Introduction

"

I dream of being a _{Laestrygonian.}

"

  If you’ve browsed a number of projects here on WorldAnvil, you’ll notice mine is missing the World Meta section. Well, it’s not missing, I’ve simply hidden it. I have something filled out, but it's rather slapdash, and also not at all helpful. Much of its content resembles the front page blurb or the "copyright" footer at the bottom of this page. I’ve opted to write a proper introduction instead of filling out a series of canned questions.   I like to think my project here is unique. I don’t mean that to be an expression of pride, to say that "I’m so creative, and no one has ever made anything like me before"; “unique” is often used as a euphemism for “bad”. I’ve spent a fair bit of time browsing random worlds on this site, and I have yet to come across another project like mine. Setting aside content, structurally this project doesn’t fit the norm. I’ve noticed projects here tend to fall into a bimodal distribution of completion: projects are either very expansively and thoroughly developed and realised, with a beautiful custom layout and extensive use of art (AI generated or otherwise), or (more often) they’re extremely underdeveloped, having a few stub and placeholder articles, a template layout, and often having been seemingly abandoned for some time. I’ve seen relatively few that seem to fall into the middling level of development I would classify mine under.  

Layout

I've laid out this project in the style of a wiki, with extensive hyperlinking between articles and an only mildly stylised layout. More importantly, though, it is laid out to be as factual and objective as possible, with as little conjecture or cultural bias within articles as is reasonable. The information in this project does not necessarily reflect the knowledge a given person from a given time would have. This, of course, being a conworld, theoretically anything can be known, and more is known to me than is put here. This project presents essentially the information that could be reasonably known about this world in a modern timeframe.  

Geshkara

Geshkara is the world used to run my campaigns. Initially, created for running Dungeons & Dragons, it grew initially out of the general vision (5^th edition) D&D has for a fantasy world. At its start, though, it was intended to be more serious and more cynical than the Forgotten Realms of 5e with more attention to detail and consequences of worldbuilding decisions: the elves were proud and stubborn, as elves are, but were also moribund, outbred and outcompeted by the shorter-lived but more innovative humans, the dwarves and dragonborn xenophobic and isolationist, humanity ambitious and expansionist. Magic and its practitioners were oft viewed with suspicion, and magic frauds abounded. As time continued, though, and I continued developing it, it began to deviate further and further from the high fantasy vision of D&D and the Forgotten Realms, as I began to exercise my own vision.   At some point it became so fundamentally different from the vision of D&D that it became largely incompatible with the rule system of D&D: no alignment system, different magic items, ditching Vancian magic (though so did D&D in practice), no devils, no drow, a different cosmology, etc. Different peoples and cultures have different interpretations of the gods. The extent to which gods are real, their motivations and intentions, and the extent of their interventions in the mortal realm are frequently debated. To the extent the divine is understood, it is largely mystic and gnostic. Divine and druidic magic were ditched as distinct forces from arcane. Various races were reimagined, reinterpreted, removed, or added. The outer planes were reimagined. The fey were largely killed off and the planes were sealed away from easy access or travel.  

Time

Time is very important to me. I don't mean I've spent a lot of time thinking about how my calendar will work, or how many hours are in a day, how do the people tell time. While those are important considerations, what I mean is a deeper sense of time: centuries, ages, epochs—how the world changes over time. I've noticed among other worlds (even professionally published ones), seldom is more than one timeframe presented. D&D, and most fantasy in general, assumes a high medeival time period, or one approximating it in its broad strokes at least (for example, full plate armour was not in use until the Late Middle Ages or Rennaissance, beginning around the time the Turks were sieging Constantinople with cannons). Besides this, the timeframe presented usually looks largely like how much of the history of the world is presented to have looked—the so-called "mediaeval stasi", the world trapped in the (High) Middle Ages for eternity. The High Middle Ages lasted about 250 years in the real world. At the beginning of the High Middle Ages, around 1000 AD, the Anglo-Saxons ruled England, having conquered the Danelaw less than 50 years prior, Scandanavia was still largely pagan; Abbasid Baghdad was sacked by the Seljuq Turks in 1055. At the end, around 1250 AD, England was Norman, Scandanavia was Christian, and the Abbasids fled the Mongol invasions to Mamluk Egypt, with their Turkic army. The period saw seven crusades in the eastern Mediterranean, the Baltic crusades, the East-West schism in the Christian church, Magna Carta, the king of the Franks became the king of France and the king of the English became the king of England (an important distinction in state-building), the Byzantines were destroyed and came back, the founding of Poland, the Mongol conquests, the fall of Kievan Rus'. In even just the 250 years of the High Middle Ages, a lot changed. Very often I see very little room for change in fantasy worlds, especially ones meant for role-playing; they're treated more like a stage, a sandbox for the players to trounce around in. While this can be fun, and has its place, it nevertheless makes the world seem less alive. Maps in the real world change quite often, and they changed a lot more until recently, but yet you usually see one political map presented for a fantasy world. (Itself, a political map of the sort often presented is itself highly anachronistic, with maps prior to the Age of Discovery being highly innacurate, stylised, and often meant to portray things other than an accurate depiction of the land and the world. Maps of the sort were more symbolic and not meant to be useful in things like navigation.) That sort of thing implies that borders don't change, that these peoples don't fight, they don't go to war, they don't have any ambition. Without a certain level of dynamism, a world can feel more like a theme-park. The real world is one of change, chaos, and conflict. It's one of surprise, and events that often don't make a lot of sense. Too often a fantasy world seems stagnant, like the events happening don't really matter to the grand scheme of things, or that the only events that do are the ones the players are directly involved in. While the world exists for the players, it doesn't revolve around their characters.   I understand why mediaeval stasis is attractive: besides just being easy, the implication of change and of especially technological development carries some implications that many might find undesirable. If 200 years before a setting's "present" people wore chain maille and used one-handed swords with shields while now they use halberds and plate armour, then in another 200 years will they be using flintlocks? Another 200 years still and will that great "engine of progress" be represented literally by a great steam engine ferrying jingoistic soldiers to the front with rifles in their hands to die anon, face down in the mud of the trenches choking on sulphur mustard? I get it, progress implies inevitability implies modernity, and modernity sucks; that's why people like fantasy. Who wants to see an elf running a Maxim gun? Me. I do. Besides, I like that feeling of inevitability, the pull of what is in this world a cycle which any further elaboration upon would be significantly revealing of what might be called "spoilers".   Another problem created by this focus on a sole "present" that every game in a world is run in, is that it often leads to an underdeveloped past. A lot of worlds will have a lot of detail about an ancient past: long-dead civilisations, ruins, ancient manuscripts, far enough removed to be of little import to the daily lives of regular people, but have very little with respect to the more recent past. Often the past that's focused on is the past of things no longer around, which never interacted directly with anything contemporary; there's a ton of information about things that happened 2000 years ago, but almost nothing about what happened 2 or 20 or 200 years ago. It makes the present feel disconnected from the past. A lot of times real history can feel like this as well, which I ascribe mostly to how it's taught. There's very little emphasis put on continuity in school. When I learned about the first World War in school, the Ottoman Empire had been brought up as the "sick man of Europe", to which I thought, "Wait, who? The only other time I've heard of these people was when they took Constantinople in 1453. What's their history? How are they the 'sick man'? How did they get that way? Where did they come from?" When applying this kind of process to worldbuilding, it's easy to get a group of people without a past. A lot of peoples and races in fantasy worlds seem authochthonous (sometimes they literally are), and lack a history. Humans from all over the world miraculously all happen to speak the same language, conveniently dubbed "Common", and usually no explanation for how or why everyone speaks this is ever given. Common (or any language for that matter) is almost never given an Urheimat, and therefore the people have no origin. It's for convenience of course, but it makes little sense, and if you start really exploring the past of your world it becomes a large problem. This is the reason there are so many languages in Geshkara. I really like languages, but also, language is important. Culture is important, and language is culture; there's a reason the term "ethnolinguistic group" exists.   While I don't necessarily have anything against mediaeval stasis, and I don't even find it necessarily unrealistic (Japan continued to use the matchlock tanegashima basically unchanged for 300 years, and China arguably reached a sustainable, steady-state pre-industrial economy under the Qing that might have continued without significant technological progress were it not for European intervention). Especially with the introduction of magic, it's certainly plausible that innovation in technology and the natural sciences stagnates with magic able to provide a steady enough economic situation that further advancement is unnecessary. Gunpowder may never have been invented and the social impacts caused by the levelling effects of personal firearms and the infantry revolution never felt on society. Industrialisation in the real world was driven in no small part by unstable economic situations, with the agricultural efficiency increases in England necessitated by the population declines of the Crisis of the Late Middle Ages creating larger urban populations as the population increased again. The lack of unfree labour in Britain created a situation in which there was a drive to increase production efficiency and utilise energy sources more powerful than the available muscle power, which met with this increasing urban population, and the advances in the sciences during the Enlightenment, and created the groundwork for industrialisation. All of this to say, industrialisation was not inevitable, and certainly isn't in a fantasy setting. However, I wanted my setting to tread the path towards inustrialisation, and I was very careful to set up the necessary ingredients for industrialisation in Geshkara. But whether industrialisation is the end or not, I find steady states uninteresting. Even if the Crisis of the Late Middle Ages or the General Crisis of the 17^th century did not lead to industrialisation, they are certainly more interesting than "everything is as it has been, and while the author swears conflict and instability abound, there is little evidence of it. Here, go fight the big bad who threatens to upset the balance of the world and ensure it can continue as it always has." What if I want to help the big bad? I don't agree with what he wants or what he's doing, but the world he promises strikes me as a more interesting place to study and to set stories in (as an observer not actually in said world) than the current one.   Beyond this, the past is important to me because I like to jump around the timeline of my world when running games: jump forward a few hundred years for one campaign, back a thousand or so for another. It would be incredibly credulous to try to maintain the same status quo thousands of years apart, and also make my timeline jumps superfluous. Different people lived different places, worshiped different gods, spoke different languages, and lived in different kingdoms (or tribes even). Of course the peoples of the past (present?) are often ancestors of peoples in the future, but that helps the continuity. Technology changes, too. In Geshkara, people in the 26^th century have muskets; people in the 21^st didn't. People didn't start wearing full suits of tempered steel plate armour until the of the 22^nd century. People in the 12^th century used and revered magic; people in the 29^th largely don't. At the start of the 29^th century there were no trains, by the end they run on diesel. Firebolts give way to the muskets give way to machine guns. Long before the Common Age, people didn't know how to work iron. To run games in vastly different time periods, it's important not to focus too much or get too attached to a single time period, and to really flesh out the past of a world. I consider the "present" of my world to be whenever the most recent (in the timeline of Geshkara) campaign took place, but I have ideas for the future. If you read the section on differences between this world and a standard D&D one, you'll have noticed a trend in the world: that it becomes increasingly mundane. It's useful for me to have this trend because it helps me envision what the past, and the future, look like from the reference of a certain timepoint. By the end of the 29^th century, magic is largely forgotten, distrusted, and unusable, many people are monotheistic (or at least monolatrous), and populations of non-humans continue to dwindle as the seemingly inexorable industrious progress of man drives them further to the fringes.