OK, folks. In this week’s post I want to talk about a part of Aromathus that lies outside of the lands and peoples who inhabit A Dance with Demons. To set it up, remember that the Empire of Averim was settled by colonists from the islands, where the humans originally settled after they came from lands across the ocean. These islands form what became known as the Narvith Empire, and is my topic today.

I will talk more about the Narvith Empire in the future (including one of the few D&D presteige classes I created for the world,) but today I want to introduce a few of the things that are behind its background.

To start, pull up the big PDF map of the continent that I posted several weeks back; you’ll see the Narvith isles to the west of the continent. In short, these islands were created for two simple reasons: I’ve always wanted to run an RPG campaign set in a place where the characters are hopping from island to island, kind of a pirate / swashbuckling adventure; and I’ve always been interested in English history. The meeting of the two was obvious.

I’ve never run that island campaign. I may someday, but honestly, if I were to do so, I think it would be better set in Ursala LeGuin’s world of “Earthsea.” OTOH, the tribute to English history is stronger than ever.

Consider: Good fantasy, IMO, has cultures that are based, at least in part, on reality. No matter how inventive the creator is, they are almost always borrowing from somewhere – even subconsciously. Even the “great originator” of modern fantasy, Tolkien, borrowed (if that term can even be used) from Celtic myths, etc. Why? He was creating an “English” mythology.

My focus has been at the same time very similar and very different. I remember a conversation I had at GENCON last summer on this topic. I’d been attending a seminar on building religions for fantasy worlds, and I pointed out to a friend afterword that I wasn’t so much interested in the nitty-gritty of how the religion worked, but what effect it would have on people who lived in the world. “That,” he pointed out, “is anthropology, not mythology.” The thought was very true, the more I thought about it, and it explains a great deal about how the world of Aromathus has been built.

The Narvith Empire is based on an archipelago of thousands of islands. Some of them are quite large, able to support large populations and quite varied economies. Others – most, in fact – are quite small, and don’t even appear on the PDF map. So, I thought, how would a medieval kingdom based on an archipelago function? After all, there is no such kingdom in our own world – Japan comes the closest, but it is relatively compact, with only four major islands, and only came to be a single, unified country rather late in our own timeline.

The Narvics, OTOH, where unified from the start, and their kingdom covered a huge area of the continent – much more “space” than Japan, if you include the water. In fact, it is more like Indonesia, now that I think about it, but with two major differences. First, Indonesia has many tribes, even to this day, whereas the Narviths had only the one human refugee fleet. Secondly, there is magic.

I talked somewhat about this in my last post on Averim. Magic, IMO, would profoundly influence how a society – or a world – functions. For example, the late author Arthur C. Clarke famously said that “Sufficiently advanced technology is indecipherable from magic.” I believe that the converse of that statement would also be true. Last time, I talked about war; here are some more peaceful uses of magic.

The first of these is teleportation, or planewalking, as I termed it in the books. To explain, Star Trek has transporters; Aromathus has teleporting mages – same effect. See where I’m going? Most of us are familiar with how transporters “work,” at least as a plot device. But really think about it: If magic allowed a person to have lunch in Paris, dinner in Shanghai, and desert in New York, the world would function very differently, right? Star Trek allows for that, especially when you consider that they have limitless cheap energy in that timeline. Aromathus is again the same. Now, I didn’t want the magic to be that easy, so I put the limits on it that you see in Chapter Eight of ADWD.

On the other hand, it does allow for a few things; namely, a huge empire encompassing a large volume of the globe, yet ruled by a central ruler. Granted, the ruler can’t easily send an army by magic (that’s a can of worms I REALLY don’t want to deal with…), but an emissary? Or a bag full of gold to pay off a local Duke? And so the Narvic Empire was born.

This leads to my second point: Ships and the sea. I don’t need to spend as much time on this, but it does influence how the empire works. Magic can move a few people, or small good, but anything moved about in bulk requires ships. As I said, I never did that ocean campaign (Or now, story), but I can.

Beyond the bigger parts, though, are the details. I will get into these more in a later post, but for now, this is where I borrow more heavily. In the “macro,” the Narvics have a sea-faring culture based on trading. Just like the English of the 19th century, Narvic traders (and money) are everywhere. In fact, it is again magic that allows an empire very much like the British Empire in its world-spanning time to exist in a fantasy setting with technology equivalent to the high middle ages.

In the micro, though, is where the details lay: a “royal navy,” and a country with a very small army. Trading for everything, and dominating the world economically as a result. Remember how I said several posts back how Averim was originally going to be Germanic? That’s why – Averim is to the Narviths as Germany was to England in the 19th century.

See where I’m going with this? The Narvith’s started off as medieval Brits, but became so much more. It’s a part of the world where I had a lot of fun running D&D campaigns “back in the day,” but is still, as they say, rife with possibilities.

Now, a teaser: Another big influence on me has always been the Arthur legends. See why I had to have an English culture in my world? While I don’t have the Arthur legend as a part of the Aromathian mythos, I do have the Knights of the Round Table. I’ll talk about them – and how I use them as a prestige class – in my next post.