The Silver Sun — Synopsis and Thoughts May 10, 2007
Posted by chorenn in World-Building.add a comment
As I noted before, elements of this campaign were drawn from The Silver Sun, a fantasy novel by Nancy Springer, and thus, I feel it is important to write and comment about the book.
The Silver Sun is the second novel in a series of five books called The Books of Isle, which are about the rulers of the kingdom of Isle. Isle itself is an island continent; at the time of The Silver Sun, its cities and regions are ruled by different lords under a single king, King Iscovar. Individual lords rule their domains as they see fit (most of them oppressing their people and waging wars with neighbors in attempts to gain more land), and King Iscovar kept firm control over the lords. He cared mostly that his power over the land never weakened, and cared not which lord ruled what area or waged war when, as long as they all bowed to him. His family line was also well known for cruelty, and for worshipping the Sacred Son, a god of tyranny who demanded human sacrifice and suffering. His elite soldiers were known as Kingsmen, and they were quick to appear when they detected any dissent (or rumor of dissent), squashing it violently.
Before Iscovar’s reign, there had been two kingdoms on Isle — the country of Welas had never fallen to the kings of Isle. However, when Iscovar ascended to the throne, he had attacked Welas successfully, and when Welas sued for peace, he demanded that the king of Welas’ daughter wed him, for he knew that their future heir would be the heir to both Isle and Welas, cementing Welas as part of the kingdom of Isle. Since the alternative was wholesale slaughter of her people, she agreed.
The two main characters of the book are Hal and Alan. They first started traveling together when Hal came upon Alan in the forest being beaten by the local lord’s soldiers; Hal rescued him and Alan, having been robbed of all that he owned, had no other choice but to depend on Hal for a time. Alan was the son of the lord of the city of Laueroc, a benevolent ruler, but, when his father had been taken by King Iscovar’s forces and the lordship replaced by a puppet lord, Alan had been forced to flee.
After some adventure, during which the two grew close, Alan becomes irritated that Hal repeatedly got Alan into mortal danger but Alan never knew why. Hal finally realizes this and explains everything to Alan: He is Hervoyel, the son of Iscovar and heir to throne of Isle. He completely disagrees with his father’s methods of ruling and legacy, and refused to swear fealty to him, and thus has fled. His aim now is to gather allies and strengthen himself, for his father is sick and dying, and he knows that many of the lords will try to take the throne by force. His father knows that it’s only a matter of time before the lords realize that the crown prince is gone and the king has no control over his heir , and thus King Iscovar is searching for him.
Hal also tells Alan that he had been tortured by his father (in the hopes that he would break and swear fealty), and when that didn’t work, his father had him watch someone be tortured slowly to death — that person was Alan’s father. Alan realizes that the prince, who he had always imagined was a monster like his father, is actually his great friend, and rather than blaming Hal, tells him that he wishes they were brothers. They then perform a ritual of blood-brotherhood.
Much of the rest of the book describes their trials as they travel the land to gain allies, and then Hal’s return to the capital to claim the throne, then defeat the armies of the lords who have come to seize power. Along the way, they encounter many prophecies about their task — two men, one in silver and black (Hal) and the other in gold and green (Alan) championing the peasants and bringing peace to the land. Hal eventually ascends the throne as King Hal (discarding his given name) and asks Alan to ascend also, so they would rule side-by-side. Each man, on their own, had discovered that in truth, they were half-brothers — Hal’s mother had an affair with Alan’s father, and Iscovar had actually been impotent — so Alan’s claim to the throne was as valid (Hal wasn’t actually a blood heir, after all, and as a folk hero, Alan is just as popular as Hal), and the prophecies surrounding Hal stated that he would have no heirs, so Alan would be establishing the royal line. Thus, they become the Sun Kings, Hal in silver and Alan in gold, ushering in a new age of peace to Isle.
The thing that appealed to me about the plot of this book was the whole destiny thing, as well as the prince working from outside the castle to seal his throne. There was a lot in the book that couldn’t be done well in a D&D campaign, so I chose what I wanted very carefully.
1. The land in my campaign is, like Isle, an island continent, with no communication with any countries beyond its shore. The people of Chorenn don’t even know if there are other people in the world (more on this later).
2. Like Iscovar, the king of the land, Harold, had to deal with one rogue nation on the continent, Valuria, and, after waging war on it, demanded the hand of the princess of Valuria to ensure that his son would succeed to both thrones.
3. King Harold has only one heir. It didn’t make sense to me that Iscovar would allow his heir so much freedom of thought for so long, so Harold had two sons. He groomed the first son, Thomas, to be like himself, but, confident that Thomas would make an excellent heir, paid little attention to his second son, Johnathan. Thus, Johnathan was raised by his mother and taught benevolence and an appreciation for culture and civilization. Thomas died in a freak accident, and when Johnathan saw what his father did to the person he felt was at fault for it, he fled the castle to regroup and find his own allies.
4. Johnathan is one of the player characters. I worked with Nathan (who I mentioned in a previous post) to create this character, who must keep his identity secret, for fear of being turned in or turned into a political pawn, until he finds people he can trust.
5. I copied a few of the lords that appeared in the book, including the lord whose daughter Hal eventually marries. It’s a bit unfortunate, but Nathan has chosen that girl to court, before I had a chance to introduce his character to other likely candidates.
6. King Harold also has a legion of Kingsmen, but they are more spies and assassins. The Obsidian Guard are secret spies and have their own secret language, and they live among everyone else, incognito. They report all dissent to the king, as well as other plots and interesting news, and people know that if they speak even a little badly of the king, they are likely to disappear on the morn.
7. One thing that I didn’t mention in the synopsis that I used was the religious system. The world that Isle is on was created by a single being, called Aene (“The One”), who is not worshipped, and actually, is not even known, except by Hal who had a mystical revelation. The individual gods that people worship are only facets of Aene. My world has the same system, though the being has no name. In addition, there are a myriad of gods — big pantheon gods, city gods, regional gods, ancestral gods, familial gods, god of that rock over there, etc. I wanted the players to have a feel for what it was like, way back when, before Christianity, when every person had his own spiritual outlook.
Those are the big things to mention. I’ll edit this if I can think of other relevant pieces from The Silver Sun.
The Importance of History October 8, 2007
Posted by chorenn in Personal Comments, World-Building.Tags: history, Ideas
1 comment so far
It’s been a while, hasn’t it? I’ve been busy in real life, so much so that most of the work on my campaign has been directly on it, or on organizing all the information I have about it. I have set up a personal wiki, using the Wakka Wiki engine, to record all of the information and have it available to me anywhere I can get Internet access. I chose Wakka Wiki because it allows me to deny permission to secret pages — most wiki systems do not allow that. I’d link my wiki here, except that all the interesting stuff is closed to the public, so there’s not much there.
Things have been progressing nicely in the campaign. There has been a bit of party in-fighting, when one of the members finally snapped under the pressure when he realized that his goal of a quiet life had just been demolished, but another player stepped up and pulled the party back together.
The thing I want to discuss today, however, is more about how to build a believable world. I started at first with a map of the land, an idea of what the different regions were like, and a concept of its theology (with the intention of letting the players build the actual gods, since my pantheon is so free). I made sure the regions were sufficiently different so that they would have different flavors as well as different climates and monsters, and filled in the details as I went along.
However, I discovered after a while that ideas that I had needed to fit with other ideas that I had used before, and that the things that the players enjoyed the most were those that had a story behind them. Why is this particular lord so domineering and greedy? Because he’s not actually the lord — the real lord disappeared centuries ago, leaving behind only an artifact that identifies the true lord of the town, and the current lord, actually a lord regent, is constantly afraid that some peasant will walk up, touch the artifact, and rob him of his title and power. Why does this particular humanoid race seem to appear and disappear every century or so? Because they move from place to place, and many of their places are not within the human realms.
It occurred to me that to have an interesting, consistent world, you need to also have a history. It actually does matter what happened a century ago; things that happened back then may actually affect what happens today. In my campaign, for example, the elves lost the human/elf war and went into hiding centuries ago, long forgotten by the humans. A large faction of them are waiting for the human monarchy to fall apart, so that they can burst out of hiding and sweep over the human cities, leveling them to rubble. The party doesn’t know this, and if they can salvage the monarchy and unite the nation, they might never know, but if they don’t, they will discover the consequences.
I’ve always felt that giving the players choices made the game fun. In this particular game, the players make all the choices; very little of what they do is dictated by me, the gamemaster. But I have also found that if you can make their choices actually mean something, the game becomes epic.