Café de Nuit

The Fraternity decided not to include size in the Souragne's Gaz.
That's fine.
However academicaly I would like to discuss a few things:

From the Ravenloft Core Rulebook:

Population: 3100
There are references to settlements, plantanations and villages.
Full ecology
2/3 of the domain is a swamp.
There is no reference to size.

IMO the domain should be about 40x30 miles. So that the distance between the two main settlements should be a few hours walk.

In 2nd edition Scournage was only 4 sq. miles that means that Port d'Elhour, Tristepas and Marais d' Tarascon were about a mile from each other.
There would be no room for other plantanations, villages and settlements. In fact there would be a problem to support even Marais d'Tarascon's 300 people in such a small domain. And there certainly couldn't be a full ecology!

alhoon wrote:The Fraternity decided not to include size in the Souragne's Gaz.
That's fine.
However academicaly I would like to discuss a few things:

From the Ravenloft Core Rulebook:

Population: 3100
There are references to settlements, plantanations and villages.
Full ecology
2/3 of the domain is a swamp.
There is no reference to size.

IMO the domain should be about 40x30 miles. So that the distance between the two main settlements should be a few hours walk.

In 2nd edition Scournage was only 4 sq. miles that means that Port d'Elhour, Tristepas and Marais d' Tarascon were about a mile from each other.
There would be no room for other plantanations, villages and settlements. In fact there would be a problem to support even Marais d'Tarascon's 300 people in such a small domain. And there certainly couldn't be a full ecology!

There could be a full ecology, your back garden has a full ecology, for example.

"Full ecology", in the RL setting, means enough of an ecosystem that the Summon Monster/Nature's Ally spells have creatures available to bring you. A back garden might have a complex ecology by IRL definitions, but it's unlikely to support any animal big and formidible enough for even a Summon Nature's Ally I spell.

alhoon wrote:The Fraternity decided not to include size in the Souragne's Gaz.
That's fine.
However academicaly I would like to discuss a few things:

From the Ravenloft Core Rulebook:

Population: 3100
There are references to settlements, plantanations and villages.
Full ecology
2/3 of the domain is a swamp.
There is no reference to size.

IMO the domain should be about 40x30 miles. So that the distance between the two main settlements should be a few hours walk.

In 2nd edition Scournage was only 4 sq. miles that means that Port d'Elhour, Tristepas and Marais d' Tarascon were about a mile from each other.
There would be no room for other plantanations, villages and settlements. In fact there would be a problem to support even Marais d'Tarascon's 300 people in such a small domain. And there certainly couldn't be a full ecology!

Alhoon, I agree that the 2nd ed distances for the domain are ridiculously small (Port d'Elhour and Marais d'Tarascon really should be more than 1-2 miles apart). I'm not sure that we need to pin down an exact size for the island, even though the distances you suggest sound reasonable. Perhaps the Mists could ebb and flow, at times revealing "forgotten" parts of the island, and at other times closing in to create a "shrinking" effect? Just a thought...

I do agree that it is too small and if I ever set anything there I'd make it much larger. Dependant on if it were a campaign (much, much larger) or just a short single-adventure trip (just a *tad* larger).
But flexibility is the key as we want people to choose which works for their campaign.
Okay, moving on...

But don't forget in the real word, and especially in midieval times, settlements were close to each other and small. Even now there's not much space between cities and suburbs and small town, except in North America which is very, very different given the rapid expansion.
That's what makes Fantasy worlds so odd, you have these HUGE gaps between cities (the N-American view) in a chivalric-based society.
Perspective scewers everything. People in England think it is huge and it's a long trip across the country but here, in Alberta where you can squeeze 2-3 Great Britains inside the entire province, it seems puny and small.

Those 2-3 miles through bug-infested swamp probably seem alot larger when you have to walk than the 4-6 miles between your home and another city in your car.

Let's also not forget that there must be space enough to accommodate locations described in previous accessories such as the grove of the Maiden of the Swamp, the hut of Chickenbone, the plantation of Anton Misroi, or the pyramid of Sandovor.

Even if we take into account that travel is very difficult and that trees, mist, etc.. would make distances hard to ascertain, the present size of the domain is much too small for all the special places it's supposed to host. Why, the NPC would be walking all over each others!

Not to mention that in the Dance of the Dead novel, the riverboat travels for days in the swamp with no sight of an escape anywhere. Somehow, I doubt it would have been doing a small circle all that time...

Mortepierre wrote:Not to mention that in the Dance of the Dead novel, the riverboat travels for days in the swamp with no sight of an escape anywhere. Somehow, I doubt it would have been doing a small circle all that time...

Just reread it, and the crew of the boat was manually checking the shalowness of water before moving on, so it moved very slowly.

And Willen made indeed the boat turn in circle

Joël

TwiceBorn wrote: Alhoon, I agree that the 2nd ed distances for the domain are ridiculously small (Port d'Elhour and Marais d'Tarascon really should be more than 1-2 miles apart). I'm not sure that we need to pin down an exact size for the island, even though the distances you suggest sound reasonable. Perhaps the Mists could ebb and flow, at times revealing "forgotten" parts of the island, and at other times closing in to create a "shrinking" effect? Just a thought...

I believe that's the main reason the Fraternity chose to NOT include the size of the domain. It is a perfectly good and reasonable reason. I don't have any gripes against them.

Mortepierre wrote: Let's also not forget that there must be space enough to accommodate locations described in previous accessories such as the grove of the Maiden of the Swamp, the hut of Chickenbone, the plantation of Anton Misroi, or the pyramid of Sandovor.

Even if we take into account that travel is very difficult and that trees, mist, etc.. would make distances hard to ascertain, the present size of the domain is much too small for all the special places it's supposed to host. Why, the NPC would be walking all over each others!

My point exactly. I agree that the domain's size may change from time to time. From Tristepas to the swamp it could be 3-4 hours of walking at a time and 12 - 25 at another time.

What I mean is that it should not be 10 minutes walk at a time and 1 hour at another time. . .

PS. Gotten, I eagerly wait your request for a larger, more official submission about the DM's option "Larger Souragne"!

alhoon wrote: PS. Gotten, I eagerly wait your request for a larger, more official submission about the DM's option "Larger Souragne"!

Hey, you (or anybody else) do not need to wait for my request

You already did send me a short text on this matter. If you wish to expand it, as you wish to do with the domain , please do send me a revised version.

Joël

One intriguing possibility that occurs to me is that Souragne might be a sort of "magnet" for oubliettes, as a side-effect of Misroi's conscious (or is it? are we sure of that?) effort to isolate it from the Clusters and Core. If it's constantly having little bits of landscape added to it, some at the edge and others farther inland, then its overall size and the distances between locales really would vary rather drastically between one journey and another.

In nearly any other domain, such discontinuities would be pretty obvious, but the wetlands of Souragne are relatively trackless and little-known. (The fact that the attaching oubliettes would instantly get innundated with swamp water, masking their differences in terrain-type beneath mud, reeds, and murk, wouldn't hurt either.) Some oubliettes last long enough to be used as natural resources -- that's where the domain's inhabitants would get most of their stone for construction, though they don't realize such precious stone outcrops' transient nature -- while others could act as mythic sites that appear and disappear (thematically, the Maiden's home might work better like this than as a fixed permanent locale), or origin-points for monsters which couldn't otherwise survive in the domain.

Not only would this give Souragne a hefty injection of "Twilight Zone"-like ephemerality, but it leaves the FoS a suitable mystery to be perplexed by as they investigate their new home. It's also an excuse for us to play off the recent VRGtMists release's oubliette concept, ASAP.

Rotipher wrote:One intriguing possibility that occurs to me is that Souragne might be a sort of "magnet" for oubliettes, as a side-effect of Misroi's conscious (or is it? are we sure of that?) effort to isolate it from the Clusters and Core. If it's constantly having little bits of landscape added to it, some at the edge and others farther inland, then its overall size and the distances between locales really would vary rather drastically between one journey and another.

In nearly any other domain, such discontinuities would be pretty obvious, but the wetlands of Souragne are relatively trackless and little-known. (The fact that the attaching oubliettes would instantly get innundated with swamp water, masking their differences in terrain-type beneath mud, reeds, and murk, wouldn't hurt either.) Some oubliettes last long enough to be used as natural resources -- that's where the domain's inhabitants would get most of their stone for construction, though they don't realize such precious stone outcrops' transient nature -- while others could act as mythic sites that appear and disappear (thematically, the Maiden's home might work better like this than as a fixed permanent locale), or origin-points for monsters which couldn't otherwise survive in the domain.

Not only would this give Souragne a hefty injection of "Twilight Zone"-like ephemerality, but it leaves the FoS a suitable mystery to be perplexed by as they investigate their new home. It's also an excuse for us to play off the recent VRGtMists release's oubliette concept, ASAP.

I think this idea has merit...

I'm putting down spells to send you right now. When I finish them, I'll also send a few more points about the size (although most have been put down here and in the other thread so far).