The Great Sertaria Rehabilitation Project 2015:

You may be wondering what I mean by that title. To those reading the preview right now:

Well too bad!

HAHAHAHA Now I have you all with my snappy subject line!


*ahem*

So, to offer a little explanation for myself, recent talk started some of my mental gears turning, and I got this idea for a wonderful little thought experiment. I thought that maybe I could ask everyone how they personally would have tackled Sertaria if it had been a private project of their own – what parts they think should be emphasized, what they think don't work, what could be tightened up, etc.

While I won't have anyone adhere to them, I feel forms help increase replies because it's so easy to just say your direct replies to the questions, so I'm including one for this thread:

• What aspects of Sertaria would you emphasize, if it had been your own private project? Think of things like:
  
  • Races
  • Landscapes
  • Cultures
  • Magics
• What aspects of Sertaria would you be rid of, if it had been your own private project? (same basic question as above, but reversed)
• Is there a tool or concept space which has been added since the original creation of Sertaria (such as the God type) which you would integrate into one or more continent of Sertaria?
• How would you approach building this plane, top-down (from world concept down to the minutia), or bottom-up (taking interesting pieces and fitting them into a whole)? Would you approach the individual continents in the same way?
• For those feeling particularly intrepid: What changes would you implement into the style guide to reflect your vision?

I'll post my thoughts on the aesthetics without using the form. Things I would change:


1. Rename Ameran and Afresa.

2. Make the continents interact, just a little. They can trade occasionally. Cyreans can try to build craft that can sail the weird seas. There could be a historical event where Faskerians try to invade another continent, but largely fail because 2/3 of their battle magics don't work work well, if at all.

3. Relax the off-color mana-drain, probably just for planeswalkers and intercontinental travellers with intercontinental and interplanar mana-bonds.

4. Reduce the species diversity slightly: by this I mean, make the Cyrean Merfolk and the Khurvesh the same species with two different cultures. Same for the Ouphes and the Snakefolk. This probably wouldn't work for the vampires, so I suggest renaming either the Gentevan or the Olekian vampires to something else like Lich or Ghoul or Nosferatu.

5. Make Cyrea, Faskeria, and maybe Afresa slightly less one-note. Faskeria can have a fascist nation that practices "peace" through isolation, having aggressive foreign policy but a peaceful culture at home. Or just describe what Faskerians do other than kill each other, and how they maintain populations. Give Afresa some little -aligned forest villages and -aligned wizardly groups. Desribe Cyrean cities and what the people who don't work in labs do. It is a wild place, but why aren't any of the -aligned inhabitants trying to amass knowledge and power?

6. Give Gentev a well-described resistance. Give the society something to struggle against, because an oppressive regime has much less definition without an external threat or something else to challenge its hegemony. As written, Gentev is very static, which doesn't really fit with green or even black. Heck, the continent could even have a second or third society and religion, with their own separate take on , that struggles for dominance against the Pistra society.

7. Describe vampire and deserter society in the sewers under Olek.

8. Explain how there are Merfolk and Homarids if the seas are made of mana or aether or whatever.

I actually really like this idea.

They get ruinously humiliated by people who weren't even that well trained for war in the first place. A small group of Faskerian survivors are so disillusioned by their defeat that they convert themselves to a bizarre new philosophy (not actually one espoused in the continent they tried to conquer) and build a small out-of-the-way convent where their descendants live on in obscurity, having long-since adapted to the mana environment without integrating into the surrounding society. Their philosophy has continued to get more bizarre over the generations and their oral history really paints an inaccurate picture of what Faskeria was even like.

Also, 9. Have Kor on more than one continent.

I'm 100% in favor of you writing this story Arcades just for the record

I don't know how I would turn this into a story with characters since it's inter-generational and I suck at making characters, but I relinquish the outline to anyone who does feel inspired.

Say it's Cyrea they invaded, and any Cyrean who does meet them just assumes that the Kor and Rhox are nothing more strange than mutants.

that would fit with what Raven and I established of Cyrea in uh whatever our story is called that we still haven't put up for vote ha ha whoops

Breaking Form. Nifty little yarn, that.

Glad people are commenting.

Well, to use my own form:


I want to make a few things clear:
1. I think that Ameran is the most well-developed of the five continents, at least in ways that make sense. Despite being involved in Gentev myself, I think a lot of the aesthetic choices actually hinder it, like using both Orochi and Nezumi from Kamigawa, seemingly just because they call out the Indian influence more.
2. Despite the stupidly grimdark nature of it, or perhaps because of it I'm not sure, Faskeria is actually my favorite continent. I always really liked the Pale and the dream-war with the Kithkin. It also occurs to me just now that the style guide never actually mentions that the Pale are fungus.
3. Props to Arcades for making a lot of very solid suggestions. I read them over a lot while writing this post.
4. There is a horrible lack of names in Sertaria. There's style but no substance. The guides all outline the plane as it should be written, but don't actually describe anything that you might find within, like the names of cities or peoples. There's nothing to really latch onto other than the "wouldn't it be cool if" concepts that they present.

Except that the Orochi don't even do that since they're Japanese. What you would have wanted was the Naga, which HEY, look at that, now you can.*

Incidentally, there WAS actually some material written for Gentev on the old forum.
It was Molcru vs Kashius in an RP war. You should still be able to find the collected posts in the Great White Wastes.

*make no mistake either, Naga would be the way to go because a six limbed snake person with boobs and a fantastic mane of hair makes ZERO sense to begin with.

I have my own ideas for this thread, but I'm first going to spend some time responding to things that people have already posted. That's going to be long enough already and it helps me order my thoughts.


Agree. They're WIP titles from before the EM existed and it shows.


This was the goal but it somehow didn't get across or made explicit enough in the final document. The continents explicitly drift on the ocean to allow this sort of thing. We even started (but never quite finished) a roleplay event about the continents all converging in one place leading to lots and lots of conflict (as well as 5 giant Incarnations coming into existing because of that conflict). I endorse making this behavior more explicit, with the caveat that the continents shouldn't drift in predictable patterns.

Works for me, but how do other people feel about this? It could make the wedge-distinction even more arbitrary than it already is.


I agree with the sentiment, but I'm unsure how to do this in practice. The Khurvesh are very distinct and (I feel) they represent the core values of Afresa.



I feel its important to note that while Faskeria is very warlike, their war most closely resembles World War I, where the frontlines hardly move (and if they move it moves centimeters or meters. Hardly ever kilometers. This allows for non-war culture as well (which would still be influenced very heavily by the war and propaganda).

Those villages and wizard-groups already exist on Afresa in the snakefolk and the Vedalken. Or did you have something different in mind?


This was the case early on, but this was reverted later. The seas are just water.

Okay, my brain just stopped working, so I'll write more later.

(Great, now this looks like I'm just picking on Arcades...)

Interesting history lesson:

Some of how this looks now came about as I recall as a compromise between people who REALLY WANTED DIFFERENT CONTINENTS and people who REALLY WANTED RELATED CONTINENTS. There was a big issue in particular where Skibo literally singlehandedly held up the whole project because everyone else who had worked on the project had to abstain and he had like the sole vote on whether or not it got in, basically, and there were a few elements that he hated. It was a big problem and it's the reason why some of the rules are structured differently now.

Anyway, I think if I'm remembering right that the mana drain and lack of interaction between continents was sort of a compromise between people who wanted them totally isolated and totally not isolated. I can't remember who was on what side though.

In earlier drafts I think Incarnations were a bit of a bigger deal because I floated the idea that they emanated from the mana seas.

I'm still of the opinion that the mana drain problem isn't a problem so much as an opportunity, honestly. I like that challenge.

I think a lot of the tweaks being suggested here are probably good ideas though.

I was under the impression that the Nagas are kind of particular to Tarkir due to their origins? Also, to be clear, the Orochi kind of reflect the Western perception of the multi-armed Vishnu (although vedalken would work as well or better on that front if the color was actually open) so there was some justification, however little, in their inclusion. If I were to be perfectly honest, most of the Gentev style guide was Yanmato's work which I helped iron out some of the kinks for.

As far as braving Sula and beyond... I don't think I want to. I was reminded how horrible the new Wizards site is when I read the Planeswalker's Guide to Fate Reforged. I thought they were going for "mobile-friendly", but that is nowhere near the case.

Personally, I like the mana-drain effect, BUT I don't think the mana-drain necessarily means that the continents have to be isolated from one another. The people can still interact, I would think. It might make warfare and invasion more difficult, but if anything, I think the absence of two colors per continent would actually encourage trade.

At one point, the continents literally floated on their backs and that was what was responsible for the movement.
It cuts the roster of usable characters off at the knees. Most of what we do is plop planeswalkers into our settings, and that's a challenge that most look at and find just not worth trying to meet. The reward doesn't feel proportional.

turns out, it looks like the origins might have been BS.
But I don't hesitate for a moment to think that now they have this tech they won't use it. Afterall all, we have Kirin and Lammasu on Tarkir as well, and they only had one place before to each of their types.

The orochi's multiple limbs were originally meant to emulate some aspect of the Orochi's multiple heads, as near as I can tell, so trying to translate them over into Indian myth as a response to Vishnu seems... not worth taking.

Vedalken could have played better, I think, to a Shiva allegory with the multiple limbs and blue skin and everything. You could have probably stretched them into white/black since collectively, they sort of inform blue on their edges.

In a way, yes, but I feel it might be a little too on-the-nose? I think Gentev does some interesting things, but I don't find pushing the Indian flavor to be one of them. Gentev probably needs the most rehabilitation, with the Orochi and Nezumi (the latter mostly just need a name change), but I don't think I'm the one to do it.

I do think the interaction should be minimal. More than Shards of Alara, but much less than Khans of Tarkir or Conflux.

I'd also like to keep/revive the idea that the seas are weird. The continental shelf areas can be like normal water, but out in the deeps it should become a strange and uninhabitable place. Otherwise, the huge expanses of blue creatures clashes with the wedge-ness of the continents.

Make Incarnations a plane-wide thing, but not the Angels of the Pistra. I always thought those things were constructs, like the religion itself, solely to perpetuate the power of the highest castes.

QFT

On the other hand, Gentev should not become too reminiscent of Sultai. Also, my impression is that Nagas are actually half-human, while snakefolk are all-reptile.


Thinking more, I think that off-color mana should be restricted to planeswalkers.

Clarification: that last sentence refers to Afresa.

Make that more clear, I guess?

I'd also like to reduce the number of one-continent races in general. I didn't like the way Alara did that anyway. And we could draw some connection between the Faskerian Cinders and the Ameranian Flamekin.

It's increasingly looking like the Naga lied about that. On the Card of the Day the other day, wizard's straight up said they lied about their relationship with the dragons exclusively to gain power in the sultai hierarchy.

I didn't think they were part dragon... Hm, so they're not part human at all? Then uh, why've they got human faces? Do we just assume they're actually the same species as Serpent Warrior?

I also want to put that flavor tidbit in the Tome of More Flavor. Can anyone please link the card of the day archive or this particular one?

Why don't kitsune have fox faces?
Well... no. Because the naga are naga. What exactly that means is ambiguous, but they weren't typed as snake and that is telling.