvan, is a city-state called Uzuldaroum.  It exists on a nearly lawless frontier, as none of the land north of the area has been explored, or at least no parties have reported back that have tried.  All the trade in the area flows from the south, since the north is a frozen waste, and therefore very few have traveled there. The entire population of the city is albino, with all the telltale signs and symptoms.

    The leader of this city-state is called the Profligate. He rules with an iron fist by decree, and no one has ever seen his face since he wears a featureless half-white, half-black (split vertically) iron mask in public, and is entirely covered by robes. He oppresses the people under his rule, exacting harsh taxes and harsher penalties. However, crime is nearly nonexistent due to this harsh rule, and thieves' guilds fear operating here. Even someone merely accused of a crime is gathered up by the city-state's guard and never seen again. Oddly, they have no jail or dungeon within the city. No one knows where prisoners are kept, or what is done to them.

    The people of Uzuldaroum are a strange lot, following odd traditions set forth by the Profligate. Only two colors are allowed for clothing, black and white. Exactly half the body must be covered by white, and the other half black. To violate this will invite a visit from the guard, and if the offender does not immediately fix his clothing, he is executed on the spot. The only currency that is exchanged, by order of the Profligate, are live fish. The larger the fish, the more it is worth. Money from outside the city must be exchanged at the gates for live fish if any visitor needs something from within (and before they'll be let in, they must wear half-black and half-white clothing). Spies are used extensively by the city guard to maintain order for the Profligate, and they are paid well (in fish) to report violations, even down to the ban on singing. 

    The only music allowed to be performed within the walls of Uzuldaroum must be played on a zither. Any melody can be chosen, but the zither must be used, and singing is outlawed under penalty of execution. Another more diabolical custom, which is followed each eve of the New Year in the city, is a time of complete anarchy. All crime is legal from midnight until dawn, and the city guard is given the night off and required not to enforce any laws. This leads to absolute pandemonium in the city as the populace runs wild, and the "celebration" is called Transgression. The only other major "holiday" within the city is held on the summer solstice, and involves the entire population staying inside their homes for 24 full hours, restricting themselves only to eating meals and reading the Profligate's book of laws called The Binding Book of Urging, which contains all the leader's strange laws. This holiday is known to citizens as Lecture.