Aetrimonde

Having recently dropped a lot of lore relating to alchemy, I’m going to top it off by discussing some lore related to Gobol Karn, ancient birthplace of the alchemical arts…and a lot of horrific atrocities committed using them.

The ruins of Gobol Karn are presented as one setting for classic dungeon-crawl adventures in Aetrimonde: they are your classic ancient ruins, filled with treasure, traps, and monsters. Unlike the Dwarven Federation and Caras Elvaren, Gobol Karn is not a functioning polity in the setting’s present day, and so its entry in the campaign setting doesn’t focus so much on culture and politics–because it doesn’t have any. This entry is designed to inspire GMs to write adventures set in the ruins of Gobol Karn, by conveying a concept and tone: these are the fallen ruins of a great and terrible civilization, still haunted by remnants of the atrocities it committed and the mistakes that laid it low.

The Ruins of Gobol Karn

Gobol Karn, at its height, laid claim to the entire south of the continent, but even at the peak of its power it remained a singular, megalopolis-sized city state. The goblin imperial family was large and riven with infighting, and from the earliest days of the empire its Emperors and Empresses understood that they could not allow a potential rival to establish a separate seat of power. They kept their rivals close, and took pains to prevent their outlying fortresses, slave camps, and other outposts from becoming self-sufficient settlements that might grow into a rival’s base of power. And so Gobol Karn grew into something like an anthill, with a vast population held close at hand, where their rulers could keep an eye on them. The city itself sprawled, forming a warren of cyclopean structures built from black basalt and held upright, in many cases, because they were packed so tightly together that they simply had no room to collapse.

Feeding a population of such density required the efforts of vast cohorts of laborers, slaves, and beasts of burden, and as the goblins perfected their grasp of alchemy, the difference between these castes vanished. Alchemy made laborers and slaves stronger and more docile, at the same time it made working animals smarter and more biddable. But this use of alchemy eventually proved to be a key factor in Gobol Karn’s downfall. It first caused problems when alchemically-altered animals escaped from captivity and began to breed true in the wild: among them were gryphics, the ancestors of modern gryphons and hippogryphs, which became a hazard to life and limb in outlying parts of the city where they would nest atop towers and prey on slaves and citizens alike. But worse than the predators were the vermin: altered rats and mice and rabbits, created by ill-conceived experiments and freak lab accidents, that became an ecological catastrophe when they were introduced into the wild. And worst of all were the plants: artificial crops intended to feed the city’s endless mouths but which choked out all other vegetation and drained the soil of life.

Gobol Karn did not fall in a day, or even a year: it took a decade, during which the empire was wracked by repeated famines, leading to uprisings, leading to palace coups, leading to riots, leading finally to fires which swept through the city. The chaos broke the imperial family’s hold on the populace, not to mention their slaves, and there was ultimately a diaspora as the inhabitants of the great city abandoned it in search of somewhere that food still grew. The ecological damage remained localized to Gobol Karn due to climatic factors: the invasive crops that had been designed for the warm south failed to thrive in the cooler north (to the great relief of the other polities of the time), and the animals rapidly became the targets of organized hunts (those that weren’t found to be useful and domesticated). But the south of the continent remains in large part barren, as a legacy of Gobol Karn’s ecological tampering.

The desolation is most severe immediately around the city of Gobol Karn, and there are stranger things to be found here too: alchemical experiments that ran out of control as their creators escaped the city, bizarre cross-bred creatures that evolved in the selection pressures of the abandoned warrens, and the inbred goblinoid descendants of the imperial family’s political prisoners who were left to rot in the dungeons beneath the palace. The city is incredibly dangerous, and all the moreso for its tight quarters and the ravages of centuries. Gobol Karn was never extensively mapped, and it is now half-buried in silt blown in from the wastelands. The parts of the city still exposed to daylight have long been exhaustively looted, but many buried buildings in the lower levels of the city have been preserved, and the catacombs and tunnels have barely been touched. Delving into them means digging into long-buried chambers, where one can never be sure what unnatural creatures lurk through the next doorway or around the next corner…

The dangers of delving into the goblin ruins are not only in the ruins themselves. Further from the city, the wastes are inhabited by rivalrous tribes of goblins, who remember little of their ancient empire and are more concerned with eking out an existence from the inhospitable land. Some of them consider their ancestral ruins cursed, avoiding them like the plague; others dare to venture within, hunting alchemical beasts for food and hides, or scavenging artifacts to sell to adventurers and merchants not brave enough to enter the ruins for themselves. Many of the northern tribes continue their ancestors’ slave-taking traditions, raiding outlying villages in the Unclaimed Reaches for captives and loot; virtually all of the tribes attack travelers opportunistically, if they have the advantage of numbers or are able to make an effective ambush. And most of them have learned, in recent years, that adventurers heading to the ruins carry valuable supplies…while ones coming back might have found something valuable.

Up Next

That’s it for Gobol Karn, at least for now. I have my own take on what Gobol Karn was like before it collapsed, but unless there’s great demand to hear about it, I’m going to keep these thoughts to myself and let other GMs develop their own versions as their campaigns demand. In the meantime, keep an eye out for the concluding post on non-combat encounters, and some more dragons…