Unrewarding
The votes have been tallied, and this month’s Patreon poll has produced a winner. The latest dot on the Handbook-World map is the ratfolk haven of Brie! (Better luck next time, warforged village of 01000011 01100001!).
If you’ve never tried your hand at worldbuilding, I suggest you pull out the big box of crayons and give it a go. Some of the most fun you can have behind the GM screen lies in inventing new and bizarre places and peoples. Finding a good starting place can be tough though. An individual building is a bit granular for my tastes, while pulling a whole kingdom out of the aether gets overwhelming in a hurry. Conveniently enough, the classic “starting village” is about the right size for a comfortable worldbuilding task.
For me, the first question is always “what’s different about this place?” Important NPCs and tavern names and quest hooks can wait their turn in the queue. Before all of that wonderful inventing I try and figure out my gimmick. Is this a rowdy pirate town? Are we going for the Shire with undersized everything? Maybe it’s an Ewok village set among the trees. Maybe it’s an cosmopolitan sort of town where merfolk and land-dwellers live side-by-side. As the ridiculously cool Salt in Wounds setting shows, a strong starting concept can lead to all the other jigsaw pieces. To that end, I find that turning a race into a gimmick is an effective tactic.
Take Menzoberranzan for example. It’s been years since I first read about the subterranean city of the drow, but certain details still stick with me. The central clock tower / stalagmite Narbondel is a good case study:
Narbondel was the only unshaped piece of stone within the boundaries of the city cavern and it was used as a clock. At the end of every day, the Archmage of Menzoberranzan cast magic upon the stone to heat it. The heat from the Archmage’s spell formed a band around it and moved up. When the end of the glow was at the pillar’s top, the day was almost done. When the pillar was completely dark, it was called “Narbondel’s Black Death” (effectively midnight).
This setting detail rises directly from the drow themselves. They’re subterranean, so they have no sun to mark the day. That means they need a magical substitute. That means they need mages. The place of magic within the society becomes a question, which gives rise to Sorcere, which gives rise to Tier Breche, the dark elves’ caste system, and all the houses of Menzoberranzan vying for prestige. It’s like getting lost in a Wikipedia link chain, but every “click” becomes another useful part of your setting.
So what do you say to a little exercise in community worldbuilding today? We know that Brie is populated by ratfolk. We know that it produces fine cheese. What else can you tell me about the place?
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Well, from the PF description we know that they are hyper-social and live in tightly packed areas. Yet, on first glance at the image it would seems there are at least two freestanding buildings of relatively small size. My contribution to Brie is that those buildings aren’t where the ratfolk live; instead, the ratfolk have a large and intricate tunnel system beneath the area where they live and hord their goods. The buildings up top form the dual purposes of entrances to the underground network and, more importantly, places where they perform tasks that they wouldn’t want to do in the tightly packed tunnels below. Some of the examples are carpentry (don’t want to get sawdust everywhere that everyone lives), baking (fires underground are not good), sheltering surface livestock, and so on.
As a side contribution and a staple for most villages and cities in my world building, the ratfolk have managed to capture a gelatinous cube at the bottom of a deep pit. They have constructed latrines above it and use it as a public toilet, as well as a place to dump sewage and organic waste in general. Once a week some ratfolk will use nets on long poles to fish out any non-organic matter that’s gotten trapped inside the cube.
Nice! So if they’ve got a gelatinous cube and have a system of underground tunnels, it follows that the extremely useful gelatin must have wandered up from somewhere.
I suggest that a disused part of the village is connected to the Underdark/Nightlands/natural caverns. Only the very poor or the desperate make their homes in the abandoned tunnels of Cutter’s Sink, named for the stone cutters that once mined white limestone there. Brie’s turn from quarrying to agriculture is only a few generations old, so only the oldest of the Brie folk still have friends among the dwarven laborers that once came to work the mines.
To further on the idea of the cave system it would only make sense that these caves once used for mining are now their aging rooms for cheese. They could use small patches of yellow mold in barred crates to keep some areas even cooler. In order to keep the mold from growing out of the crates they have a maintenance crew clean the bars once per day with alcohol soaked rags and use a piece of coal with tongs to ‘feed’ them.
On a mechanics note it would seem that if they were living in a wooded area they would have the standard rangers, hunters and druidic types about. However I believe thematically that Alchemists would work best for this area, specifically Horticulturists. Also Druidic Herbalism seems like it fits quite nicely as well. The Alchemists and Druids are able to make sure the correct cultures grow and can manipulate side caverns to produce various new types of cheese.
Experimental Cheese Druid seems like something that ought to exist.
When I get around to turning Brie into a proper mini-dungeon, I think that might be our main quest-giver.
“Please heroes! You must save my latest experiment. It is a highly unstable Munster. If it goes critical in the tunnels, all of Brie could collapse!”
I would imagine that Verminous Hunters would make up some amount of their armed forces, or be it the town hero. It’s quite thematic that a ratfolk would be a verminous hunter, especially paired with some form of vermin companion, like my brother did with a two tailed scorpion, thanks to evolved companion.
Seems like the perfect place for a hunter to dwell, given the surrounding environment, at a glance. Someone has to be the head of the town’s defense, after all. Why not make them just that much more special?
Very cool. What kind of vermin are most common in the area? Given all the tunneling going on in the area, it’s probably common to make friends with subterranean bugs.
Bats, beetles, scorpions, centipedes, rats, and wasps are those that would likely inhabit the area. A decent variety of verminlike companion options, although, I would say a scorpion would be the best. Scorpion mount anyone?
Considering their homes look to be made out of still-living trees, I’d hazard that they’re a druidic community. They likely produced the cheese in-village, and cheddar is made from cow’s milk, so there are likely small herds of bovines in the area, which is possibly how the druidism came to be a major factor in the village – it’s about the only way a bunch of three foot tall ratfolk are going to be able to keep the herds healthy and without risking themselves. Cheddar production is also best/properly done by aging the cheese in a cave or underground tunnel, which means they probably have at least a rudimentary tunnel system beneath the village.
And yet the cheese-bearers are wearing what would appear to be generous gold and silver accessories. So they seem to be aware of the value of precious metals and understand the impression it gives, while having apparent easy enough access to it that the ratfolk bringing the cheese can wear more of it than Fighter has left in his pack, but they’re paying Fighter in cheese. I’d go so far as to suggest this was an absolutely willful deception on at least their leader’s part, which means the village probably leans harder on the ‘neutral’ part of druidic alignment.
Given the apparent age of the white ratfolk, it’s also likely they don’t face a lot of dangers or hardships, which means the village is probably in a fairly tame piece of woodland and doesn’t see a lot of danger – I don’t imagine life there is particularly hard or troublesome. If danger should threaten I imagine they have easy access to the tunnels or caves mentioned above, and wait for it to pass over. The worst that could happen is the tree-houses being damaged or the cows scattering into the woods – a druidic society solves both problems in short order once the danger passes.
Interesting point on the jewelry. They must be fairly insular then, trading on their faux-bumpkin reputation while keeping all the wealth “in the family” as it were. Perhaps this is a reaction to the collapse of their mining economy.
The fact that they are hiring Fighter (and the rest of the party, presumably) also supports the idea that they see very limited threats, since it implies that they don’t have any homegrown heroes of sufficient level.
Combine that with the hints that they are very isolated, that suggests that their primary defense is concealment: their villages are hidden, and even the entrances are very difficult to find without guides. They probably combine regular concealment techniques with magical illusions and anti-divinations.
Not to mention that druidic magic would give some unique opportunities in concealment magic. Perhaps there are magically maintained walls of thorns around the village, and you need one of the druids to let you in or out.
Now I’m just imagining them popping out of every nook and cranny like muppets preparing for a musical number.
I propose that Brie is similar to the Genii from Stargate Atlantis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genii_(Stargate)) – while they seem to be a village of peaceful farmers and cheesemakers, this is in fact a front concealing their underground bunkers of advanced technology. Maybe it’s a love of firearms and Gunslingers (like the Rattus Faber of Fallen London – http://thefifthcity.wikia.com/wiki/Rattus_Faber), maybe it’s Iron Gods-style future tech. Perhaps the whole village is built upon a crashed spaceship that they secretly harvest their technology from. Regardless, they use their innocent face to keep more powerful local factions from looking for their tech, even to the point of allowing bandit raids to succeed and sending gullible adventurers against minor threats rather than laser-blasting them.
They also have an arch-rivalry with that stuck-up bunch of guineapigfolk down the road, as the guinea pigs want to steal their tech (http://thefifthcity.wikia.com/wiki/Pigmote_Isle).
Why do they pay in cheese? Either they use their appearance to get out of having to pay for stuff with actual rewards (“we have nothing to give but cheese!”), or cheese really IS their most valuable resource, both for its nutritional value and because their quasi-nuclear reactors run on it. Or maybe they just heard that Fighter really likes cheese (https://1d4chan.org/wiki/Cheese).
…On a different note, if they make cheese, they need a good source of milk. Probably cows or goats. Possibly something else. Probably best that Fighter doesn’t ask.
Generations have passed, and none now recall what lies beneath the wooded vales of the Barrier Peaks.
I think it’s worth noting that they are offering cheese as a reward for adventurers. To be ignorant of the common use of precious metals as currency and/or the risks involved with slighting a group of sellswords, they have to be isolationist in the extreme. Vast majority of them have most likely never seen a baldskin in their life. Building upon Halitrad’s notion of Brie’s people enjoying a fairly peaceful life, I would expect those two aspects to be mixed together – the ratfolk are actually highly xenophobic, viewing outsider presence as a source of nothing but trouble. Now that their job has been done, Cleric and Fighter will likely find themselves not-so-subtly nudged toward leaving the village as quickly as possible. Perhaps the chief/mayor will even “accidentally” direct them toward some less than pleasant area of the forest, hoping to prevent the word of Brie’s existence from spreading.
That dirty rat!
Perhaps they’re aware of the perils of offending armed sellswords but several of them are high level rogues that are in witness protection but more than capable of putting up a fight
If it’s a producer of cheese, then they have milk to produce it with. This branches into two questions: What other dairy products might they export, and from whence does the milk come? Depending on the climate (which is listed for the non-nomadic ones as ‘normally pretty hot’), certain cultured dairy products like yogurt might be relatively difficult, but there may be an advantage to dry consumables like powdered whey. High quality butter is also very likely, given the ease of production.
Now what produces the milk? Is it the ratfolk themselves? While that’s someone’s fetish, it’s unlikely if it’s an export, and they probably have livestock to handle that business. What might ratfolk herd, then? It’s been suggested that the underground structures of the ratfolk are far more extensive than their aboveground engineering, so we’re likely to see the pasturing, such as it is, similarly underground. The ‘cattle’ will obviously have to be mammalian. I’m thinking moles. It’s mole milk that’s so popular. And the world will never know because they’re simply not invited to find out.
Mole cheese, mole cream, mole butter, frozen molescream cones. The variations are without end, I’m sure.
Let’s not be silly. You can’t milk 3 oz. moles on an industrial scale. We’ll obviously have to invent dire moles for the purpose.
As suggested earlier, they have a vast community below grounds.
Every year they hold “The Festival of Screams”. Though this sounds terribly barbaric, the name is actually derived from the tunnel leading to the very deepest caves where only the bravest venture for valuable resources. Once every other year on the first full moon, a swarm of large spiders, newly hatched will attempt to enter the tunnel system proper to feed. Preventing this, is a 150′ long tunnel that has been covered by Shreiker fungus. The fungus is a warning, a deterant, and a buffer. The spiders that aren’t warded off by the tunnel are dealt with by the town guards. After the swarm abates, the celebration continues, now celebrating the “harvest” of materials from the tunnel.
On any other day, the tunnel may be used only after Silence is cast on it to protect the foraging party from the fungus.
Nice! This sounds like the adventure hook for the mini-dungeon. The Shrieker Tunnel is the barrier between Brie proper and the wilder portions of abandoned tunnel. And it’s through this tunnel that the cheese thieves passed.
At this point I’m guessing it was ettercaps that stole the experimental cheese druid’s latest creation.
The largest structure in Brie, located in and around the oldest tree which towers above the rest of the forest, is the temple of Tyri, the goddess of agriculture. Tyri is the chief deity because he/she is important for both the health of the fields surrounding the village, as well as the productivity of sheep, goats, and cows that are all milked to provide resources for Brie’s chief industry of cheesemaking. Cheesemaking is important, of course, as both a way to store food over the winter, as well as a commodity for trade and barter with other communities.
In Brie, Druids and Clerics are practically indistinguishable, as animals and plants are deeply rooted (hehe) in Brie’s prosperity and survival. Clerics tend stay closer to home, casting “Protection against Weevils” and “Cure Hoof-rot”, while the Druids travel further afield, defending the herds against wild animals, but both are traditionally raised and taught in the shade of the same leaf, and enjoy a good mug of fermented yak’s milk together at the end of a long week.
If possible, you should visit Brie during the the annual Harvest festival, when the year’s first cheese is sufficiently aged to be considered worth eating, and many of Brie’s resident’s open their homes and hearths to visitors.
I think I like the idea of dire moles providing milk (see further up the thread). It’s going to be tough to clear enough land for pasturage in this kind of forest, but getting all of the local Verminous Hunters to drive insects towards the omnivorous moles should work nicely.
I do like the idea of druid shepherds retrieving wayward livestock though. Trying to retrieve a prize-winning milk mole from a deep tunnel sounds like a solid hook.
Also, GJ on the local holiday. I always forget to add those in, and wind up tacking something on at the last minute. Any idea what we should call it beyond the “Annual Harvest Festival?”
If I had an idea for a better name than “Harvest festival” I would have put it in my original post 😛
Still, maybe you can add a bit of spooky Halloween-esque aspect to parts of it, or even go with some of the older religious connotations of All-Saints Day and combine it was themes of ancestor worship, depending on how you want to design theology in Brie.
Anyway, I like the idea of dire moles- it makes me think of the webcomic Digger. Depending on how much you wanted to homebrew, maybe wombats could become the rodent-races equivalent of Dwarves or something.
Here’s a fun idea. What if we call the holiday Rooters Day? Since all manner of tree roots grow down into the Briefolk’s tunnels during the autumn, they make it an annual contest for the town’s children to clear the tunnels of pesky plant life. The youngsters race around the tunnels with wheelbarrows and shears, each trying to chop down the heaviest weight in roots. This has the advantage of getting the kids out of the house while the adults prepare for the feast.
The contest winner is crowned Rooters Day Champion, and gets the first bite of the first cheese. Afterwards everyone makes merry around bonfires made from the cut up root piles.
Sounds good to me!
Perhaps the more spooky minded let their incisors grow long (rodent incisors just keep growing) in the preceeding month so they can be temporarily filed into makeshift fangs for the festival.
They were indicted for war crimes against local yuan-ti, yet another exhausting chapter in these two people’s never-ending blood feud. Every bard knows “the troubles” began when the ratfolk stole the yuan-ti’s gorgonzola recipe.
What… What kind of dairy livestock to the yuan-ti keep? The mind boggles. O_o
In their underground tunnels, the people of Brie actually form mazes to protect their most valued possessions.
As for myself, I start creating a setting wherever the inspiration strikes me. Like the D&D game I’m running I started with a country that was just the concept of “is a dangerous jungle that has the ruins of what was once the largest city in the world” and expanded in all directions from that. At this point I’ve figured out several countries, cities, characters, the planar setup, and important past events. Also a few other planets in the setting and a few such things more detailed setting stuff for those too.
Maybe a 4e style skill challenge to navigate the maze? I could see that. For mini-dungeon purposes though, maybe it’s a simple “must make ## Survival checks to pass, but each failure results in a roll on the random encounter table.”
That raises a couple of questions. What’s on the random encounter table, and what are the ratfolk of Brie trying to protect?
I enjoy how the reward isn’t even a whole wheel of cheddar, but instead has a slice missing.
Notice how Scabby isn’t anywhere in sight.
I just had to think,… what if that Cheese was a great Reward? I mean they can’t be that Isolated right if they are famed for their Cheese. So what if that Cheese is actually tenthousends of Gold Pieces worth, and the Reward is meant to be genuine! Of course if you want to be Evil you will only tell this to the Party AFTER they ate it or declined the Reward. Watch all of them go into Rage without being Barbarians!
Maybe it functions as hero’s feast?
No i meant, they produced High Class Cheese only bought by extreamly wealthy Nobles, so they would be kind of like Truffles in Terms of Worth, but of couse you would only tell the Party after they ate them!
nice. i am picking up what you are laying down
The most common names for males are Mickey, Jerry, and Algernon
And let’s not forget Itchy.
A couple other thoughts:
*The srd says that ratfolk tend to be packrat[folk]s so maybe they’re paying in cheese partly because they all spent all their money on knick-knacks and curios
*On a related note there’s possibly enough loose junk around to create difficult terrain in many indoor areas
*regarding the tunnels, I can’t shake the image of them accidentally breaching into kobold tunnels and the kobolds responding by setting up giant mousetraps
Ooh! Maybe there’s a communal “stuff pile.” That could be a good treasure store.
The local counting system uses base 13
(6×9=42)
That’s going to be a hard pass. I go slightly cross-eyed just looking at that equation.
Do you get the refrence though?
I know the trolls from Discworld have some base 4 shenanigans:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troll_(Discworld)
If there’s something else then I confess myself clueless.
It’s a refrence to the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. There’s a scene in which it is implied that the Ultimate Question (to which the answer is famously “Forty-Two” and which a race of demigods masquerading as mice had spent the equivalent of trillions of dollars searching for the exact wording of) was “What do you get when you multiply six by nine”
Heh. I guess it’s been a while. 42 is the only part of the meme that really stuck with me.
I… would actually accept this reward wholeheartedly.
I am imagining that you are Wallace so freaking hard right now…
http://www.tickhillvelo.com/slir/w660/images/stories/additionalFields/content-3-285-more%20cheese%20gromit.jpg