Full World Hooks for Far-roamers (RPG Blog Carnival, #Lore24)

For this months blog carnival we are back to the host Of Dice And Dragons for the topic of World Building which is also happening concurrently with the kick-off of the Lore24 challenge by T.W.Wombat of Wombat's Gaming Den of Iniquity - mostly coordinated with the #Lore24 hashtag. So - two birds, one stone to set out my own #Lore24 project.

Partly driven by home campaign's bard getting access to the Legend Lore spell, partly by the fact they are starting to interact with further flung reaches of the world due to their access to a flying saddle but also there has been a long running nagging thing in my mind that with magic, flying mounts, even just sea-faring ships, there ought to be stories of all sorts of places and maybe I ought to sketch out what folk ought to know.

So we turn once more to our wonderful Azgaar map and look at everything that is *outside* the Known World - the three campaign spaces - Ducal House, Southern Reaches and Bay of Princes have more or less blocked out their immediate neighbourhoods - so I want to look at the rest of the world.

What we are looking at in the 'known world' is the old elven colonial empire with that shared history - but what lies beyond? Things I want to twiddle with in this #Lore24 project are the worldbuilding principles of:

Deep Time - in particular the sense of you can 'go back in time' by moving around and finding places where the old ways, the ancient lands and extinct beasts are still present. The elves have retreated from the mainland - but they still dwell in their glory on the islands to the east, the dwarves are thought extinct throughout most of the Known World but there is a nation of them far to the south, etc.

Lands Beyond - looking at the implications of the stuff established in the play spaces carried away from that space - what lies *behind* the kingdom of villains? Who is on the other side of the giants? How closely can weird stuff be packed? Borders are not the modern sense, things think in range of influence or hunting grounds.

Fantasy Geographic Destiny - the mixing effect of perceived hospitableness of terrain. Some magical nasties can act as barriers and cause separation and divergence where otherwise one would expect connection - magical wastes, undead, demons. Conversely some species happy to live in 'inhospitable' places and facilitate cultural bleed and trade across what would otherwise be barriers - dwarves, aquatics.

Plot related details - some strange rocks have been overturned in the course of the campaigns, I want to tease out some of the the implications of those.

Cultural implications - if living memory can be centuries and folk memory millenia, what does that mean. Places connected by unusual trade routes - air, tunnel, aquatic, underdark, portal, planar, spelljammers - can share cultural similarities and be much closer than nearby but disconnected places.