I think the original description I gave had more land to the west of the Stormbreakers as well. I narrowed it in this and put in the slightly smaller range of mountains to the west based on some thoughts about the region to the south (which I think I'll be expanding on soon, once I've got all the Dawnlands material organised over here).

Edit: I resized the map so that it's a little smaller, albeit still fairly large. At the current size, 1 pixel = 1km^2

People: The Kadiz Nomads

The nomads call themselves the "Kadiz" whereas members of the Orthocracy are the "Kaddish". This is a shibboleth between the two groups. They speak mutually intelligible dialects of the same language, Kaddish/Kadiz.

History:

The old kingdom of Kaddish was an oligarchic monarchy, with a king who controlled the city and various nobles and officials who controlled the surrounding countryside. When the revolution happened, about a quarter of the city was driven out of the kingdom (the nobles, the surviving royal family, their servants, and anyone thought generally to support them) and fled onto the plains. There, they allied with the "traitor clans" of the Hill Elves, the elves who had supported the Kaddish against the Hill Elf Confederacy.

Races:

The nomads of the Plains of Kadiz are the remnants of the old oligarchic High Kaddish mixed with Hill Elf tribes. They have intermingled for about two hundred years. Humans and elves continue to form distinct ethnic subgroups within the nomads, but trade and intermarriage mean that the two races are co-extensive with one another - a clan may be mostly elf, but it will have a few human members, and at least as many half-elves. Humans are the most populous of the three races, with half-elves next and elves last.

Few other races are found amongst the nomads. The knowledge and tools required to soulforge races have been lost by them. Anyone else is almost certainly a slave, a trader, or a refugee from one of the cities.

Religion:

The rootstock religion of the nomads is the old Hill Elf religion. It features two main groups of spirits to be placated - the Storm Bulls and the Wolves of the Earth. The wolves hunt the bulls, which causes phenomena like meteor strikes, prairie flash storms, earthquakes and such. The nomads sacrifice cattle to the Wolves of the Earth to feed them and keep them from chasing the Storm Bulls. They burn great swathes of grass as sacrificial feed for the Storm Bulls. There are two different types of priests, each responsible for appeasing one group of the spirits and performing the necessary sacrifices. Generally, priests are not professionals or clerics. Priesthood is awarded as a title to worthy members of the community who know the rituals.

Most clerics are actually shamans. A shaman is seen to be under the purview of a spirit that is not a member of the Celestial Herd or the Stone Pack. These kind daimons help or harm mankind for reasons that are clear only to them and perhaps the shaman. Most powerful clans keep a few around, but otherwise shamans are expected to wander from clan to clan as they please.

Travel:

Briefly, human-dominant clans ride horses, elf-dominant clans walk. Not all humans own horses, but horse-taming is a skill humans brought with them to the elves, and the great herds remain in the hands of majority-human clans. Wagons are common, as are sledges. The Kadiz normally travel twice each year; once to their winter pasture, and once to their summer pasture.

Families and Clans:

Kadiz families are large, complicated, and confusing. The Hill Elves consider everyone in a clan to be related. This meant that to marry someone other than a relative, young elves would raid other tribes for wives. The humans brought the polygamous, matriarchal practices of their ancestors with them, and combined them with the Hill Elvish clan structure.

In practice, generally one man (elf or human) is in charge of each sept of the clan. He has many wives of both elvish, human and mixed descent, and attempts to father as many children as possible on them. The male children must go out raiding or trading to find as many wives as possible, while the female children are traded out to other clans or other septs by the older women. The wives of dead men are usually married off within the clan to other men, usually friends or brothers of the chief. Once a man has enough wives, he may start his own sept. Members of the sept and the rest of the root-clan are considered only distantly related to one another and may intermarry.

The men are generally so busy raiding or herding or praying that the women actually run the sept, and most inter-sept business within a clan is brokered by them. All wife trading is handled by women with minimal input from the man allowed.

This is a highly unstable system, and it is only the high mortality rate amongst men, the large families of the nomads, and the fact that they raid not just other clans but also the Kaddish, the helots of Dwer Tor, and hostile Hill Elf clans for any women they can find that keeps it functioning. Like most polygamous societies, there is a fairly stark dichotomy with some men having many wives, many children and much status in society, and many men having no wives at all. These men tend to form the bulk of the raiding parties sent out to capture new wives.

The nomads have very large families. Child mortality is low because the diseases that plagued their urban ancestors are not as easily transmitted with the lower population density. Food, in the form of cattle, sheep, goats and their byproducts are plentiful. The polygamous structure of families also means that four or five children can be carried to term within the same period of time. Having large families is culturally expected, and eventually founding one's own sept is desirable.

The inhabitants of Dwer Tor and the Orthocracy both have stereotypes of the Kadiz as sex-crazed murderous bandits that derive at least partly from these customs.

People: The Orthocracy of Kaddish

The Kaddish are a passionate, neophilic urban society based out of the largest city in the Dawnlands.

History:

The Kaddish claim to be descended from the Dawnmen, the near-mythical people who slew Eternal Night and began time. They founded the Kingdom of High Kaddish, which endured for approximately 600 years and conquered most of the Dawnlands. In the process, it destroyed the Hill Elvish civilisation, and subjugated Dwer Tor, only to fall to a revolution 200 years ago which founded the Orthocracy.

Races:

The Kaddish are predominantly human and halfling, but most other races have a presence there. The Kaddish are the only people in the Dawnlands who are aware of the secret of soulforging, which allows them to create new races, and they continue to use this secret to create new species in the modern day, many of which escape. Dragonborn, tieflings, and drow are only found amongst the Kaddish and are soulforged humans and elves originally. Tieflings and drow are called "the Burnt", are considered a single race (just as humans and elves are) and form a distinct subculture in Kaddish society. Most of the other races have at least a token presence in the Orthocracy.

Religion:

The Kaddish are known for having more religions than the rest of the Dawnlands put together. They worship a variety of gods, demons, spirits, vampiric heroes and other powerful entities. They are the only civilised people who tolerate humanoid sacrifice, and this is their preferred method of executing criminals. Most priests in Kaddish are religious professionals associated with powerful temples and cults. They tend to be wizards, warlocks and bards. Most Kaddish do not exclusively worship one god. The most popular cults in Kaddish include the Black Vermin Gods, the Screaming God, the Headless God, the Red and Blue Snakes, the God of Secret Doorways, and the One-Winged Raven.

Travel:

The Kaddish are the only people in the Dawnlands who are capable of sailing out of sight of land. They do not regularly do this, but are capable of doing so. While they do still raise some horses, they are inconvenient in the urban metropolis and are too expensive for ordinary Kaddish. Most Kaddish get around the Orthocracy on foot, in wagons, or, if they are rich, carried on palanquins with armed attendants pushing crowds out of the way.

Factions:

Factionalism is a fact of life in Kaddish. Everyone is connected to one group or another that supports and protects them in exchange for service. The most common kinds of faction are clans, colleges and cults. Most Kaddish belong to all three, in addition to whatever other allegiances they may have. A faction can make various demands on its members depending on its function.

Clans - Kaddish live in large extended family groups. Kaddish society is polygamous and collectively matrilineal, with all the children of a single mother-group seen as relatives. Like most polygamous societies, a few men have many women and many men have none. Prostitution is rampant, and the excess population is siphoned off into economic colonies and military service. Clan members tend to help pay one another's debts off and ransom one another from slavery.

Colleges - A college is an organisational unit from the revolution that continues to the present. Theoretically, it was responsible for providing a certain number of men to the Kaddish military. In practice, they are organised gangs of veterans who combine the functions of organised crime and government in one. The members of a college are typically interested in extorting as much money as possible from members of other colleges while protecting their own members from extortion and crime. Colleges are usually run by an orthocrat, and there are usually no more than one or two per district in the city. They typically both organise and put down riots as it suits them. The heads of colleges are orthocrats.

Cult - Religion is ubiquitous in Kaddish life. Kaddish religion is cultic, centred around the fulfillment of a cult rather than conscientious adherence to a dogma or creed. Most Kaddish switch faiths opportunistically to advance their status. Cults help their members with difficult problems that other institutions can't, since they can often muster magical resources for their followers. The high priests of more popular temples are orthocrats.

People: The Dwer

The Dwer are the inhabitants of the second city of the Dawnlands, Dwer Tor. They are also found throughout its colonies.

History:

Dwer Tor was the grant given to Kakarna, the first divine hero and founder of the dwarvish race, by the Dawnmen as thanks for his assistance in slaying Eternal Night. It has remained an independent city-state for most of its existence, being an ally and tributary of the Kingdom of High Kaddish. Hundreds of years ago, eladrin fled from the distant Kingdom of Falling Stars up the Great Southern Road to Dwer Tor and integrated into Dwer society. Since then, dwarves and eladrin have constituted the upper ranks of Dwer society, oppressing the halflings, humans and others beneath them.

Races:

The Dwer have a majority of halflings (50%), with fewer dwarves (35%) and a minority of eladrin (10%). The remainder are mostly humans and elves living in subject territories.

Religion:

The Dwer have a state-supported church in which their king is the high priest of the Hard-Faced Mother, the star-wife of Kakarna who forms the mountain on which Dwer Tor is built. They also propitiate their divine heroes, powerful individuals who develop incredible power and who reincarnate from time to time to defend the city and its people. Very few divine heroes are incarnate at any time, and they are often far from the city dealing with distant terrors before they can come close. There are about two-dozen divine heroes total, each with a cult focused on emulating their chosen heroes' conduct in order to build the power of its followers. Divine heroes are mainly worshipped by the optimate and thaumate castes. Helots confine themselves to worshipping the Hard-Faced Mother.

Travel:

The Dwer are great rivermen, connected as they are with the Dawnlands' largest series of rivers, the Little Road. They do very little oceanic sailing though. Eladrin are the only members of the society who ride commonly, as both dwarves and halflings find it awkward. Some parts of Dwer Tor are difficult to access without being able to teleport, and these primarily eladrin buildings are a unique architectural accent.

Caste:

Everyone in Dwer Tor is one of four castes

Optimate - the ruling caste. Optimates are traditionally warriors and statesmen. Many optimate families are also rich trading families. They run the government of Dwer Tor and its colonies. The king may only be from an optimate family. Optimates are primarily dwarves, with a small number of eladrin families. They may adopt talented members of other races, but those members cannot pass that status on to their children unless they are dwarves. Optimates are organised into houses with patrilineal descent.

Thaumates - the administrative caste. Thaumates are the religious, technical and magical professionals. Thaumates are either dwarves or eladrin. Thaumates are organised in ecclesia, or schools, with all members of a school being related to one another. Thaumates identify themselves with a first name and the name of their school.

Helots - the vast bulk of the population. Helots are the productive caste. They make and trade goods, grow food, and have built Dwer Tor's wealth and reputation for fine craftsmanship. The helot population is overwhelmingly halfling, though dwarves are well-represented amongst the artisans and rich merchants. The helot population is both urban and rural, found in the countryside surrounding Dwer Tor. Helots are organised into demes of about two hundred households which are considered to be related. Helots are forbidden to touch weapons without permission from an optimate or thaumate, and are barred from certain sections of the city.

Slaves - the Dwer use many slaves. These may be criminals, prisoners of war, debtors who defaulted, or simply people who had the misfortune to be captured by slavers. About one fifth of the population is slaves. Slaves are the property of the Dwer state, and must be rented from the king. They are mainly used for dangerous and unpleasant jobs like mining quarrying, and for tasks requiring minimal skill and maximum effort like unskilled agricultural labour. The city of Dwer Tor is kept quite clean by an army of slaves that sweeps over it every night to wash, sweep and collect trash. Slaves are forbidden from wearing any colour other than black.

People: The Forest Dreamers

The Forest Dreamer tribes are a collection of peoples who inhabit the rainforest penninsula of the Dawnlands and who were never conquered by the Kingdom of High Kaddish.

History:

The Forest Dreamer tribes were once merely a collection of lizardmen, kobolds and halflings all warring with one another at the edge of civilisation. That changed when the rainforest in which they live suddenly began to bleed into another realm they called the Great Dream. The fey peoples of the Great Dream emigrated from that other realm, bringing with them new gods, new knowledge, and new organisation to the warring tribes. More bizarre beasts came through as well, and under a series of great chieftains, the tribes were unified in the face of this threat. Though they never completely eradicated the creatures, they absorbed the new peoples and colonised the Great Dream, learning much about its way. In the passing centuries, the tribes have fragmented and reunited many times, but the most recent unification, completed thirty years ago by the chieftain Xochimunza has reinvigorated the tribes. Xochimunza's son, Moctanimunza has begun preparing them to move out of the rainforest and into the wider Dawnlands, to take vengeance for Dwer Tor's invasion of their homelands.

Races:

The Forest Dreamers have a plurality of halflings (40%), but also have lizardmen (20%), kobolds (20%), gnomes (10%) and a scattering of humans and elves (>10%) amongst their members. Typically, any given tribe has only two or three races amongst its members. Tribes of the same species tend to band together in the great councils as blocs, though opportunistic chieftains will switch sides whenever it benefits them.

Religion:

The Forest Dreamers worship the insect spirits of the Hivehome, the ur-nest hidden in the Great Dream. Some spirits are wild, and are little more than particularly powerful beasts, while others are intelligent and are amenable to sacrifice and other propitiation. Individual shamans tend to have a particular patron spirit that they invoke, while the wider community worships the insect spirits as a whole. The Forest Dreamers consider it a sacred duty to encourage the spread of Dreaming Trees, strange trees that spread open the border to the Great Dream. These trees feed on the blood of living things, and ritual humanoid sacrifice to them is common.

Travel:

The Forest Dreamers have great canoes they use for travel within their domain, but they avoid the sea except for short trips from one river opening to another. They have few domesticated animals, and none suitable for riding other than dogs for the smaller halflings and kobolds. Many of their great temples and buildings have alternate entrances underwater for lizardmen to use.

Tribes:

The Forest Dreamers tend to a monogamous, patrilineal system, except for lizardmen and kobolds who are matrilineal and polygamous due to their egg-laying nature. Tribes are oriented around a charismatic individual and typically possess one or more settlements under their sway. They are typically named after these settlements though exceptions do exist. Tribes are not economically specialised, and most survive off some combination of hunting, gathering, fishing, orchard cultivation and limited agriculture. The exception are the small number of tribes who border Dwer Tor's economic outposts who have learnt to produce the specific rare goods that Dwer's merchants want - silk, teak, rare herbs, etc.

Things to Own

Clothes

The finest clothes in the Dawnlands are made in Kaddish. The Kaddish wear brightly coloured clothes made of wool and hemp, with the rich wearing cotton and linen. In warm weather men wear breeches, fitted tunics, leather shoes or boots that are shaped for each foot, and an ever-changing variety of hats. Women wear patterned, embroidered blouses that leave their lower arms bare, and skirts that go just below the knee. In winter, men wear ashkans, put heavy wool chaps over their breeches, and will often wear mantles or ponchos of heavy fabric. Women wear wool wraps on their legs, fur gloves and heavy woolen cloaks sealed with pegs or buttons (a recent innovation) and lined with either soft fur or sheepskin.

In Dwer Tor, most men wear a salwar kameez, a full body suit of light bleached cotton or linen, year round. Optimate and thaumate men wear knee-length silk robes or cotton togas over it, usually in their house or school's colours. Padded wooden sandals are common. Helots tend to wear cotton or hemp kilts and leg wraps over their salwars in whatever colour they like. They wear simpler unpadded sandals made from reeds or go barefoot. Hats and gloves are uncommon, expensive, and seen as foreign. Cloaks and mantles are common in poor weather. Optimate and thaumate women wear silk peplos, with cotton and fur shawls for when it's cold, and with more colour variance than is customary for men of the same caste. They wear similar footwear to the men. Helot women wear hemp and cotton chitons, and often wear several layers in different fabrics when it gets cold. Scarves and shawls are common.

The Kadiz nomads mainly wear furs, felt, leather and wool. Men in summer wear felt or wool kilts, leather or wool vests, a distinctive folded hat made from sheepskin, and wrap their feet in leather and wool layers dipped in tar or hot fat to harden them. In winter, they wear the same, but with sheepskin or felt ponchos on top of everything and sometimes with a kind of wrap for their midsection and chest made of furs. Women in summer wear wool dresses with woolen blouses. Their footwear is usually lined with fur or sheepskin but are otherwise identical to men's footwear. In winter they wear long fur coats made from bear, beaver, sable or fox, and lined with deerskin or sheepskin for warmth. Kadiz clothing is almost never dyed or coloured because of the expense.

The Forest Dreamers wear unisex clothing. Men and women alike in summer wear sleeveless linen or hemp tunics or go barechested. Both wear simple loinclothes made of hemp underneath hemp kilts. Men wear ornate hats and headdresses, especially for ceremonial purposes. Womens' clothes tend to be less ornate than mens, with less beading, dye and fewer feathers. The Forest Dreamers have many vegetable dyes that can only be found in their forest, and their clothing, despite its simply manufacture, is dazzling in comparison with much of the rest of the Dawnlands.

Money

The Forest Dreamers and Kadiz nomads both rely on barter or use Dwer coins when they need to.

The Kaddish have no gold mines and only a few silver deposits. They issue paper money backed by silver and the yearly grain harvest. The unpredictability of the harvest means that their money supply is subject to many shocks, and barter is quite common.

The Dwer possess the secret of the only gold mine in the Dawnlands, at Moon Peak. They also mine several rich veins of silver ore in the Stormbreakers. They mint silver coins and use the gold piece as a notional unit for accounting purposes. Most money in the Dawnlands comes from Dwer Tor.

Residuum is a de facto third currency accepted everywhere. It is not particularly common, but most people in the Dawnlands recognise it, and the demand for it by gnostics means that it is almost always welcome.

Swords, Armour, Implements, etc.

The main sources of these in the Dawnlands are Kaddish and Dwer Tor. Dwer Tor work is better quality, but tends to come in fewer varieties - the smiths perfect making the same sort of blade over and over again. The exception is armour. Any armour heavier than scale is only made in Dwer Tor, as they are the only ones who know how to forge iron and steel into such large sheets. Weapons and armour from Dwer Tor also tend to be iron rather than steel and thus rust more easily.

The Kaddish produce a wide variety of low quality armaments, from improperly sharpened swords to spears made from whatever waste wood was at hand. Most mercenaries and bandits rely on the cheap, abundant Kaddish weaponry. There are many capable master-smiths in Kaddish, but they are normally employed by orthocrats to equip their private forces, leaving public weapons manufacture in the hands of untrained halfling factory workers working in hellish conditions. Their weapons do tend to be steel though, and once you've gotten the blade sharpened or head resocketed, they are fine and capable weapons.

In both cases, magical weapons are produced in small quantities and may be available for sale. These are very expensive, and most warriors prefer to take a cheaper weapon to be blessed and magically reinforced by the local wise man than to pay for a smith to make it innate. Exceptions are made for rare examples of craftsmanship - no one can imitate the powers of one of the rare Greenswords of the Dawnmen, for example, though these are almost never sold.

There's some new content already for folks who've read the old thread: A description of the Forest Dreamers.

What'll be coming next are regional descriptions. So the Orthocracy of Kaddish's municipal geography & lack of government, Dwer Tor's web of colonies, the Forest Dreamers political organisation, etc.

An update on my own status regarding the Dawnlands:

It looks like the 4E game won't be happening after all. Scheduling problems led to the recruitment of a new group whose prevailing interest is in Eberron, so that's where I'll set my campaign come September.

In the mean time I'm planning on using a version of the setting for HeroQuest 2. My 'A' game will be in Glorantha at the end of this year, with Dawnlands serving as a backup for introducing people to the system and generally mucking about in. The flexibility of the ruleset means I can wrap it around the setting in its entirety, which should be fun.

As ever, excellent work. I look forward to seeing a pdf version imminently.

Very cool to hear about the Heroquest mod, mate. Best of luck and let me know how it works!

I'm going to get the regional info done, plus some more general information on the setting before publishing. I'll be talking tonight with a friend of mine who self-publishes comics, and I'll see if he knows how to make good looking *.pdfs.

I am, btw, also working on maps and details for the two adjacent areas to the Dawnlands - the Hyperborean North and the Kingdom of Falling Stars + surrounds. The H-North will have emphasis on primal heroes, trapped spirits, elemental beasts, immortal hobgoblin tyrants, etc. and will be ideal for folks who want an epic viking feel with lots of sailing around and raiding and monstrous things lurking outside of holds.

Cheers, I will.

Right now I'm fiddling with the cosmetic details. I've found that seperating the Dawnlands from the D&D ruleset has freed up my imagination considerably when depicting the races. Dwarves are now civilised neanderthals and the soulforged have drifted from default racial representations into something else - cambions, nubians and saurians, to be precise. I may start a spin off thread at some point to explain the changes without disrupting the flow of 'official' material.



Awesome is as awesome does. I look forward to reading it.