Gods: Successor States of Rega (Worldbuilding Episode #4)

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Salutations! I'm Jack Kellum. Welcome back to of Gods and Gamemasters. This is episode 4 of my Worldbuilding series, with a concentration on gods and pantheons, and how they affect the development and ongoing history of your fictional world, whether it be for roleplaying games or speculative writing. Once again, I offer the caveat that if I use Dungeons and Dragons specific terms, they are really only shorthand. These techniques, this example, are just as applicable to any fantasy setting or science fantasy for that matter. Later in the series I'll cover science fiction worldbuilding, and the differences and similarities. This time around, I'm covering how the nations and regions of the world we are building developed after the fall of Rega, in “Gods: Successor States of Rega”

Into the meat of it! As the empire crumbles under its own weight, abandoned by its gods for impiety and wickedness, new nations will arise out of the provinces of the formerly mighty nation. The area around the city of Rega itself is monster infested, and the city basically becomes lost...a location of legend despite its very real history, and perhaps a locale for epic adventure.

When it comes to the successor states, it is easiest, since we used a Roman model, to fashion the new nations after the ones that rose to take Rome's place, but just like with the gods, we need to twist and change it enough to make it our own, and one good way to do that is to imagine how each region, each culture, reacted to the fall, and how the gods influenced them directly, as well as how belief (or lack thereof) in the gods, caused the people of those lands to act.

Here we have to start seriously considering geography, and you might, at this point, want to at least crudely map out where all these locations are in relation to one another. Map tutorials are a bit beyond the scope of my series, at the moment, but I will end up providing a map for Rega sometimes this week, both on my Patreon and on the blog.

Directly around the original country of Rega itself, we have the elven people of the Peninsular Forest. Unlike Rome, we will have Rega itself in the southern portion of, let's call it, Arkia, or the Arkian peninsula, after the bear raised hero who was the second King. Since real world Italy was named after an ancient king named Italus, this falls in line. So. Elves in the Arkian Forest,(they almost certainly call it something else, I'll come back to the other peoples of the land in a later video,) Dwarves in the Caputine Mountains that form the spine of the whole area. (Caputine is derived from the Latin word for Head...since the general notion is that the Appenine mountains of Italy got their name from the Celtic word for head or mountain...just a direct translation. Hide those serial numbers!) More Dwarves in the mountains that protect the north end of the peninsula, we'll call them the Gells, flipping it around and giving them a Celtic translation of the Latin word Alp, meaning white. We might end up calling the elven forest the Caputine Forest, since the largest forest in real world italy is nestled in the Appenines, which we have changed to the Caputines here.

Not going too far afield, let's stick to the closest regions of the former empire for our setting at first. We can add more distant lands later if we need to, just alluding to their existence is fine for most purposes. Going for the larger regions, directly north of Italy we have Germania, to the west we have Gallia, then Hispania. To the east we have the Balkans, which can easily be divided into Dacia and Greece/Macedonia. That gives us five good successor states, with everything north or east of Roman Germania (or rather, its equivalent) being still 'barbarians'. Far to the east there might still be an Empire, less powerful than Rome, like the Byzantines. Let's call it Vyzantos, or the Vyzant Empire, from the Greek word for Byzantine. Still, it's not so much a successor state as a continuation afar. And maybe in this setting it's the evil Empire of the East (a classic trope, don't knock it). Maybe they turned entirely to the worship of Interitus and his children, in response to the fall, and are truly overrun with yuan-ti. We'll actually get to that in another episode on Evil Empires.

So. Germania, Gallia, Hispania, Dacia, Greece, as our core nations. The Greek equivalent is isolated on its own peninsula, but Dacia...Dacia is right up against the Vyzant. We can base our new nations cultures loosely on their real world counterparts, with, as mentioned before, modifications for the gods, the beliefs, and the history that has already occurred.

Germania. This is the modern day Germany, Austria, and Switzerland...but at the time of the fall of Rega, its equivalent would have been Celtic in the south and Germanic in the north, for quite an interesting blend. Let's call it Theudonia, putting a Roman ending on a proto-Germanic name for it's people, which has a lot in common with the pre-Celtic word. Like many countries, it means, Land of the People. Theudonia is a less Reganized ( like Romanized, not like Reagan) area than many of the others, with more influence from Nordic neighbors to their north, and barbarian tribes to their east. They would still worship the same gods, with a very intense concentration on Saevios as god of strength and storms. Theudonians at this point would resemble, in many ways, the later Germans, except with many more dark skinned people from the long cosmopolitan ways of the Empire. The northern Theudonians would be more Germanic, lighter, and probably less civilized. Their weapons and gear, would be appropriate at this point our 11th century. Chainmail would be the heaviest, most advanced armor available, barring left over armor from the Empire. A Lorica segmentata would be equivalent to splint or halfplate. Any plate would be dwarf make, here and elsewhere. Theudonia is a patchwork of feudal lordships with an elected high king, vaguely like the Holy Roman Empire.

To the West, Gallia. We could call it Keltia, which is in fact what the people of Gaul called themselves. By the same time period, that region might be vaguely French...but where can we spin it? The area would also be very feudal. What if they responded to the fall of empire by embracing the original republican ideals of Rega? So that the central government, as it were, was made up entirely of a Senate composed of the local feudal lords? That gives us an interesting Keltian Republic...that's still basically feudal in nature, but perhaps the Keltian lords still adhere to noblesse oblige (the noble's sense of duty to their subjects), at least in the most part? So we have Keltia as an area that is culturally early French, but a feudal republic with the only central executive being a temporarily elected military leader in time of war, like the original Roman dictators. The big difference between it and Theudonia is that Theudonia's elected king is a true monarch once on the throne, while Keltia only sometimes has an executive whose powers even then are limited. North of them are barbarian islands.

Hispania. Obviously, the region should have some things in common with Spain. But in this setting, neither Christianity nor Islam rise. And the western province was probably very cosmopolitan before the fall...possibly leading to a beautiful melding of the cultures of Islamic and Christian Spain, with a more blended populace making for a uniformly light brown people. Perhaps in this province, which we could call Hesperia, which means 'westland' in both Latin and Greek, they particularly reverenced Marea and Ignia, giving them a strong focus on exploration, alchemy, fine crafts. They would be the most civilized of the successor states, protected from distant barbarians by the sea and their navy.

Then we turn east. Dacia is where Romania, Transylvania, and such regions are. Dacia, on the eastern border, up against the waves of horse nomads, in our world. Dacia, where Romans melded with Dacians who then melded with Slavs, who then were overrun by Hungarians. A warlike place, but long civilized, unlike Germania. So what do we do with it, in the world after Rega? Let's call it Skaria, from a proto-Indo European root meaning mountains or rough. We make it a bastion against the Eastern Empire of the Vyzant, which has even taken the Greek style peninsula south of it, and comes up hard on Skaria's eastern border. It is even more of a dangerous frontier than Theudonia, with barbarians to the north and Imperials everywhere else. They produce great horsemen and soldiers, not far removed themselves from their nomadic roots. Their Order of the Dragon, revering the mighty scaled beasts, holds the line against the Empire. Their lives are Spartan, simple, they know little but war. Saevios and Ignia are their patron gods, helping them to survive. Culturally, it's Eastern Europe, Hungary at the beginning of its kingdom.

Hopefully that paints a picture. Join us next time when we start filling in blanks, with “Vyzantos: The Evil Empire”.