I`ve been fiddling around lately with stuff having to do with Oriental
Adventures--mostly with a skill based martial arts system--and it got me to
thinking about how to include some of that sort of stuff in
BR. Personally, I *HATE* the idea of monks in Cerilia. In fact, I`m not
much of a fan of how 3e handles monks or the martial arts in general--hence
my desire to make the martial arts skill based--but that doesn`t mean that
there shouldn`t be some sort of unarmed fighting among the Cerilian
cultures. In fact, unarmed combat could easily fit into several of the
Cerilian cultures.

Aside from that, though, Cerilia occupies a pretty small portion of the
world. Cultures with more of a focus on the martial arts could very easily
exist on other continents, just the way OA campaigns are set on Kara-Tur in
FR, an OA campaign could be placed on a distant continent of Aebrynis. The
cultures of Cerilia tend to have originated from the same "points of the
compass" that their real world analogies occupy in Europe. That is,
Anuireans (the French/English analogy) live in the SW portion of the map,
the Vos (Russian/Mongols) in the NE, Rjurik (Norse) in the NW, the Brecht
(Dutch) in the central, northern regions and Khinasi (Arabic) in the
SE. That would indicate that the eastern cultures are the more "oriental"
ones, and the further east one goes (and probably south a bit too) the more
oriental the cultures could become.

I bring this up because I`m thinking of running an OA-Aebrynis campaign in
the next few weeks, and I`d like some opinions on a few issues:

1. Where is it? We know about the Dragon Isles and a few other areas south
and east of Cerilia, but we have very little information about those
regions, or what might lie beyond them. I`m not sure how close I want an
BR-OA setting to be to Cerilia. Anyone have a general idea how close or
how far it should be in relation to the existing maps of Aebrynis?

2. Regency. I`m going to go with a campaign at the "adventure level"
rather than the realm level, particularly at first, but eventually I can
see PCs rising up through the hierarchy of a realm until they become LTs
and/or regents themselves. There are no bloodlines outside of the northern
Aduria and Cerilian regions of Aebrynis... or are there?

A. The migration of "second sons" would account for a certain amount of
diffusion of bloodlines around Aebrynis, but not enough to really justify
having the number of blooded characters running around in an OA campaign as
there are on Cerilia. Some bloodlines, however, could easily have made
their way to across the seas in the past 1,500 years.

B. Who says there was only one Deismaar? Of course there was only one
_Battle of Deismaar_ but given that we`re dealing with the gods here, and
presumably they can do things like be in more than one place at a
time. Maybe Azrai (or his asian aspect "Khankallil") fought the equivalent
of the OA gods in a simultaneous battle at the foot of Mt. Haji while a
similar battle at Deismaar was going on. The exact nature of the OA
conflict could be tweaked and twisted to fit into a more oriental setting.

3. What cultural analogies should exist? I`ve been leaning more towards a
pan pacific kind of thing recently, but I`m curious what cultures folks
think should be included in such a setting.

Anyone have thoughts on this?

Gary

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