Last week, I posted my concept for the Horselords of Shildaria setting. The next step is to deal with the basics of the society. This starts with the age of the society and geography. I’m still going to be using ideas from Aria Worlds, but won’t be giving exact values for any of the numbers in the book. If you want, I’m sure from the descriptions I give that you’d be able to figure out the system.

I will eventually get into the history of Shildaria, but at the beginning of setting creation, all we really need is a basic idea of how old my society will be. Completely new societies are actually quite rare and are usually built upon the ruins of a previous society. Societal age for my purposes represents the time since the last time their was a massive societal change as well as how long the society that came before it existed. The last major change for Shildaria came from the Druid Wars, which lasted about 12 years for them and ended 15 years prior to the events in the series. Prior to that, the society lasted about 150 years.

To determine the political and physical geography, I need to determine how isolated the society is. The feel I’m going for is something akin to post apocalypse, which means the the society is not only isolated from other societies, it will be even internally isolated. There will be roads from village to village, but they will be poorly maintained if they are maintained at all. There will be two main roads out of the country, one to the northwest to a country called Tarala. Another to the east through a badlands and into the country of Taeoch. These roads are similarly of poor construction and can become impassible with bad weather.

Now that I know how isolated they are, I can determine how well they actually interact. Do not assume that just because a society is isolated, the interaction is low. After all, Cairo is isolated due to the Sahara desert and the Mediterranean Sea. However, it’s been a major trading hub for millennia. In the case of Shildaria, however, I want the feel to be of large, empty landscapes filled with dangerous people and predators. I also want there to be some national political issues as well as influence from their neighbors. Therefore, their interaction will be slightly higher than their isolation, with regular commerce internally among the provinces. Interaction with the countries around them will be limited, but only uncommon.

Geographically speaking, this means I need a place where horses are a significant advantage in transportation and warfare. It needs to be large enough that traveling across it is a major undertaking, but not so large that there is no way that they would be coherent as a culture given the time and technology. Because of the concept for the continent, it also needs to be fully tropical. There need to be hills suitable for using as defensive structures, but also flatlands that are easily farmed. There will also need to be significant amounts of wood, due to some of the technology and ideas I’m going to use. Something that looks like Florissant National Monument in Colorado.

For the northeastern part of the area, I’m going to want badlands, which will isolate the area from Iola and to some extent, Taeoch. These would look Scott’s Bluff National Monument and Badlands National Park.

Next week, I’ll be discussing the philosophical orientation for their society and how that will affect the rest of the world-building. See you next Sunday!