The Hidden Side of World Building - The Kota Forests

this world building session is made possible by world of warships look in the description for an awesome promo deal when you sign up i was casually looking around at regional dungeons and dragons maps and i always came across this one weird thing forests are pretty much always shown as these big clumps of trees with nothing interesting about them what forests are super interesting they're much more than just blobs of trees and whatever human landmarks exist there so today let's do a challenge that exposes how cool the unturned and unappreciated aspects of world building can be let's build a small woodland area on a large scale like it's the entire world map if you like world building and gaming like and subscribe to stoneworks worldbuilding and check out my patreon for extra extra content and my minecraft server because everyone there is really cool okay so the premise of this world that i've created is that there was once a race of giant creatures here but they died off leaving only their earthworks and their garbage this woodland grew up and became old with many animals and then a legendary event happened where this lake became the center of a force field that repels woodland predators at the beginning within this force field there was a massive heat wave that caused multiple fires and killed a bunch of the animals but that was several decades ago without the stress of predators the mice living here became more sociable and intelligent and now there are multiple civilizations here hugging the lake and its rivers with this focus of controlling the water let me introduce our awesome sponsor world of warships this is a free team-based naval battle game for pc that really tests your strategic skill against players from all around the globe they have over 400 beautifully rendered historical ships that you can customize before you enter into the naval arena you think you could have won the battle of midway as japan time to put that to the test bro with tons of different maps weather conditions and team arrangements you never know what your next battle will bring you can stack your team with agile destroyers tanky battleships jack of all trade cruisers and aircraft carriers that control the sky i really like being in the support role with the aircraft carriers but last time they caught me alone off guard with a destroyer and he really screwed my ship up with hit-and-run tactics this game has been a big inspiration for when i world build naval tactics so register today at the link in the description get a huge head start there by entering the promo code boom it comes with 200 doubloons two free ships the saint louis and premium emden cruisers 20 restless fire camouflage 2.5 million credits and seven days of free premium so thank you so much to world of warships for making this world building possible check them out below now let's continue on to strategic geography so first let's just go over the map for a little bit in the middle you have the kota which is a lake where the force field that keeps predators out originates to the south and the west of it you have this region that is full of rivers and small ponds that connect to this lake but around these ponds you get a series of swamps that are all connected to the very south you get the canopy mud bog which is super dark super dense and mysterious since no one can enter it without dealing with the natives there who are specifically adapted to living in this dark wetland to the north of dakota you get two really big rivers the bamboo river which stretches right next to the giant's dike right here and you get the nile river which connects the cota to the bamboo river and continues on through this little tunnel under the dike up here to the bigger atacota within the land all around you get these different fields there are big grassland fields that are quite dry and quite hot to be in pretty deserty once you're in one all around those you get these regular woodlands some of them are denser than others especially when you get into the swamps they become super dense but when you go into these sandy woodlands which is this kind of white color right here they become a lot more open because not as many trees and plants can grow where the soil is all sandy now the northern section of this world map is pretty cut off from the rest of the world map through the giant's dike and that's mostly because i like the idea of a big dike running across the entire place and this place really bores me right now so i'm just not gonna give it any love so that's a general overview of the map let's go over the geopolitical tensions that this setup might create so the way this world is set up it seems like there would already be a few prevalent tensions that would create conflict one is this idea that the societies around the big lake coda are civilization and that everyone else everyone outside the force field that has to deal with predators are barbarians on the inside you have more civilized doesn't have to worry about predators more creating states religions big things and fighting each other on the outside you get more quote unquote barbarians they have to worry about predators they have to do a lot more fighting for their lives and their organization is a lot more geared towards survival and hunting and gathering next you have land and water because you have these large stretches of land that people are gonna end up owning and you have these stretches of water which can be really powerful as defenses food sources or trade routes and lastly for the land you're gonna have these open places such as these fields and these sandy woodlands versus more dense places like the thicker regular woodlands or the swamps which are going to be super thick because they're full of underbrush and mud it's kind of on a spectrum here but the way this world building will go down i think it works well so first because we've already talked about boats and naval things i want to start with the trade routes the possible trade routes that we'll have will be along the rivers and the big lakes that we have i'm only highlighting them so you get a better idea here now these river trade routes are going to be really important for shipping things in from the land that is surrounding it whereas the big lake trade routes are going to be big in getting all these lands to access each other everyone on the lake can go wherever else as long as other ships aren't stopping them but rivers you can only travel two ways what the river trade ends up creating on the land are these kinds of trade watersheds where land trade routes will form depending on where the closest water that they can trade with is because it's going to be cheaper and faster to trade things over boat than it is by land these river trade routes would probably lead to a bunch of little towns and cities growing up here that bring trade between the land onto the river and probably up onto the lake what this ends up creating for each river trade route are these kinds of watersheds where anyone in a particular area will trade will go to this one river to trade because it's convenient and close for example if you had some products to sell right here in the hawk watch woods which river would you go to the river running or the boulder river well the boulder river looks a bit closer so probably that one plus the river running has this larger stretch of swamp right here and this lake might get in the way if you need to go to a particular town right here so we could consider that as part of the boulder river's trade watershed these are just approximate lines there's no way to tell what the actual trade areas would end up being because there's many other factors involved when we get knee-deep into the real world building prevalence of crime trade prices where the water trade towns pop up the types of people that live there etc so these are some approximate trade watersheds it takes into account certain hills and valleys and everything like that because say you are right here would you rather go downhill onto this iron creek to ship your goods or would you rather hike over this big hill and then down to the lake shore our land trade routes are going to be quite different either somebody is going to be selling their goods and it's going to do with those trade watersheds or they could be trading them over land with people that are especially mobile i had the idea that in this particular plateau they came up with the idea of squirrel chariots because squirrels often keep their tail stable while they run around so maybe the mice in this plateau are really good about getting goods across the entire thing pretty quickly that makes it so that trade from any surrounding places can be brought this would also go into effect around sandy woodlands woodlands that are basically not as dense because they have sandy soil so then what happens is all of these areas became become hot spots for very mobile peoples to gain a lot from trade but also war we'll get into that in a minute but i think the biggest overland trade route would have to do up here with the liber giants dyke um the ancient race of giants that first inhabited this world basically built this very linear and flat chain of hills that rise above everything else and create this bamboo river right here well even though it's quite degraded and it's not totally flat now a highly mobile population would be able to take advantage of this as a highway system and a wall so i think there would be a massive trade route that runs along here which could distribute goods from the great cota island down to here and maybe they could bring it southward and it could end up even down here in the swamps of the boulder river now to connect all of these things you have the trade routes of the giants dike but you also have this river which runs through the giants dike the giants built a little tunnel for it you know well i think this tunnel is too small to ship anything adequately through there so what ends up happening is there's probably going to be a big trade hub right here on the intersection of the water route and the land route and really it's the center of all of this trade but it could even access these areas because you got land trade routes going in through here and you got the water trade routes that are going up like that so an important city would be had right here so i think that's it for the trade routes the more trade that a place has generally the better because nobody ever trades if it's not a win-win situation unless you're committing bandagery now let's talk another important part of strategic geography let's talk military strategy this has to do with power projection defense and mobility a good example for power projection would be this spot right here for any of these mice states that are going to have a navy on the lake this part is going to be the most vital in controlling the most area on this lake that is because it is the single point which has the most access to different parts of it this is going to have the the quickest reaction time to anything that goes on in any part of the lake although this is a little flawed because it's not in the center it's not necessarily a circular lake you know what i'm saying but this one point is going to be big for projecting power particularly whoever owns this could put a total stranglehold on whoever owns this bay right here now a bay of this shape is strong and weak for different reasons it's strong because if you are dominant on the seas all you have to do is put up a line of ships right here and the rest of your stuff is totally protected as long as you aren't getting invaded on all sides by the land so maybe make uh your town on an island out here pull a little venice and then you'll be good you'll just have your boats circling around but actually no i was wrong it's weak for the exact same reason all you have to do is put up a line here but all your enemy has to do is put up a bigger line right next to it and if you live up in here and you're reliant on the trade from the rest of the rivers and the lake you're not gonna have a good time with all of your trade cut off that's why this one part is extremely important sticking with the water theme here the rivers that we have are all very defendable this kind of natural boundary makes it harder for armies to cross and therefore makes it harder for someone to invade you so if you lived smack dab in the middle of this really rivery region it's not gonna be super hard to defend your territory if there's an invading army if there's an invading army and you lose a battle on the river and they get to the next one then you have another river there to defend you and you can try to battle them there of course it's probably not going to work out that way every single time especially if they have boats or anything coming up the river but it still acts as a defensive boundary and is incredibly useful the same goes with ponds even larger now for the biomes the swamps and woodlands that are here the the swamps that are the dark green and the woodlands that are the light green are going to be pretty difficult for an invading force to come in and take entirely now we're talking about mice here that's the prime race the sentient main character species that is in this world so they're gonna be able to climb up trees and stay in there while an invading force comes in so i imagine we'd see a lot of warfare involving dropping things on the mice that invade and maybe even some star wars ewok tactics who knows that would be fun with mice right [Music] okay maybe not but still the denser the area is if it's a swamp or it's a dense woodland like right here the lumber yard would it's not going to be easy for a larger force to come in and take it because they're going to have more hurdles even marching through the area unless they already have cleared out paths which they will but then guerrilla forces can go into the woods and kind of keep them occupied that way next let's move on to the terrain first is the wolf ant hills this large basically mountain range of sandy wood hills that are covered with giant giant ants that are super vicious basically it's my world building excuse so that i don't have to worry about anything coming in from the east unless it's convenient for me you know just like a good world builder does now over here i think is one vital part on the lake this one large hill lies at the cross point of many regions you have this swampy woodland valley right here you have this hilly region that has a bunch of plateaus right here and then you have the lake to its south this one hill is going to be big in projecting power wherever you're trying to go on land specifically but like if you have this hill and there's an enemy city down here you know what you do you know what you do you know what you do you go [Music] now these other hills can do the same thing but this one big big hill has a bigger advantage over these other hills so for that basically every hilly ridge should be outlined on this map let me do that real quick so this is an approximate map of our hilly ridges so people on the hills or the plateaus would have a better time fighting there than the people below them basically if you want to own this whole region first try to own this area before you own this area it's easier to charge everyone downhill than it is to charge everybody uphill now there are some specific interesting places that i want to talk about right here in the maple swamp you have this one hill region that has more woodlands than swamp around it if there's swamp all around and woodlands in the middle with a hill this would be a great place to put a fort or even your capital city because any invading army is gonna have to go through the swamp and the rivers and a yuck to get to your capital city where you can launch counter offensives into your homeland the swamp now up here on the gyartome plateau i think this one is special too because this area is flat and has long grass on it if you owned these middle hills here you would be able to see out a really really long way and since this is a plateau up here this is probably even higher than these hills down here so maybe you could even see further down that way huh having this one area central to the plateau would make for a good military access point to control the liber giant's dike also has this exact same thing going on especially look at right here if you had a kingdom that just existed over here and there was an enemy army from this kingdom over here if they tried to march through you would have multiple things that bog your enemy down as you have a better position atop the ridge an enemy army coming in would have to go over a swamp a river and then up this dike to then fight you you would just be sitting there they might even be tired by the time they get to you you would probably kick their asses if you were on top of this giant's dike that's why this makes a good defensive line and lastly if mobility becomes a big thing in the military tactics kind of like the mongols then these huge empires could arise from around the fields say you have the squirrel charioteers and they're really good at hit and run tactics they come up with bows they attack people and then they wheel away and they leave all because it's open ground that they're running over now what does this mean for the other places that aren't their homeland now if it's hilly it might be a little bit harder but as long as it's open these kind of tactics still work a sandy woodland grove i don't think would have they'd have a problem with either as long as the trees are kind of spaced out but their mobility would still work to their advantage in these rather open areas now when you get to a dense swamp or a thick woodland that's when things like chariots and really mobile tactics don't work as well because there's more things in the way from you hitting your opponent with arranged attacks and then running around ceaselessly because you're basically fighting in the battle of endor you move too fast you get blown up on a tree so that's why the way this mobility works you might have some empires forming on the most open areas as long as they can get the technology to have really mobile tactics who knows i do i'm world building it now let's talk about the good stuff food when a mice civilization starts on this lake i think one of the first things they'll really get into besides their natural foraging in the woods and swamp is fishing once they figure out how to fish that's when i think communities can first pop up kind of like norde chico in south america the first settled peoples were a fishing civilization so in the swamps on the rivers and among the islands you might get people who are bouncing back and forth looking for fish to eat that might be some of the earliest powers that you get that are settled next i was thinking about agriculture and i couldn't decide if a field or a swamp would be better for food output in real life wetlands are super biologically diverse however they're very hard to grow things in because they're always flooded and muddy and they're sometimes really dark and dense with other plants a field is kind of the opposite it's not diverse it's really only going to have grass and a few trees but it's pretty open and there's not a lot of competition but it's also going to be pretty dry for it to be a field so then what do we make of this well this really wet low in the ground environment would actually be really good for rice cultivation so let's say there's a parallel to rice in this world that the mice eventually discover and then the swamp areas can get really far into food production and you can get some big populations that way that is one reason why china and india have really large populations because of the population dynamics that rice cultivation brings with it now the fields i think are still going to be good they're still going to have output but it's going to take longer especially since there's very little irrigation that can be had the only one that's going to happen is going to be on this pond and this river right here so the fields will be pretty important for agriculture they'll create these grass seeds that the mice will definitely enjoy eating they might have to move around like nomads creating different farms and domesticating and hurting animals around these fields however up here i decided to add the equivalent of cliche world building volcano with a big pipe that's on fire at the top what this basically did was ruined a bunch of the lands where the wind would blow most of this fire but on the other side you would get only occasional fires in the field that is below so for generations this grass has been burnt and regrown over and over so what you get is this black soil with all of these grasses just burnt into it all those nutrients and the grass in turn may have learned to sprout their seeds quicker because the fire's just gonna come take them out might as well get it done early so that doesn't happen so with the black and fourth field i think you'd get even larger food productions than any of these other areas that are just field-like so really i think the biggest food producers in this world are going to be the coastal swamps and rivers and this black and forth field now woodlands and sandy woodlands are going to be kind of tough for food woodlands you can definitely get a lot out of there's going to be a bunch of nuts and berries to scavenge in the woodlands but we're talking city size populations for this world so agriculture is still going to be here it's just gonna be a bit less productive than might happen in the swamps and the black and fourth field but the sandy woodlands and by extension the wolf ant hills are gonna be a lot harder because they're all sandy there will be some crops that they can come up with but once again they probably won't be as productive as the equivalent of rice or the black and forth field grass okay so these are all realistic world building on a fantasy woodland world let me create a small timeline of what i'll call prime empires and i'll show you what those are like and the logic that i have behind each of those this is the political lore of seven prominent states that existed in succession called the prime empires i'm just gonna show maps of these empires with relevant cities so listening to this while playing some world of warships or stoneworks minecraft is recommended the first real state to spring up was an alliance between two large towns on the imbru river delta biotra is a fishing town on one of the islands and gammoth is a market and ritual town that has many large gardens around it this is just as agriculture is becoming large enough to allow for permanent settlements around it the child of two aristocrats that intermarried from each town a mouse called island stepper was the first to expand the alliance's power he built a fleet of shallow waterships created forts in the trees and established a law code he battled many tribes and laid waste to the stubborn hilltown of itanya his daughter kintel mitten expanded the conquests further south and inland and commissioned a society of holy people to memorize the old stories her father's law code and magics biotra and gamoth got so big that the two cities physically merged with a high bridge of wood and bones connecting them so the capital was now called biotragemoth there's a story that one night a random fisherman saw a ghost and then the next day he caught a giant demon fish in the lake turns out that the force field repelled hawks and cats but sea monsters could still get at these mice biotragemats oligarchy and temple took this as confirmation that the lake storm god yulid was defeated and that the empire would take his place by conquering the entire lake they were soon after absolutely wrecked by an unprecedented flood so you tell me how that went after this hegemons from multiple towns around would establish a bunch of empires in this valley with cities on the hillside the river the delta and the swamp all competing for power and independence as the last of these hegemons fell the second prime empire a more militaristic state emerged the bull briar dynasty slowly expanded their land in the obermonce hills they claimed all the neighboring strongholds in drawn out wars and eventually launched down to the river valley and its towns soon after the original line in the bullbrier dynasty kind of petered out and a sister clan claimed leadership through a pretty vague connection to the bull briars they fought a little civil war and they came out on top so this dynasty lasted a while conquering the coast but then it got corrupt and decadent and then a third dynasty came to power they conquered the pubidubia inland and pushed their northern border outwards well during one minor succession crisis to the third dynasty a bunch of aristocrats and palace officials ended up jokingly swearing an oath before the gods that they'd protect a lowly bard as the next king well when they mistreated the bard soon after lightning struck the palace and almost all of them died in the fire not wanting to anger the gods anymore the bard's teenage son was made king by the survivors and thus started just a really bad time of mismanagement puppeteering and court intrigue local aristocrats became much more independent to stave off localized raids by border tribes so when the fifth dynasty cooed the fourth out of power the empire fractured up and the fifth dynasty became purely symbolic until it died a few decades later the most important thing to come out of the bullbrier empire is the keepers of the trails an almost sacred organization that is dedicated to the upkeep of roads around the woodland as well as preserving ancient powerful knowledge history magics and how to read the old giant's language they were based in this jane's grave region kind of between the obermanns hills and the imbru valley river and many of the original members of the keepers of the trails were trained by the waning society of holy people from the old island stepper empire so they kind of consider themselves the cultural successors of the first civilized people their main job is worshiping the lake kota in elaborate rituals to maintain the anti-predator force field in this they started as a strictly a political intellectual group but we'll see that notion ground up into sawdust in just a few decades the third state came about in the four rivers region to the southwest with the development of rice agriculture in the warm humid season a large population began to grow here however towns would consistently fight each other over farmland and access to waterways during the breakup of the bull briars one ambitious regional warlord in the poopydubia region launched a southward military campaign to expand his border past where the bull briars ever went kind of an ego thing kind of a popularity thing so he could gain more power the warlord punched pretty far in with aid from allied states in the region but a coalition most prominently led by the city loga beat them in a decisive battle and they killed a huge portion of the invading army by trapping them between river fleets the coalition then annihilated some of the warlord's allied states and eventually it consolidated as a united polity the state became extremely centralized as the rivers were connected by canals on the interior and a republican system for aristocrats was set up in light of how much of a joke the quote-unquote bullbrier dynasty was after the conquest that brought it to this monstrous shape on the map it began to decline to infighting and corruption there were frequent civil wars and raids on the eastern border and the capital city would be moved around as different factions gained power loga was even sacked and burned by a tribe who crossed the boulder river however this state is still the longest lasting of the ones i'm showing you going as prime empire for over 80 years about 10 mouse lifetimes but it would be constantly harassed by the next empire its territory falling to just between the black pool the pubidoobie river and the boulder river next up is geographically the largest empire of the seven prime the tradition of the keepers of the trails had spread far and wide by this point they held that a savior mouse travelled all three quotas all eight rivers into the underworld and back out and then sacrificed himself this supposedly created the anti-predator force field now a leader from the gyartome tribe named palaishaza changed this narrative to fit his world much more he reinterpreted the savior as being a nomad made the mythos more land oriented and most importantly he claimed that his people were the true inheritors of the savior's gift after a few wars he united the whole field of horizons and went on to conquer all around using superior mobile squirrel riding tactics they focused a lot of energy on the giant's dike being the first state to control a large portion of it all at once including the crown jewel the trading city between the water and the dike elya during these conquests the keepers of the trails played a pivotal role in organizing resistance at the nile river successfully keeping the gyartome out of that swamp with or without the northern swamp the gyartome committed a lot a lot of bad war crimes when conquering new lands so this empire stayed whole for about 15 years a little bit shorter than two mouse lifetimes but then it fragmented into six competing states the fifth prime empire expanded on a similar model of mobility tactics but it also featured a much more brutal society it started way out in the three-handed tree hills to the very west the tribe there conquered the black and fourth field and enslaved its population into farming the land but since this is far from the lake the military aristocracy had to constantly fend off hawks and cats from the population what this ended up creating was a hyper-militarized society where war chiefs would race to conquer and plunder surrounding lands and there was an actual race to see who would kill and conquer their way to the coast first an alliance of three mouse chiefs was able to take a chunk of the obermance and waterfront territory but as soon as this happened and they shared the glory they started fighting during the struggle to become sole ruler one of the three allied chiefs named ido deb made an agreement with the keepers of the trails that would bolster his legitimacy they would come to label him as god king in exchange for protection funding and a private army although it happened a bit more subtly than i just explained it this empire existed for a good 25 years and then it fell to food shortages peasant uprisings and the assassination of the eighth god king remy from ratatouille the sixth empire started maybe 10 years after the fall of the previous one the nation of the bull briars rose once again first taking over the obermance hills the king amthrib integrated the keepers of the trails as a religious rubber stamp to his policies and he used their private army as part of a campaign on nations to his east justified by minor religious differences they fought and conquered the heathens all the way to adakota the large lake past the giants dike to the north and then they turned around and then continued on the western side of the empire king amthrib was a brilliant military commander but a terrible statesman he appointed unlikable and unpredictable people to govern the new provinces and didn't give them much military or legislative power so they couldn't challenge his rule well he gets surprised when tons of people successfully overthrow these tyrants and he personally has to go play rebellion whack-a-mole with half of his captured lands omthrib is killed on this re-campaign and his son spends the rest of his life playing rebellion whack-a-mole with some success before dying of disease the whole thing then falls apart and the keepers of the trails are now rich lords in many of the new fragmented states now this last empire here is by far the least prestigious sucks to be mediocre nile river valley simply a successor state that came from omthrib's conquests takes over most of the nile river region and then acquires the trade city ellia through marriage with this new money they're able to finance the conquest of the obermanns but they get beat out halfway through this empire is mostly important because near to its end it got into a full-blown war with the keepers of the trails where the keeper's army raised many coastal cities of this empire completing the transition from priestly guild of sacred knowledge to corrupt landed aristocracy with the keepers of the trails abandoning its moral religious duties and the succession of prime empires complete it seems that the great force field of kota can now turn off the story of kota continues soon subscribe to stoneworks world building and a big thank you to our sponsor at world of warships the link is in the description use the promo code boom for a bunch of awesome free stuff when you first log on and then a quick heartfelt sincere thank you to all the patrons on the patreon rift ranger the optimus maximus xiv who by the way i owe making you into a god in my lore world building story so if you want that just hit me up and i'll do that and it'll be cool tyler hartley chance morrison kenny vetter sam welch ben mcfarlane fred joseph veren travis william price and ben snow y'all are all so dope and thank you so much for helping support this channel you're bringing this content out to the world [Music]

Channel: Stoneworks

Views: 236,716

Keywords: Worldbuilding, world building, writing, history, DM, D&D, Dungeons and Dragons, culture, society, city, characters, empires, states, countries, borders, map, geography, how to, names, Rome, China, language, novel, writer, GM, art, migrate, character, land, help, creative, stoneworks, plot, story, structure, religion, artifact, item, magic, quest, tv, movies, world anvil, dungeon master, campaign, worldbuilding for fantasy, Geopolitics, arena, news

Id: S8onWBKmoJU

Length: 36min 59sec (2219 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 15 2021