Thankee, M'lud.

I'm sliding back into Hyperborea one polypous appendage at a time. 

Ciao,
Geffyl

Handy Haversack wrote:

In my brain, I never really see any kind of pitched battle happening. Frankly, there just don't seem to be enough people in Hyperborea for it to happen! And most of the settled regions seem to use geography as their main defense. What do you think?

I agree with this, personally.  One of the things that sets Hyperborea as written apart from (for example) Greyhawk is the relatively small human population.  Also, the city-states are all separated by howling wilderness that makes large-scale clashes between them impractical.  Obviously there would be pirate (and Viking) raids, clashes between the "lords" of Brigand's Bay, deadly squabbles among various tribes of the barbaric peoples, and numerous other types of mass combat.  But the population numbers given just don't support the idea of battles between armies numbering even in the high thousands.  Personally, I would imagine most of the city-states maintain no more than a couple thousand mercenary soldiers (similar to the situation in "A Witch Shall be Born") and perhaps a levy of a few thousand citizens.

(One positive side-effect of this is that any PC who sets up a stronghold and hires a few hundred mercenaries become a real power!  No need to contend with the Overking's army of 90,000 or whatever it was...)

But of course, you could always increase the given populations to support larger armies.  Why not?
 

Last edited by Blackadder23 (6/11/2014 9:19 am)

Blackadder23 wrote:

One of the things that sets Hyperborea as written apart from (for example) Greyhawk is the relatively small human population.  Also, the city-states are all separated by howling wilderness that makes large-scale clashes between them impractical.  Obviously there would be pirate (and Viking) raids, clashes between the "lords" of Brigand's Bay, deadly squabbles among various tribes of the barbaric peoples, and numerous other types of mass combat.  But the population numbers given just don't support the idea of battles between armies numbering even in the high thousands.  Personally, I would imagine most of the city-states maintain no more than a couple thousand mercenary soldiers (similar to the situation in "A Witch Shall be Born") and perhaps a levy of a few thousand citizens.

(One positive side-effect of this is that any PC who sets up a stronghold and hires a few hundred mercenaries become a real power!  No need to contend with the Overking's army of 90,000 or whatever it was...)

But of course, you could always increase the given populations to support larger armies.  Why not?
 

I see your point and agree that a "Lord of the Rings" style army would probably be overkill. Although imagining some horrifying cosmic entities consuming such a force makes an entertaining picture.

I was actually going to start with the Great Kingdom's Knights of Doom. My previous notes estimated their strength between 15,000 - 25,000 soldiers. I'll go into more detail in one of my future posts on the army and its article from Dragon Magazine.

Overall, I was planning on using the idea behind the army, i.e. an ancient lich or similarly dark immortallish being using automaton knights. The actual "Knights of Doom" are surprisingly few compared to the humanoids they command.
 

The Gal Hills "cities" are said to have 1,200-1,500 inhabitants, I think, with more for Gal itself. And that looks to be one of the major areas of human settlement. The Green Death is still at work in Hyperborea, I think, with the population barely climbing back in a very dangerous world.

By the way, I tried to comment on the blog. Without some kind of profile, the comment just disappeared when I tried to submit. But I like your thoughts on Kromarium! I picture vast swaths that are uninhabited, shunned, feared, with most of the population established in new, makeshift quarters dwarfed by the ancient towers. A few brave, powerful, foolish, or wealthy people have taken over some of these towers, but ancient dangers lurk in all of them, and power. My take so far.

Geffyl wrote:

Sorry, I'll have to see if there's some setting preventing guest posting.

[edit] I'm sorry. I've been throught the settings and it just won't let me remove it's wanting a profile. They had to have changed this sometime recently, because I have had other people post anomonously on other blogspot blogs of mine. [/edit] 

I understand. The blog hosters and software distributors want a closed environment so as to glean more info and have more users. I'm just cuss-headed. I'll post here or drop an e-mail or PM when something strikes me! You can even post them as comments on the blog if you want.

Geffyl wrote:

Handy Haversack wrote:

But I like your thoughts on Kromarium! I picture vast swaths that are uninhabited, shunned, feared, with most of the population established in new, makeshift quarters dwarfed by the ancient towers. A few brave, powerful, foolish, or wealthy people have taken over some of these towers, but ancient dangers lurk in all of them, and power. My take so far.

Thanks. The more brave, powerful, foolish, and wealthy, the better! For the ancient dangers, that is.  

Totally. I already have an adventure kicking around in my head that would be centered on one of the festivals (Apollonalia, I think) that involves a raid on one of these towers and so would deal with the traps and resistance of the inhabitant and some of those ancient dangers in the hidden ways. I figure each of these towers is unique, with a history all its own. Leaves lots of room to play with. Kind of like the towers in the Citadel in Wolfe's Book of the New Sun, but not guild-related, clearly--and probably only *some* of them are ancient space ships!