Green Bastion

A druid city, and the thinking behind it. Ruins, a giant tree, an island, a monastery.

At the end of the last Heliomar session, the party had caught up with an “archaeologist” (read: tomb robber) wizard who was willing to give them a teleport-lift to the city of Green Bastion. This is in the context of them being semi-lost in an area called the Shrikan Hills, with winter coming in, and with at least ten days of northward travel - in good conditions - between them and the teleport facility that would get them back to Soom, where they started. The conditions are not good.

Pretty nearly every NPC they met on the way south to the place they were investigating was headed for Green Bastion. They know it’s a druid city, and that a lot of people go there for the winter. And until they met Lilith the “archaeologist”, that was about the limit of what they knew. The somewhat sandbox-y (but not full sandbox) nature of the game, to allow for people dropping in and out as necessary, means that I’m not always sure which direction things will go. There were about even chances, in my mind, of the the next civilised port of call being Soom, Green Bastion, or the town of Rikitos, way to the south, a few slightly lower possibilities of the group stumbling into one of the smaller, more local settlements (all of which are… odd), and a non-zero chance that they’d decide to hunker down in some cave or ruin and wait until spring.

But Green Bastion it is, so I have a couple of weeks between now and the next game to develop that particular city. It’s kind of resistant to being written down directly, so I’m having to come at it sideways, as it were. I’ve put together a Pinterest board, and also a Spotify playlist, and I’m writing up bits and pieces of observations on the place.

So far, I know that it’s run by a Druid Council. It’s built in enormous, mostly ruined fortress on an island in a large river, there’s a huge, huge tree at its northern end, and there’s another fortified ruined building on the southern/eastern bank of the river wherein five ancient roads converge, and a dedicated order of monks keep watch. You can hear music from almost all parts of it, and a lot of people go back there to spend the winter.

I’m trying to aim through about three targets at once here. The first is to provide a possible “home base” for the player group, but not to railroad them into it. They should be free to “settle” here or in Soom (or in Rikitos or Vosh or some of the other as yet unrevealed settlements), or to create their own stronghold/settlement somewhere (and if they do that, then Soom, Green Bastion, etc, serve as examples). The second is to put together (another) place that couldn’t exist in the Empire; to contrast the authoritarian, everyone-gets-hit-with-the-same-hammer conformity of the established place with the everyone’s-free-to-do-what-they-want of Heliomar. And the third, as ever, is to provide a coherent backdrop from which cool emergent stuff can come to liven up plot or just be evocative background.

The ruined fortress aspect gives the place a distinct look - big stone walls, overgrown with creeper and brambles and ferns (or the local equivalents), plenty of places where a collapsed wall, or even half of a building fallen away reveals chambers now open on one or two sides, bridges that cross over a lower district, and plenty of atmospheric arches, flights of steps that go nowhere in particular any more, and so forth. The druids and other residents have built into this, so that there are some people just living in original rooms, some who have moved into the open chambers and maybe put up a wooden or woven or magical wall on the open side, some who have built wooden house in the open areas, or leaning against part of the structure, and some who have just filled in gaps. It’ll look a little post-apocalyptic, I think.

The island means both that the place is defensible - although really, anyone taking on a city run by druids deserves everything they get - and also that the more water-oriented species of the setting can be there too. Nereids and water genasi and merfolk and so on can live in the river, and there can be amphibious areas where the old walls have fallen, and there’s an indistinct land/river boundary. The size of the river implies that there’s a large watershed and river network feeding into it, which means that boat travel happens there too. That means that some of the reading I’ve been doing about the Mississippi and other big rivers, and about Chicago as a North American trade centre can feed in there too.

The druidic nature of the place means I can play with green visuals a lot, in contrast to the assumed grey of most fantasy cities, or the white of the stereotypical lawful Imperial capital. There are perfectly good reasons for there to be vines and leaves and mushrooms all over the place. There’s also good reason for some of the inhabitants not to have houses at all, but to live in tents or beast-drawn caravans or giant mushrooms or hollow trees. It means that “ecosystem” is a thing the city thinks about (even if that rather jarringly modern word isn’t used), and that there will be an effort to accommodate different kinds of people and creatures in different environments.

The huge tree gives another visual anchor. For some of my players, this means they’ll think of Teldrassil. Others will think of Yggdrasil (which is, of course, what Teldrassil is based on; it’s literally called the World Tree). Those who’ve read the Dragonlance books might think of Solace in Krynn, and I’m playing into that by having there be houses and streets (or at least byways) up into the tree. If any of them are into the older Star Wars Expanded Universe stuff, they might think of Kashyyyk (I don’t think any of the present crew are, but it’s in my thinking all the same). And some of it derives from very old imagery in my own head, Jill Barklem’s illustrated children’s books, about which I had completely forgotten until one of the illustrations floated by on Twitter a few months ago and gave me flashbacks. It also gives me an opportunity for there to be slightly dodgy, poorer area to the city, because nobody really wants to live in the place where the fruit of the giant tree comes tumbling down from a hundred metres or more overhead, or at least not in autumn. The counter to that, of course, is that some of them get up into the tree and pick the fruit before it can fall. At the same time, this is a city where some sizeable percentage of the inhabitants can cast goodberry multiple times a day, and there’s no shortage of land on which to grow things, or wilderness in which to hunt. Part of the point here is that the exiles and outcasts of the Empire have a better quality of life than the poor of the Imperial provinces.

The convergence of ancient roads provides a slight contrast to the rest of the city. They meet under - that’s literally under, not “in the shadow of”, or anything - another huge, more intact building which has now been made into a monastery for a druid-allied order of monks. Some slightly anarchistic voice in my head identifies this as New Jersey to the island’s New York, but I’m ignoring that. At the moment, I’m seeing this structure as being somewhere between Pieter Bruegel’s ‘Tower of Babel’ and the Roman Coliseum, but its actual looks may vary between now and then. The arches do seem to be a thing, though.

The monks who live in this structure and guard the convergence of roads are also interesting. I haven’t had many monks in game campaigns before 5th Edition, and certainly not organised groups thereof. These guys are allied with the druids, for sure, but are a different group, with different aims and goals. I’ve yet to make any decisions about what they or their environs look like, either. And the convergence of roads itself implies things - that this city is now at the “centre” of the continent, the equivalent of Byzantium, where many trade routes converge, and that it was also important and central in Ancient Heliomar. The druids don’t tax people passing through, though - it’s not really clear if they tax anyone - and the monks are there for their own reasons.

There’s the musical aspect of it, too, which goes with druids for me. The playlist varies between not-quite-metal ambient drone-ish (but not actual drone, because that’s specialised deep-cut stuff) and Romani fiddle music, stopping off in various oddments along the way, and while that doesn’t necessarily reflect all the music of the city, it certainly represents some of it. This implies, though it doesn’t necessitate, the presence of some number of bards, or possibly fey, or just land spirits that prefer to provide their opinions in music.

And finally, there’s the detail that people - explorers, “archaeologists”, rangers - go there for the winter, so that it’s like the reverse of a tourist town. The druids can presumably hold off the worst of the weather, so it’s not going to be buried in snow the way some of its surroundings are, but it’ll still be chilly and often quite damp. So there must be many comfortable and warm places to make it worthwhile spending the winter there. I’m thinking a little of Edinburgh here, where coffeeshops and pubs and such are tucked into odd corners, and a little of Malcolm Saville’s depiction of the town of Rye (which I’ve never been to), and of Paris around the Sorbonne, and of comfortable old-world hotels and indeed Irish pubs. And bookshops, because a great many of the “archaeologists” are wizards.

Of course, writing this also provides me with a meta-account of the place toward which I can point the players, and has allowed me to sidestep the difficulty of writing a direct description of a place that doesn’t quite want to be written about.

More, I think, anon.

Drew.