Plains of Caranus

My original idea for the blank space on my map of the Plains of Caranus, was that it would remain blank.  The word plain means ordinary and as it applies to geography it means ordinary variation in height, that is flat.v when we look in out world we see plains that have variations.  The hills are flat rolling like the waves of the ocean; they are hills but the average altitude does not really change.  Also, the land is soil based.  Where I grew up could have been considered a plain, there were a lot of hills, but the average altitude did not change much, but there was little soil and a lot of bedrock at the surface, so it was not a Plain.  Vegetation does not make a plain either.  We picture an ocean of grassland with herds of large herbivores.  Nature scientists first thought that the rainfall did not sustain forests and it was the grass that grew natively on the plains of the Prairie, but it was the herbivores that created the grassy coverage by mowing the trees to death.   Other plains on Earth have this affect the Serengeti is mowed down by herbivores and trees are rare there too, but the if left alone, the trees would come back and cover the landscape.  

The Plains of Caranus are huge.  The original Hex paper I used was about 40x30 hexes and the scale I used was 100km/hex, giving the page about 12 million square kilometers area.  Which means little to most people. So here try this on for scale, one sheet has more area than Canada, the USA, or Europe, individually or half the size of Russia.  The area of the Plains of Caranus had about four of these sheets in it.  The plains stretched from the temperate zone to the subtropical zone.  The Northern extent would get snow and be cold a quarter of the actual year, the South would be brutally hot for a quarter of the actual year, and unpleasantly warm the rest, because it is beside a very tropical sea.  The whole of the plains would be analogous to the Great North American Plains, which stretch from Texas to the Northwest Territories, except much larger in size.  No, it was unintentional.  

The nature of this "Plain" is that it is flattish, that it all drains into the Great River and it is completely heterogeneous.  Let me explain that last one.  There are some forests dotting the area that stretch for a thousand kilometers, that are documented on the map, there are areas of low hills that cover a million square kilometers and there are no mountains.  But this does not hold true on the small scale.  Each hex is a big area: ten thousand square kilometers, many countries are smaller than that and all cities are smaller.  Each hex is composed of mostly arable land.  The Plains are a hodgepodge of hills, forests, small mountains, grasslands, marshes, and micro deserts like badlands.  There are great rivers, small rivers, lakes, towns and cities.  There are empires that control a hundred hexes and there are towns that run free independent of all.  It would be easy to say that the plains contain a thousand kingdoms, but if you spent the time to categorize each, it would have changed by completion.  10,000 would be closer.  

Let me explain Heterogeneous again.  On Earth, a space the size of the Americas prior to European discovery, had 1,500 living languages and maybe that many cultures, but all human.  The Plains of Caranus, are much bigger than the Americas, the language diversification, would be similarly diverse, but would not be JUST human.  The Four Great Races: the Elves, the Humans, The Orcs and the Dragon-kin were altered when the Great Calamity occurred. The massive dose of radiation from the exploding Orcish Colony ship interacted with the Magic of the world in general affected everything.  

Great human civilizations were obliterated wholesale, but where they survived there were a few new species, but mostly new races that populated the stretch, thousands of years of evolution in a few generations.  The demihumans were affected least, diversification of their races just as the humans did, more Dwarf races, more Halfling races, more gnome races.  The Elves, suffered like the humans, diversity of races and mutant like new species called Fariykin.  Dragonkin mutated similarly too.  As with the Orcs.  The Orcs were new to the world entirely.  Their mutations were also new.  Gnolls, Bugbears, Hobgoblins, Goblins?, Trolls, Ogres, Ettins and others joined the ranks of species at large, with much conflict and change.  Animals, stayed animals, but some became monsters.

When I originally made the Plains, I had been using the Dungeons and Dragons paradigm, so every culture, individual, species had an alignment.  They ranged along two spectrums, Chaos to Lawfulness, Goodness through Evilness.  Each race was set and unmutable.  Humanoids were evil, demihumans were good.  My intention for the Plains was turn this on it's head.  Orcs could be good, halflings could be evil.  Other Role Playing systems changed this for me in my head, morality became more defined and less polar.  

The Plains of Caranus, is a big blank screen of white, with large rivers flowing through it.  Just as white light is made of all the rest of the colours, the apparent blankness of the Plain is filled everything in the world: Ten Thousand Kingdoms (Empires to independent Towns), Ten thousand cultures, a thousand races, one hundred sentient species and one race, one species, one policing all of it unseen; The Protectors.

Policing.  The Protectors are rumour and myth.  They are unseen and they are unfelt.  They move through the lands creating great wonders in unused uninhabitable lands.  They impose restrictions on where people can go and what they can learn, but remain in the shadows.  The lands in the North East were restricted from settlement for thousands of years until the last migration from the distant continent was allowed.  The North East is populated by refugees who are prideful and xenophobic in extreme, they were guided to this land by the Protectors.  The Protectors, lifted the ban on transportation to Caranus from the other continent.  Lifted their own ban.  To allow the xenophobes entrance to their new land, that they had been preparing for them centuries prior to their rise in that old continent.  For what reason, is a mystery to all that know.  Know, because very few know that the North East has been populated yet and none know why the Protectors had let them of all people come to that place.  

The Protectors have no leadership, they follow the dictates of their goddess, the planet itself, but there is a first amoung equals, the Chosen of the Goddess.  The Chosen can see through the lines of fate and can nurture the lines that will affect the world at large to protect it.  The Chosen knows that there is a calamity coming that is hidden by uncertainty and that the Chosen of the Blue Goddess is important to this time and must be uncovered and that she was born a few years ago, in the lands of the Xenophobes a culmination of working of the fates for a thousand years.  The power of the Unseen Goddess runs through her and it is with her that the Protectors and the First Among Equals, hope to uncover the Chosen of the Red Lady and the Chosen of the Green Lady and with them shepard the world through the troubled times.

Sounds like the basis of an epic novel, eh?